A game designer gets revenge after his masterpiece becomes a success under his boss's name, turning reality into the digital battlefield of the game.
Tropes:
- Actor Allusion: Kind of an obscure one, but the disgruntled game designer who becomes Cyberskull's voiced by Danny Goldman, who also voiced Brainy Smurf, another egocentric "genius" with delusions of grandeur. If a much, much more benign one than Cyberskull.
- A God Am I: Cyberskull proclaims himself "a digital god" after he gets going reconfiguring reality.
- Berserk Button: Cyberskull's enraged by being called "average" or treated like just another nerd. Since he had his life's work stolen and the credit claimed by somebody else, it's almost understandable.
- The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: When Max proves too good at the game for Cyberskull's liking, he immediately comes up with an unbeatable new level on the spot to salvage his ego.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Yeah, it sucks that Kurtz didn't get the success he deserved for creating a really popular product, but turning the world into a hellish gamescape to get back at his boss was probably going too far...
- Fictional Video Game: "Dementoids", a mid-90's virtual reality rig. There's also Tibetan Terror, the game Virgil uses to call Max to action this episode.
- Hollywood Game Design: Apparently, one person can do all the work creating a VR arcade game, and one other person can steal the work and claim they did it by themselves instead.
- Improbable Age: Every single programmer the episode shows looks to be around Max's age.
- Magical Computer: Surely one of the most absurd examples out there. A "computer virus" can make its user into a superbeing who can alter reality at a whim.
- Multiarmed And Dangerous: The villains in the "Dementoids" game have four arms.
- No OSHA Compliance: The doors still automatically open for an elevator that's under repairs and Max falls down the shaft. Fortunately the portal that delivers him to Norman and Virgil's down there, so maybe Virgil arranged for that to happen to him.
- Pac Man Fever: Generally it's not too far off of a general idea of what video games of the 90's were like (overly macho heroes slaying monsters with goofy-looking melee weapons for no real reason, getting superpowers from random things like junk food). Virgil saving the day by tapping in complex calculus on the inputs of an arcade game with a joystick and six buttons is a little much, though.
- Reality Warper: Cyberskull turning the world into the game he designed, and making up new content on the fly when Max proves to be so good at the game Cyberskull realizes he's a threat after all.
- Tron Lines: Landscapes in the video game (and the real world, once Cyberskull starts transforming it) are covered with them.
- Whole-Plot Reference: The episode feels a lot like a slightly updated take on TRON, especially if Flynn had been the villain.
