The adventure game "Day of the Tentacle" had the previous version of "Maniac Mansion" included. According to Wikipedia [1] it was the first time you could play the predecessor game in a newer version.
The whole original Maniac Mansion game can be played on a
computer resembling a Commodore 64 inside the Day of the Tentacle
game; this practice has since been repeated by other game
developers, but at the time of Day of the Tentacle's release, it
was unprecedented.
You can play Wolfenstein 3D in one of the recent Wolfenstein games. IIRC it's presented as an arcade machine, but it seemed like the whole game was there (I played quite a bit of it, but didn't finish before bailing back out to the "real" game).
Tried to find a TVTropes for this kind of thing, but couldn't. Surprised, seems like there'd be one.
Well, right, but that's not quite the same thing. Video games also do "show within a show", sometimes taking the form of an actual show (Address Unknown in Max Payne, and that other one that's plainly mimicking Lynch's Invitation to Love from Twin Peaks), or an actual play, as in Midsummer Night's(? I think it has the one with Thisby and such, right?) or Hamlet, which I wanna say at least one Final Fantasy has featured (9?), among other games, or sometimes, matching the medium, taking the form of minigames (dice or card games, or arcade games, say, in games that aren't primarily about those things but just have them in the world—even sports games in non-sports games, like Blitzball from FFX)
The purest form of this specific thing is more like having an entire episode of MASH play on a TV in the background during an episode of Trapper, MD.
Ah, embedded precursor is the right one. I tried to find the relevant page by looking through the lists of tropes for a couple that feature that, and failed.
I played Maniac Mansion the first time that way. I never got it originally, but played Day of the Tentacle and got side tracked finishing that game inside the game.
Fun, didn't know that. I recall both games, Maniac Mansion on C=64. Impossible Mission is the first game I recall with working terminals inside (but those terminals didn't play a full game although it likely could be done).
Not economical anymore, if you can instead slowly trickle them out to your paying subscribers at two games a month, to then end up at 10% of the library your previous console had when you discontinue it.
Not older versions of the game itself, but the entire gimmick of Lazy Jones is that you're an employee walking around a building and entering rooms to goof off playing mini-versions of various games on a lot of different computers:
Super Mario Brothers 3 had the original (non-"Super") Mario Brothers arcade game embedded in it. (If the second player tried to visit the same spot as the first player on the map, it would jump to the arcade game like a little competitive mini-game.)
