Nintendo has created something special with Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, allowing players a staggering amount of freedom and customization, sparking an explosion of memes.
What Is ‘Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream’?
The latest life sim for the Nintendo Switch, Tomodachi Life sees players manage their own island, along with a population of fully customizable Miis, with their own personalities, wants, needs and ever-shifting relationships.
The game contains familiar elements from The Sims and Animal Crossing, but with a much larger focus on creative tinkering—it’s a true sandbox game, expanding far beyond the limits of the original 3DS version.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream lets gamers create exactly the kind of Mii they want, but it also allows players to draw their own objects and place them inside the game.
Players can also draw characters’ faces to replicate pop culture icons.
The creative tools ignited a surge of memes, all created inside Tomodachi Life, and even sparking memes specific to the game.
Tomodachi Players Love Cigarettes
It’s become a trend for players to recreate cigarettes, often boxes of Marlboro Reds, inside of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream.
The meme was sparked on launch day after Redditor Spirited_Gene_2633 posted the first pack of cigarettes, taking care to categorize the object as a “sweet treat” that tastes “awful.”
Players really embraced the idea of filling cutesy Tomodachi islands with smoky lung-busters. Soon, they began gifting cigarettes to their Mii children, creating cigarette cakes and even building houses that resemble boxes of Marboros.
Memes Thrive In ‘Tomodachi Life: Living The Dream’
Gamers are figuring out how to stretch the tools of Tomodachi Life even further, creating large structures using custom cubes.
Players are living vicariously through their Miis, gifting them copies of Heated Rivalry and recreating scenes from Challengers for their island inhabitants to watch (there seems to be a theme emerging here).
With hyper-detailed pixel art, player’s creations have become increasingly unhinged.
One Tomodachi user recreated Death Note, but with a romantic twist, shifting the dynamic between Ryuk and Light Yagami.
Players are using the game to reference old memes and create new ones, with internet classics resurrected into increasingly unhinged forms—the game even brought back “Thanks, Obama.”
Tomodachi Life is proving as malleable as a social media platform, as subject to Kirkification as any other part of the internet, alongside references to Ea Nasir and his shoddy copper.
There’s always something new to discover amongst the game’s bewildering detritus of pop culture and irony poisoning—Jennifer Coolidge drinking Hennessy, or a love triangle with Walter White.
Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream offers players a place where they can fully express themselves, and it immediately came to resemble the weirdest parts of the internet.
