The Wolverine Memes: A Man, A Bed, And A Phone

There is a moment in every long development cycle where the developers stop being professionals and start being people who have been on the internet. Insomniac reached that moment, and the result is that a multi-million dollar Marvel game contains a shot-for-shot recreation of a cartoon screenshot from the nineties.

That is the whole story. Everything else is people reacting to it.

The meme itself

First, the original. This is Wolverine, in bed, in a full costume, looking at a phone.

It comes from the nineties X-Men cartoon, and it has been in circulation for years as the universal image for "I said I was going to sleep two hours ago". The comedy is entirely in the costume. He has not changed. He is not going to change. Somewhere in that room is a man who put on a full yellow tactical suit, got into bed, and opened his phone.

What he is looking at has been swapped a thousand times. Sometimes it is a group chat. Sometimes it is a trivia game. It does not matter. The face does not change.

And then it was in the game

Which brings us to the part that broke everybody.

Insomniac rebuilt it, and it is the image at the top of this page. Same pose, same angle, same joyless phone posture, rendered in a modern engine with subsurface scattering on the arms. Somebody storyboarded this. Somebody animated it. Somebody sat in a review meeting and approved it, and that person deserves a raise.

The reaction when players found it in the wild was not subtle.

This is what a successful easter egg looks like. Not a nod, not a poster on a wall in the background. A full recreation of a joke the audience already owned, handed back to them at four times the resolution.

Everything else, however

Now, having praised Insomniac for their taste, we should probably discuss the motorcycle.

Something has gone wrong here and the internet found it within about ninety seconds of launch. The pose, the empty road, the general sense that Wolverine is being carried along by a motorcycle rather than operating one. It became the single most screenshotted frame in the game, which is impressive for a game with claws in it.

The streamers got hold of it immediately.

The format writes itself. Straight face, genuine enthusiasm, and then footage of a man sitting bolt upright on a bike travelling at highway speed through traffic that appears to have been placed rather than driven.

The claws, though

In fairness, the game does the big moment properly, and the reaction footage proves it.

Every Wolverine adaptation lives or dies on this shot, and the game clearly knew it. Note the button prompts still on screen. Somebody was playing this, holding a controller, and made that face anyway.

"This moment changed me" is doing a lot of work for a fourteen second clip, but honestly, so did the moment.

The two eternal camps

Every big release splits the internet into the same two groups, and this one is no exception.

This is the most relatable meme of the lot. There is always somebody having a genuinely nice time with a game the timeline has decided is bad, standing quietly in a corner of the internet, saying nothing, waiting for it to be over.

And then there is the other camp, who have been running this joke since the announcement.

Console exclusivity plus a price tag plus a motorcycle that does not work is a lot of raw material, and the Spider-Man newspaper format has been absorbing raw material since roughly 2010.

The waiting, obviously

None of this is new, of course, because the waiting has been the joke for years.

Peter Griffin in an armchair is the universal symbol of a release window announced far enough ahead that you can watch a season change through the window while you wait. The announcement gave everybody a year of nothing to do but make memes, and they used it.

A quiz for Wolverine fans

Which brings us to the obvious follow up. Everybody claims to be a Wolverine fan now. Very few have put in the decades. There is a difference between somebody who liked the movies and somebody who has opinions about which cowl shape is correct.

So test them. Not fairly, obviously. A NoodleStrike quiz looks like an ordinary yes or no quiz, except one button per question refuses to be pressed. It dodges the cursor, ignores the first few taps, or swaps places with the other button right as they commit. You decide the verdict before they open the link. They just sit through the ceremony of receiving it.

Title it "Are you actually a Wolverine fan?" and use these five. The bracket is the button that still works.

1. "Is the yellow suit the correct suit?" (Yes) The opening question, and the only acceptable answer. Anybody who hesitates here was never in.
2. "Have you ever done the claw hands?" (Yes) Everybody has done the claw hands. In a mirror, probably, and recently.
3. "Be honest, did you also get into bed fully dressed and look at your phone?" (Yes) The meme, aimed directly at them. This is the one that gets screenshotted.
4. "Is the motorcycle section fine, actually?" (No) Break the pattern here. Four yeses in a row gets predictable, and this is the question where the honest answer and the rigged answer finally agree.
5. "Would you still buy it for seventy dollars?" (Yes) The closer. They will fight this button hard, and they will lose, and they would have bought it anyway.

Narrate it with Hairy Bones, whose twenty one moods include surprised, angry, superhero-heroic and crying. Run the questions as surprised, laughing-jump, thinking, angry, and then superhero-heroic on the last one, and his face tells a second story underneath the text while your friend fails to answer honestly.

If you want the quiz to feel like an interrogation instead, Trevor has fifteen moods including dangerous, mastermind and looking for revenge, which suits a loyalty test with a threat behind it.

For the result card: "Verified. The claws were never in question."

Every quiz example is playable straight from the page, and how it works explains each trick.

Build one and find out who has actually been here the whole time.