When they’re not inspiring wretched movies made from their IP, video games are scoring a little better on the cartoon scale.

We may have eclipsed the Golden Age of video game animated series, but reach back into the recesses of your pop culture brain and tease out some memories: what video game shows spring to mind, fondly recalled or otherwise?

Thanks to Mach6 from the Jury Room for the topic!

Dave:  Pac-Man the cartoon.  I can only summon the vaguest of memory strands about this series, but I know for sure I have seen it before.  Some standard-issue hunting and gathering on the Internet reveals the following about the 1982 cartoon:

Pac-Man and his wife Ms. Pac-Man (no Mrs.?) have a family of Pac-Kids and they’re consistently bothered by some lovable ghosts and a tall bald man with a radiator glued to his mouth.  No matter the plotline, the Pac-family always defaults to the winning formula of eating glowy pellets and chasing the ghosts off.  What less-observant viewers failed to catch is the underlying subtext of the concept of self-medication when dealing with clinical depression.

Anyway, behold the intro in all of its 27 year-old glory.

Steve: Gotta go with Pole Position. While technically, it doesn’t have a whole lot in common with the game, the name was liscenced from Namco, and people still connect the two. The crime-fighting duo of whatisface and whasername fight… er… crime, with an annoying kid and a funky cat/monkey mixed breed genetically bred monstrosity in tow. To fight said crime, they drive their hot, souped up race cars. The dude gets his future-is-now blue gull-wing Delorean looking racer (probably with bags of fresh bolivian flake taped under the fenders), while his sis kits around in a red classic mustang convertible. It gets better – the cars talk! Not only do they talk, but they have 15 inch monitors planted in the center console and they have happy looking digital faces! The show also had one hell of an awesome opening. One last aside: The animators and production team responsible for this madness would eventually deliver the considerably more awesome MASK cartoon a few years later.

Look upon this intro and despair:

Jon: Mega Man, early 90′s. That which is dead can eternal lie, yet with stranger aeons, even death may die…