In movies, books or other media (even in videogames too) we can find samples of fictional videogames that don't exist in reality. However, some of them are so obviously bad games that leave you wondering who on earth could be willing to play such thing...

One example that comes to my mind is Three Body (from the Three-Body problem novel): Basically a VR MMO lobby with a few absurd historical references. The game has a hidden purpose on the story... I'm not giving away any spoilers... But it's so dull and boring that actually no one would be interested in it IRL.

Do you know any other examples of bad fictional videogames?

Space Quest was full of them, and what's worse is that some of them were actually playable.

Worse still, most are also required for progression, because fuck you.

Astro Chicken, Stooge Fighter, Nukem Dukem...you can tell the designers at Sierra were all about subtle parody.

What makes these games so bad? You're trying ask the player to play arcade action in what is essentially, a pretty adventure game engine. It never was made for it, and in the case of the Skate-O-Rama in Space Quest IV, it's just downright broken because the timing is completely bugged.

In universe? Well, you've got Astro Chicken which would have been pathetic out of universe and pathetically simple in universe, Stooge Fighter is just bad aside of your opponent cheating while being unfunny (but that's a problem SPQ6 has.), and Nukem Dukem is a giant mech fighting game that controls about as well as driving a forklift with your life on the line. Oh, and Skate-O-Rama is 0 g skating, however the heck that's supposed to work.

Much less said of the subtle parody games featured as pasquinade towards LucasGames and other companies titles of the time. (Such as BOOM, or SimSimSimSimSim.)

Like that one slot machine that had a chance of killing the player character with each spin?

(Playing it was the only way to get the money needed to progress.)

The text adventure in Thimbleweed Park can cause severe damages in-universe. Out-of-universe, IIRC Ron Gilbert had actually planned to make a fully playable game, but had to drop it because of development constraints.

The strategy game in the Stargate Atlantis episode The Game, while extremely enjoyable and realistic, had serious repercussions too. I'd say it's designed to attract only the "right" kind of people. ;) Amazing book series!

Yes, but you only need to do that once and you never have to deal with again. In the remakes, you can even rig the machine to cheat back. And it's literally a slot machine, with no actual skill involved.

Also, I wouldn't call it "bad", but in Retro Game Challenge, there's a racing game, and then there's a special version of that racing game that has an advertisement (for a fictional company, of course) in it.

(Incidentally, that game is probably my least favorite sub-game in RGC, and it's annoying that you essentially have to do two sets of challenges in it.)

While I'm not a fan of SQ6, in defences of Stooge Fighter, it was not meant to be played. It's a puzzle after all and you only win it if you solve the puzzle. And you don't really have to play the Astro Chicken either, it merely provides a story explaining why you need to go where you need to go. Other than that, you can skip it

I just remembered that the original La Mulana had a Gradius clone in it. Of note is that this minigame only gave the player 1 life. In order to proceed at one point in the bonus dungeon, you have to play this game and reach a certain score.

[Spoiler for said game]
If you manage to clear the first level of the minigame, it will appear to restart, but will then crash, denying you the high score. (La Mulana, for those who haven't played it, is a pretty trolly game, and this is just another one of those trolls.)

The remake doesn't have this minigame, probably due to copyright issues. Unfortunately, the remake doesn't have any minigames at all; I think NiIGORO should have ported a couple of their old flash games, added some trolls, and included them as minigames.

Stardew Valley has two entirely-playable mini-games: Journey of the Prairie King, and Jumino Kart. One of the reasons the achievement-free GOG version of the game is better than other platforms is because it doesn't have any achievements involving their completion to mess with players. Total feels-bad superhard mini-games that destroy the feeling of the real game. [They're not just mini games but fictional games because both are arcade games in the SDV's bar.]

The SUPERHOT games also include a few playable ASCII minigames. Not actually bad, but not the kind of games you'd spend hours playing...

Reminds me of almost all movies about "Hackers"...

In Persona 5, the player can play retro games console games that somehow increase various social stats and even win accesories. The games are mostly parodies of 80s/90s console games.

One of them is "Gambla Goemon", a game that involves rolling the dice to desired numbers in order to win. Dice-rolling mini games are nothing new in video games, but I never heard of a game that is fully dedicated to it.

One game that comes to mind is the mini-game "Super Space K'Noidtrix" for the Nintari Console in The Adventures of Willy Beamish.

I'm reminded of a fictional video game from a book I read that was apparently a very good MMORPG, that could be played using anything from a text terminal to virtual reality. Only problem is that, as part of the plot, somebody needed to get admin privileges in the game, and the only way to do that involved accessing it in a way that dying in the game would cause the person to die in real life.