Scott Pilgrims Precious Little Second Life

Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game celebrated its 15-year anniversary on August 10, 2025. Below, we speak with the developers of the original game about how it came to be and its enduring legacy.

Trust an elder millennial on this one: The longer you live, the more you start to see the media of your youth reflected in a weird, recursive funhouse mirror. The old Grandpa Simpson "It'll happen to you!" meme is not just a perfect reaction to have here, but a perfect example. It's a famous meme, born from a show that is now mostly known by younger generations as an infinite meme factory, from a scene that was directed at Gen-Xers with nostalgia for the 1970s, by a character lamenting how he was cool in the '50s, and nostalgia for the '40s being the actual intended joke.

Scott Pilgrim now occupies a similarly strange place in pop culture. Back in the mid-2000s, the original graphic novels were to old-school video games, anime, and Canadian indie bands what Kevin Smith's worship of Star Wars and Marvel comics were to Gen X. Plenty of readers could latch onto the story of a nerdy slacker--the titular Scott--dating Ramona Flowers, a much cooler person with a checkered past, and Scott having to reckon with said checkered past by fighting her seven evil exes. The emotional honesty injected into the story by its creator, Bryan Lee O'Malley made it appeal to the folks who may never have picked up a controller, the folks who simply saw an extremely well-drawn, well-written fantastical slice-of-life indie book. Scott still had to deal with getting a job, paying his rent, and generally having to become an adult. He just happened to do so while speaking to nerds in a whole other secret language of nostalgic metaphors.