About

A Bear! Play Dead! Not That Dead! is an absurdist two-panel meme format and exploitable comic in which a person notices a grizzly bear in the vicinity and tells their friend to play dead, with the friend then turning into a discontinued game series, a video game that has lost most of its userbase (known as a "dead game") or something else generally considered "dead." The original meme was posted on X / Twitter in early October 2024, spreading over the following months. The format is structurally similar to memes such as Man I'm So Hungry and Can't You Take Anything Seriously?.

Origin

On October 5th, 2024, artist and X user @capo_cino351 posted a two-panel meme in which two friends encounter a grizzly bear, with one telling the other to play dead. The other friend then turns into Little Big Planet, a puzzle platform video game series that had no major installments since 2014. The original X^[1] post has since been deleted.

Spread

Starting on October 6th, 2024, users on X / Twitter posted edits of the original meme, replacing Little Big Planet with various video game series considered "dead."

For example, on that day, X^[2] user @Murdoink edited the title of the fighting game series Virtua Fighter into the image, with the post (shown below) garnering over 550 reposts and 4,300 likes in four months.

In the following week, the format saw viral spread on X and Reddit. For example, on October 6th, 2024, Redditor Baandlol posted a version of the meme about the failed multiplayer video game Concord. The post (shown below) received over 4,200 upvotes in the /r/memes^[3] subreddit in four months.

On February 4th, 2025, X^[4] user @Swag_K1RBY posted a version of the meme about the platform fighter game Multiversus, which was planned for shutdown in the near future. The post (shown below) garnered over 1 million views, 3,000 reposts,and 79,000 likes in one day.

Various Examples

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Search Interest

External References