game-identification
This was in an episode of The Office:
I googled and absolutely nobody seems to know what it is. The answers I've seen have been Doom, Quake, Strife, Blake Stone, Marathon, Rise of the Triad, and all of those are wrong. Other people have said it's a fake game made by the production team, but I seriously doubt they would go through all that effort, considering they've shown real games being played on the show several times.
Which game is it?
It is the game Hardball! published by Accolade in 1985.
This is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
Your image is from the first person view, but the elements of the HUD match.
Health, mana and stamina bars are at the lower left, followed by icons for the current weapon and spell. Next is the compass with nearby locations. The center icon at the bottom of the screen is indicating that the player can level up. The two icons at the upper right indicate ongoing magical effects.
Comparison image from an IGN Review
Best Answer
This is a fake game. A demo created specifically for the show made to look similar to real games.
Watch here (thanks @BlueRaja for providing the video link), shown between 1:30 and 2:30
Reasons:
The game plays itself. In the scene, we see the character with hands on and off the mouse, the player continues to move, even when nobody has their hands on the controls. Additionally, the character never uses the keyboard, only ever the mouse. It's quite hard to play a FPS with just a mouse. This is a clear indication, that this is a scripted demo running and the character just pretends to play.
The game is very simple. The animation consists of moving forward and occasionally an explosion. This doesn't feel like a real game, but a simple tech demo.
The technology is mismatched. This episode aired in March 2010. The monitor looks like a standard TFT screen from roughly 2005, while the game looks like a mid 90s FPS. While it's certainly possible to play such a game on a modern machine, it seems strange for the producers to show such an old game and getting it to run on a Windows Vista or newer machine isn't all that easy. DOSBox would likely be required and I don't see the show producers make that effort for a background animation.
A lot of elements look very similar to Doom (character portrait in the UI, the weapon model).
The games UI is at the top of the screen, which is very unusual. The most important UI elements in FPS are always at the bottom, because that's where the weapon model is. The only game with top UI elements is Rise of the Triad and that only displayed less important information (e.g. score) on the top.
The player character is named (Mad dog), this is again taken from Rise of the Triad and serves no purpose, no other game I know did that.
Searching Mad Dog FPS on google only yields an FMV western game. The character is unknown otherwise.
All of this leads me to the conclusion, that this is an animation made to look like a 90s FPS specifically for the show. Why do this? When you show a real game, you run into licensing trouble. The game must be credited and you need permission from the owners to show it. Especially, when the game is just an unimportant background element, the games owner has little incentive to consider it advertisement. Thus it's simpler and cheaper to just create a short animation. This also means, the actor doesn't have to learn (at least rudimentary) how to play the game, they just need to pretend to play it.