Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream 500 cigarettes meme sets off a trend

Living the Dream has no filters, but its Marlboros do

Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream allows players to draw any object they want and place it into the Nintendo Switch’s new life sim. It turns out that the Tomodachi Life community has one specific thing on its mind: cigarettes.

Since Living the Dream’s release on April 16, players have taken to social media to share their wildest creations within the game’s unrestricted customization suite. Browse through the Tomodachi Life Reddit, for instance, and you’ll find everything from the cast of Avatar: The Last Airbender to a whole Costco. You’ll also see a whole lot of cigarettes, giving the game one of its first big community memes.

What’s the deal? The trend seems to have started on launch day when Reddit user Spirited_Gene_2633 posted a near-perfect recreation of a Marlboro box. (The only difference is that it says Miirlboro instead of Marlboro.) Tons of copycats popped up on Reddit over the next few days, while other players got a little more creative. User Autistic_Rizz upped the ante with a “Cigarrette Cake,” popping a few cigs on top of the standard cake slice stamp that appears in the game.

The meme really started to escalate on April 18 when Reddit user cc_slider made a post titled “FIVE HUNDRED CIGARETTES.” The post, which has 15,000 likes, shows a custom drawing of 500 cigarettes sitting on a plate. When another user asked how cc_slider created it, they wrote, “I made one cigarette then cloned it 500 times.” When another user theorized that they must have made a full row of cigarettes and cloned that, cc_slider stepped in again to issue a correction: “Nah I rawdogged placing all 500 cigarettes.”

“Five hundred cigarettes” is a meme in and of itself. It originates from an episode of The Orville, Seth MacFarlane’s sci-fi comedy series that ran from 2017 to 2019. In one episode, aliens Bortus and Klyden discover the joy of cigarettes together. The scene ends with one of them demanding a 3D printer to spit out 500 cigarettes. It’s a natural escalation for a joke that was brewing in the Tomodachi Life community. What’s funnier than one Marlboro? 500 of them, I suppose.

Since then, cigarette mania has only grown. Players are giving them to their children, turning houses into cigarette boxes, and watching in horror as all their cigs get abducted by aliens. It’s Living the Dream’s first true running joke, and one that models what makes Tomodachi Life so powerful as a meme generator. With its lack of filters (minus the ones on the cigarettes), players have unrestricted freedom to craft any ridiculous item they can dream of, place it into the absurd life sim, and watch what emergent comedy comes from it. Fans certainly aren’t taking that freedom for granted right now, and that’s a terrifying thought.

If you want to add some cigarettes to your own island, you can try using Living the Grid, a community-made tool that turns any image you upload into pixel art that you can recreate in Living the Dream.