- 1 week ago
Sometimes the biggest threat isn't the villain, but the hero trying to stop them. This list explores 10 iconic video game protagonists whose well-meaning actions had devastating and unforeseen consequences for the entire world.
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00:00Everybody wants to be a hero. I mean, just look at the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
00:04We all want to be part of the team handing the forces of evil the ultimate beatdown of their lives.
00:09However, there's a bit of rose-tinted glasses thing going on here, because you know what?
00:12Heroes don't always make things better. So let's take a look at them.
00:16As I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 video game heroes that accidentally doomed everyone.
00:2210. The Saints – Saints Row 4
00:24Few science fiction stories would have the guts to blow up the Earth.
00:29But then again, this is Saints Row 4, a game that opens with a man riding a nuclear missile halfway
00:34into orbit,
00:35only to literally crash-land into the Oval Office and become President of the United States.
00:40Suffice to say, nothing is sacred here.
00:42When the evil Zin Empire, led by the suave connoisseur of literature, Zinyak, invades Earth,
00:48he traps the Saints in a simulation with the stern warning that if they attempt to escape, it will result
00:53in the Earth's destruction.
00:54As any self-respecting hero and player would do, they call the obvious bluff and get to escaping anyway.
01:01Except, it turns out, the big bad over here wasn't bluffing, leaving the shocked Saints staring at the horrifying spectre
01:07of Earth blown to smithereens,
01:08along with every single person not yet abducted by the Zin.
01:12Worse still, while a loophole does allow the Saints to go back in time and see their Earth again,
01:17their Earth is absolutely permanently fried.
01:21On the plus side, though, with Zinyak defeated, they become rulers of the most advanced intergalactic empire in existence.
01:26So maybe it could be worse? Maybe… no, because the Earth is still gone.
01:319. Juliet Starling – Lollipop Chainsaw
01:34Juliet Starling may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but when you're a badass teenage zombie-slaying superhero
01:41rocking a chainsaw and some magic to boot,
01:44smarts might not seem all that important.
01:46So when a deranged goth takes revenge for the years of bullying and neglect by initiating an extra-dimensional zombie
01:52invasion,
01:53thus dooming the entire world to a zombie apocalypse, Juliet does what she does best – slaughter zombies in style.
02:00Players, however, would have noticed something rather ominous.
02:03Juliet must kill five dark purveyors in order to prevent the apocalypse.
02:07Thing is, though, the summoning of said purveyors only happens when the pawn arrives,
02:11and Juliet just happens to be freshly arrived on the scene.
02:15Our hero, bless her heart, never apparently realises that she is indeed the pawn.
02:19It's only when all five purveyors are dead and the goth proceeds to blow his own head off to complete
02:24the ritual that the penny finally drops.
02:26Cue a skyscraper-sized zombie of all zombies rampaging through town.
02:31In all fairness, her quick thinking does save her boyfriend, which turns out to be rather crucial,
02:36but overall, less lollipops there, Juliet, and more hitting the books.
02:408. Guy Brush Threepwood
02:41The Secret of Monkey Island
02:43Saving the damsel in distress is a well-established literary trope,
02:47one that The Secret of Monkey Island hilariously subverts by having the damsel save herself,
02:51only for the heroic manly man to completely mess things up.
02:54When hero Guy Brush Threepwood learns that his love interest, Governor Elaine Marley,
02:59has been captured by the villainous undead pirate LeChuck,
03:02and that LeChuck, also smitten with Marley, intends to forcibly marry her,
03:06he naturally rushes to the rescue.
03:08Arriving in the nick of time to object, he's actually surprised to find that Elaine has already freed herself,
03:12and not only that, she has laid a trap for LeChuck in the form of a doppelganger comprised of two
03:17monkeys in a wedding dress,
03:18ready to spray LeChuck in the face with deadly root beer.
03:21But Threepwood's arrival foils the plan, leading to a lecture from Marley and a furious LeChuck beating him all across
03:28the island,
03:28a beatdown that only ends when the hopelessly incompetent hero remembers that he has root beer of his own.
03:34While Threepwood does get the girl in the end,
03:36we probably should be wishing that any future heroics are best left in her far more capable hands.
03:427. The Hero of Tristram
03:44Diablo
03:44As far as villains go, they don't get much bigger than the devil himself,
03:49and big damn villains need big damn heroes to take them down.
03:52Ideally, though, you need big damn smart heroes,
03:55and when it comes to the Hero of Diablo, smart they are not.
03:59When Diablo's plot to gain dominion over the mortal realm was foiled,
04:02he was imprisoned within a soul stone and buried by another bunch of dumb-as-doorknob heroes deep beneath the
04:08village of Tristram.
04:09Naturally, death, demonic possession, and bloody mayhem ensued.
04:12Equally naturally, heroes answered the call to sort out this mess,
04:16duly carving their way through the evil throng, dungeon by dungeon and monster by monster,
04:21eventually entering hell and throwing down with Diablo face to face, destroying his mortal form.
04:27So far, so good, right?
04:28But then, in one of the most monumentally stupid decisions in gaming history,
04:32the Hero, in a fit of righteous, self-sacrificial heroism,
04:36jams the prison of a prime evil into their own forehead,
04:39in the vain belief that they can contain this evil.
04:42And the fact that we have Diablo 2 and 3 shows how well this bloody decision turned out.
04:476. Chell
04:48Portal 2
04:49Portal's villain GLaDOS and protagonist Chell have quite the history.
04:54The murderous, cake-loving, hilariously snarky AI used Chell as a human lab rat
04:58before trying to incinerate her alive, a trap that Chell barely escaped
05:02before returning the favour and dismantling GLaDOS piece by piece.
05:05Come Portal 2, Chell finds herself once more imprisoned in the Aperture Science Facility,
05:10where she's awoken from stasis by lovable moron Wheatley.
05:14Accidentally awakening a furious GLaDOS, Chell is summarily forced back into being a test subject.
05:19Wheatley responds with a plan to defeat GLaDOS by replacing her with himself.
05:24The problem is, though, as GLaDOS puts it herself,
05:26he's not just a regular moron, he's the product of the greatest minds of a generation
05:30working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived.
05:35And when that moron promptly goes insane with power,
05:38his infinite incompetence threatens to destroy the facility and kill all three of them.
05:42Ironically, GLaDOS is the key to fixing things here,
05:45with the two of them ending up as an unlikely heroic duo.
05:48Not that GLaDOS deigns to keep Chell around, though,
05:50expelling her from the facility before our hero can break anything else.
05:545. The Lone Wanderer
05:56Fallout 3
05:57The Fallout series has always been known for its murky morality,
06:01so it should come as no surprise that when a quest gives you the option of doing something
06:05unambiguously good, there's a good reason to be suspicious.
06:08Arriving at the luxurious Tenpenny Tower, the protagonist, the Lone Wanderer,
06:12finds ghoul Roy Phillips insisting that he and his gang be allowed to move in.
06:16Money isn't the problem, as Roy has plenty of it.
06:19No, instead, the racist human residents are less than thrilled at the idea of ghoul neighbours,
06:24leaving the door firmly shut in Roy's face.
06:26Now, the player has a number of options, from simply killing the residents to dealing with
06:30the residents' pest problem by exterminating the ghouls, but you can also take the long,
06:34arduous high road by negotiating a truce between the two sides,
06:38allowing the ghouls to move in and live peacefully alongside the humans.
06:42But this is Fallout, not Care Bear.
06:45The peace holds for a while, but the Wanderer can return later on in the game to find the
06:49humans slaughtered, victims of a disagreement that led Roy to, as he puts it,
06:54take out the trash.
06:55No good deed, it seems, goes unpunished.
06:584. Captain Titus
07:00Warhammer 40k Space Marine
07:02In Warhammer 40k, Space Marines are the best of the best, the emperor of mankind's elite.
07:08So when a Forge world comes under Orc attack, only those able to do the impossible are up to
07:13the task. Fighting through the hordes of Orcs, the unconventional and unusually compassionate,
07:18for a space marine at least, Captain Titus encounters the shady Inquisitor Drogon, who
07:22tells him of a weapon that could destroy all of the invading Orcs, or actually blow up the planet
07:27should the less-than-intelligent Orcs begin to tamper with it. Ever the loyal soldier of the
07:31emperor, Titus fights his way through the legions of Orcs and escorts Drogon to his secret facility.
07:36But that is about all that goes right here, because it turns out that Drogon was actually
07:41a sorcerer's puppet, and instead of wiping out the Orcs, the weapon tears open a portal
07:46to the demonic warp, ushering in an invasion of chaos demons and corrupted space marines
07:50led by a chaos sorcerer hell-bent on ascending to become a demon prince. Luckily for Titus,
07:56he's an absolute beast, and luckily for players, fighting the forces of chaos is brilliant fun.
08:01So you know what? Maybe we'll forgive him this time.
08:033. Edge Maverick – Star Ocean – The Last Hope
08:07If there's one thing that is every hero's kryptonite, it's the soppy story. All the
08:12villains need to do is turn on the tears, spin a pitiful yarn, and even the most cynical
08:15do-gooder is honour-bound to believe them. And we all know what happens next.
08:20Such is precisely what befalls star-ocean hero Edge Maverick. Finding himself stranded
08:25on Earth circa 1957, he and his party are captured by scientists guilty of imprisoning and
08:31experimenting on alien refugees. Busting out of jail, they are stopped by the head scientist
08:36Bakhtin, who then proceeds to spin an absolute masterclass of a soppy story.
08:41You see, Edge comes from a future where the Earth was devastated by nuclear war. Bakhtin
08:45correctly deduces that his civilization overcame their dependence on nuclear energy by developing
08:50a clean energy source, one that should Edge help her replicate, would prevent the need
08:54for nuclear weapons and thus the apocalypse. Edge falls for it hook, line, and sinker,
09:00and promptly finds himself stuck in a cell, watching as the deranged lunatic integrates
09:04the new source into a nuclear reactor with predictably catastrophic results. Edge and
09:09the party escape, but not before the Earth is destroyed. Suffice to say, Edge's conscience
09:14is having a long time recovering.
09:162. Gordon Freeman – Half-Life Series
09:19Gordon Freeman – Hero of the Black Mesa Incident
09:23The opener of the way, the one free man. With titles like that, how could you not be a hero?
09:28But for all his heroic deeds, Gordon does seem to have a habit of making things worse.
09:33In Half-Life, Gordon successfully defeats the Nihilanth, the creature directing the alien invasion
09:38of Black Mesa, but in slaying such a powerful foe, he attracts the attention of the Combine,
09:43an intergalactic empire that proceeds to conquer Earth in only seven hours. In Half-Life 2,
09:48he successfully falls the escape of the pretentious, self-serving sellout of humanity
09:52Wallace Breen, but doing so leads to the destruction of the Citadel, the Combine's seat of power
09:57on Earth. With it comes the creation of yet another Combine superportal, and the threat
10:02of a second, even more devastating invasion. Gordon eventually seals the portal, but with
10:07humanity's forces still pitifully weak and a key resistance leader dead, it was a small
10:11victory at best. To be fair, Gordon is doing his best, but perhaps it would be better if somebody
10:16else took up the hero's mantle. Barney, me old mucker, it's your time to shine.
10:20And number 1. The Nereverine
10:22The Elder Scrolls III – Morrowind
10:24Over the course of The Elder Scrolls Morrowind, the protagonist, the Nereverine, completes a series
10:30of tasks to prove themselves as the prophesied hero who would work to bring down the evil
10:34Dagoth Ur. And being a prophesied hero, they naturally succeed, destroying the heart of Lorkhan,
10:39the source of Dagoth Ur's power, and ending his plot to take over the world. But there's just one
10:44teeny tiny sticking point here. The heart of Lorkhan was also what gave the gods of Morrowind,
10:50their tribunal, their power. Power that was the only means of preventing a rogue moon from slamming
10:56into the planet's surface. And the result? The destruction of Morrowind's capital city and a
11:00massive volcanic eruption that covers the entire region in choking ash, killing thousands and
11:05displacing thousands more. As if that weren't enough, the destruction of the heart of Lorkhan
11:10may have also triggered the demonic invasion that formed the basis of The Elder Scrolls IV
11:14Oblivion, which in turn becomes the basis of the Skyrim Civil War and The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim.
11:19So yes, if you played all three, you've been cleaning up your own mess for two whole games.
11:25No wonder the hero of Morrowind hasn't been seen since.
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