10 Video Game Heroes Who Accidentally DOOMED Everyone

Everybody wants to be a hero. I mean, just look at the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. We all want to be part of the team handing the forces of evil the ultimate beatdown of their lives. However, there's a bit of rose-tinted-glasses thing going on here, because you know what? Heroes don't always make things better. So let's take a look at them, as I'm Jules, this is WhatCulture.com, and these are 10 Video Game Heroes That Accidentally Doomed Everyone. 10. The Saints – Saints Row IV Few science fiction stories would have the guts to blow up the Earth. But then again, this is Saints Row IV, a game that opens with a man riding a nuclear missile halfway into orbit, only to literally crash land into the Oval Office and become President of the United States. Suffice to say, nothing is sacred here. When the evil Zin Empire, led by the suave connoisseur of literature, Zinyak, invades Earth, he traps the Saints in a simulation with the stern warning that if they attempt to escape, it will result in the Earth's destruction. As any self-respecting hero and player would do, they call the obvious bluff and get to escaping anyway. Except, it turns out, the big bad over here wasn't bluffing, leaving the shocked Saints staring at the horrifying spectre of Earth blown to smithereens, along with every single person not yet abducted by the Zin. Worse still, while a loophole does allow the Saints to go back in time and see their Earth again, their Earth is absolutely permanently fried. On the plus side, though, with Zinyak defeated, they become rulers of the most advanced intergalactic empire in existence. So maybe it could be worse? Maybe...no, because the Earth is still gone. 9. Juliet Starling Lollipop Chainsaw Juliet Starling may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but when you're a badass, teenage zombie-slaying superhero rocking a chainsaw and some magic to boot, smarts might not seem all that important. So when a deranged goth takes revenge for the years of bullying and neglect by initiating an extra-dimensional zombie invasion, thus dooming the entire world to a zombie apocalypse, Juliet does what she does best. Slaughter zombies in style. Players, however, would have noticed something rather ominous. Juliet must kill five dark purveyors in order to prevent the apocalypse. Thing is, though, the summoning of said purveyors only happens when the pawn arrives, and Juliet just happens to be freshly arrived on the scene. Our hero, bless her heart, never apparently realises that she is indeed the pawn. It's only when all five purveyors are dead and the goth proceeds to blow his own head off to complete the ritual that the penny finally drops. Cue a skyscraper-sized zombie of all zombies rampaging through town. In all fairness, her quick thinking does save her boyfriend, which turns out to be rather crucial, but overall, less lollipops there, Juliet, and more hitting the books. 8. Guybrush Threepwood The Secret of Monkey Island Saving the damsel in distress is a well-established literary trope, one that The Secret of Monkey Island hilariously subverts by having the damsel save herself, only for the heroic manly man to completely mess things up. When hero Guybrush Threepwood learns that his love interest, Governor Elaine Marley, has been captured by the villainous undead pirate LeChuck, and that LeChuck, also smitten with Marley, intends to forcibly marry her, he naturally rushes to the rescue. Arriving in the nick of time to object, he's actually surprised to find that Elaine has already freed herself, and not only that, she has laid a trap for LeChuck in the form of a doppelganger comprised of two monkeys in a wedding dress, ready to spray LeChuck in the face with deadly root beer. But Threepwood's arrival foils the plan, leading to a lecture from Marley and a furious LeChuck beating him all across the island, a beatdown that only ends when the hopelessly incompetent hero remembers that he has root beer of his own. While Threepwood does get the girl in the end, we probably should be wishing that any future heroics are best left in her far more capable hands. 7. The Hero of Tristram, Diablo As far as villains go, they don't get much bigger than the devil himself, and big damn villains need big damn heroes to take them down. Ideally though, you need big damn smart heroes, and when it comes to the hero of Diablo, smart they are not. When Diablo's plot to gain dominion over the mortal realm was foiled, he was imprisoned within a soul stone and buried by another bunch of dumb as doorknob heroes deep beneath the village of Tristram. Naturally death, demonic possession, and bloody mayhem ensued. Equally naturally, heroes answered the call to sort out this mess, duly carving their way through the evil throng, dungeon by dungeon and monster by monster, eventually entering hell and throwing down with Diablo face to face, destroying his mortal form. So far, so good, right? But then, in one of the most monumentally stupid decisions in gaming history, the hero, in a fit of righteous, self-sacrificial heroism, jams the prison of a prime evil into their own forehead, in the vain belief that they can contain this evil. And the fact that we have Diablo 2 and 3 shows how well this bloody decision turned out. 6. Chell Portal 2 Portal's villain GLaDOS and protagonist Chell have quite the history. The murderous, cake-loving, hilariously snarky AI used Chell as a human lab rat before trying to incinerate her alive, a trap that Chell barely escaped before returning the favour and dismantling GLaDOS piece by piece. Come Portal 2, Chell finds herself once more imprisoned in the Aperture Science Facility, where she's awoken from stasis by lovable moron Wheatley. Accidentally awakening a furious GLaDOS, Chell is summarily forced back into being a test subject. Wheatley responds with a plan to defeat GLaDOS by replacing her with himself. The problem is, though, as GLaDOS puts it herself, he's not just a regular moron, he's the product of the greatest minds of a generation working together with the express purpose of building the dumbest moron who ever lived. And when that moron promptly goes insane with power, his infinite incompetence threatens to destroy the facility and kill all three of them. Ironically, GLaDOS is the key to fixing things here, with the two of them ending up as an unlikely heroic duo. Not that GLaDOS deigns to keep Chell around, though, expelling her from the facility before our hero can break anything else. 5. The Lone Wanderer – Fallout 3 The Fallout series has always been known for its murky morality, so it should come as no surprise that when a quest gives you the option of doing something unambiguously good, there's a good reason to be suspicious. Arriving at the luxurious Tenpenny Tower, the protagonist, the Lone Wanderer, finds ghoul Roy Phillips insisting that he and his gang be allowed to move in. Money isn't the problem, as Roy has plenty of it. No, instead, the racist human residents are less than thrilled at the idea of ghoul neighbours, leaving the door firmly shut in Roy's face. The player has a number of options, from simply killing the residents, to dealing with the residents' pest problem by exterminating the ghouls, but you can also take the long, arduous high road by negotiating a truce between the two sides, allowing the ghouls to move in and live peacefully alongside the humans. But this is Fallout, not Care Bear. The peace holds, for a while, but the Wanderer can return later on in the game to find the humans slaughtered, victims of a disagreement that led Roy to, as he puts it, take out the trash. No good deed, it seems, goes unpunished. 4. Captain Titus – Warhammer 40k Space Marine In Warhammer 40k, space marines are the best of the best, the emperor of mankind's elite. So when a forge world comes under orc attack, only those able to do the impossible are up to the task. Fighting through the hordes of orcs, the unconventional and unusually compassionate, for a space marine at least, Captain Titus encounters the shady Inquisitor Drogon, who tells him of a weapon that could destroy all of the invading orcs, or actually blow up the planet should the less than intelligent orcs begin to tamper with it. Ever the loyal soldier of the emperor, Titus fights his way through the legions of orcs and escorts Drogon to his secret facility. But that is about all that goes right here, because it turns out that Drogon was actually a sorcerer's puppet, and instead of wiping out the orcs, the weapon tears open a portal to the demonic warp, ushering in an invasion of chaos demons and corrupted space marines led by a sorcerer hellbent on ascending to become a demon prince. Luckily for Titus, he's an absolute beast, and luckily for players, fighting the forces of chaos is brilliant fun, so you know what, maybe we'll forgive him this time. 3. Edge Maverick – Star Ocean, The Last Hope If there's one thing that is every hero's kryptonite, it's the soppy story. All the villains need to do is turn on the tears, spin a pitiful yarn, and even the most cynical do-gooder is honor-bound to believe them. And we all know what happens next. Such is precisely what befalls star ocean hero Edge Maverick. Finding himself stranded on Earth circa 1957, he and his party are captured by scientists guilty of imprisoning and experimenting on alien refugees. Busting out of jail, they are stopped by the head scientist Bakhtin, who then proceeds to spin an absolute masterclass of a soppy story. You see, Edge comes from a future where the Earth was devastated by nuclear war. Bakhtin correctly deduces that his civilization overcame their dependence on nuclear energy by developing a clean energy source, one that should Edge help her replicate, would prevent the need for nuclear weapons, and thus the apocalypse. Edge falls for it hook, line, and sinker, and promptly finds himself stuck in a cell, watching as the deranged lunatic integrates the new source into a nuclear reactor, with predictably catastrophic results. Edge and the party escape, but not before the Earth is destroyed. Suffice to say, Edge's conscience is having a long time recovering. 2. Gordon Freeman – Half-Life Series Gordon Freeman, hero of the Black Mesa incident. The opener of the way, the one free man. With titles like that, how could you not be a hero? But for all his heroic deeds, Gordon does seem to have a habit of making things worse. In Half-Life, Gordon successfully defeats the Nihilanth, the creature directing the alien invasion of Black Mesa, but in slaying such a powerful foe, he attracts the attention of the Combine, an intergalactic empire that proceeds to conquer Earth in only seven hours. In Half-Life 2, he successfully foils the escape of the pretentious self-serving sellout of humanity Wallace Breen, but doing so leads to the destruction of the Citadel, the Combine's seat of power on Earth. With it comes the creation of yet another Combine super portal, and the threat of a second, even more devastating invasion. Gordon eventually seals the portal, but with humanity's forces still pitifully weak and a key resistance leader dead, it was a small victory at best. To be fair, Gordon is doing his best, but perhaps it would be better if somebody else took up the hero's mantle. Barney, me old mucker, it's your time to shine. 1. The Nerevarine – The Elder Scrolls III Morrowind Over the course of The Elder Scrolls Morrowind, the protagonist, the Nerevarine, completes a series of tasks to prove themselves as the prophesied hero who would work to bring down the evil Dagoth Ur. And being a prophesied hero, they naturally succeed, destroying the heart of Lorkhan, the source of Dagoth Ur's power, and ending his plot to take over the world. But there's just one teeny tiny sticking point here. The heart of Lorkhan was also what gave the gods of Morrowind their tribunal, their power. Power that was the only means of preventing a rogue moon from slamming into the planet's surface. And the result? The destruction of Morrowind's city and a massive volcanic eruption that covers the entire region in choking ash, killing thousands and displacing thousands more. As if that weren't enough, the destruction of the heart of Lorkhan may have also triggered the demonic invasion that formed the basis of The Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, which in turn becomes the basis of the Skyrim Civil War in The Elder Scrolls V Skyrim. So yes, if you've played all three, you've been cleaning up your own mess for two whole games. No wonder the hero of Morrowind hasn't been seen since.