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"YOU embody Jeearr; you are cursed by ten thousand generations of victims; your face adorns the idols. And worst of all, you remain awake and aware, a witness to horror, never sleeping, and never, ever to escape. Your score is -99 of a possible 400, in 805 moves. This puts you in the class of Menace to Society."

In most games, players see the dreaded Game Over screen when they lose in some way. Maybe you fell down too many Bottomless Pits and lost all your lives, or the Player Character was beaten to death by a particularly vicious Demonic Spider. Maybe you failed a story important mission or lost a critical Non-Player Character during an Escort Mission. You might have been caught or captured during a Stealth-Based Mission. …Or, maybe you just forgot to pause the game while reading the walkthrough you pulled from GameFAQs and the game's timer ran out — you get the idea. These are all standard failings, usually treated with a simple default message: "Game Over."

Alternatively, you have successfully finished the game, defeated the Final Boss and receive a Game Over message after the credits because technically the "game is over". But that is not what this trope is about.

Sometimes there are games that give an unusual message or even a full cutscene for losing the game in a specific way. These are non-standard Game Overs.

There are a few variations on this theme:

• In games where the standard 'game over' sequence is getting killed by something, any situation in which you can lose without actually dying may result in a non-standard game over. Conversely, getting outright killed in a game whose scenarios rarely involve life-threatening situations may trigger a non-standard Game Over.
• Otherwise standard game overs (loss of hit points, lives, etc.) that receive special treatment because they occur in a particular place or time (e.g., a unique Downer Ending cutscene for losing to the Big Bad);
• Punishment game overs that the game levies against usually unsuspecting players who attempt to break the rules or derail the plot (e.g., when the game actually lets you say "no" to the main quest — and averts But Thou Must!, or triggering a case of You Lose at Zero Trust or a Reality-Breaking Paradox).
• Odd or bizarre noncanon bad endings that the player can choose to acquire, usually involving failing a mission objective in a way that causes the death of the main characters, often in a way that no stat bonus on Earth could get the player out of. Theoretically, anyway.
• You lose in a way that renders the Player Character Deader than Dead, such as erasing yourself from existence completely.
• Performing any stupid thing which causes death of the Player Character, especially when not in battle.
• Performing any obviously stupid or unsavory act just to see what would happen. This often gets you chewed out by an NPC followed by an unceremonious game over. This is often the case where you do things such as fire on friendlies just to see if they are Friendly Fireproof. Even if they don't fire back and kill you, you will still likely be arrested, court martialed, or some other appropriate punishment indicating that your mission is over and so is your career.
• Failing a Copy Protection check. The player is instructed to give a piece of information that could only be found in either the instruction manual or the feelies. Failing to do so would trigger an unwinnable scenario or cutscene. Not surprisingly, some of these sequences actually involve a pirate NPC or two. Genre Savvy players will likely figure out what is going on if the tone suddenly seem to breach the Fourth Wall, pirates are not a logical element in the game story, and it immediately follows a copy protection check. The vignette is likely to involve an admonishment about how Digital Piracy Is Evil, all while still in character. These are all clues that your game is permanently over until you purchase a legal copy.

This page is about the unusual, context-sensitive methods by which players trigger a Game Over screen. It doesn't include the times when the game tries to trick you into thinking that the game has ended.

For games where every death is accompanied by a special message, see Have a Nice Death. For games where every death has a special animation, see The Many Deaths of You. For games where all bad endings contain extended narrations or demonstrations about the consequences of your actions, see It's a Wonderful Failure.

For standard Game Overs that result from an instant-kill attack, see One-Hit Kill. For the game ending early due to a non-standard victory condition, see Instant-Win Condition. If a non-standard Game Over cuts the game's ending, then it's aptly No Ending. For non-standard Game Overs triggered early in the game, see Press Start to Game Over. For situations where there's an achievement awarded for this, see Achievement Mockery.

Genres with their own subpages:

• Action
• Action-Adventure
• First-Person Shooter
• Role-Playing Game

Other Examples:

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Adventure Games

• The Interactive Fiction Game, Anchorhead, has a large number of grisly ways to die, but the character can go insane in true Call of Cthulhu fashion by either fully reading the black tome in the church or by attacking and killing your husband during the game's finale. The character can also suffer "Endless Torment" by being sucked into the womb at any point.
• All of the endings in the Atlantis series are non-standard, and depend entirely on what wrong choice you made to bring them about.
• At the end of Beneath a Steel Sky, you can get one either by having Rob voluntarily plug himself into LINC, or waiting until LINC itself grabs him. Rob struggles for a while, then has his mind wiped and replaced with that of LINC.
• In The Black Cauldron, if you fail to get Hen Wen before she reveals the location of the Black Cauldron to the Horned King, the game ends immediately.
• BROK the InvestiGator is a hybrid adventure game and Beat 'em Up with a multitude of potential game overs, primarily from failing to solve an important puzzle or from dying in combat. However, it's also possible to fail by beating up a non-hostile character that calls the police on you, solving a puzzle before you're supposed to know the answer and causing a Temporal Paradox, ingesting medicine with disabling effects, and so on.
• Chicory Acolorful Tale: If you just repeatedly refuse to take Chicory's discarded brush at the beginning of the game, the credits start silently playing over a blank void. Once they're done, you're allowed to immediately resume from that decision.
• In The Dead Case, shortly before the very last part of the game, the killer runs into the house of the protagonist's fiancé, pursued by the ghost of his wife. The dead wife goes to set the house on fire, and the player is given the choice between stopping her and letting her go ahead. The correct option is to stop her (which will lead to the two going inside the house, stopping the killer, and saving the fiancé), but letting the ghost burn the house down will result in a game over, informing the player that the fiancé died and the killer escaped.
• Death Palette has every death be a Non Standard Game Over, with an artistic representation of how the artist was killed and a short snippet of the news report about their death.
• In the computer game version of Frederick Forsyth's The Fourth Protocol (in 1984), you have to uncover a Soviet plot to explode a nuclear bomb near a US Air Force base in Britain, to influence the upcoming British elections and lead to the election of an anti-NATO, anti-American, anti-nuclear, pro-Soviet government. Usually, if you take too long or don't get anywhere with the plot, you get a memo telling you you're being reassigned to The Falkland Islands, until you get far enough. When you find the bomb, you have to defuse it, and if you mess it, up you are told the plan succeeded: Britain fell to the Soviets, and they started working on Europe from two fronts. But sometimes a different ending appears: the bomb leads to a limited nuclear war, destroying both sides and making the northern hemisphere uninhabitable. This comes "From the annals of the Australio-Indonesian Empire..."
• Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmacist quits to DOS if you shoot yourself.
• Normal game overs in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective are caused by being unable to save your subject's life before time runs out. However, there are two instances where you can actively cause the subject's death.
  • If you recline the seat while the van-driver is driving, he will lose control of the vehicle and crash anyway.
  • In Chapter 15, if you replace the bullet with the hard-hat, rather than the soft knit hat, it will still crash into the victim's face and crush his skull (even more brutally than the bullet would have). His ghost isn't very pleased, but it's hilarious to watch.
  • In Chapter 15, if you try manipulating any object in view of the killer, he will notice you because he's also a ghost and knows of ghost tricks, and will immediately shoot the victim.
• From Next Door: If Namie is injured by the creature enough times in the climax, she is knocked unconscious and we hear the sounds of the creature dragging her (presumably to the other house), brief silence, then sinister growling. It's not considered a true ending though, as it immediately goes back to the player's previous save.
• The PC game Hell Cab, despite having a three-strikes-and-you're-out life system, has a few instant-death consequences depending on your morals. Early examples include telling Nero you want to throw the ladies to the lions, and choosing to kill your opponent during the gladiator match.
• Hiveswap: In Act 2, during the trial recess, if you're able to accuse Lanque, Joey will end up getting thrown off the train by him. The Game Over text is in a different font and in said troll's blood colour, while the music that plays is also different from the regular Game Over music.
• In one of Homestuck's flash "walkarounds" (Past Karkat: Wake Up), Karkat specifically tells you not to fall asleep — that doing so would be fatal, given the dream worlds' annihilation. Later on, Nepeta shows you to an Easter Egg room with a bed and lots of treasure chests. Guess what you can do.
• King's Quest:
  • King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow: The normal Game Over sequence is a very short cutscene in the Realm of the Dead. There are three Non-Standard Game Overs: a Deader than Dead Game Over (Alexander's skeleton in tattered clothing collapses on a black background), a Forced Transformation Game Over ("Was that the beast you could do?"), and another non-deadly Game Over where Alexander gets captured and locked in the castle dungeon right before the wedding ("'Tis a noble thing to have a means of escape, and 'tis a far, far better thing to never get caught at all!")
  • King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella had a couple. Rosella could, in theory, complete all the victory conditions… except getting the magic fruit she came to get for the ailing Graham. What plays is most of the happy ending, but when she gets to Daventry, she has to admit failure and watch her father die. Another one was either failing to escape the tower cell or getting caught by Lolotte's guards, which ended with her forced to marry Edgar. note
• Leisure Suit Larry:
  • In Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards, anything that resulted in a "normal" dead body would trigger a cut-scene of Larry's corpse being lowered into a laboratory, which then creates a new Larry to be raised to the opening scene for the soon-to-be-restarted game. (Interestingly enough, getting killed in an alley would result in one of the techs saying Larry screwed up again, but this never happened anywhere else.) More obscurely, if the player took too long to reach the end game, Larry sees the sun rising, and then shoots himself in the head in despair over still being (technically) a virgin.
  • In Leisure Suit Larry 2: Looking for Love (in Several Wrong Places) and Leisure Suit Larry 3: Passionate Patti in Pursuit of the Pulsating Pectorals, you can type cheat. This automatically quits the game, with no warning.
  • Leisure Suit Larry 6: Shape Up or Slip Out!: If you hook up with Gary the towel attendant or get a peek at Cavaricchi's chest, the game plays a different song at the game over screen. Yes, that's right. You can get a game over for being gay or looking at a woman's breasts.
• In the video game version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you play most of the game as King Arthur, but the "Knights in Kombat" mini-game allows you to play as Arthur or the Black Knight. If you play as the Black Knight and win, the game immediately cuts to the Game Over screen.
• In Myst, if you try to enter either the red book or the blue book, the brother inside will keep you trapped inside the book by tearing out all the pages. If you enter the green book without the final page, you're also trapped. In the nice ending, you put the white pages into the green book with Atrus in it. Then you get to wander the entire game world as a reward. Other entries in the series also offer multiple endings.
• The Neverhood contains a drain with signs warning the player to not jump in the drain because they will die. If you click on it, Klaymen jumps into it and falls out of the Neverhood and the credits roll. This is the only way the player can possibly kill themselves in the whole game.
• In the bonus chapter of Nevertales The Beauty Within, failing the test of character results in the main character's husband being crushed to death while she waits fruitlessly forever for his return.
• Failure during the finale of any Quest for Glory installment from Trial by Fire through Dragon Fire will lead not only to the hero's death, but a scene of the resident Sealed Evil in a Can breaking free to lay waste to the world.
  • This can happen several times in the second game, Trial by Fire. The main city is beset by four elementals over the course of the story, and three days after they individually show up, if they haven't been defeated, then you get a cutscene of them destroying the city. In addition, the final portion of the game, after the Big Bad gets the Sealed Evil in a Can but before it is released, any failure or waste of time will result in the above mentioned non-standard game over.
  • Playing as the Thief will end badly no matter what you do if you die, as Iblis, the sealed evil in question, will be released regardless, so this route is really a series of non-standard game overs.
  • In the third game, the Fighter must become initiated into the Simbani tribe as part of the plot, and this means competing against your new friend and the chief's son Yesufu at the Initiation Ceremony. The competition includes a number of events, including running, which Yesufu will always automatically beat you at until a pre-scripted moment where he is injured. If you leave him there, the Simbani, who rely on complete trust and cooperation within the tribe to survive in a harsh environment, will be horrified by your selfishness and refuse to initiate you, leading to a game over.
  • In Dragon Fire, you can sacrifice yourself to weaken the Dragon of Doom so your companions can slay it and save Silmaria. This gives you a Game Over screen that tells you how your sacrifice won't be forgotten. Another way, if you're a mage, is to cast the Thermonuclear Blast spell. This will kill you, your companions, and the dragon, and probably blow away a chunk of Silmaria in the process, but the game over screen says you did save Silmaria from destruction from the Dragon of Doom.
• Return to Zork: In most deaths, a three-note song plays (the notes are from the game's opening theme), Morpheus laughs at you, and a temple screen is shown. However:
  • In the very first death of the game (getting attacked by a vulture), a longer song plays.
  • In any death relating to water, a different three-note song plays.
  • In any death relating to explosions, there is no song and no evil laugh.
  • In one death (walking over a pile of leaves and getting sprung in a trap that also turns you upside-down), the temple screen is also upside-down.
  • Two final special game overs, related to the Copyright Protection quizzes. One just exits out to DOS normally if you get the questions wrong, but in the other one, later on in the game, you are "blown" back to DOS by a double barrel hunting shotgun.
• In Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis, if you approach Shelton too carelessly at his control panel, we're treated to a rather disturbing scene of him pulling a gun out and killing Nina with it. Although this is subverted as it's revealed to be Nina imagining what would happen if she took that action likely due to adventure games having a rule against killing the player character since the complaints of the old Sierra games, this is still quite a shocking roundabout twist on that rule.
• In Shadow of Destiny, when you die, you are generally given a couple of hints, and automatically continue; without the option to game over. However, it is possible in at least the first chapter to meet yourself — by coming into contact with yourself, you create a time paradox which erases you from existence. It also fails back to the title screen. You also unlock one of the Multiple Endings by inducing someone else to do it.
• Shadowgate: All the myriad deaths cut to a glowing-eyed Reaper against a sunset with the caption, "It's a sad thing that your adventures have ended here!!", except (at least) jumping into a massive chasm, which brings, "The Reaper Man stands below, waiting to catch you" instead.
• Space Quest: Multiple:
  • Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers has the option, at one point, to access an in-game computer and "delete" the files for Space Quest IV. Doing so automatically quits the game, with no warning.
  • You can type cheat in Space Quest II, although it results in a different ending.
  • One is added in the VGA Remake of Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter, where you can choose to flee instead of risking death trying to save Xenon and the galaxy from the Sariens.
• Trying to enable cheat codes in The Stanley Parable results in Stanley being trapped in "the serious room", leaving the player no choice but to restore or restart.
• In Super Adventure Rockman, the default Game Over screen is Roll dying. However, there are some battles that can cause a special Game Over for you.
  • Losing to Shadow Man will cause Shadow Man to kill Mega Man off-screen, and give out a Evil Laugh.
  • Losing to Gemini Man will cause Gemini Man to comment on Mega Man's loss before finishing off Mega Man with his Gemini Laser and giving out a Evil Laugh as the screen fades to black with no option of continuing.
  • Losing to the final boss will cause a Game Over where Ra-Moon kills everyone and takes over the world. There is a option to retry the final boss, luckily.
• In Sword Of Shannara, if you attack the Warlock Lord instead of the book controlling him, you get a text-only ending where the main character is the new Warlock Lord.
• Touhou Kenbun Roku: During Chapter 3, you meet a king and his daughter. You can opt to touch the daughter, and if you do, the game abruptly ends.
• the white chamber has a full eight endings. Four are standard Have a Nice Death you get by getting killed before completing the story (end up in outer space, get electrocuted, die from toxic air, or decide to stay in a quarantine bay until you expire). Completing the story nets you an ending depending on how many points you've gained by certain deeds until then: five points nets you the Redemption ending, in which you leave the station. Less, you get the Damned ending in which you have to do everything all over again since you didn't learn. Zero points nets you the Tormented ending, in which you're essentially Dragged Off to Hell. Oh, and scoring six points (difficult unless you go out of your way to do everything right) lands you the Comedy ending, which is weird.
• Typing "click heels" in the old The Wonderful Wizard of Oz text adventure would lead to a black screen and state that while it did get Dorothy home safely, it leaves her friends fending for themselves, and that Dorothy will spend the rest of her life wondering about the adventures she missed out on.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories has a game over scene for every lost duel where the opponent mocks Yugi & Yami for their defeat. A game over still occurs when they're friendly dueling with their allies without any risks in the duel.
• Bug Hunt for Macintosh, in addition to the normal Game Over by Player Character death, has at least five non-standard failure situations; escaping on the shuttle but leaving the alien alive aboard the space station and being sentenced to prison for it; having the station self-destruct with you still onboard; using the frag grenade onboard the station and suffering Explosive Decompression; launching the alien on the shuttle without first rigging it to explode with the aforementioned grenade; or taking off on the shuttle yourself with it rigged.
• In Maniac Mansion, half the titular house is blocked off by a steel security door. The only way to open it is to use the keypad to enter a randomly chosen code from the codebook enclosed with the game as Copy Protection. If you get the code wrong, you trigger an alarm that inevitably blows up the house. The only way to stop it is to use the keypad again and enter a code correctly. Even when you open the door, the mansion's inhabitants will sometimes close it if they pass through it. Most later adaptations simply keep the door open at all times and remove the keypad feature altogether.

Augmented Reality Games

• Pokémon GO:
  • The AR+ mode for iOS devices requires the player to reach the Pokémon slowly to avoid getting the warning bubble getting filled. If the player reaches them quickly (ie: immediately), there's an increased likehood of Smoke Out.
  • Using Pokémon Go Plus? Well, you can also get a bizzare Game Over by just pressing the button, as it gives the player only one shot at catching Pokémon using one regular Poké Ball with no option for trick throws.

Beat 'em Up

• In Advance Guardian Heroes, running out of HP will lead to the game's Big Bad offering you an "invincible body" in exchange for your soul. Refusing leads to a standard Game Over. Accepting the offer results in you being resurrected in "Devil Mode", wherein — as promised — you are given invincibility. This only lasts for a few minutes, however: once the time limit is reached, the Big Bad will claim your soul and destroy your new body: all accepting the offer does is prolong the eventual Game Over. Reaching the end of the game in Devil Mode also results in an immediate Game Over, with no chance to see the ending.
• In Anarchy Reigns, during the boss fight against the Blacker Baron, once you weaken him to about 25% of his life, you'll be warned of an impending plane crash on your position. After weakening him further, you'll then have about 20 seconds to finish the fight, or else the plane will crash, killing you both and causing a Mission Failure.
• In The Bouncer, if you run out of time trying to find the keycard to unlock the cargo to stop the train from crashing with rocket fuel, the collision into the building is more destructive and causes sea water to rush through the explosion, which then causes the whole next level to have water chasing you at certain points which causes emergency doors to close. If you don't make it through the doors fast enough, then a cutscene plays where your character of choice is trapped by the doors and the water reaches them. It then cuts to the normal game over screen over a black background.
• Fable Heroes normally does not allow the player to lose; even if all Player Characters in the party are killed, they can complete the level as ghosts, receiving fewer resources. The normal end screen shows the party members standing on a championship platform. However, if the game is set to the highest difficulty level and all the PCs die, the game cuts to the same platform but with all of the top 3 spaces occupied by monsters, with the heading "The Creatures Win!"
• A very harsh example happens in The Ren & Stimpy Show: Time Warp. The game begins with the titular duo having to collect 47 million Gritty Kitty proofs to win a time machine. If they complete the first stage without having enough, the game ends. In reality, the duo only have to collect at least 67 as Powderded Toast Man conveniently destroys a shipment that contains 46,999,935 proofs. Nowhere does the game tell or clue the player how many Gritty Kitty proofs to collect until the stage has already been beaten.
• In SNES version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time, beating the game on Easy or Normal Mode can be result in alternate ending merely consists of Splinter telling you to hone your skills more, and then the mockery part (courtesy of Shredder) before the Game Over screen.
• In Undercover Cops, failing to stop Dr. Crayborn from dropping the atomic bomb on the city will result in a bad ending in which the city is destroyed by the bomb and the three city sweepers are forced to quit their jobs, followed by the Game Over screen.

Fighting Games

• In the Arcana Heart series, should you time out during the final boss battles, the bad endings show either the Elemental World and human world merging in the first game or Japan getting destroyed by Ragnarok in the third.
• In Bushido Blade, you must fight your opponents honorably in Story mode. Use dishonorable tactics and the game abruptly ends after you do so, with a random message (For example, "None are more contemptible than those who defile the way of the Bushido.") berating you.
• Normally, losing a fight
  in the first Fatal Fury leads to a taunting quote from your opponent and a "Continue?" screen showing your fighter's battered picture. Losing to Geese, the last boss, however, gives you a cutscene where he kicks you off of Geese Tower. The "Continue?" screen likewise shows your character plummeting to his death.
• In Marvel vs. Capcom 3, you can watch a unique ending sequence if you lose to the final boss and opt not to continue. In Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, said ending became unlockable by beating the newly added Galactus Mode.
• In most fights in Mortal Kombat 11, losing a fight gives you a simple continue menu. Kronika, on the other hand, prefers to add insult to injury if you lose to her.
  • Lost in the Tower? She always performs her Fatality, which shows her killing your character and rewinding time to bring them back to life… only to do it again and again, ad infinitum, until you do something in the menu.
  • Lost in Story Mode? She will form a blade on her wrist, much like Raiden did at the start of the story, and decapitate Fire God Liu Kang as soon as possible.
• Samurai Shodown IV: Amakusa's Revenge has a time limit to reach Amakusa. If you go over the time limit, you can still continue playing, but after defeating your chosen character's rival in Amakusa's Castle, they will abruptly die when the castle explodes
  . The game then provides an epilogue that states that even though Amakusa is dead, the death toll from his reign of terror is immense.
• Street Fighter:
  • In the arcade version of Street Fighter Alpha 3, losing the final CPU match against M. Bison does not allow you to continue. Instead, you'll get an alternate ending in which M. Bison uses your character's body as an energy source for his Psycho Drive. And if you lose to Ryu playing as M. Bison, it will play Ryu's ending instead.
  • Street Fighter: The Movie has a general time limit in its Movie Battle mode. Let it run out and the game ends abruptly as soon as your current fight finishes, with narration stating Guile was court-martialed for disobeying orders, the Allied Forces had no choice but to pay Bison the money he demanded, and Bison used that money to create and unleash an army of super soldiers upon an unsuspecting world.
• Super Smash Bros. Ultimate: The adventure mode, World of Light, has two bad endings which double as non-standard Game Overs, since they just kick you out of the mode without triggering the credits: during the final stretch of the game, if you defeat either Galeem or Dharkon alone, the other will finish off his nemesis and destroy the world with light or darkness, respectively.
• Tekken:
  • In Tekken 5, if you lose to Jinpachi and let the "Continue" timer run out, you'll get an extended Game Over. Instead of just a plain "Game Over" appearing, a cutscene plays first. Jinpachi laments that no one was able to stop him, cries Tears of Blood, and goes One-Winged Angel one last time before rocketing himself into the sky. The screen fades to black, with one final message:
  • Losing to the last phase of Tekken 8's Final Boss in Story Mode results in an alternate ending in which Kazuya, in time-honored Mishima fashion, throws Jin off a cliff, then proceeds to consolidate his rule of the world.
• In the Virtual Boy game Teleroboxer, there is a "Title Defense" mode which can only be played if you defeat all of your robot opponents, including the "Legendary Champ". If you lose even one match in the "Title Defense" mode, it will say that you are no longer the champion and you must now retire. Depending on which save file that you played on, it will say "CHAMPION RETIRED" on it, which means you cannot play on that same save file ever again.
• In the original Virtual-ON and the sequel Oratorio Tangram, attempting to defeat the final boss by time over will result in a bad ending (due to a Wave-Motion Gun on the moon powering up in the first game, or a Reality Warper super-computer activating in the sequel).

Light Gun Games

• In Silent Scope, in the final part of the game, you only get one shot to headshot the boss. If you miss, he will set off the bomb and escape. A screen is then shown saying "The President's rescue operation has failed."
• Space Gun has a mechanic where you have to rescue survivors as you play through the game. Failing to save enough by the end of the fourth level will land you with a screen showing dead survivors and how the mission was a failure due to the casualty count, leading to an automatic game over.
• Time Crisis:
  • In the original Time Crisis and Project Titan, running out of time caused an instant game over, unlike the sequels.
  • In two sniper missions of Rescue Mission in 3, missing a shot or let the timer run out will cause an instant game over and ask you to continue.
• Zorton Brothers has an example of this; besides the undertaker burying you if you lose all of your lives, the fight against the Zorton Brothers is this; you only have two bullets to kill the Zorton Brothers. If you miss a single bullet, you will be shot, and you will be treated to a scene with the undertaker commenting on your loss against the Zorton Brothers. Afterwards, your remaining lives are ignored, and you do not get to continue, meaning that it's back to the beginning of the game for you.

Management Games

• A round of King of the Castle is intended to end with either the King succeeding at their ambition, or one of the Noble houses succeeding at their Scheme or Rebellion. However, there are also decisions that can immediately end a reign, such as the King angering a Witch or Assassin and getting killed in revenge, that lead to everyone voting on which of the two Noble factions that were closest to winning getting their representative on the throne.

Maze Games

• In the Tandy Color Computer game A Mazing World of Malcom Mortar, sealing yourself into a dead end or blocking the path to the exit with a permanent brick wall triggers an immediate Game Over, so as to avert an Unwinnable situation. A similar NSGO occurs if you barricade yourself in with destructible walls, are out of dynamite, and said barriers block access to dynamite pickups.

MMORPGs

• In The Elder Scrolls Online, during the mission The Parley, Queen Arzhela has tasked you with protecting her, during her meeting with Septima Tharn. It is however, an ambush, and by attacking her illusion, she will call out the Seventh Legion to aid in killing the queen. It then becomes an ambush, and you're then asked from the top of a cliff to provide assistance and protect the queen. If her health drops to zero at any point during this mission, the screen will fade to black while Septima Tharn relishes in her victory. Despite the fact that it just reloads the mission from the point of the ambush if you fail, a Nonstandard Game Over doesn't usually happen in an MMORPG. But this is one of few instances where failure to protect an important ally will result in one.
• Final Fantasy XIV
  • The Steps of Faith tasks players with stopping a dragon from storming the gates of Ishgard across a long bridge. If the dragon manages to make it to the end of the bridge and destroy the last ward, you are shown a cutscene of your character watching powerlessly as the dragon breaks through, leaving Ishgard to their mercy.
  • The fight against Bismarck occurs on a floating island being pulled along by an airship. Periodically, Bismarck will ram the island and weaken its integrity, which is represented by a special bar. Should this bar reach 0%, you are treated to a lovely cutscene in which Bismarck rises up and swallows what's left of the island whole. With your character still on it.
• In World of Warcraft, the game is never "over"; players who die just respawn as a ghost, walk back to their corpse, and typically restart the quest, fight, or encounter they failed on. But sometimes something else happens…
  • The corpse run back Blackrock Depths (or Molten Core) in Blackrock Mountain leads you past another ghost NPC, Franclorn Forgewright, whereas normally the ghost world is completely empty, even of other dead players. When you stop to talk to him, Forgewright's ghost gives you a quest that's unobtainable in the living world.
  • The fight against the Lich King ends with a scripted Total Party Kill after which you cannot respawn as a ghost since "your soul belongs to the Lich King". Naturally, a third party resurrects you shortly thereafter to bring about his final defeat.
  • A Total Party Kill during the Madness of Deathwing encounter will result in him activating the titular ability "Cataclysm". Doing so causes the entire screen to temporarily go black as he just destroyed the planet.
  • The same thing used to happen if the countdown ran out for Algalon the Raid Destroyer, for the same reason.
• Toontown: Corporate Clash: The Chainsaw Consultant will fire everyone in his sight out of a cannon, and if the Toons fight too aggressively during his first phase and get his RPM meter above 20,000, that includes them. You don't technically go sad, but you land outside his boss arena at 1 HP and with no gags to use in battle. Fittingly, while most "cheats" take the courtesy of explaining what they do when they occur, this one takes a different tack: DEADWOOD!

Party Games

• In Getter Love!!, the game normally ends when you or one of your opponents declares your love to one of the girls. If someone other than you wins the game, you're treated to a word from everyone involved, and that's it. If two game-weeks pass by and no one wins, you'll be forced to marry Reika, with her equally butt-ugly family attending the wedding ceremony.
• The Jackbox Party Pack has a few scenarios where a game can end without a winner being declared.
  • In general, if nobody writes/draws anything for a round, the host says something snarky and the game quits back to the title screen.
  • In Trivia Murder Party, if all the players are dead before round 5, the game immediately ends. Sometimes, a man talking about how 'heaven got (number of players) bad trivia partners' replaces the 'List of the Dead' song before the credits theme.
  • In Monster Seeking Monster, games below a minimum number of players will gain an additional NPC player in the form of a Robot. The Robot gains hearts more easily than other players (gaining bonus hearts if a player even tries to message or date it), but also loses a heart every night. If the Robot comes in last place, it fails to understand human emotions and destroys humanity, meaning everyone loses. To make this clear, the End-Game Results Screen states that the Robot regrets what it did.

Pinball

• Many older pinball machines had a mechanism to detect dishonest players trying to cheat the machine's coin mechanism into thinking a coin had been inserted when it actually hadn't, or trying to steal the coin box outright. If triggered, the machine displays "SLAM TILT" (not to be confused with the regular TILT) and all players get a Non-Standard Game Over, plus any credits left in the machine are voided (newer games 80's and on don't void credits). However, modern pinball machines usually don't even have Slam Tilt switches, since modern coin mechanisms aren't vulnerable to the old exploits that Slam Tilt guards against. That said, Creature from the Black Lagoon at least has a unique quote (from the player character's girlfriend) if it happens: "That's it! Take me home right now!"
• Many older electromechanical pinballs (usually ones that only support a single player) would immediately end the game rather than just the current ball on a (non-slam) tilt. Games made shortly after the penalty was reduced to the modern convention of ending the current ball would sometimes note this change.
• Operation: Thunder is infamous for abruptly ending the game if the player successfully completes all eleven missions and completes the Final Assault. Fortunately, this is an operator-adjustable setting, and most home collectors simply turn it off for longer playtimes.
• In the latter half of The New '10s, a trend emerged where completing the final Wizard Mode or otherwise finishing the main objective led to the game ending entirely. Examples include destroying the 9th reactor in Total Nuclear Annihilation, playing "Billion Dollar Babies" in Alice Coopers Nightmare Castle, and playing "Escape Nublar" in Jurassic Park (Stern).

Platform Games

• ALF for the Master System has a nasty prank in store for those who buy the Alf Book item. First, it tells the basic story of ALF with a nice nod to Sega, but then it sends you back to the title screen with a mocking message. Pretty funny if you bought it too early on to lose much progress, but pretty irritating if you decided to hold it off until later. THEY DID AND DECIDED THAT IF ANYBODY EVER READ THIS BOOK THEY WOULD HAVE TO GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING OF THE GAME. SURPRISE...HA
• In the first two Banjo-Kazooie games, as well as Donkey Kong 64, just quitting the game triggers a Game Over banner, as if the developers of the games (Rare) wanted the player to beat the whole campaigns in one session. In both DK64 and the first BK, the Game Over includes a scene showing the potential outcome that would result if the protagonists failed to twart the plans of the villains; once the player gets past the foil of the evil plans, and all that remains is the final battle, no scene is shown, as the game just puts the Game Over banner before returning to the title screen (this is also true for the entirety of Banjo-Tooie, which doesn't have any Game Over cutscenes whatsoever).
• Castlevania:
  • In Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, normally Richter dies in a Rain of Blood (being the first Castlevania protagonist to suffer this), but getting ambushed by a living portrait ends up with Richter being trapped in a picture within the picture — which the figure in the portrait proceeds to tear up. It's the only unique death animation in the game. That said, this isn't really a Game Over (unless you were on your last life).
  • Losing to the True Final Boss in Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow results in Soma being taken over by Dracula completely, and you get a short scene where Julius Belmont is implied to make good on the I Cannot Self-Terminate promise he made with Soma earlier. The DS sequel one-ups this even more: getting the Non-Standard Game Over unlocks a new game mode where the other characters team up to take down the now Face Heel Turned protagonist.
  • A number of bad endings are effectively this, since many games that offer them don't have "routes"; getting the bad ending is often a matter of performing a certain action and then having the consequences play out immediately (or at least with one boss fight beforehand) in the form of said ending before showing the Game Over screen:
    • Killing Stella and Loretta in Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin allows the Big Bad or so he seems; he's actually the Disc-One Final Boss to get away. You have to use the Sanctuary spell to cure them of their vampirism and continue the game.
    • Engaging and then killing Albus without rescuing all captive villagers in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia results in an ending where Shanoa sacrifices herself to a vessel said to be able to destroy Dracula. Rescuing said villagers results in Albus revealing the true nature of the sacrificial ritual, a boss fight with Barlowe, and the second half of the game.
• Cave Story:
  • After the standard Critical Existence Failure, the gameover screen reads "You have died. Would you like to try again?" If your Oxygen Meter runs out underwater, the screen changes to "You have drowned." If you fall into either of the two Bottomless Pits in the game, it reads "You were never seen again..."
  • The worst of the game's Multiple Endings borders on a non-standard game over. Notably, the music that plays ("Hero's End") is different from that in the better endings ("The Way Back Home"), and this is the only ending that lacks the ending credits.
• In the second episode (game) of Commander Keen, there are Tantalus Ray Cannons you must destroy in order to save Earth. There are eight of them, but if you press a switch on the side of any of them, a Tantalus Ray shot will destroy the planet and your game is over instantly.
• Conker's Bad Fur Day involves a fabled Panther King seeking a red squirrel with which to replace his broken table leg, so as to prevent him from spilling his milk on said table. The standard game over has Conker, the protagonist, tied and gagged to the king's table leg. Depending on the circumstances of the player's death, the game's nonstandard endings include the Panther King's minions turning Conker in as either a bag of soggy squirrel (drowning or otherwise dying underwater), bloodied chunks (gibbed), or black char (burned or electrocuted), or just a shot of Conker's Face on a Milk Carton (falling down a bottomless pit). In the final stage of the game, they do away with the cutscene entirely, only showing you "GAME OVER" on a black screen.
• Donkey Kong Country: In the extremely unlikely event that you allow the platform to get too far away from you in Tanked Up Trouble, the game will automatically play Diddy or Donkey's Bonus failure animation, a life will be docked from you, and you'll go back to the level select screen as if you'd otherwise died normally.
• In Drawn to Life, you can choose not to help the Raposas. Mari, the only one hearing from "you" at that point, loses hope, and the game ends.
• Duck Dodgers Starring Daffy Duck has two different Game Over scenes. The first is that Daffy Duck is beaten up by his superiors and kicked out of the office as he's told to look for another job. The second shows Cadet Porky Pig given the job to defeat Marvin while Daffy is given the duty of being a janitor. Both of these end with Daffy walking down the street as "Game Over" pops on the screen.
• In Elevator Action Returns, if you run out of time near the end of the final stage (the nuclear missile silo), the missile will be launched and a picture of an erupting mushroom cloud is shown, followed by a message on the computer screen that says "YOUR MISSION IS OVER".
• Plenty of 'em in I Wanna Be the Guy.
  • If you fall out of the sky, a plane from Mario Paint hits you, accompanied by an 8-bit Game Over music ditty.
  • If you lose to Mike Tyson, the "you lost" theme from Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!! plays.
  • If you get grabbed by Kraidgief: Hokuto Shinken...Spinning Piledriver!
• The indie PC game Iji includes a specific death sequence for being slain through overkill. Ordinary deaths in the game, no matter what the cause (small-arms fire, electric shocks, miniature nuclear explosions), result in the protagonist being Blown Across the Room while shrieking before bleeding out as the game over music plays. However, getting killed by the final boss's superweapon, the Phantom Hammer, a laser designed to burrow through miles of earth and destroy Alpha Strike-preventing shield generators, instead results in Iji being vaporized instantly and wiping her stats to zero, with nothing but silence left where she once stood. Then the game over music kicks in and the boss says his standard victory line.
• Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards has a Boss Rush mini-game. When you lose all your lives, instead of the "Try Again" and "Quit" options you'd get during normal gameplay, your only option is to "Accept Defeat".
• In Kya: Dark Lineage, standard Game Overs show a screen saying "Game Over". However, near the game's end, if you're hit by traitor Aton's Wolfen Gun, you can see a sequence where Kya slowly transforms into a scary, female Wolfen. And that's The End.
• In Mario's Time Machine, if you either lose all of your lives or run out of time rescuing all of the artifacts from Bowser, then the game will show a cutscene where Bowser successfully activates his time machine and escapes to a tropical island. If you rescue all of the artifacts but get them back in the wrong time period, then Bowser's time machine will overload, and as a result he is sent back to the Cretaceous period all dazed and confused-looking. If you get everything right, then Bowser's time machine will still overload, and as a result he is sent back to the Cretaceous again, only to be crushed to death by a giant dinosaur foot.
• In Mega Man Legends 2, if you mess up during the time you're defending Nino island from the Birdbots and they blow through the gate, the scene switches to the Guildmaster going nuts and hitting the self-destruct button, blowing up the island and everything in it.
• In Mystery Quest, losing all of your Hit Points gave you a normal Game Over screen with Hao standing in place and crying. However, if he should die by jumping into deep water without an SOS raft, the Game Over screen will show Hao crying against a watery background while displaying the words "Hao Can Not Swim; Game Over".
• Inverted in The NewZealand Story. If, after clearing World 1, you lose your last life by getting hit by an arrow (or similar) attack, instead of the standard game over screen, you instead go to "heaven", and have a chance to escape in order to continue the game. If you make it to the end of this "hidden" stage, however, the game ends for real. You have to find a hidden exit in order to get out of this "nonstandard" game over. Escape and you have one last chance.
• In Nosferatu, defeating the final boss after using eight continues leads to the hero discovering his kidnapped beloved had already been turned into a vampire when she suddenly bites him, followed by an immediate Game Over.
• In the Oddworld series, there are horrible consequences if you fail to complete the in-game tasks to a high enough standard. In Abe's Oddysee, if you fail to save over 50 Mudokons, Abe will be sliced and diced through a meat saw in Rupture Farms. In Abe's Exoddus, again, failing to save enough Mudokons, will leave Abe in the hands of the Brewmaster, who will strap him down and pass electricity through his body to extract his tears. Eventually, the electricity gets turned up too high and he will be electrocuted. In Munch's Oddysee, failing to obtain a certain level of Quarma will leave both Munch and Abe to be mauled by Fuzzles, who also alert the Vykkers as to their whereabouts. Abe will be killed and his head hung on a wall which Munch has an even worse fate: He is strapped down, while his lungs are forcibly removed while he is still fully conscious so that they can be given to the ailing Glukkon queen. If you somehow do even worse than that, you get one final newspaper showing everything Abe and Munch tried to prevent came true- not only is the Glukkon Queen getting said lungs, but the Gabbiar was sold and consumed, and all the Mudokons are being returned to slavery, with their hatchlings soon to join them.
• Prince of Persia has a rather delayed one. When you start the game the princess is cursed to die in one hour (two in the longer SNES version), and you have to get to the top of the castle and save her before time runs out. You can continue even after the hour time limit is up, however when you reach the final stage you'll be greeted with the princess's corpse since she of course died when the timer expired. In the SNES version, you don't get to fight Jaffar either.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Ratchet & Clank (2002) has this for the later half of the Final Boss battle with Drek. Fail to turn off the Deplanetizer in time and you'll watch the weapon blow Veldin up.
  • In Ratchet & Clank (2016), if Clank is caught by Victor, a scene plays out where he'll laugh maniacally on top of Clank's body.
• Rayman 2: The Great Escape has exactly one of these. There's a quest in which you have to locate a healing elixir in the Cave of Bad Dreams. After completing the cave's obstacle course, you are offered massive sums of cash. If you accept this, you will find yourself sitting on a luxury yacht with a pile of cash the size of a small building. The implication is that Rayman lets his greed get the best of him and decides to simply let the pirates enslave everybody while he lies around enjoying his money. The game snaps you back immediately instead of ending the game though, and will cycle through until you pick the right option. In some ports of the game, Rayman just takes the potion automatically, though.
• In The Simpsons: Bart vs. the Space Mutants, losing your last life in the final level rewards you with a look at the aliens' ultimate weapon: an army of Homer Simpson robot duplicates.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 has a versus mode where two players can compete against each other as Sonic and Tails. If one player loses every life in either act of Emerald Hill, Casino Night or Mystic Cave, it's an instant loss for that act.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog CD, waiting idle for 3 minutes will cause Sonic to lose his patience with you, and with an "I'm outta here!", leave the game, giving you a Game Over.
  • In SegaSonic the Hedgehog, failing to escape from Eggman's Tower in time will cause a Game Over with no option to continue.
  • In Sonic the Fighters, after defeating Metal Sonic, the Death Egg II you're both fighting on will begin a self-destruct sequence. Dr. Eggman comes out to challenge you, and you have 15 seconds to defeat him lest the Death Egg II explodes with you on it.
  • In the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), at one point Sonic has to jump onto a whale's dorsal fin and hang on while Tails takes control briefly. If you take too long as Tails to find the switch for the sea gate, the whale will swim out to sea with Sonic still hanging on.
  • The classic fan game Sonic Robo Blast (predecessor to Sonic Robo Blast 2) had a stage set in a volcano that would erupt in five minutes, real time. The eruption was an instant Game Over, ignoring lives.
• Running out of time on the Dam level in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989) causes the bombs to detonate. This causes a game over, no matter how many turtles you had remaining.
• The Sega game adaptation of Tom & Jerry: The Movie has one where, if Tom is idle for too long, Jerry simply runs off the screen, taking you to the Game Over/Continue screen.
• Wario Land 3 has a strange inversion, where the Game Over is non-standard because there is only one way to die. Normally enemies can only inflict Amusing Injuries on Wario (like getting Squashed Flat or set on fire), and some of these even allow him to reach new areas, but during the Final Boss fight Rudy the clown will occasionally try to grab Wario. Let this attack connect and you receive the only Game Over in the whole game.

Puzzle Games

• Antichamber: Killing yourself in-game (namely by crushing yourself with blocks) will crash the game engine.
• Catherine: Losing all retry attempts and returning to the title screen will show a scene in which Vincent died in his sleep as police take photographs of his corpse.
• One question in The Impossible Quiz 2 asks "Click Yes to exit." Clicking "Yes" will take you back to the title screen, without the Game Over screen. This also returns in a question in The Impossible Quiz Book Chapter 1 and 2. Falling for reverse psychology and pressing "Please don't press this." and "Shut down" on their respective questions will also have the same effect as above.
• LIT (2009) gives you a unique punishment if you use too much electricity at one time; the generator breaks and the screen undergoes a Fade to White, leaving Jake and Rachael at the mercy of the creatures in the darkness.
• Void Stranger: The normal way to get a Game Over is to die without any Locust Idols left, at which point the player is asked if they want to continue; accepting the continue puts the player in Void status, whereupon the game over state is lifted and the player has infinite lives but as a result the player cannot proceed past B226, while declining to continue exits the game and starts the player from the beginning next time they play. However, in several floors, if there isn't a wall separating the dungeon and the HUD at the bottom, you can actually move tiles until they connect to the HUD, which you can then walk on. Picking out tiles from the Locust Idol counter will cause the game to "glitch". Interacting with certain other elements of the HUD will effectively trigger this trope:
  • If you pick out the HP/VOID indicator or the wand icon, the game will crash and exit!
  • If you pick out the floor counter, you will suddenly end up in an endless void, starting at an error screen. You are stuck here and while you can walk around, the only meaningful thing you can do is exit the game.
• In the computer version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?:
  • If, on the Fastest Finger portion of the game, no one gets it right after several attempts, Regis Philbin comes on, mocks you for being stupid, and says "That's it, I'm out of here." Then the game quits.
  • This also happens as early as the select mode screen. note If you do nothing, Regis will make a comment once every few seconds, growing increasingly impatient each time, before he finally throws in the towel and quits the game for you, kicking you back to your desktop.
• In almost all You Don't Know Jack games, the following will happen when the contestants respond with "fuck you" on Gibberish Questions three times in a single game: the first time, you lose a very large sum of money, and depending on the mood, the host will take even more and possibly even rename you into something insulting. The second time, nothing happens to the score because he doesn't find it funny or creative enough to warrant the punishment a second time. The third time, he just gives up and closes the game, and he'll make it known you can't pause or press a key to get out of this if you tried. The same also applies if "fuck you" is used a player's name in between sessions, with the exception of the second time causing you to lose even more money than the first time. In the case of multiplayer games, any and all players who do this will be renamed, but it will only count as a single instance; it otherwise goes pretty much the same as when used during a Gibberish Question.

Racing Games

• In Beetle Adventure Racing, you can't fall too far behind without the game automatically disqualifying you. If the game estimates that it would take you 60 seconds to catch up with the car in the lead, it's game over for you.
• In Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, if you download a patch so the computer could move, and it wins, the game will crash because there is no code for when you lose a race.
• In the original Test Drive, if take too long to reach a gas station, you are told that you are "driving too slow to have a sports car", and the game ends there, regardless of the number of lives remaining. If you rear-end a police car, you also get an instant Game Over.
• Real Racing 3
  :
  • In a Drag Race, the player's race ends like this should they prematurely hit the launch button three times before the lights go green.
  • In Time Trials, the player's lap will be rendered invalid if they go off-track or collide on the wall, forcing players to start over. Weekly Time Trials and Time Trial Competitions, on the other hand, mitigate this by giving players a time penalty for off-track cuts and wall collisions.
  • Some events, including Flashbacks, will implement no off-track and no damage objectives, or both at the same time; failure to do so causes the player to get an instant DNF. Additionally, certain goals even include fuel management (as well as battery management for Formula E cars, which is carried over in its own race section), setting up a fastest lap, completing a lap with a timer, and even maintaining their car's engine heat. The player can instantly lose the race if they run out of fuel or overheat their engine.
  • The Formula One Invitational Series from the 2022 Season onwards also implement fuel management on the third portion of a Grand Prix circuit tiernote , and as mentioned above, running out of fuel means an instant DNF.
• In Vette!, if you don't answer the Copy Protection question correctly, after a few minutes, the game displays the message "You are driving a stolen Vette" and quits.
• Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune series:
  • All games let you have this by driving the cars into wrong way, but it is possible only if you aren't playing Multiplayer Battle, and you have the Retire Option enabled on your game save in your card.
  • Starting from 4, retiring a Story Mode race by pulling this gives you an instant Game Over, but it doesn't count as a loss for your records. You have to insert coins to restart it again.

Real-Time Strategy

• Battle Zone 1998 includes several missions that avert Take Your Time despite the absence of a mission timer. On Mars, General Collins orders you to scan Cthonian ruins for a flight data log; continue to ignore his orders, and he will transfer Grizzly One's command to Lieutenant Corbin, who orders Grizzly One to be court-martialed.
• Failing the storyline stage battles in Brütal Legend leads to a Type A cutscene where they gloat over you.
• The old MS-DOS Real-Time Strategy game Command HQ features a nonstandard game over by nuclear winter. Normally, allowing your capital to be overrun results in the status bar stating "We captured the enemy's capital!" or "The enemy captured our capital!", along with a catchy tune and a bit of flashing. However, if you use too many nuclear strikes in a scenario, it exits straight to DOS with the message "SIC TRANSIT GLORIA MUNDI" (Latin for "Thus passes the glory of the world.")
• Last Train Home: If the Major commands less than six Legionnaires, the smallest number required for a combat mission, the journey ends in their immediate surrender to the Reds and execution.
• Rise of Nations:
  • The game has two kinds of Game Over: the normal defeat, when your opponent simply wins, and the Armageddon defeat, which happens if you drop too many nukes, and basically means everybody loses. Similarly, the Cold War campaign has two Game Overs: the normal defeat, where the opposing side wins, and the Nuclear Holocaust ending, where everybody fires Mnogo Nukes.
• The New Order Last Days Of Europe, a Hearts of Iron mod depicting a dystopian 1960s where the Nazis won World War II, can also result in a nuclear Holocaust if global stability drops below a certain point or the nuclear powers' core territories are directly threatened. If you are playing as Ordenstaat Burgundy or the Black League of Omsk, this outcome is your victory condition. It also results in a Bittersweet Ending; millions die, but human civilization rises again thousands of years later in a more peaceful and understanding form, and the brutal ideology of Nazism and the horrors it unleashed on the world are forgotten forever.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Falsebound Kingdom has several special game overs depending on the campaign objectives and storyline.
  • After brainwashing Tea, Scott Irvine makes her attempt a forbidden spell that will destroy the world, with herself as the tribute for it. If you wait until the mission timer runs out, she succeeds.
  • If you win the second brainwashed Joey fight with anyone but Mai, he fails to break free of the mind control. Scott sets him up to sacrifice himself via a hypnotic suggestion, and Yugi and friends can't even take revenge on Scott since he appears as a hologram.
  • Your second encounter with Yami Bakura has him threatening to burn Jakhud to the ground. If you fail to stop him from reaching the city, he makes good on this threat, and you get a special cutscene of Fizdis crying out for her parents.

Rhythm Games

• Arcaea:
  • If you fail an Anomaly track and your progress towards unlocking it for regular play hasn't reached 100%, "Anomaly Lost" will appear on the results screen along with your current progress.
  • If you fail "Ether Strike" with Anomaly mode active, the screen, which has already been gradually fading to white, will turn white completely, the music will fade out, and the shutters will close without the usual "TRACK LOST" text.
• Normally, a Game Over in beatmania IIDX results from finishing a song with less than 80% Groove Gauge. However, if you miss 50 notes in a row, or have one of several different "survival" gauges and that gauge hits 0%, the "STAGE FAILED" shutters — which never pop up on a "finish with <80%" fail — will pop up and the song will immediately end. And from SPADA onwards, the "STAGE FAILED" screen tells you the exact note and measure you failed, with the caption DEAD.
• In DanceDanceRevolution A, failing the Extra Stage track "ENDYMION" will still take you to the results screen and end-of-credit routine as usual, but instead of the menus' usual blue sky background, the red sky that's been there since you unlocked the track will persist until your credit ends.
• In the Groove:
  • The first game has a slightly different Game Over screen for its hardest song, "Pandemonium." After the usual "LIFE DEPLETED/ROUND FAILED" screens, a skull appears afterwards.
  • In the Groove 2 features something similar if you fail "Vertex^2," you get the usual "LIFE DEPLETED/ROUND FAILED" screens, and then a power of two pops up next to "FAILED," turning it into "ROUND FAILED^2."
• REFLEC BEAT typically lets the current song run to the end, unless you are playing the iOS port, in which you can pause the game and quit or restart the current song. However, in Reflec Beat colette -All Seasons-, the Pastel Wonder Traveler event puts you on a Life Meter, which decreases whenever you get a Good or a Miss. If your HP hits zero, the song ends immediately in failure.
• Rhythm Heaven (GBA/AC) and Rhythm Heaven Fever offer two ways to fail "Night Walk": Either fail to hit enough notes, which is the "standard" way, or fall into a Bottomless Pit.

Roguelike

• 868-Hack will give you a special death cause if you manage to make yourself stuck with no possible move.
• While dying in weird ways is pretty standard in Ancient Domains of Mystery, there's also the non-dying way to end the game by having your character just walk off the game map by the same path they took to get in, never to return. It's definitely the easiest way to avoid actually dying, aside from the fact that the backstory implies the forces of Chaos will then probably consume the world. (Unless, of course, you already stopped them, because you also leave that way to win in the normal ending.)
• In The Awakened Fate Ultimatum, if you choose to have Shin not try to save Eri after she is kidnapped by devils, he receives a package containing her severed head. This causes him to go full monster, killing everyone around him, destroying Celestia and then the devils that come to investigate the carnage. You are then dumped to the game's title screen.
• In Brutal Orchestra, choosing to kill This Pitiful Corpse leads to a unique cutscene where Bosch explains excitedly that Nowak was fooled and gleefully abandons him in a void before booting back to the title screen without unlocking hard mode.
• In Darkest Dungeon, if the rest of the party should die when against a boss that has captured one of your heroes (the Hag, the Siren, the Fanatic, etc.), the mission is lost resulting in a Total Party Kill, likely because the boss finishes with whatever they had in store for the captured unit.
• FTL: Faster Than Light:
  • There is a special Game Over message for allowing the Rebel Flagship to destroy the Federation base: The Rebel Flagship is within range of the Federation Base. All is lost, they've won.
  • Another unique Game Over occurs if you die during the training mission:
  • A rare situation can occur in Advanced Edition if your ship has a clone bay: If you have the back up DNA bank augment which prevents you from losing crews in the clone bay when it's disabled, and all your crew members are dead and the clone bay is destroyed, then you are stuck since you will not see the game over screen as your crews are still in the clone bay but there is no way to repair it (unless you have a repair bomb) and you can only manually restart the game.
• Nethack lets you do this as early as the first turn. You start on the highest floor of a dungeon, right on top of a staircase. You're supposed to bring an amulet from the bottom floor all the way up to that staircase so you can enter the final phase of the game. But you can also climb out of the dungeon without the amulet. This ends the game immediately, with your final stats page saying you "escaped." Some players do this to start scum for a good set of initial items, though it can also happen if you confused the real amulet with one of the "cheap plastic imitations."
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity, you can actually refuse to come back to the Pokémon world after your partner makes it possible with a wish. This results in being sent back to the main menu after a brief narration that you never returned and were missed terribly by your friends, and upon loading your save, the game will treat it as though you had been defeated in the dungeon prior to the event.
• Rogue: "R.I.P.: Software Pirate. Killed by Copy Protection Mafia.", if you die while playing an illegal copy.
• Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate: If the Black King gets checkmated by the Black Bishop, he turns the Black King into a White King which then hops around the board a few times before the game cuts to the "Try Again?" screen. Unlike every other form of defeat, the "Game Over" text does not appear if you lose this way, mostly because the Black King didn't actually die.

Shoot Em Up

• In the PC Engine Super CD version of Gradius II, if you beat the game on the easiest difficulty, Easy, you won't be able to see the ending of the game. Instead, you'll recive a mock-up screen where there's the Vic Viper above the planet Gradius with a text that says: "CHALLENGE NORMAL MODE". Exaggerated, during this screen the game over theme is played and after a pair of seconds, the game voice taunts you to "CHALLENGE NORMAL MODE" and the mentioned text with start flashing and the screen starts to disappear. Also, you won't be sent back from the first stage, after this, the game is automatically over!

Simulation Games

• Ace Combat:
  • In the final mission of Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, if you fail to destroy the SOLG (loaded with a nuke) in time, you're treated to a short cutscene of it detonating over Oured.
  • If you don't destroy the last missile in the Megalith mission in Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies, you get to see that very missile launch from its silo and win the war for Erusea.
• In Cold Waters:
  • If your submarine takes fatal damage but you manage to abandon ship at a shallow enough depth, there's a good chance you and your crew will survive. In that case, you may be picked up by NATO units and continue the campaign with a new sub. However, if there's a lot of hostile units still afloat in the area, you will be captured by the Soviets (or Chinese, in the 2000's campaign) and imprisoned in a gulag for the rest of the war, ending the campaign then and there.
  • If you sink too many neutral merchant ships, you will be relieved of command and sent to a court martial, also ending your campaign.
• In F/A-18 Hornet, if you land or eject in enemy territory, you get captured and are listed as "Missing in Action". If you cause any collateral damage, you are Court-martialed.
• In the 1985 game Balance Of Power, pushing too hard in international negotiations would result in an immediate end to the game, with a black screen displaying the message: "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." If you do it by mistake, the message will change to make it "an accidental nuclear war", but it is still a game over.
• FreeSpace:
  • In both games, jumping out without being authorized to do so will result in a court-martial for desertion.
  • In the second game there's a mission in which you go undercover among NTF, and you are ordered to destroy a civilian transport. Regardless of if you comply or not, your cover is blown and the other pilots will turn hostile. Once you've eliminated them, reinforcements will arrive to get you out. If you destroyed the transport, the mission will be considered as a failure and you will be court-martialed.
• Harvest Moon
  • There are three non-standard Game Overs in Harvest Moon DS and two or three in Harvest Moon DS Cute.
    • The first is during the opening sequence, when Mayor Thomas from Mineral Town annoys your character into attacking him. The dog will then become angry. You'll have the option to call your dog back. Refuse, and Thomas will scream and the screen fades to white as the dog attacks him. The credits roll, and you're taken back to the title screen.
    • This next one takes a very long time to get… you have to grow a Level 100 Toadstool, then submit it at the Harvest Festival. The entire town (including you) will grow sick. The credits roll, and you're taken back to the title screen.
    • If you turn on HMDS with Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town in the GBA slot (or HMDSC with Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town), villagers from Mineral Town will start to visit Forget-Me-Not Valley. You only have to do this once to make them keep coming back forever. The Mineral Town girls in DS are marriage candidates… but marrying any of them will take you back to the title screen and revert back to your last save file. This is changed in DS Cute, though, allowing you to continue the game with a Mineral Town husband.
  • In the English version of Harvest Moon: Magical Melody, marrying your rival, Jamie, will cause the game to end as they weren't marriageable in the Japanese version, and thus nothing was written for them post-marriage.
  • In the Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life subseries, your game ends if you are not married by the end of the first year.note In later chapters, allowing your farm and shipment levels to fall by the wayside can cause your wife to leave you. In the PS2 special edition, you can end the game in the first cutscene by simply telling Takakura you don't want the farm.
  • In Harvest Moon, if your farm is in bad enough condition by the time your parents visit the first time (about six months in) you'll be booted from the farm and, most likely, have to re-start the game. Though since it takes so little to make your farm acceptable, this becomes an Earn Your Bad Ending scenario.
• In the late-80s jet combat simulator Jet Fighter II: Advanced Tactical Fighter, a successful ejection would result in the message: "Successful bailout! Rescue copter is on its way! Isn't simulating stimulating?"
• Normally, in Lobotomy Corporation, each day goes on until you end it after meeting your energy quota, or you reset it to try again. But Day 47, 48, and 49 can trigger a bad ending if you attempt them without having previously completed certain side-missions, or if you lose all your Agents while you're trying to complete that day's mission.
  • On Day 47, Abram simply tells you that you aren't ready yet, and to go back.
  • On Day 48, Abel triggers the facility's self-destruct.
  • On Day 49, Adam uses the Seed of Light to turn the City's people into Abnormalities.
• Monster Rancher: Running out of money causes an instant Game Over. In 2 for instance, Colt says this before the game goes to the title screen. "Oh my gosh! You are broke. (The game is over!)"
• The Oregon Trail II: "You're Fired!" (kicked out of the wagon train), if you're a trail guide and morale gets too low.
• Pacific Strike: If you are inept enough to let enemy Japanese planes sink both the USS Enterprise and the carrier assigned to replace it, the game immediately ends in defeat for the US Navy and Hawaii is ceded to Japan as part of the terms of the peace treaty.
• In Papers, Please, there are a few ways that the game can end instantly, booting you back to the title screen without an ending. These include:
  • Failing to disarm a bomb on day 15
  • Touching the poisonous powder on day 20
  • Getting hit by a grenade from a suicide attacker on day 21
  • Failing to kill the EZIC rebel attacking your booth on day 31, if you did not sufficiently cooperate with EZIC
• Pilotwings: In both of the game's helicopter missions, your craft is a One-Hit-Point Wonder. Get hit once, and your chopper is instantly busted and plummets to the ground, abruptly ending the game. Since you don't even get any message from your instructors, the disturbing implication is that the player character perished.
• In Red Baron and its sequels, while getting your plane shot down often kills you outright, it's possible to survive a crash only to spend the rest of the war in a hospital or POW camp before you can recover or escape, respectively.
• The Sims: At the very start of the "Get a Life" mode in the console versions, you can explore your dream house as you see fit before you join your mate in the tub. But if you keep them waiting too long, they'll get progressively angry and annoyed, until they give you a Game Over and end your playthrough before it even starts.
• Space Shuttle Project had it possible to get a game over before the game even begins. The first thing you have to do is input a password that the game gives you, either the one it shows you, which starts a new game, or a password from a previous game. Every time you fail to put in a proper code, you lose a life. Lose all your lives on this screen, and the Game Over newspaper has a headline that declares "Impostor Astronauts Arrested."
• In the Star Wars: Rogue Squadron series:
  • Failing a critical mission objective will cause the mission to end (even if you are still intact), followed by a "MISSION FAILED" screen (instead of "GAME OVER") with a description of what triggered mission failure.
  • If you shoot down allies/convoys/things you're supposed to be protecting, you get a warning or two ("Skywalker, what are you doing?!"), and then Rieekan calls you back... Rieekan: Commander Skywalker, return to base. We'll discuss your... tactics... in private.
  • In Rogue Leader, it's possible to get a unique game over by running out of torpedoes in the attack on the Death Star. Cue Yavin IV getting blown the hell up.
  • Normally, the Death Star blowing up is something to celebrate, but in the Rogue Leader bonus mission "Triumph of the Empire", you play as Darth Vader during the Death Star assault and your objective is to destroy the Rebels under a hidden time limit. Take too long and the Death Star explosion becomes your Mission Failed cutscene.
• Strike Commander: Failing to keep the mercenary squadron you are in charge of in the black financially will lead to the bank foreclosing on your base and putting it up for sale. The squadron disbands and the game ends.
• Trauma Center:
  • Under the Knife and Second Opinion, Episode 4: Fail the bomb "operation" and instead of a depressing Game Over in which Derek quits his job, you hear an explosion as the screen simply goes white.
  • New Blood, Episode 5: Run out of time on the lock-picking mission, and instead of "Your skills were not up to the task — Operation Failed", you hear the sound of water filling up as the screen fades to white.
  • Trauma Team also gets one. If you fail on the final chapter, instead of the normal message/suicide note, you get a recording of Rosalia talking about Albert and the Rosalia Virus, seconds before her death.
• Wing Commander:
  • In the first game, if the Tiger's Claw is destroyed, you get a message saying "With your carrier destroyed, you drift endlessly through the void..."
  • In Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger, screwing up critical missions results in the fleet jumping back to Proxima and then making a Last Stand at Sol. This mission is unwinnable even with godmode, and drops you into another cutscene where you can decide how you die. This is quite possibly the Nonstandard Game Over that's drawn out the longest. If it is possible to save before the mission, pray you didn't save it over your previous save game.
  • In Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, if you repeatedly screw up your early missions, say, by immediately ejecting on launch for every mission you get, Tolwyn hands you your pink slip in a hysterically dark cut scene.
• In X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, if you fail at a mission (rather than just dying, ejecting, or hyperspacing out of there before the mission's done), you'll be treated to some tragic music. Depending on how well you did, you might be the sole survivor, or your enemy might curb stomp you.

Sports Games

• Baseball Stars uses a similar "mercy rule", ending the game if either team is ahead by ten or more runs at any point. So did Sega's Sports Talk Baseball for the Genesis. It was explicitly called a "10-run Rule", and the talking commentator would say the team won "by domination".
• In Blitz: The League 2, getting Franchise injured in Prison Ball will end the game, as you have ruined your career. Unlike in other modes of the game, Prison Ball will not let you perform triage if an injury occurs.
• Mario Superstar Baseball and Mario Super Sluggers have a rule (which can be disabled in normal game modes, but is always active in story mode) where being 10 runs or more ahead at the end of an inning ends the game; however, if the visiting team is 10 runs ahead in the top of the inning, the home team still gets the bottom of the inning to reduce the deficit under 10 (for example, 15-0 to 15-6) before the rule kicks in.
• Super Bases Loaded for the SNES. In this particular sports game, you end up getting the Non-Standard Game Over screen, should the CPU completely blow you out by getting 9 runs straight. It will not even wait for you to make it to 9 innings. Instead, it will briefly freeze, then show someone from your team kneeling in defeat, with the word "Blowout" over their head, with some sad music. From there, it will go to the scoreboard, and the words "Blowout Game" will appear. From there, it will promptly go back to the title screen.
• Tropical Angel: Normally the game ends by running out of time, but getting hit by the shark results in a game over no matter how much time you have left.

Stealth-Based Games

• In Batman: Dark Tomorrow, if the player defeats Ra's al Ghul without disabling a relay that the game doesn't tell you about, then he manages to blow up the North Pole anyway, destroying every major city in the world.
• In Dishonored: In the final mission of the Brigmore Witches DLC, Delilah Copperspoon is conducting a ritual to hijack the body of Empress Emily Kaldwin using a painting of her. Allowing the ritual to go ahead will have her disappear into the painting of Emily while taunting you, leading to the Game Over screen. GAME OVER You failed to stop Delilah's ritual.
• Hitman:
  • In Hitman: Codename 47, if 47 doesn't take down Ortmeyer before he attacks, 47 will wake up in his bed chamber, having been mind wiped.
  • Two of them as death cutscenes in Hitman: Blood Money. The first is in You Better Watch Out... where an unknown Franchise assassin disguised as one of the strippers stabs 47 in the neck with a nail file. The second is in A Dance with the Devil; the singer is actually a Franchise assassin named Eve, who will try to seduce you. Should you follow her and wait for too long, she will stab 47 repeatedly. There's also one in the final mission, Requiem: if the player takes too long to wake up 47 during the fake credits sequence, his funeral ends with the coffin he's in being closed and then cremated.
  • In one mission of Hitman: Absolution, if 47 has the audacity to shoot a nuke that's hanging on a ceiling, the scene cuts to Kane & Lynch with others in the desert, as the facility is destroyed by the nuke's explosion in the background.
  • In Hitman 2, in "The Ark Society" mission, you need to kill your targets in order to secure the Constant's killswitch so he can be captured alive. Once you have it in your possession, you can just use it, completely ignoring the entire point of the mission, and trigger an automatic game over. Doing this completes a challenge.
  • In the last mission of Hitman 3, If 47 chooses to take the memory wiping serum, he will collapse to the ground. Some time later, an amnesiac 47 wakes up in a padded room as Edward greets him.
• Metal Gear:
  • The original Metal Gear Solid used the Nonstandard Game Over as a plot device on one occasion, being told before a possibly-fatal Minigame that "there are no continues, my friend...". And, of course, dying results in a non-standard game over screen — with no CONTINUE option. A player would have to quit the game and reload before they could try again. The game can go even further to psych out the player here. If you haven't saved in a while, the game will detect this and call you out on it. "You really wanna travel down that long road again?"
  • In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, during the Tanker chapter, if Snake gets caught sneaking around in the holds during the Commandant's speech, the player is shown the soldiers in whatever room he's in taking Snake into custody before "Game Over" is displayed.
  • MGS2 uses a completely different "Game Over" screen for the solo Raiden missions that's unlike the "Game Over" screen when playing as Snake or even as Snake/Raiden later in the game. Around the time both characters join forces, the player learns why this is.
  • Also from Metal Gear Solid 2, there's an Escort Mission late in the Tanker chapter where you need to escort Otacon's younger half-sister Emma. If she dies, it's obviously Game Over, with special scathing quotes if you killed her yourself.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which is a prequel, you meet a young version of Ocelot from the previous games. He's supposed to survive the events of the game, but in one occasion you can kill him after he's been knocked out in a cutscene. If you do so, you'll have Colonel Campbell, from the future, shout "Snake, what have you done? You changed the future!! You've created a time paradox!", and the words "OCELOT IS DEAD" will appear, instead of the usual game over text, before gradually changing into "TIME PARADOX". This also applies to other characters whose actions affect the rest of the series, but Ocelot is the most notable. You even get a achievement for this in the HD Version.
  • In MGS3, if Snake takes too long to defeat The Boss, the scene cuts to the two hearing a pair of Migs dropping bombs on their position.
  • There's a few cases in Metal Gear Solid and its sequel, in particular, where you get a wildly different Informal Eulogy depending on the circumstances. Crash into the tripwires surrounding Baker, and Ocelot will call you an idiot/fool depending on if you're playing the remake or not. Fail the torture, and not only will your CONTINUE option be missing, but you'll get to hear Liquid yell at Ocelot for getting carried away and botching another interrogation. Die during the final battle in Metal Gear Solid 2 after your "support" team has dropped their façade, and they'll laugh at your failure.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, die during the final battle & you will be given the choice to "Continue" or "Exist". Choose the latter, and you will hear Ocelot tell you "It's not over yet, Snake!" and you will have to choose again, only "Exist" will have returned to the traditional "Exit".
  • If, in the VR missions centered around Gurlugon, you get hit by one of its Eye Beams while wearing the BDU, you get possibly the most bizarre game over sequence in the entire series
    .
  • Rather than Snake dying, there are other ways you can get a Game Over. If, for example, you kill Johnny in MGS4, Otacon will shout "Snake, what did you just do? Have you lost your mind?!", and as soon as the Game Over screen appears, Otacon says "Oh no! What are we going to do now, Snake?"
  • In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, if Snake is unable to prevent the Peace Walker from launching a nuke during its battle, Snake watches helplessly as it fires the weapon.
  • There's a few ways to get one of these in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
    • If Ishmael dies in the tutorial level, you'll get a "Time Paradox" message foreshadowing the fact that he's the real Big Boss.
    • You'll also get one of these if you kill one of your own men while on Mother Base by throwing them into the ocean/off a high enough ledge that can kill them, where Ocelot screams "Boss, have you lost your mind?!" "Maybe you're not the Big Boss we hoped for after all.".
    • In Mission 1, where you have to rescue Miller, Ocelot tells you he only has about 3 days to live. If you wait 3 days, either by using the Phantom Cigar or simply by taking too long, he will be unresponsive when you trigger his cutscene, and when Snake lets go of his face, it will stiffly lull to a downward position, causing Snake to scream in agony and Ocelot to solemnly inform you that Miller has died from extensive blood loss due to his severed limbs. This also results in a "Time Paradox" message.
    • Killing any Child Soldiers in Africa causes the screen to flash red and the camera to focus on the corpse before going to the normal game over screen.
    • Killing Eli in Mission 23 will also result in a Time Paradox message. This is because he is Liquid Snake.
• Splinter Cell:
  • In Splinter Cell, you are on a training facility, and at a certain point you get a gun. If you turn back and kill an officer, you get fired. You also get fired if you attack Grimsdottir in the beginning of the level. Same for any level with friendlies or other NPC's you are required to keep alive.
  • In Splinter Cell: Double Agent, if you fail the final minigame-for-a-boss, you are treated to a very disturbingly realistic portrayal of emergency services and news helicopters flying over Manhattan as a smoking ruin after a nuclear blast.
• Yandere Simulator:
  • The 'standard' game overs are these:
    • Heartbroken: Ayano can no longer hope to romance Senpai, either because a rival successfully confessed to him or Senpai saw her doing something horrible and rejected her (Or, less commonly, you let your reputation get too low).
    • Arrested: Ayano left too much evidence behind, and the police arrested her.
    • Expelled: Ayano behaved badly in front of the teachers once too often, and the Guidance Counselor lost patience and expelled her.
    • Trying to threaten the Guidance Counselor in order to get out of trouble causes her to immediately expell Ayano, regardless of whether she has suspended her before or not. Did you really think threatening an authority figure would end well?
  • Less common game overs are the following:
    • Apprehended: Ayano killed someone in front of the wrong person, and paid for it. Teachers and heroic students (and some normal students, if you kill someone they were especially close to) will initiate a 'struggle' minigame, the Student Council will pepper-spray you into submission, and if you kill someone with four or more witnesses, they'll gang up on you and take you out.
    • Comatose: Ayano killed someone in front of a Delinquent, and lost the subsequent minigame, resulting in the Delinquent beating her unconscious. Or she walked into her own electric booby trap and got herself fried.
    • ??????: You aggravated the Headmaster too much, and he tazed you in preemptive self-defense. And calls off a mysterious deal he made with Mr. Saikou, presumably about Yan-chan.
    • Killing fifty students or more causes the Headmaster to shut down the school. As a result Senpai transfers to a school in another town which Ayano can't follow him to, getting an instant game over.
    • Exposed: A Phone Addict was able to post proof of Yan-chan being a murderer on the internet before Yan-chan can stop them.
    • Caught: Ayano was caught sneaking into Osana's stalker's house, or in 1980s Mode Ryoba is caught sneaking into the insane asylum.
  • And then there's SNAP Mode, which can best be described as a playable game over (thus far only unlocked if one gets the 'Heartbroken' Ending, but planned for some of the others): in which Yandere-chan, your player character, having, well, snapped, finds a knife and proceeds to kill Senpai and then herself, beating anyone who's in her path to death with her bare hands in the process.
  • In 1980s Mode the canon ending is Ryoba is arrested for Sumire's murder, but is found not guilty due to a lack of evidence, her turning the Journalist's accusations into him framing her so he could get his name in the papers and had a perverted interest in her, and at least one character witness (the Journalist's own protege, no less) saying Ryoba would never do such a thing. However, it's possible to play so badly (being sloppy about hiding evidence, having a suspicious reputation, having students accuse her of murder and/or police concluding a student's death was murder) that the player gets a rank of 'F' and Ryoba is found guilty of Sumire's murder.

Survival Horror

• Ao Oni: In most versions, there is an early scene where you can walk past the clouded-glass door of the bathroom in time to see a large shadow pass by, with some very heavy breathing. Activating the door several times results in Hiroshi entering, but the camera staying outside. All we see is a smattering of blood on the glass before the game cuts out.
• In Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, Frank needs to take a dose of Zombrex once every 24 hours. If Frank doesn't get his shot by 8AM, he will drop dead on the spot.
• Deadly Premonition: Choosing to suicide or shoot Forrest Kaysen over shooting Emily to end her suffering results in Kaysen's sapling sprouting, reducing her to a husk. A mentally-broken Zach mourns her in the Red Room as York tells you it was the wrong choice, before sending you back to try again. Also, failing either of the timed tree-of-hands puzzles means that York gets corrupted by the purple smoke; the same thing happens if you attack any of the brainwashed townspeople on the way to rescue Emily. And in one of your first visits to the Red Room, failing the QTE to hold your breath and sneak by an enemy gets York instantly killed.
• Eternal Darkness: In any chapter with Bonethieves, if you take too long to shake them off, they'll claw their way into your character's body, taking them over and ending the game.
• In Fatal Frame II, if you decide to use the secret passage to escape from the haunted village without your twin sister Mayu, you'll get a scene and then one of these. It could actually qualify as a bad ending, since it's a viable conclusion to the story and even suckier than the already depressing regular (and canonical) ending.
• Five Nights at Freddy's:
  • Five Nights at Freddy's:
    • Freddy is the only animatronic in the game to have two jumpscare animations - one is used during normal gameplay, while the other is used when the power runs out.
    • Golden Freddy. When you look at the poster at the end of the West Hall while it displays his face, he appears in your office. You will then hear robotic murmurs and hallucinations just before he instantly kills you and crashes the game, but only if you don't pull up your monitor and switch to another camera.
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's 2, both Shadow Freddy and Shadow Bonnie crash the game instead of killing you.
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's 4, Nightmare is slightly more benevolent: he merely resets the game. Nightmarionne takes that role in the Halloween Edition.
  • In Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach's Ruin DLC, most of the things that can actively kill Cassie are Hostile Animatronics. The one exception is a go-kart that suddenly drives forward by itself.
• Haunting Ground has several special cutscene deaths that the unsuspecting player can incur, mainly for failing at certain puzzles, but some are very obvious (did you really think hiding in an iron maiden was a good idea?).
• Ib: In the grey rooms, Ib comes across a blue painting which wants a flower to eat. Offering it her rose (i.e. her life meter) will cause the painting to eat it, killing her.
• The Last of Us:
  • The whole game is essentially one long Escort Mission, so you can also get a Game Over if Ellie is killed on your watch at any point.
  • Early on, taking too long while chasing down Robert will cause the screen to go black and you're treated to the text "Robert got away".
  • At one point in the suburbs chapter, you have to hide in a house and act as a sniper to defend Ellie and two brothers you befriended from a group of hunters, including an armored car. If you don't take out enough hunters fast enough, you're shown a cutscene of the group being killed.
• Night Trap has a Game Over that can occur if you don't push start during the opening scene, effectively ending the game before it even starts. Commander Simms: You're wasting time, get over there now! (Beat) Looks like you're not up for this mission...breaking contact. SCAT System Disconnect
• In the VR game Propagation, soldiers arrive to help you part way through. Shooting them provokes them to shoot you back, killing you instantly and bypassing any extra lives you may have left.
• Resident Evil:
  • In Resident Evil, if Chris is poisoned by the giant snake, you get to play as Rebecca to retrieve the serum and heal him. If you take too long, Chris will be dead when you reach him and it'll result in a game over.
  • While playing as Sherry in the remake of Resident Evil 2, if the player is caught while trying to avoid Chief Irons, he will grab her and exclaim "Game over, Sherry!" as she lets out a Big "NO!". Instead of the usual game over screen, which shows a pool of blood on the floor with the message "YOU ARE DEAD", the screen instead shows the bedroom door in the orphanage with the message "YOU ARE TRAPPED".
  • Resident Evil 3: Nemesis has a unique case when playing as Carlos. After getting the vaccine needed to cure Jill of her T-Virus infection, Nemesis appears in the main hall of the Clock Tower and one more time in the piano room. If you let him reach the door to the chapel Jill is in, he will break down the door and kill Jill as Carlos lets out a Big "NO!".
  • Resident Evil 4:
    • If Ashley gets captured, a cutscene is shown of the Ganado carrying her off and the game over screen says "Mission Failed" instead of "You are Dead". This also occurs if she is killed, either by an enemy or your bad aim.
    • In a scene where you defend a cabin with Luis, if you shoot him too many times, you're treated to a cutscene where he gets sick of it and guns you down.
  • Resident Evil 5 also has one. If Chris kills a brainwashed Jill in the middle of the fight, you're treated to a death cutscene and a screen that says "Your Partner Died" like you would get for any of Sheva's deaths.
  • Resident Evil: During the Storm: If you fire your gun in your apartment twice, when everything is normal and zombie-free, your neighbors will call the police and get you arrested.
• In SCP – Containment Breach, refusing to cooperate with the guards will have you terminated before the containment breach even occurs.
• In Silent Hill 3, if you die a certain way or in a certain place, Valtiel is shown carrying away Heather's body. And if Heather shoots Claudia, Heather "births" the god and dies in a rather gruesome cutscene, where Claudia says "Oh God, bring us salvation".
• In Slender: The Arrival, if you somehow manage to find your way out of the map's boundaries (either by mistake or by purposefully trying to glitch out of bounds), you will eventually end up falling through the map and get the standard Game Over screen, except there will be an additional message overlayed on the screen in messy-looking text, presumably said by Slenderman: "Not even a bug in this game will save you from me."
• Idle for too long in Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion and Specimen 9 comes out of nowhere and kills you, resulting in an instant Game Over.
• Tormented Souls has one in the form of walking into a completely dark area, as the screen starts glitching out before a cutscene of something attacking Caroline and dragging her off to an uncertain doom kicks in. This makes even otherwise completely safe save rooms a danger if you don't have the lighter equipped.
• Yomawari: Midnight Shadows: In the final chapter, if the player has Haru complete the tutorial all the way through, she will hang herself just like Yui and the player will be taken back to the title screen. In order for the player to continue the story, they need to turn away from the noose on the tree, read the paper scrap, and walk away from the tree until the prompt "I can't take it anymore!" can be selected.

Third-Person Shooter

• Army Men:
  • Army Men: Sarge's Heroes has one in the ice level where you free prisoners. If you manage to get yourself locked in a cell, Plastro himself comes out of nowhere to mock you followed by a game over.
  • Sarge's Heroes 2 has a hilarious one. The tutorial has you follow orders from Colonel Grimm, a.k.a. Vikki's father. You can choose to kill him and simply finish the tutorial yourself, but at the end, instead of Vikki's usual "Congratulations" when you open the last door, she will immediately shoot you with a bazooka as soon as the door opens. Even if you somehow dodge, you still fail.
  • The second game and Toys In Space also have various failure cutscenes for missions, ranging from being melted by a magnifying glass to being torn apart by zombies in a hospital.
• F.A.K.K.2 would give you game overs if you managed to kill yourself.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising has several, with what causes them ranging from "failing a critical goal" to "missing a quick-time event".
  • During the flying segment of Chapter 12, you have to make a detour to destroy a falling Reset Bomb that Viridi deployed as you approached the Reset Bomb Depot. It's a Time-Limit Boss, as with most other aerial boss fights; however, unlike all those other fights, there's not a special event that wins the fight for you if you take too long. If you don't destroy the Reset Bomb in time, then you get a game over because Pit isn't lucky enough to be outside the blast range this time.
  • Most of Chapter 17 takes place on a platform being held up by Centurions high above the ground. You're being attacked constantly, and the Centurions aren't invincible; they will die if you don't kill the attacking enemies quickly enough. Palutena has an extra set if you let the first two die, but that's it; if you let that set die, then you get some unique dialogue before you get a game over and restart at the last checkpoint.
  • Chapter 20 ends with a fight against a possessed Palutena. However, the goal is not to attack the boss, but rather to attack the Chaos Kin, which is controlling her. However, it's pretty easy to hit Palutena, and if you do so too many times... game over.
  • The more minor non-standard game overs include; failing to line up with a target while falling at certain points in Chapters 17, 21, and 25, failing to shoot the Chaos Kin near the end of Chapter 21's flight segment, getting hit by the Great Sacred Treasure's arena-wrecking laser blast in Chapter 24, and failing to keep your reticle on Hades so that Medusa can interrupt his attempt to finish you off in Chapter 25.
• In Max Payne, failing to prevent the helicopter from taking off in the final level leads to a special cutscene where Max gets splattered by the heli's mounted guns.
• In the opening level of Scarface: The World Is Yours, if the player continues shooting at the enemies below without turning around, Tony will be killed after getting shot in the back exactly how he died in the film.
• Spec Ops: The Line:
  • If Walker dies before making it to the destroyed helicopter in "Adams", a special loading screen will play where Konrad's silhouette will shake his head at you with the faint voice of "Stop, just fucking stop!" being yelled in the background.
  • Dying to the hallucinatory Lugo in the next chapter will give the player another one of the White Phosphorous scene, with "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" being hummed in the background. The game then rewinds to the beginning of the fight — except with a Heavy Trooper in Lugo's place.
• In the Splatoon 2: Octo Expansion, if you fail to cover Commandar Tartar's NILS Statue with ink in three minutes or fall into water, the game will cut to a Inkopolis covered in primordial ooze with a quote from one of the Mission Control characters.
• In Splatoon 3, if you fail during the last stage of the Final Boss fight against Mr. Grizz, you get a cutscene of the Earth and Inkopolis being blanketed in Fuzzy Ooze with panicking Inklings immobilized by it.
• During the "Break Narmer" missions in Warframe, if Kahl is defeated by a Deacon, he will not be killed, but instead paralyzed by the attack, leaving him helpless as the Deacon floats up to him and places a Narmer Veil on his face.

Tower Defense

• Bloons Tower Defense:
  • Normally, in Bloons Tower Defense 5, the only main way to lose is to run out of lives. However, in the Wizard Lord mission, if you don't give a tower to feed the Wizard Lord, he will get angry, disappear, and you will instantly lose regardless of your lives. Sometimes, it can also freeze the game on you after the Wizard Lord disappears but before the game over message appears.
  • Combined with Guilt-Based Gaming, Bloons Monkey City provides a game over if you quit a tile. The game over message also changes to "You abandoned your monkeys on the battlefield."
  • Also in Bloons Monkey City, in the mission Engineer Rescue, there are some caged engineers on the track, and they'll disappear if a bloon touches them. If all engineers disappear this way, you'll lose this mission. You can pay some cash to free them to prevent this.
  • Letting a boss bloon in Bloons Tower Defense 6 last longer than 20 rounds will automatically end the game in a loss, despite your lives not being exactly set at 0.
• Each installment of Canterlot Siege has a True Final Boss that can only be fought on harder difficulties. They must be defeated or it will result in a instant loss regardless of remaining lives.
• Plants vs. Zombies:
  • I, Zombie: When the player has less than 50 sun (since the Imp and Regular Zombie are the cheapest zombie types for the player to buy which both cost 50 sun) and there are no zombies present on the board, the game will display "GAME OVER (iOS/Android)/{level name on PC, DS, and console versions}: You lost all your zombies!" losing dialog box.
  • I, Zombie Endless and Vasebreaker Endless: The losing dialog box "GAME OVER (iOS/Android)/{level name on PC, DS, and console versions}: You made it into a streak of {number of streaks completed}." if the player starts a new streak and the zombie is killed but the player has less than 50 sun. This is also the same case for Vasebreaker Endless but it only happens when they let the zombies reach the house. If a zombie reaches the house in Vasebreaker Endless, the said message will appear without showing the cutscene of a zombie entering the house and "THE ZOMBIES ATE YOUR BRAINS!" message.
  • Survival Mode: Same as adventure mode, some mini-games, and normal Vasebreaker levels, but after "THE ZOMBIES ATE YOUR BRAINS!" message appears, the losing dialog box will say "GAME OVER (iOS/Android)/Survival: {any of levels on PC, DS, and console versions of the game}: You survived for {number of flags completed} flag(s) before dying a GRUESOME ZOMBIE DEATH!!!" instead of simply "GAME OVER".
  • Zombiquarium: If all of Snorkel Zombies were died, the losing dialog box "GAME OVER (iOS/Android)/Zombiquarium (PC, DS, and console versions): All your pet zombies have perished!" will display.
  • Last Stand (Puzzle Mode and Mini-game): Same as Vasebreaker Endless, but if a zombie reaches the house, the losing dialog box "GAME OVER (iOS/Android)/Last Stans (PC, DS, and console versions): You survived for {number of flags completed} flags!!" will display.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time:
  • Any levels with normal objectives after the 1.7 update of the game (with the exception of not losing any lawn mowers starting on version 1.9 and planting on Dave' mold colonies when its objective text was changed on later updates, and on certain circumstances, exceeding the plant limit), when failed, will display the objective description in green text above the screen and will become lowered as the screen goes black. However, like any some other losing screens, the brain is still displayed when the player loses, plays the game over music of a specific world and the generic Big NO! scream.
  • In Piñata Party with a target score, finishing a level without reaching it will make the screen black and displays the message "You missed the target score: current score/target score". Similar with the situation mentioned before, the game over message also lowers while the screen goes black.
  • Save Our Seeds levels is the same as any normal levels in terms of its general objective, but if one endangered plant is killed by zombies or by player's intent (i.e. shoveling them before the 1.9 update and putting a plant on a fire tile at the same lane as the plant needed to protect), that's also result to the loss of a level, as the screen goes black normally and the message "THE ZOMBIES ATE YOUR PLANT!" will appear. In Dark Ages — Night 12, if the player fails to prevent the Puff-shrooms from disappearing, the message "PUFF-SHROOM DID NOT SURVIVE!" will display instead.
  • In Cannons Away, failing to reach the target score will display "PENNY IS NOT IMPRESSED WITH YOUR SCORE!" and your current score and the target score for the level will appear where the brain is displayed.

Turn-Based Strategy

• Blaze Union: Although the game over conditions are normal, losing the battlefield where the female characters are cornered by a gang while shopping leads to a unique scene, where it's explained said party members, one of them in her teens, were so deeply traumatized by the rape that they were put through, the revolution had to be put on hold indefinitely.
• Disgaea:
  • The series tends to give you often humorous endings for being beaten by the games' Goldfish Poop Gang, or one of the main team members before they've joined the group. Most of them are treated like endings (particularly in 3 and 4, which add lengthy narratives to them), causing the credits to roll, and in some cases, allowing you to start a New Game Plus earlier than normal.
  • In Disgaea 2, a multitude of characters propose bills to be the main character in the Dark Assembly. Should they be passed (and there's a very high chance they will without any intervention on your part), you immediately get a game over. Also, winning the Hopeless Boss Fight against Laharl, or the one against Etna, nets a Non-Standard Game Over as well.
  • Revisiting the final level of the first chapter in Disgaea 3 and winning the battle there before a certain point in the story also results in a humorous ending where Mao and Almaz openly acknowledge that they've screwed up the plot and the only option is to reset the game.
  • Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance has different than usual Non-Standard Game Overs, since fewer of your future party members have to be fought. Also, they don't force a New Game Plus anymore, and instead send you back to the base with no consequences (other than obtaining a trophy for getting a game over if you haven't already) For specific examples:
    • In chapter 4, when a cursed Usalia goes berserk, you have to kill everyone but her to proceed. Kill her, and the game ends on the spot. Killia becomes devastated that he couldn't save Usalia and leaves the party, causing the rebel army to disband and leaving Void Dark to continue conquering Netherworlds unopposed.
    • If you've scored at least fifty ally kills and win the final battle, you'll get a choice of whether to run away, or stay calm and think. Choosing to run away triggers the normal ending, but choosing to stay calm and think causes the possessed Liezerota to kill herself to destroy Void Dark's dark essence. This ends Void's reign of terror, but leaves Killia distraught over losing the woman he loved a second time.
  • In Makai Kingdom postgame, you can trigger an encounter with Zetta himself, who turns out to be Overlord Baal possessing Zetta's lost body. Winning the fight nets you the body as a playable character. However, if you've previously shanghaied Laharl and use him as the active character when initiating the encounter, and then winning the fight, results in Laharl claiming the victory instead of Zetta, followed by him destroying the body and ending Zetta's reign.
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance gives you a game over if you fail a story mission. However, if Marche gets sent to jail in the middle of a battle or dies in a Jagd, the game also ends.
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade:
  • In one of the sidechapters, the completion goal is to make it to the other side of the map and talk to the boss, Fargus, in order to earn being ferried by his crew to the Dread Isle. If you so choose to attack Fargus, he'll probably kill any unit you have at the time. But if you somehow defeat him, the mission ends with him telling you that you now have no way to continue. Game over. Even if you didn't kill him, he would then refuse to take you to the Dread Isle, resulting in a similar ending.
  • If you fail to protect the NPC Natalie in chapter 4, the typical game over screen plays over a short cutscene of Lyn mourning her, lamenting her inability to defend those who need help most. The game ends soon after, implying that Lyn abandoned her quest in shame.
• In Fire Emblem Engage, losing the final battle treats you to a scene where Alear awakes in Sombron’s lair and finds out not only everyone else has died, but also Sombron has recorrupted them and Veyle, much to their horror.
• Galactic Civilizations II: Losing control of your Galactic Superpower's homeworld isn't normally an instant-lose condition. Destroying your own homeworld with a Terror Star, however, gets you a game-over and a mocking Have a Nice Death message.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • Waerjak in IV can trigger one of these when he meets the Boar's Hoof tribe. Waerjak is given the option of attacking them and claiming their garrison; if he does so, his followers will turn on him, proclaiming his philosophy of community to be a lie. This is a recurring element throughout the campaigns, made easier by the fact that all events are narrated instead of animated, resulting in various different scenarios that you wouldn't normally see in a game. If Lysander, for example, were to attack Glen Garrison to rescue the Big Bad's mother (instead of finding a way around it), the commander would notify him that he sent his men to execute her. If Elwyn takes the red ship instead of the blue one, Shaera would commit suicide, believing that he died (granted, this is an unnecessary complication of the gameplay, since Harke will bribe the crew to switch the sails, and Elwyn arrives just in time to save the girl anyway, making the outcome pretty much the same).
  • Might and Magic VI has a special ending video if you complete the end-game dungeon without getting the Ritual of the Void. You are warned that if you destroy the Kreegan Hive's reactor without powerful magic to keep it contained, it will destroy the world. Ignore the advice, and you get to see exactly that happen.
  • Another way to get this in Might and Magic is in VII, but you'd have to be pretty stupid for it to happen. For one quest in the main storyline, you end up working for two nobles simultaneously, and your actions during the quest require you to betray them both. Treason is a crime punishable by death, and that might make you worried. However, in each case, there are no witnesses and no evidence pointing to you, so neither of them would even suspect you unless you actually confessed. Believe it or not, there's an option that lets you do that when you finish the quest and report back to them. Long story short, if you confess to one of them, you won't live long enough to tell the other.
• Liberty or Death has a forgiving time limit, with the player required to end the war by the year 1820. If the time limit is reached while playing as the British Army, the death of King George III will force them to surrender to the Americans, resulting in an automatic Game Over. Conversely, running out the clock while playing as the American army counts as an Instant-Win Condition.
• M.U.L.E.: While the players are competing to be the most successful, they also need to keep an eye on the colony's overall production. At specific points in the game, the colony must meet certain benchmarks; if it doesn't, the colony is a failure and everyone loses.
• In Super Robot Wars F, allowing the Ideon's "Ide Gauge" to fill up too much and go berserk. If it is raised any higher, or if it is destroyed in its berserk state, the bad ending triggers. When the Ideon returned in Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, the Ideo Gauge no longer triggers a game over, but the game will still end if the Ideon is destroyed.
• Theatre Europe, a WWIII wargame from 1985, is an odd duck: both the mechanics and presentation are more interested in the nonstandard loss (global thermonuclear war) than the stated win/loss condition (Warsaw Pact taking West Germany within a month.) To access nuclear weapons, you had to call a Real Life UK phone line that'd play a recording of air raid sirens and the sounds of war leading up to an explosion, a baby crying, and "If this really what you want... the code is Midnight Sun." The nuclear war cutscene is chilling despite the Commodore 64's limitations, while normal win or loss just says peace talks are underway and gives you your score. Enough nuclear strikes can pull you out of any bind - except pushing that button too many times means the End of the World as We Know It instead, you're not told how many is "too many", you may push it by accident (one type of air mission can escalate out of your control and go nuclear, though the game's so obtuse on what that mission does that there's little point), and you're not the only one pushing the button (plus you automatically tit-for-tat the enemy's strikes; you can disable that, but then he'll have the lead.) There are undocumented triggers for global thermonuclear war (NATO crossing into Warsaw Pact territory, the Warsaw Pact being about to win the game on hard difficultynote ) and an option to fire everything with no helpful uses. A lot of work's gone into this nonstandard game over to teach players that WMDs are a horrible idea, and the game may be a very old Deconstruction Game, where the goal is to reject the premise you've been given, that of ground war in Europe.
• X-COM:
  • XCOM: Enemy Unknown
    • If you fail the tutorial mission, XCOM will be immediately disbanded.
    • In Enemy Within, failing "XCOM Base Defense" will result in an instant Game Over.
  • XCOM 2:
    • As with before, failing the tutorial mission will result in the alien's immediate victory.
    • The Dark Event "Hunt XCOM" can result in your flying fortress being grounded by the aliens. Failing the subsequent mission to escape the aliens' trap, either by losing all of your soldiers (plus reserves) or allowing the aliens to board your ship, will result in XCOM's immediate destruction.
    • During the climax of the game, failing either of the final two missions immediately ends the war in the aliens' victory. In the final mission, you will automatically lose if the Commander's Avatar is killed.

Visual Novels

• Many of the Ace Attorney games have those, usually in the final cases:
  • In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, in the fifth case “Rise From The Ashes”, you find a piece of cloth in Gant’s office that seems to implicate Ema in the first murder, but Gant had it hidden in his safe, suggesting he was involved. During the final batch of testimony, Gant will at one point subtly-imply he knows you have it and pressures you to submit it. If you fall for his trap, you end up irrevocably tying Ema to the first murder; you are then told that the trial was unwinnable from that point on (since you had no way to tie it to Gant) and Lana ends up Guilty. The trick is to hold off on presenting it until it's brought up a second time; by not falling for Gant’s bait, he’ll incriminate himself regarding the cloth, letting you use it to take him down for good.
  • In Justice For All, right near the end of the 4th case, you're given a chance to show a particular piece of evidence to a particular person. At this point the case is deadlocked, as the assassin holding Maya hostage is on his last straw, and any pushing other than the Not Guilty (for an obviously-guilty murderer) would lead to his killing her. Neither Phoenix nor Edgeworth can push the case any further. Franziska just pulled a Big Damn Heroes moment with a few new pieces of evidence, but there isn’t any more room for evidence or testimony. The player is given a single chance to pick the right piece of evidence and the right person to present it to to save the case. Pick the wrong thing or person, and the villain goes free, an innocent person is convicted, Maya presumably lived (but is never seen again), and Phoenix quits being a lawyer out of shame. "The miracle never happen..." The solution is to present the blackmail tape to the assassin; by proving the villain betrayed him, the assassin will break his contract, eliminating the villain’s leverage and sealing his fate.
  • In Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, you actually get to pick the verdict at the end, courtesy of the Jurist System. If you pick guilty, it results in a hung jury, and the defendant dies in the hospital — the verdict never happen.
  • In Gyakuten Kenji 2, you can refuse to help a mentally unstable and profoundly broken Sebastian Debeste and instead tell him that he's "a failure as a human being". Doing so finally puts him over the edge and ends the case immediately, as he's the only one who can find the evidence his father got rid of.
  • The final case of Dual Destinies provides unique game over sequences during its sole trial day, which double as bad endings:
    • Failing to prove Simon Blackquill's innocence after he's admitted his guilt makes things spiral go From Bad to Worse: Blackquill is executed the next day as scheduled for a crime he didn't commit, his sister Aura leaves with the hostages she took (including Trucy) and they are never heard from again, Athena leaves the office, Apollo is so broken he stops smiling, and Phoenix gives up on being a lawyer.
    • Losing during one of the forced questions in the chapter "Remembering the Killer", leads to Aura Blackquill becoming unshakably convinced Athena was the real murderer and kidnapping her, with Phoenix never seeing her again.
    • Losing during the final testimony given by the Big Bad will lead to Athena and Simon being let off the hook... while the phantom walks away scot-free and the Dark Age of the Law keeps growing ever darker.
  • In Spirit of Justice, the final case once again has multiple outcomes depending on when you lose the case. Lose during the first trial day of the final case and the villainous Paul Atishon walks away scot-free with the Founder's Orb, and Apollo and Phoenix's relationship goes down the crapper. In the final trial, losing the case after getting Dhurke posthumously acquitted results in the true killer's identity being lost forever, while the revolution completely falls apart because of Dhurke's death. Failure to provide proof that the Queen is the real killer ends with her siccing her guards on Apollo, forcing him to go into hiding with him deciding to join the revolution to overthrow the Queen.
• Aoi Shiro: All routes (assuming you don't succumb to a bad end first) have the option to abandon the training camp due to deteriorating weather. While the protagonist survives, the main plot remains unresolved.
• Amidst the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot of AI: The Somnium Files, one potential route has Date abandon the mystery and his career entirely, and run off with Renju's well-endowed receptionist. One can hardly blame him.
• Case 03: True Cannibal Boy: If Lily refuses to search for Sally, a mysterious man with Marty's silhoette will stab her after she leaves Silversmith. This is the real Marty, since the killer didn't use the Cannibal Boy's Modus Operandi of tapping on a window first and the killer isn't floating like most evil spirits. Additionally, Marty recognizes Lily when the Ghosteaters visit his house, showing that he was the one stalking her at the start of the game.
• Choices: Stories You Play gives the player character several opportunities to die for making the wrong choice, but some of these require you to go out of your way to die. (In the event that the character does die, the game will restart from a "checkpoint" before the decision that led to the character's death; the game doesn't actually end there.)
  • Endless Summer plays with this; the character can die by making a bad choice, just like in other Choices stories, but unlike said other stories, the player character will remember the incident, experiencing it as an in-universe time anomaly. Played fully straight in one instance, however: correctly guessing the name of the AI before finding the clue results in the player character's head exploding. The game over message says: "Do not attempt to cheat the laws of time."
  • In Bloodbound, you get a diamond choice to hook up with a character who will kill you.
• In Da Capo the Yoriko route starts off with Jun'ichi saving a cat from a tree, then jumping forward to him waking up in his bed at some later time. He gets the option to either get up or go back to sleep. If he goes back to sleep, the game immediately cuts to credits.
• Code:Realize: If you refuse Lupin's acceptance in the first multiple choice part, he'll be upset and leave you alone. Cue "FIN" and black screen.
• Danganronpa:
  • In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, near the end of the fifth trial, Makoto realizes that Kyoko told a lie and is given the decision to reveal the lie or stay silent. If he chooses to reveal the lie, Monokuma suddenly cuts the trial short and forces everyone to vote immediately; with Kyoko being labeled as the culprit and executed. What follows is that Makoto and the others have accepted their fate to remain trapped in the school, along with a shown picture of them as adults with their children. It then turns out to be a Daydream Surprise by Makoto, allowing the player to make the right choice this time.
  • Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls:
    • Failing the "motivation" scene will have Komaru softly say that she doesn't hate it, and Kotoko comments that she's all hers now. Then promptly lampshade that they can't show any further because of the game's rating.
    • Near the end of the game, Komaru is given the option of destroying Monaca's controller. If she breaks it, the Monokuma helmets explode, killing all the children, and the result pushes Komaru into becoming a new Junko Enoshima.
  • In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, if Shuichi doesn't gather all the evidence for the last trial before time run outs, Ki-Bo demolishes the academy and decimates it.
• As a combination Visual Novel/RPG, Fate/EXTRA has one of these for pretty much every defeat by another Master, as well as a number of ways to lose by making a wrong dialog choice. (DEAD END, indeed.)
• Fate/stay night has Multiple Endings which are tagged with a descriptive note, with all game-overs being tagged "Dead End" if Shirou dies and "Bad End" in all other cases. The odd ending out is the "Sparks Liner High" ending, where Shirou fights and defeats Saber Alter in an one-on-one duel at the cost of his own life. Even though it ends the route without any real conclusion, it is referred to only as an "End", the only ending with this note.
• Hotel Dusk: Room 215 has two:
  • If you lie to Summer in the bar at the beginning of chapter 7, Summer will get discouraged and check out of the hotel before the night ends. Dunning thinks Kyle had something to do with it because he overheard Summer's mumble of wishing he never talked to him, but instead of kicking Kyle out, he will tell him to not worry about it since he was sick of Summer anyway and drags him to the bar where he spends the entire night drinking with him.
  • Also, if you check too many items while locked up in a airtight room at one point in chapter 10, Kyle will run out of oxygen and die. Interestingly, the Game Over screen still shows Kyle leaving the hotel.
  • In the sequel, Last Window: The Secret of Cape West, in Chapter 10, if you go to Frank's room and accuse him of spraying you on the 4th floor in Chapter 9, no matter what you do after that point, you will eventually head back to Room 406 only to be sprayed again, resulting in a Game Over. You're actually supposed to go to Margaret's room and accuse her instead, but the game in the previous chapter leads you to believe that it's Frank who's up to no good.
• Should you fail the bomb diffusing sequence at the end of Act 2 of Policenauts, in the Game Over screen.
• Lux-Pain:
  • Using Sigma carries a gauge with it, which depletes as you probe their mind more and more. If it falls to zero, Ray Platiere will tell you that you basically destroyed their mind and you get a Game Over. "You're no telepath."
  • Every time you let a Silent infectee get away, intentionally or otherwise, the Hazard percentage at the corner of the map increases. If it reaches 100%, you get another call from Ray that says that it's too late, and there's nothing left to do for the city but send in The Tigers and destroy them all mentally to stop Silent spreading any further.
  • Failing to find Yayoi before too long when she goes missing will get you told that it's too late, and that she killed herself due to Silent's infection before you could save her.
  • At one point towards the end of the game you have to read the residual thoughts on a corpse in the morgue. Natsuki, another member of your Mission Control, warns you beforehand that this is dangerous for a telepath and is not like reading a living person's mind. If you chose to back out once you've activated Sigma, the screen cuts to black, you hear Natsuki scream and a single line of narration describes the protagonist losing his mind.
• Monster Prom: In a multiplayer run, if one of the player manages to achieve THE SUPER SECRET ONE ending, all other players are locked out of their endings, even if they did everything correctly as well and no matter whether it's a secret ending or a prom date, the Narrator will just state that the player couldn't get a date because everyone else is in an orgy they're missing out on.
• In the game My Harem Heaven is Yandere Hell, Yuuya must keep his True Companions (relatively) sane during a string of stressful events. In most bad ends, he fails and consequently gets murdered, but in the "After-School Bloodbath" ending he instead decides that his friends are irredeemable. Since Yuuya is everyone's Living Emotional Crutch, his disillusionment means there's no possibility of reaching a good ending, even though technically The Hero is still alive. He's just abandoned the storyline.
• The Shell has a few, but some are difficult to distinguish from the good endings, such as they are. In one in particular, Reiji will end the game locked in a mental ward if he disembowels his best friend Shugo for the key to escape a trap.
• Your Turn to Die has two involving the Sanity Meter, which increases every time the player remembers their fallen friends, and another two involving a premature end to the Deadly Game that serves as the plot.
  • If it gets too high, Sara will be pushed past the Despair Event Horizon and attack her hallucination of Joe. Keiji writes her off as too far gone.
  • It's possible to lower it with a device provided by Safalin, but with the caveat that it not be used more than twice. Use it three times and Safalin will erase all of Sara's memories of Joe. Broken and now addicted to the device, Sara begs for it to be used again, which Safalin promises to do if Sara agrees to do whatever Safalin says from now on.
  • At one point, Q-taro begins collecting tokens in an attempt to escape the Death Game on his own. Give him enough tokens to do so via trading and he'll promptly abandon the facility, leaving everyone else behind to die.
  • The other one comes in the end of the 2nd round: Nao has the Sacrifice card, which means that either she and Sou/Kanna dies, or everyone except her and Sara dies. Vote for her and the latter scenario plays out.
• Zero Escape:
  • In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, non-standard game overs are actually plot-critical. If you try to get the True Ending on your first playthrough, instead you get the Coffin Ending. You need to find the Safe Ending first... Eventually you find that you are actually playing from the perspective of the protagonist's friend in the past. The fact that you know it would be impossible for Junpei to know at the time is because she (you) actually ran through these scenarios where Junpei made this or that decision, gleaning more information about the best way to proceed each time.
  • Virtue's Last Reward. You will be running into a lot of different endings, several of which are 'To Be Continued' path locks that require secret knowledge from other paths to get past. Some Game Overs, which do not even appear on the game's provided flowchart, arise in circumstances where a plot thread is impossibly damaged; for example, if the player managed to annoy Alice enough to alienate her by repeatedly failing to decode a message, the game ends instantly, even though nothing has happened to Sigma.
  • Zero Time Dilemma has an inversion with the results of the coin flip at the beginning of the game during your first playthrough, in which you will always get it right note . True to his word, Zero releases all of you. Game over. Credits roll. You win. Ten minutes flat.

Wide-Open Sandbox

• Grand Theft Auto:
  • In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, during the mission "Stowaway", you can jump out the plane without a parachute, which leads into a cutscene showing CJ crashing into a parked car at a drive-in.
  • In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, during the mission "Phnom Penh '86", if you snipe Lance out of his chopper there will be no "mission failed" message even though you'll have to start the mission again. The silver lining of this is that you can take and save Lance's chopper as long as it didn't blow up.
  • In Grand Theft Auto V, during the mission "By the Book", Trevor is tasked with torturing a man for information to catch a terrorist. If pushing the victim too far, he will have a cardiac arrest needing an adrenaline shot. If the player take too long, the victim will die and a cutscene plays out where corrupt FIB officer Steve Haines scolds Trevor and promises to punish him later before the mission failed screen shows up.
    • There are a few other instances of cutscenes playing during a mission failure. For example, in "Complications", if Franklin fails to drive to the dealership after Michael orders him to, a cutscene is shown of Michael pistol whipping him.
• In Saints Row IV, at one point your are offered a choice to either keep fighting or take a deal with the aliens to save the world by dying. If you take the deal, you get a game over screen telling you that you shouldn't have trusted them. Amusingly, this earns an Achievement.
• In Shenmue, or just the first game at least, it's impossible for Ryo to actually get himself killed — failing a Quick Time Event or losing a fight results in Ryo taking a dirtnap. The only exception is allowing April 15th to roll around, in which case Lan Di comes back to the dojo asking for the Phoenix Mirror; Ryo challenges him to a fight and is subsequently wiped out in one move, the same move that Lan Di used to kill Ryo's father in fact.
• Early sandbox ZX Spectrum game Skool Daze normally ends the game when you have accrued 10,000 lines or more; however, there is a random event where you must avoid contact with another character who has contracted the mumps. Get touched and you contract the illness too, whereupon you are immediately sent home.
• Vangers:
  • At one point you may discover a special artifact Mechanical Messiah. It has a number of dangerous functions and is considered to be cursed. One of its functions is named Lucky: try to activate it and the fourth wall will be destroyed, with the game stating that you, the Vanger, have failed the test and will be utilized. This becomes understandable if you played the game before and know the ending(s).
  • If you ever bring Geer'AH something that he dislikes (that is, any Beeboorat-related item that is not Valorin/Heroine, or some cirt from non-Beeboorat Larva), he'll get angry and take all your possessions, forcing you in a Raffa. Try this once more, and... well, remember Geer'AH telling you stories about Bloody Hilarious games he hosts? Get ready to take part in one of them.
• Watch Dogs: Legion has an unlockable Final Death Mode which makes it so any operative who dies is dead forever. If your last operative is taken out, the screen will read "DEDSEC HAS FALLEN", and the credits will start rolling.
• In X: Beyond the Frontier, if you shoot at the Terran mothership during the Justified Tutorial, you'll get the usual "cut it out" remarks from the flight controller. If you keep doing it past the part where he threatens you with Reassigned to Antarctica, he'll actually do it.

Examples in non-video game applications:

Card Games

• In Blackjack, if any player or the dealer gets a hand worth exactly 21 in just their first two cards (a "blackjack"), that player automatically wins. Their opponent(s), as a result, all automatically lose (multiple players with blackjack tie).
• The standard Chrononauts has this occur if there are thirteen temporal paradoxes on the field at one time. An expansion included a character who actually had a temporal paradox as his own win condition.
• There are quite a few in Duel Masters. Several extremely powerful monsters come with an extra effect that states if they're ever not in your monster zone after they come into play, you lose the game on the spot. (The wording is specifically "not in your monster zone", so getting sent back to your hand is just as game-ending as if they were destroyed.)
• Fluxx has Goal cards — if someone meets the conditions on an active Goal card, they win. It also has Ungoals — if the conditions on an active Ungoal card are met, everyone loses.
• In Magi-Nation, the Shadow Mage Agram has an ability that permanently increases its Energize ratenote each turn, but also triggers a negative effect if it goes too high. If you have another Magi left, you must summon it and put Agram back into the pile; if Agram is the only Magi you have left, you instantly lose.
• In Magic: The Gathering, the standard loss condition occurs when your opponent brings your life total to zero. However, there are other ways to lose the game:
  • If you are forced to draw a card when there are no cards remaining in your library, you are "decked" and lose the game.
  • Creatures with the Infect ability, rather than dealing life damage to a player, inflicts that player with poison counters. A player with ten poison counters loses the game.
  • Certain cards cause you to win or lose in unusual circumstances; for instance, Coalition Victory
    , which lets you win if you have a land and creature of each of the five colors of mana, and Near-Death Experience
    , which allows you to win if you have exactly 1 life remaining in your upkeep step.
  • There's a story out there that said that when Time Walk was still in development, its ability was phrased as 'opponent loses next turn'. It was intended to make an opponent skip his turn... but playtesters interpreted it as 'opponent loses the game on his next turn'. Suddenly, you could immediately lose the game because of a two-mana spell. The card text was quickly revised to clarify its intent, and later cards that give you instant wins usually have highly specific requirements (decking out, having 10 more life than your starting total, having only one life, and so on) or are extremely expensive to invoke, such as Door to Nothingness
    .
  • The Commander format has commander damage: if a player takes 21 combat damage from another player's commander, they lose the game regardless of the rest of the game state.
• In Munchkin players win when they reach the 10th level, but they must do it by defeating a monster — other ways to normally level up (such as selling items or using "go up a level" cards) aren't allowed. Except for the card "Divine Intervention" which makes every cleric go up a level, and explicitly states you can win the game this way (and lets you mock all the other players if you win).
• My Little Pony Collectible Card Game has this card
  ◊ which makes you lose instantly should you flip it.
• Netrunner has the Corp card "ACME Savings and Loan", which immediately gives you twelve bits. However, once you use it, you have to pay one bit at the end of every turn or lose the game. The only way to stop this effect is by repaying the loan (spending twelve bits at once); this also gives back the agenda point you had to spend to play the card.
• One set of the Pokémon Trading Card Game, has a Slowbro card
  with an attack called "Three Strikes", which states that if all three coin flips involved in the attack are tails, then you lose the game.
• Seeing as it is based on comic books, Sentinels of the Multiverse features a few ways to cause the players to get a Non-Standard Game Over (the standard way of winning is to reduce the Villain to 0 HP)
  • If Baron Blade has 15 or more cards in his trash (i.e. discard pile) at the start of his turn, his Tractor Beam plunges the moon into the Earth, and everyone dies.
  • Evil Alien Overlord Grand Warlord Voss takes over the Earth if he has 10 or more Minions in play at the start of his turn.
  • The Dreamer turns the Standard win condition listed above into the lose condition in battles against her: If she dies, the heroes lose. Justified, for two reasons: 1) The Dreamer is the child version of the hero Visionary, who time traveled to the present to save her younger self from a government project, so if Dreamer dies, Visionary dies. 2) the Dreamer's psychic powers overloaded during a nightmare and the nightmares themselves must be destroyed to wake her up. In short, the battle is one big Hostage Situation.
  • Wager Master is good at these. "Who Are You Fighting?" causes the heroes to lose if Wager Master runs out of HP (notice the Exact Words - effects that destroy Wager Master without reducing his HP to zero, like Tachyon's "Sucker Punch" or Ra's "Wrathful Gaze", won't trigger this); "Wagelings" causes the heroes to lose if there are more villain targets than hero targets; "An Unwise Wager" causes the heroes to lose if any hero runs out of cards in their deck; "Playing Dice With the Cosmos" ends the game in a loss if any hero is taken out; and "The New Deal" deals damage to heroes with even HP each turn, and the heroes lose if this damage incapacitates one of them. There are also two inversions: "Losing to the Odds" lets the heroes win immediately if all heroes have even HP totals (that aren't their maximum HP) at the end of the villain turn, and "Not All He Seems" ends the game in a hero victory if Wager Master runs out of cards in his deck.
  • During a fight with Deadline, his powers slowly destroy the Environment deck, removing cards in it from the game whenever he flips. If the Environment deck runs out of cards, the damage Deadline has done to Earth becomes irreversible and the heroes lose.
  • This is Inverted with Gloomweaver. If the heroes manage to get all three of his Relicsnote into his trash before he can flip, the heroes succeed in preventing his summoning to Earth, and Gloomweaver automatically loses.
  • The environments also have Non-Standard Game Overs occasionally. The most prominent is the Self Destruct Sequence in the Wager Mars Base. If the Sequence completes itself, the base blows up and everyone dies.
  • Silver Gulch, 1883, has Lost In the Past. If there are no cards in the Environment's trash by the end of it's turn, the time portal the heroes used to get to Silver Gulch closes and thus, the heroes lose.
  • The Mobile Defense Platform has the Propulsion Systems. If it loses all of its 10 HP, the Platform (which is flying, it should be noted) plummets like a rock and everyone dies. Note that it can be removed or destroyed in other ways without invoking the everyone dying part.
  • The Celestial Tribunal has Representative of Earth. When the card comes out, the players pick a hero who they aren't actively playing the game with and put them into play, with a maximum HP of ten. As the card's name implies, they represent the people of Earth in the Tribunal's judgment of the planet. If that hero runs out of HP, the Celestial Tribunal sentences Earth to death and the heroes lose. Like the Propulsion Systems, if the Representative of Earth card is destroyed or sent back to the environment deck, the game continues (with the chosen hero put back in the box).
  • OblivAeon is attempting to destroy the multiverse itself. At the start of the game, you choose a set of environments you will confront him in. OblivAeon has several ways to destroy these environments; if you run out of environments, the multiverse ceases to exist and you lose. During initial playtests, defeating OblivAeon during its first phase (no mean feat, as it has 10,000 HP and a completely different objective) would result in a Reality-Breaking Paradox that also lost the game.
• Under some partners rules variants of Spades, getting a "Boston" run on your team (losing all thirteen tricks) is an automatic game loss.
• The Star Trek Customizable Card Game (First Edition) by Decipher was normally won either by scoring 100 points before the opponent, or (more rarely) by having the higher score when both players' draw decks were depleted. A common "nonstandard" game ending involved a card called Writ of Accountability. If you exceeded any of the limits outlined by the card, and your opponent activated the card on you, you instantly lost the game, with a score of 0 (and if only one player remained—which nearly always was the case—that player scored the full 100 points needed to win). There were a few other cases where you could lose the game instantly (such as calling "Devidian Door", then being caught without a Devidian Door in hand when it came time to show it), but that was perhaps the best known.
• In the ''Star Wars LCG'', the Light Side player typically wins by destroying 3 Dark Side objectives which typically have 5 (rarely 4 or 6) damage capacity each. In the Core set, there are two cards that can circumvent this scenario:
  • There's one Dark Side objective ("Heart of the Empire") that has 10 Damage capacity and gives extra start-up resources, but when it is destroyed, the Dark Side loses automatically. Good to get late game, but an obvious target when opening the game with that objective.
  • The Light Side has an enhancement ("Trench Run") that allows the player to attack that card for 10 Damage instead to win the game. Of course if the card doesn't come up early enough in the game there's no use in switching tactics when enough damage has already been dealt to the Dark Side objectives.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! has two standard loss conditions; your life points become 0 by any means or you have no cards in your deck when you are forced to draw (either at the draw phase or by card effect). However even in its earliest days, Exodia existed as an alternative win condition. Since then several cards have been printed, most of which fall under Awesome, but Impractical. A full list of them can be found here
  .

Gamebooks

• Several Choose Your Own Adventure books feature conclusions punctuated by something other than The End:
  • The third book in the series, By Balloon to the Sahara, has a few: A Chilling End for when your character is trapped under an avalanche, The (BLAT!) End for when aliens disintegrate you with a laser gun, and even The Beginning, among several others.
  • The Mystery of Chimney Rock probably plays this trope the straightest:
    • One ending has you leaving the haunted house after encountering a ghostly creature who threatens you with his fate if you ever look back at the house.note If you don't like that ending, you can choose to look back one last time anyway, the resulting page of which simply has a bloodcurdling scream down the page in giant letters followed by a THUNK.
    • Another ending has your character accidentally breaking the resident witch's china cat and being cursed to pick up the pieces for all eternity, complete with There Is No End.
  • In Hyperspace, you can meet the Author Avatar Edward Packard. He quickly becomes an annoying Escort Mission because if you ever stop following him, you're sent to an ending which states that since the author was no longer with you, he can no longer write about what happened.
• In the third Lone Wolf adventure, The Caverns of Kalte, if you either confront Vonotar without finding Loi-Kymar or take too long to slay the Akraa'neonor, Vonotar sounds the alarm and alerts all of Ikaya to your presence, forcing you to flee. You escape and make it back to your ship unharmed, but without capturing Vonotar, and the adventure ends here. This is the only time in the entire series where you can fail your mission but you're still alive, free, and in reasonably good health and spirits, there are no obvious consequences for your failure for Sommerlund or any of the free kingdoms of Magnamund, and there is absolutely nothing preventing you from trying again at a future date. No attempt was ever made to explain what's preventing you, in this one instance, from going on later adventures.
  • Surprisingly, Aboard The Intrepid, the book 12 bonus adventure, has two of these. How it normally unfolds is that the stranger you recently rescued tells you about a fantastic treasure-filled island, you have to decide whether to search for this island, you end up searching for and eventually finding it regardless of your choice, and the decisions you make from there determine how much treasure you obtain and how much of a human cost you pay for it. However, if you decide not to go, refuse to budge on this decision, and then survive the treachery of one of your crewmen (who really, really wants to go to this place for reasons that are not immediately clear), you can quietly return to Holmgard without ever seeking out the island, and the book will acknowledge it as a "successful completion" to your adventure. A second possibility is that you make some truly boneheaded decisions after your boatswain is found murdered, resulting in you fighting your first mate and a total of twenty sailors to the death. The adventure ends after this fight regardless of how it goes; even if you win (which is just about inconceivable), the book simply says "Your adventure is over".
• Pipe Down! in the Nintendo Adventure Books sees Mario and Luigi coming across a Clawgrip, to whom they must give an item to pass. If they do not have the required item or refuse to give it to him, they try to run. The Clawgrip gives chase, and they decide to distract him with a few coins. If you don't have enough, the resulting page is nothing but the word PINCH! in a huge explosion graphic that fills the entire page, along with the "GAME OVER".
• From The Time Raider of the "Twistaplot" series: "Oh, no! You're stuck in a time warp! (turn to page -number-, quick!)" *flip* "Nothing warps the human brain faster than a time warp. (turn to page -number-)" *flip back* "Oh, no! You're stuck in a time warp! ..."

Game Shows

In game show parlance, the Non-Standard Game Over is, in its broadest sense, a form of Epic Fail, where a contestant performs so poorly that he is either disqualified or causes a situation where the leader’s score makes it mathematically impossible for him/her to catch up. In several game shows, the game is ended early, the losing contestant is given his Consolation Prizes, and the winner plays the bonus game early.