Spoiler Alert: The 25 Biggest Jaw Droppers in Gaming History

Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father. (Oh, and Leia is Luke’s sister.)

Spoiler alert! Sorry about that.

Wouldn’t that realization pretty much ruin The Empire Strikes Back -- nay, the entire Star Wars trilogy (not counting the terrible prequel ones, which suck anyway) -- if you knew that ahead of time?

There’s just as equally delicious and amazing plot twists like that in video games. Alan Danzis and Larry Frum are here to dissect the best ones. So if you really want to ruin a game for yourself – or even better, for a friend! – read on…

by Alan Danzis

As ninja Ryu Hayabusa, your goal is seek revenge for the death of your father. Little do you know, you later find out your father is very much still alive and is possessed by an evil figure.

So even though you spend much of the game desiring to avenge his murder, he winds up sacrificing himself for you after you free him of the evil spirit, but not before another enemy tries to kill you. Best. Dad. Ever.

by Alan Danzis

Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar’s masterpiece open-world cowboy adventure, allows for the redemption of former baddie John Marston after he kills a shit-ton of guys first though. (A Rockstar tradition, often found in Grand Theft Auto games.) As you approach the end of the game, you believe you’ve gotten John that redemption as he reunites with his wife and son, and even teaches the boy how to work on the ranch.

Of course, the “good guys” come back and decide John actually needs to die after all, and you’re even given a chance to kill them before they kill you—of course, there are about 50 on screen at once so you don’t actually a chance. Luckily, your son has an option to avenge you years later. (You mean you stopped playing after John died? Well… put back in the disc and finish your reveng… er… redemption.)

by Larry Frum

The creepy little girl – Alma, who appears and disappears at will and looks like she was left out in the rain too long – haunts players in the F.E.A.R. franchise. Alma plays on the psyche of your mind and, at one point, sexually assaults a character.

Is she real or just your imagination? This apparition becomes even more disturbing once you find out that she is YOUR MOTHER! EWWW! Now go back and play the beginning games with that thought in your mind.

by Alan Danzis

Most gamers didn’t love King’s Quest 3 at the time. You have to understand that at that time in gaming (1986), there was no Internet, so you couldn’t use FAQs and it would take months to finish this text adventure game.

So when the game starts off and you’re a slave named Gwydion, and not King Graham (who was the lead in the previous two games), gamers were pretty confused. Of course, if they kept playing and turned the evil Manannan into a cat (still one of my favorite parts of a King’s Quest game), you would eventually learn that you were, in fact, descended from royalty and the rest of the game you head back on your way to Daventry to save it from a dragon.

by Larry Frum

You’ve broken bricks, dodged hammers, tossed fireballs and defeated the big boss battle at the end—all in the quest of saving a princess. Guess what? Rinse and repeat because… “Thank you Mario! But our Princess is in another castle!”

Super Mario Bros. puts Mario through quite a lot to save a bunch of handmaidens before finally rescuing the Princess. Don’t get used to that feeling. She never really stays rescued for long. Maybe Mario should just stay home.

by Larry Frum

You are a tough, street-wise agent tasked with taking on three crime organizations that have taken over Pacific City. The police can’t handle it, but you are so badass, you can do it. Defeating gang leader after gang leader, you stand triumphant.

Then, as you bask in the glory of a virtually crime-free city, the head of your agency tells you they were the ones who set up the gangs in the first place so the people would want the agency to come in. Thus, the New World Order begins… thanks to you. Nice going.

by Larry Frum

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic starts off with the main character awakening in the middle of a space battle with no real memories. As the game progresses, the player can choose the path of the Jedi or walk on the Dark Side.

Eventually, you discover that you are Darth Revan, a Sith Lord who was betrayed by his apprentice and injured in a battle. If that wasn’t bad enough, you were healed by the Jedi Council, who then mindwiped you because you were such a threat to the galaxy! Dissed by both sides!

by Larry Frum

Seriously wanting to mess with everyone’s mind, designer Hideo Kojima starts off with Snake on the trail of a new weapon and sneaking aboard a tanker. But you aren’t playing Snake in this game. You are Raiden, a young rookie agent, but you are really the adopted son of the terrorist leader you are trying to stop.

And your commanding officer, the Colonel, who has been giving you orders, is actually a supercomputer that gets affected by a virus. And all the people who you thought were working for one side are now working for the other. And The Wisemen’s Committee, members of the Patriots group, are not only dead, but have been dead for more than 100 years.

by Larry Frum

In the Portal franchise, GLaDOS was a homicidal artificial intelligence program that apparently decided it could conduct testing better than human scientists. So it kills off the humans (with deadly neurotoxins) and proceeds to do science.

How different does it all look when we discover that the artificial intelligence is actually the brain pattern of a SECRETARY? That is seriously one messed up, vindictive woman.

by Larry Frum

Battle the Covenant forces on Reach? Sure. Isn’t that what Halo games are all about? The game follows the exploits of Noble Six, part of an elite team of Spartans, as they battle the Covenant invasion. Many of your comrades will die. You, yourself, will die. But not for the glory of saving Reach or destroying the Covenant.

Your real main mission is to save the artificial intelligence Cortana, who will accompany Master Chief on his missions and be instrumental in the destruction of the Covenant. But not for many years (and three games) later.

by Larry Frum

Revealing Samus to be a woman at the end of Metroid was shocking to all the old school shooters who thought they were being bad motherfuckers in 1986. Imagine their shock when the soldier who stops the Space Pirates is actually a woman.

This was striking at the time when there were very few female protagonists in video games at the time. Now, her femininity is celebrated and incorporated heavily into the story lines.

by Alan Danzis

Of all the games on the list, this one probably has the most unusual of endings in that it’s kind of not even respected in canon! After searching for Big Whoop during the entire game, Guybrush eventually winds up in the Big Whoop amusement park as a youngster, where he meets his parents who have been looking for him. Chasing after him is his brother, Chuckie—er, LeChuck.

The ending has a very surrealistic feel to it, and involves winking at the camera. Players are left to wonder if this ending is true, or if LeChuck is using voodoo again. The ending was not very well received and pretty much never spoken of in future installments.

by Larry Frum

The eternal struggle between good and evil - epitomized between the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime. Batman and the Joker have consistently been battling for many years including a stint during Batman: Arkham Asylum where Joker’s abuse of a drug caused extensive damage to his own body.

Batman: Arkham City put Joker at the forefront again as he searched for a cure while continuing to torment Batman. But all that planning, scheming and hilarity goes for naught as the Joker dies! For real (or as real as comic deaths go)! The final scene after the conclusion of the main quest is Batman carrying Joker’s body out to the waiting police.

by Alan Danzis

There are a lot of twists in Final Fantasy X. One of the big ones: Sin, the giant beast you fight for most of the game winds up being your father Jecht who, years earlier, left his douchebaggery ways aside to be a real hero.

But the real twist is when you learn not one, but two people in your party are actually dead, and just aren’t ready to move on: Auron, and… well, you. After defeating Sin’s hosts at the end of the game, Auron does eventually go to the Farplane, finally ready to make lay at peace. You didn’t die like Auron—you were the memory of those that died long ago.

With Sin defeated, the fayth that had been summoning that old city and long dead people from memories are able to rest and you disappear. (People tell me you return in the sequel, but I refuse to play since this game ended so well.)

by Alan Danzis

It seems sort of like “duh” now since Wesker is pretty much the Resident Evil franchise main villain, but in the very first game, it was quite shocking when Albert Wesker, the leader of the S.T.A.R’s Alpha Team wound up being an undercover agent for the Umbrella Corporation the whole time.

by Alan Danzis

In the critically acclaimed indie game, Braid, you play as Tim, a man searching for a princess that was snatched by a horrible and evil monster. In the final level, everything but Tim moves in reverse, which shows the princess escaping from a knight.

As you’re locked out of the house, time progresses forwarded, showing your actions in reverse and what you eventually see is the princess was running from you, setting traps you were able to evade until she’s rescued. You’re the monster she was running from the entire time. Poor Tim.

by Alan Danzis

You spent the majority of the game fighting a villain named Kessler. During your final fight with him at the end of the game, Kessler implants his memories into Cole’s minds. Cole sees an alternate timeline in which he and Trish (who Kessler killed earlier in the game) were happily married with children. When an enemy called “The Beast” started destroying the world, Kessler/Cole and Trish fled with their children.

The Beast eventually caught up with them and killed his family, forcing Kessler/Cole to travel back in time and prepare himself way earlier to defeat it. If you played the game with good karma, Cole gets ready to fight the beast; if you played with bad karma, you laugh at the idea of using your powers to fight The Beast. Who’s the Beast? Well… that would be spoiling inFAMOUS 2 and that will have to wait for another article…

by Alan Danzis

One of the selling points for Heavy Rain was the idea that even if one of the four characters you played as died during the game, they would stay dead and you could still play until the end of the game. Little did you know that that didn’t actually apply to the character of PI Scott Shelby, who is later revealed to be the Origami Killer—yes, you controlled a serial killer for ¼ of the game. You thought you were looking for evidence, when it reality, you were destroying it.

Shelby – originally Scott Sheppard – lost his twin brother in an open pipe in a construction yard and drowned from storm water. His father was too drunk to help, and so Shelby arranged trials for other fathers to do what his own father couldn’t do. It’s a twist most didn’t see coming and makes it worth it to replay the game to see if it holds up. But yes, you will have to put up with screams of “JAY-SON” again if you do…

by Alan Danzis

In the original Dead Space, your character Isaac Clarke isn’t much of a talker—in fact, he doesn’t talk at all. But we know he loves his wife Nicole and he wants to rescue her from the incident that has befallen the crew of the Ishimura.

You encounter her various times throughout the game—she even helps you recall a shuttle after being betrayed by Kendra. Kendra later shows Isaac that Nicole committed suicide via lethal injection before he arrived on the Ishimura, and his visions of her were hallucinations via the Marker.

At the very end of the game, he starts to see Nicole in Necromorph form, something that winds up being a major plot-point in the sequel. It was a twist most people didn’t see coming – especially since it wound up being suicide that took Nicole’s life – and even if Isaac couldn’t speak (until the sequel, he wouldn’t speak a single word) we knew how hard he took her death.

by Larry Frum

In Gears of War 3, the battle rages on as Marcus Fenix and his band of brothers in Delta Squad take on the Locust and the infected Lambent. One of the main members of the Squad is Dominic “Dom” Santiago, Marcus’ best friend and right hand man. Throughout the franchise, players bonded with Dom as much as they did Marcus by finding out about Dom’s captured wife and his children who were lost.

Dom is portrayed as a kinder soul, seen at the beginning of Gears 3 tending vegetables rather than his weapons. So it was rather shocking when Dom was killed off in a suicide bombing run that left players with their jaws hanging open.

by Alan Danzis

Most gamers probably assumed Lucy, the woman who helped you escape from Abstergo in the beginning of Assassin’s Creed 2, would wind up being the love interest for Desmond. That, unfortunately, wasn’t meant to be, as at the end of Brotherhood Desmond was commanded by Juno through the Apple to kill Lucy.

Apparently Desmond’s love interest is a woman who is supposed to accompany him through “the gate.” This woman has not been met yet (Assassin’s Creed 3 anyone?) Getting back to the Lucy death, it is arguably one of the biggest deaths for a main character before the final game of a franchise. Big enough to make one assume that maybe she’s not dead after all…

by Alan Danzis

Dying in a first person shooter is not new. It happens constantly, and usually within about 5 seconds before you’re back at some “checkpoint.” But Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare changed the game when it permanently killed one of the characters you were playing as Sergeant Paul Jackson who, along with his team, was unable to stop a nuclear device from detonating.

His helicopter is caught in the blast, and you can even control him for a few moments after it crashes. But eventually, he collapses over—dead. That moment is nothing new now—pretty much every Call of Duty and/or Battlefield game is pulling that trick these days. But when COD4 did it—they were first.

by Alan Danzis

Most people are going to say this twist should be #1—and many of them might be right. Losing a character in RPG isn’t new. But Final Fantasy VII built up the entire character of Aerith, allowing you to go on a perfect date with her (assuming you weren’t an ass and wound up with Tifa or even Barrett).

This was all with good reason, considering Sephiroth jumped down and stabbed her in the back. It was such a shocking moment that you probably didn’t even believe it. Many gamers obsessed over with trying to bring her back alive since they had spent so many hours leveling her up. And sure enough, some claim to have even done it, while others refuse to give up.

by Alan Danzis

Portal is cited as having incredible game design for many reasons. Chief among them is the fact that the story unfolds at such a deliberately slow pace that gamers don’t even notice there is a story at first. As you make your way through each test chamber, you’ll start to notice your guide, GLaDOS, is getting increasingly sinister (and downright mean) in her interactions with you.

The test chambers also become more dangerous, even if GLaDOS continues to promise you a reward of cake at the end. After completing the final test chamber, you realize GLaDOS has put you on track to a pit of fire. You eventually escape through the back maintenance areas and see messages about “the cake is a lie.”

You eventually make your way to GLaDOS and destroy her (temporarily of course). A portal opens and you wind up on the surface. (And if you play through a patch of the PC version, retroactive continuity kicks in and you’re dragged away.) After the phenomenal closing credits, you actually do see a cake. But we’re pretty sure that cake wasn’t really meant for you…

by Alan Danzis

“Would you kindly?” With those three words, Bioshock pretty much changed story telling in game. For half of the game, you’re following Atlas after he convinces you that he’s the good guy asking for your hlep to rescue his family from Andrew Ryan. But as you approach Ryan, you learn “would you kindly” (one of Atlas’s first phrases to you) is a programmed trigger used by Ryan’s enemy, Frank Fontaine, to control you. Oh, and Atlas—he’s Frank too.

If you replay the game, you’ll see and hear “Would you kindly?” repeated throughout. Ryan eventually uses it to get you to kill him with his own golf club. It’s not only an incredible twist that you would never see coming, but it’s an idea that is laid throughout the game in noticeable and not so noticeable ways. It’s number 1 because you never saw it coming and, more importantly, it was truly earned.

Alan Danzis is a lifelong video game enthusiast thanks to the PC Jr. his Dad gave him and his brother, which allowed him to play among other things, King's Quest 3. His fast typing skills can be attributed to playing Sierra games as a kid and he currently lives in Hoboken, N.J., where he usually plugs too many things into one outlet. Keep up with him on Twitter @adanzis.

Full Disclosure: Alan Danzis works at Ketchum Public Relations, which is his day job. His opinions here are his own and do not reflect the opinions of Ketchum, nor the clients Ketchum works with. Sony PlayStation 3 is one of his current clients and did not contribute to this article. His Complex.com writing is wholly unrelated.

Larry Frum has been playing games since “Dungeons & Dragons” was first known as “Chainmail” and immediately gravitated to video games with his “new” Atari 2600. If a gaming console has hit the U.S. shores, he’s probably played it. And no, he doesn’t have allegiance to one console/genre/character over another. Check out what he’s playing on Twitter @lfrum.