10 Absurd Ways To Die In Video Games

While we’d all love to be gamers capable of perfect no-death runs, but chances are we’re all getting wiped out at least once in most titles. It does take the edge off when these deaths are at least funny, though.

While we’re all used to being victim to a health bar depleted by gunfire or a fierce combo to the face, some video games have come up with more inventive ways to deliver us a game over.

Whether it’s an unusual way to go, a death that came out of nowhere, or an unintentionally funny demise in what was probably supposed to be a dramatic moment, these were the deaths in games that had us more amused than disappointed.

10: Spider-Man’s Awkward Face Plant - Spider-Man 3

If we’re going to start anywhere with this list it should be with a death so absurd that it spawned a meme and gathered almost 10 million YouTube views since a clip of it was published ten years ago.

In an excellent example of a clip that gets better with every watch, in Activision’s 2007 action-adventure Spider-Man 3, our titular hero finds himself in a burning building. Here, the player is called upon to execute a series of quicktime events, and successfully doing so will help Spidey navigate the flames and aid a woman calling for help who has a bomb strapped to her chest.

After executing a couple of valiant leaps, failing the final quicktime event will cause the next few steps to happen in hilariously quick succession.

The woman calls for help, you fail the quicktime event, and Spidey fails to land on his feet, fatally face-planting into the floor from an 8-feet drop, the woman says “I’m going to die” and then we smash cut to the exterior of the building as it explodes. Of special note here is the unlikelihood the fall would have actually killed Spider-Man in the first place, suggesting then that maybe he just gave up on the whole thing.

The voice acting, the flop to the ground, the pacing - this death is really an absurd work of art.