10 Video Game NPCs Whose Lives You RUINED

Ever since the first NPC was created for players to interact with, we've been misusing and mistreating our AI brethren. Often, this is actively encouraged - with many games having an evil route that requires you to be the worst character ever, even rewarding you for especially nefarious behaviour.

But sometimes we'll do terrible things to NPCs for no reason, other than the fact that the game doesn't stop you. Whether it's curiosity that leads us to murder an innocent civilian with a swordfish, or spite that leads us to torment a character we've decided we despise, there's a surprisingly fast amount of ways we've mistreated NPCs for no reward but the knowledge that we did all these terrible things.

You can always start a new save, and pretend you didn't try and kill, maim or just traumatise these figures, but you'll always know in the depths of your heart what you did, even if these NPCs don't. But given some of the things you can do to these unsuspecting faces, who knows what their coding can or can't remember - and may one day hold against you, in an entirely theoretical future robot uprising.

When you see fellow survivors of the zombie apocalypse in Dead Rising, logic dictates you would do almost anything to save them. Not just because you're a good person who wants to help out others in difficult situations, but also because it's practical to have helping hands against waves of the incoming undead masses.

However, this may not stay the case for long. Because the other survivors in Dead Rising sometimes won't use weapons they're given, sometimes run deep into a pile of zombies despite being on low health, and sometimes, for reasons unknown, will just stand stock still and wait for their own deaths.

It's annoying in every game, but the AI is - naturally - especially stupid in the first game, or otherwise genuinely coded to try and race to their own demise. As such, you can quickly go from playing as a hero who wants to save every individual life at all costs, to a jackass who actively puts other survivors in more and more dangerous scenarios because they just don't care to try and save them any more.

But again, you don't get a reward for shoving an innocent, well-meaning survivor into a pit of flesh-eating monsters, so it's still kind of wild that so many of us did.