8 Insane Video Game Events Hardly ANYONE Saw

1. Invasion Of The Thargoids - Elite: Dangerous

For the top spot, my absolute favourite use of any live event ever, and the encapsulation of the exclusivity afforded by revealing content this way.

Elite Dangerous is easily one of the coolest and most expansive space sims out there. Focused mostly on trading, mining and dogfighting inside a shared server with prices fluctuating for everyone at once, there came many teases from the developers of an alien race being active somewhere in the galaxy.

See, Elite operates on a one-to-one scale with our own cosmos, to there are MANY places some aliens could be hiding.

Cue a lengthy wait of five years with copious amounts of teasing and the fanbase ultimately giving up hope... only for this to happen:

Yup, developers Frontier dropped a TINY fraction of Thargoid invasions on unsuspecting players, and left them to freak out and tell the world.

As the loneliness and tranquility of long-haul cargo missions is a standard in Elite, suddenly having your whole ship power down as a gargantuan Thargoid ship flew overhead must've been terrifying.

Well played, Frontier.

I can't help but think of the applications of this idea in so many other genres, too. Horror villains showing up out of nowhere, a detective thriller revealing a twist to a whole community at once - hopefully the next generation takes things like this and runs with them.