8 Times You Failed To Be The Hero In Video Games
3. Bringing About The Downfall Of Humanity - Half-Life
Gordon Freeman's day in the barrel at Black Mesa is off to a bad start when he's late for work, and it just keeps getting worse. First off, he obliterates his superior's casserole in a microwave, which might result in a disciplinary, and then follows that up by unwittingly helping create a resonance cascade which ushers in an alien invasion, then a further alien invasion, and eventually the complete subjugation and near-extinction of humanity.
Whilst it could be argued that simply following standard insertion procedure doesn't make any of this Gordon's fault, it could be extrapolated that the entire experiment has been pushed forward by his thesis on teleportation of solid objects.
In the aftermath of the resonance cascade, Gordon makes his way through the ruins of Black Mesa to first attempt to launch a satellite in an attempt to reverse the cataclysm. He then heads to to the top-secret Lambda Complex, slaughtering aliens and American servicemen alike on the way, and is sent to the border-world of Xen to eradicate the alien overlord compelling its slaves to continually attack Earth. It's revealed in Half-Life 2 that in killing this overgrown fetus, the resonance cascade was amplified and subsequently allowed The Combine Empire, an even more sinister alien race, to invade Earth and brutally conquer the planet in a matter of hours.
It's been over 10 years since the Half-Life series was left on a devastating cliffhanger, and given the events of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, it's likely that things got significantly worse before they got better - if they got better at all.