8 Video Games With The BEST Game Overs

Going Out With A Bang And A Belly Laugh.

video game overs
wiki

Getting a Game Over is never a fun experience is it?

No matter how the title in question dresses it up, it's still the game telling you "Sorry pal, you've FAILED" and is writ large on the screen thanks to either literal huge text informing you of such, or by making you watch a drawn-out and often quite painful death.

Still, some clever beans within the developer community figured out that punishing the player even after their own personal failure wasn't always the best way of keeping them invested in seeing things through to the end, therefore we saw the concept of Extra Lives, Respawns, Checkpoint systems and the like in order to get us back in the action as quickly as possible.

Further still, some video games even took the trope of falling hard and turned it into an experience you'd WANT to see, either by making the death so over the top, hilarious or downright bizarre that you couldn't help but seek them out. It might have lead to our literal doom but it was well worth the ride.

8. Ron Pearlman Delivers The Bad News - Fallout 1 And 2

video game overs
Black Isle Studios

The irradiated wastes that you get to explore in the Fallout series are pretty grim. From rust coating everything that once shone to proudly, to the sheer amount of desperate violence enacted by every living thing, surviving even a day in the world of Fallout is a hard task no question.

You could be shot, you could be turned into a pile of goo, you could be mugged and left for dead by old ladies, all equally brutal and equally horrible. So why are the original Fallout games on this list then?

Well, that's down to the simple fact that in Fallout 1 and 2, upon meeting your maker you were fed a line of text describing how you died and usually with quite disturbing detail, and depending on how far you'd made it along the road there was even a chance that the one and only Ron Pearlman would narrate them!

Honestly, all manner of deaths have the edge taken off by the gravel tones of Pearlman and it makes your futile plight seem a lot more epic as a result. The man could provide the director's commentary for a documentary on watching paint dry and I'd be utterly engaged and many were sad to see that Fallout 3 abandoned this gimmick.

 
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Jules Gill hasn't written a bio just yet, but if they had... it would appear here.