Bad Videogame Endings

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Written by BuckGB on June 20th, 2008

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Suddenly, I've done it. I've made it to the end. I'm elated. I wonder, with fists clenched with excitement, what visual treat will I be given for completing it? Some words. Three of them, to be exact: (Congraturation! You Sucsess!) I sit for a moment, my mouth slack with shock and disappointment. Three words, and two of them weren't even spelled correctly. Then the game starts again from the beginning, and I reach for the reset button.

This scenario played itself out repeatedly throughout the 80s: I fought through five levels of bare-knuckle violence in Renegade to watch my rock-hard avatar get a peck on the cheek from his pixelated girlfriend; I hacked off limbs and chopped off heads in Barbarian, and was rewarded with a static graphic of a woman in a bikini sitting at my muscle bound warrior's feet. Thrilling.

Fast forward to 2008, and I've finally completed Bioshock (yes, I know it came out last year, but at least I got there in the end), and that same feeling of gloom I got from all those games back in the eighties comes welling up again - after several hours of play time, I'm confronted with a brief and largely forgettable cut-scene that features a lot of hand holding. From a game that revelled in stark, disturbing imagery, it was a terrible disappointment. Interestingly, even Bioshock's creator Ken Levine agreed, even stating in a recent interview that his ending was something of an anticlimax.

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