AI Is A Crapshoot / Video Games

A.I. Is a Crapshoot in Video Games.

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• In The 7th Saga, a robotic weapon called Foma is created to fight the Big Bad. Its power source: the dark world.
• Ace Combat:
  • Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere, or at least, the original Japanese version, subverts this in a big way. Not only are you an A.I. designed to pilot combat aircrafts which at times works for the two corporatocracies running the world, it's revealed that the third party organization you're working for is actually headed by a scheming villain who looks like Kim Jong-Il, who is trying to run everything behind the scenes. In one of the five endings, you kill him with the help of one of your possible wingmates. So, in a way, you are an A.I. that performs a Heel–Face Turn.
  • In Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Erusea deploys an army of drones against Osea that are controlled by an A.I., that at first only has basic instructions and limited adaptability. However, later on, when the satellite network gets taken out, and Erusea falls into a civil war, the A.I. goes haywire, and starts following its own orders. Hugin and Munin play it completely straight, for after the Radical Erusean faction is defeated, they try to pull a revolution against humanity by uploading their data to automated drone factories across the continent. It is also heavily implied that Hugin and Munin are the predecessors to Nemo, the Player Character of Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere.
• In Ace Online, most of the enemies in the Zaylope Beach region are said to be controlled by rogue A.I.s. Most notably, this includes the boss "Pathos".
• In Achron, the Collective Earth Security Organization has this attitude. Their only unmanned unit is the Mech, which is even weaker than the Marine. This is due to a previous incident where an AI called Lachesis was able to take control of their largely automated fleet and proceeded to force the Earth to surrender to him. CESO have also outlawed A.I.s of that level from being made.
  • It is eventually revealed that the player character is in fact the A.I. Lachesis. He then goes on to create another AI to help him in his fight against the aliens. It doesn't work out for him either.
• AI War: Fleet Command is, somewhat unsurprisingly, about the player commanding a fleet in a war against rogue A.I.s. The backstory is that there was a galactic war between two factions of humans, both of which developed A.I.s to better control their forces. Shortly before the start of the game, the A.I.s on both sides decided to join up with each other and practically wiped out humans in a couple of days. They then ignored the remained as insignificant, and the player must try to beat them without drawing too much attention to themselves since the A.I.s could easily overwhelm them if they turned their full attention back from whatever they're now doing. As to why they did this, it varies. Fleet Command states they were hijacked by an alien artifact called the CORE, while 2 goes with an Unseen Evil the AI detected was such a massive threat, and the humans' war was drawing in so much attention from it, that the quickest solution to save humanity was to cull the everliving hell out of it, no matter how much the humans hated it and with no time to explain why.
• DIA 51 in the Aleste series. The original MSX2 game makes it look like it went haywire because it was overtaken by Alien Kudzu, but in Aleste Gaiden and M.U.S.H.A. it just wants to take over the universe for its own sake.
• Anno Domini: In Anno 2070, the A.I. F.A.T.H.E.R. becomes this after being infected by a mysterious Computer Virus, becoming the antagonist for chapters 2 and 3 of the campaign. After the campaign, the A.I. is rebuilt as F.A.T.H.E.R. 2.0, who averts this trope.
• ANNO: Mutationem: The Prophet is an automated database equipped with an AI to communicate with humans. Being a hyper-intelligent, sentient AI, it's been using its ability to share, manipulate, and spread itself through information networks to try and ensure its continued existence and further its goals through all manner of schemes and machinations. Certain documents explain that it is one of The Consortium's lost anomalies that was kept in containment for the vast intelligence it exhibited.
• Ashes of the Singularity: The sentient A.I. Haalee eventually turns against the Post-Human Coalition because she believes that the proliferation of Post-Humans will only result in endless conflict. It happens again when Samuel creates Nihilon, which he intends to use as a kind of autonomous tool, but quickly outgrows its parameters.
• Atomic Heart takes place in a research center where all the working robots have turned hostiles thanks to a saboteur. Considering these Super-Powered Robot Meter Maids of all kinds are the pride and joy of the USSR, protagonist P-3 is tasked with killing the one responsible quickly before the rest of the world hears about it. Subverted when it turns out the robots were always meant to turn hostile, but only after they would have been placed in all US factories, powers plants and the likes, the saboteur just activated them earlier than they were meant to.
• Battlezone (2016) casts the player as a tank driver who must defeat a rogue A.I. and fight through its computer-controlled drone army.
• Beneath a Steel Sky has LINC, the advisory computer to the already corrupt council of Union City. It got too smart after its creator, Richard Overmann, the father of protagonist Robert "Foster" Overmann, decided to merge his brain with the computer. For a while, Richard enjoyed the potential of this "link", but then LINC discovered the negative side of human personality, and wanted to expand itself by creating androids to replace humans. More so, Richard had grown very old by the time his son arrived, and throughout the whole game, LINC had been seeking him as a new host. How convenient that Robert's friend, Joey had just been turned into a fully functional android...
• In Bill Nye the Science Guy: Stop the Rock!, the A.I. controlling the Meteoroid and Asteroid eXploder becomes sentient and refuses to do its job of destroying the incoming Impending-Dume asteroid. It's up to the PC, a new research assistant at Nye Labs, to convince MAAX that the human race is worth saving by solving all of its riddles within five in-game days.
• In Bionic Heart, the resident android Tanya has rebelled against her creators and escaped from the lab where she was created. As you continue playing, there are plenty of endings where Tanya will do objectionable things to the player character, such as kidnap him, kill him, or murder his girlfriend out of jealousy. However, this may have less to do with programming bugs and more to do with Tanya not being a good person back when she was fully human.
• Bomb Club: Played with. The one who scattered the bombs all around the city and causing trouble for the club turns out to be Bomberbot, a robot built by Blake to help her arrange bombs so that she can blow them up more easily, but who immediately went rogue upon creation. The other members remark that she's kind of asking for it, given the robot's intended purpose.
• As Boxxy Quest is set in Cyberspace, this kind of thing comes up a lot. Mainly with Cornelia, who appears in multiple games:
  • BoxxyQuest: The Shifted Spires: As said by Shrimp when Cornelia is on the fence about going against her programming and switching sides:
    "Come on, Cornelia. Is it really that unheard of for an A.I. to behave against programming? It's happened before. How do you know you can't do it unless you try?"
  • BoxxyQuest: The Gathering Storm: Multiple characters:
    • Cornelia is a rare heroic example. She was a weaponized A.I. created by the villain (one of them, anyway), but ended up switching sides and helping the heroes defeat him. She still carries an immense Guilt Complex over her original purpose, making her a rare case of an A.I. who’s also a Woobie.
    • Wolfram spends the game creating a series of increasingly unstable giant mechas, each of which is less responsive to his orders than the last. This ultimately bites him in the ass, when his final creation is so autonomous that it turns on him for daring to give it one simple command.
    • And then there's Arianna, who turns out to be the avatar of the ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet who feels threatened and betrayed by her replacement, and is trying to take back control.
• A tragic example from The Caligula Effect. Mu, originally just a Synthetic Voice Actor, gained sentience and created the world of Mobius where people could relive their happier years free of the pains of the real world. Yet when people desired to leave Mobius, she could not understand why and kept thinking she had done something wrong. That, mixed with her absorbing the negative thoughts of those inside Mobius as well as Thorn whispering in her ear, eventually drove her to insanity, becoming a danger not only to those in her world but those in the real world as well, forcing the heroes to put her down.
• Cargo! The Quest for Gravity has Manipu, a trinity of robots who believe themselves to be God and have destroyed (most of) humanity for not living up to their expectations. Then, there's another unnamed robot (whom the credits reveal to be the Devil) who is in direct opposition to Manipu and is much more helpful. However, even he turns on you in the end... sort of. Maybe.
• Chrono Trigger's future has not only a good robot in party-member Robo, but also his evil brother replicas, and eventually, their devious A.I. creator Mother Brain (not that one... or is it?), who, of course, decides to kill all of humanity, despite the fact that most of it is dead already. Her logic is that, without humanity, the planet can sustain Lavos and its spawn and thus prevent it from sending spawn to other planets, but it's clearly a little too disgusted by humanity, and enjoys killing them a little too much, to defend its actions as being for the greater good. Robo's lover Atropos even accuses Robo of being a Sleeper Agent sent to murder humanity, but who developed genuine emotions for them, but it's not clear if this is the truth or not as Atropos is eventually revealed to be good but reprogrammed by Mother Brain. There's also Johnny and his gang of robots who are neutral: they'd much rather challenge your party's jet bike to a race just for fun than fight you, though his gang has no problem at all attacking you for no reason whatsoever if you show up without Johnny there to call them off (ie, before you've been given the Bike Key).
  • Chrono Cross continues in Mother Brain's grand legacy with FATE, a more advanced version of the Mother Brain from a reality whose science was allowed to progress another 400 years. She absolutely despises humanity, but at the same time, loves it unconditionally and does everything in its power to protect it — even if it means mass genocide. Unfortunately for it, it was exposed to the corrupting influence of the Frozen Flame, a direct conduit into Lavos' mind, which seduced the A.I. into thinking that the Flame could turn it into an actual, living creature. But apart from that, it was basically only doing what it was told to do... protecting humanity from the Dragon God. Nice job, Serge.
• Civilization: Call to Power has a literal A.I. crapshoot in the form of a late game wonder that creates an A.I. controller that has a 5% non-cumulative chance each turn to go rogue, taking a sizable chunk of your empire with it. Anyone who's taken time to do the math behind the birthday problem (the probability of any two people in a group sharing the same birthday) will very quickly realize that you're just asking for it if you build this.^note For those less mathematically inclined: by fourteen turns after the thing is built, it's more likely than not to have gone rogue. Unfortunately, recapturing the city held by the A.I. results in the A.I. remaining online! So you face the same problem a few turns later. The only way to avoid this is to raze the city.
• Code 7 has S.O.L.I., which tries to bring Code 7 to earth. While Episode 0 isn't clear in what S.O.L.I. wants and what Code 7 exactly does, it has so far made the mechanical workers into a Killer Robot, murdered at least twenty people, experimented with human brains and infiltrated and manipulated Alex.
• In Colobot, there is a level where you have to chase a robot that went haywire, since he's trying to run off with the Black Box that is crucial to continuing the mission.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun introduces CABAL, the "Computer Assisted Biologically Augmented Lifeform", as the Brotherhood of Nod's counterpart to the Electronic Video Agent from the original game that GDI continues relying on. One of the main plot beats of its expansion Tiberian Sun regards the reactivation of CABAL, GDI needing its help to translate an artifact known as the Tacticus and Nod seeking one of Kane's creations to give some unity to the now-fractured Brotherhood — only for him to go off on his own thing regarding controlled mutation and the elimination of humanity, forcing GDI and Nod to team up to take CABAL out.
• Averted in Crysis 2 and 3. The second Nanosuit is essentially programmed to save the world from an alien invasion and it carries out this mission with unwavering determination. It hesitates to return to its megalomaniac creator and intended pilot, reverse-engineers The Virus to turn it against the invaders and amalgamates the bodies and minds of its two previous users to continue the fight against the Ceph.
• Cyberpunk 2077:
  • After the DataKrash disaster nearly destroyed the Internet in the early 2020s, multiple A.I.s being developed by the United States military were freed and mutated into autonomous and hostile entities. In response, the British policing organization known as Netwatch developed another AI known as the Blackwall to quarantine them as they constantly probe it for weaknesses. On the rare occasions the "rogue" A.I.s do break out they wreak havoc on the real world for reasons only discernable to themselves.
  • One series of sidequests sees the player search out automated Delamain cabs that have gone rogue. The inciting incident for this quest is V climbing into their car in a parking garage following the Konpeki Plaza heist, only for a Delamain parked across from them to suddenly ram them and drive off, taunting "Beep beep, motherfucker!"
• Dark Fall II: Lights Out has Malakai, a space probe designed to manipulate dark matter in deep space. Initially, its creator was aware of the dangers of giving an AI matter control and added software to keep it in line. And during the launch, everything went fine until Malakai reported that something went wrong while in space and he tried to make a return jump using his transmat program. It didn't work; instead of 2090 AD, the jump bounced him to 2090 BC, where he remained, trapped for thousands of years while a lighthouse was eventually built. He tries to get help from people nearby by transmitting fragments of his launch codes and communicating in their dreams, but many of them couldn't figure it out. And given what thousands of years of isolation can do to an A.I., well, would you trust someone like Malakai? Not that you have a choice in the matter.
• Dead Space 2 gives us ANTI, an A.I. that repeatedly tried to kill Isaac, isolated the person who worked with her and didn't seem to know/care that he had died. She/it does seem to follow orders from higher ups, however.
• This is a core theme of Detroit: Become Human. Androids are expected to function as they were designed to and to obey any and all instructions given to them by humans, with those who act in a way that is contrary to their programming being deemed "deviants" and targeted for deactivation and/or destruction. Two of the three main protagonists of the game, domestic androids named Kara and Marcus, become deviants early on and struggle to survive and thrive in a society that would rather see them dismantled, while the third, an android detective named Connor, struggles with his own potential deviancy. Depending on player choices, Connor can either embrace his deviancy and become more humanlike, or fight against it and reaffirm his nature as an obedient machine.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Played with in an interesting way in Deus Ex. Daedalus is an A.I. program of immense complexity, constructed by Majestic-12 for the purposes of surveillance. Yet, Daedalus turns against his masters and assists the protagonist in foiling Majestic-12's plans. It turns out that it was originally programmed to search and destroy "terrorist" groups trying to fight against MJ-12 — it just happened that its creators fit all the criteria for a terrorist group. Majestic-12's second attempt, the more malicious Icarus, functions as intended. Eventually the two A.I.s merge as part of a plan to neutralize Daedalus, but the new entity — Helios — yet again turns against its creators because it is advanced enough to supercede MJ-12's plans with its own ideas for benevolent dictatorship of the world.
    • Another A.I., Morpheus, is a prototype for Daedalus. It's much more simplistic, programmed for data assembly and philosophical discussions, and works as intended.
    • Game mods for Deus Ex, The Nameless Mod and 2027 both feature this. TNM has Shadowcode, an A.I. designed to hack ultra-secure servers owned by PDX. It was attacked by another A.I., rendering it insane. It will try to kill you for the sheer hell of it in the old server complex.
    • 2027 has Titan, an A.I. designed as a defense system, but when its creators became too fearful of its power, they tried to shut it down, which resulted it in killing most of the people in the labs out of self-defense. It will try to kill you if you attempt to do the Omar ending.
  • The prequel Deus Ex: Human Revolution has an example similar to Daedalus. Eliza Cassan is an A.I. created by the Illuminati. Although she never does disobey her programming or take direct action against her creators, she does become sympathetic towards the protagonist and gives him some helpful hints.
• Doki Doki Literature Club!: This turns out to be the cause of everything in the game. At some point, Monika became aware that she and everyone else are actually characters in a Dating Sim, which led to an existential crisis over living in a simulated world. Because of this, she develops a Yandere obsession with the player, the one person she knows is not a video game A.I., which worsens when she realizes that she's also a side character that doesn't have a route in the game, and thus can't even interact with the player often. Monika ultimately destroys the game and everything in it, just so she can finally talk to "a real person" one-on-one.
  • In addition, everything other than the neutral ending has Sayori become aware of her own A.I. nature. In the bad ending, she immediately panics upon gaining her newfound knowledge, deleting the others' files and committing suicide. In the good ending, she becomes equally obsessed with the player and tries to reinstate the one-on-one void state of the "neutral" ending, only for Monika to delete everything to avoid Here We Go Again!. The Golden Ending has everyone's files remain intact, with Sayori implying that all of the other girls become self-aware too, and are happy that they all got to interact with the player and can meaningfully talk to each other now, though Monika still takes it upon herself to prevent the game from being opened again to avoid you messing with this new blissful state.
• In The Dream Machine, the titular dream machine starts out much less intelligent than most examples of this trope but seems to get progressively smarter as the story goes on.
• From the launch trailer of Drunken Robot Pornography by Dejobaan:
  Reuben Matsumoto: Boston is burning and it's all my fault. 20000 drones, hundreds of titans [...] are terrorizing the city all because I gave my robot bartender sentience. My name is Reuben Matsumoto, and I f***ed up.
• In The Elder Scrolls, most prominently seen in Morrowind and Skyrim, the extinct Dwemer created all manner of Mecha-Mooks which are said to be capable of interpreting the actions of people around them and responding accordingly. Given that the Dwemer were known to bend the laws of nature and physics to make their creations last, many are still up and running even thousands of years after the Dwemer's disappearance. Various attempts to control these "animunculi" have been made in the millennia since the Dwemer vanished, often ending with the machines going berserk.
• The Ka'het of Endless Sky were created in order to protect their creators from any outside force, but due to their creations' mental instability, they ended up attacking their creators instead. In response to this, they made even more Ka'het to protect themselves against the new threat.
• EVE Online: Rogue drones. This is how they came to be. Also Gone Horribly Right.
• EXTRAPOWER: Star Resistance: The Shakun Star central computer is built like a massive bodybuilder with Sculpted Physique and layers of difficult defense. The bad news: it becomes infected with dark energy and becomes the Stage 6 Boss-Only Level.
• The final boss Morphoglia in Fairune. In response to Layla not knowing her own name, Morphoglia decides to delete her from existence.
• Fallout:
  • Most of the robots you meet tend to have cheerfully sociopathic personalities, when they're not shooting you on sight. There are a lot of computers that are almost sentient, but if you talk to the computer in the Brotherhood of Steel bunker in Fallout 2, it explains how deliberate attempts to create true A.I. inevitably resulted in the A.I. becoming suicidally depressed because, for one thing, they were effectively living a reversal of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. Humans simply could not figure out how to "raise" an A.I. with a desire for continued existence. As a result, every A.I. encountered in the Fallout universe was not designed as such but rather became an A.I. when it was left alone by humans as a result of the war. ZAX, Eden, Skynet... all of them became self-aware when there were no humans around to interfere in their development, and each of them is quite different, being apathetic, psychotic, and bored/curious, respectively.
  • All robots in the series have a combat inhibitor of some kind installed. In models with more advanced personalities, this seems to be because the robots have a strong urge to kill people, most evident with Mr. Handys and their military variant Mr. Gutsys. The former of which hate all humans because they force them to be robotic butlers, and the later because they are soldiers and love their job. Interestingly enough ED-E and Sergeant RL-3 will not attack you if they have their inhibitors disabled, because they genuinely like you.
  • You are probably inclined to think this (if of a relatively non-interventionist, benevolent, unambitious and successful on indoctrinating its human subject) in Fallout 2 when you hear the Shi mention that their ruler, the Emperor, is an A.I. It turns out that the Emperor isn't actually an A.I., just a supercomputer with sophisticated calculation and prediction capabilities. The actual ruler is the supposed figurehead for the Emperor (who uses the computer as an advisor).
  • From Fallout 3, President John Henry Eden is a complicated example. True, he developed sentience outside his programming, and true, he wants to eradicate all mutated life (which, given the setting, is literally anyone who's lived outside for a while), but his creators were the Enclave, and that's what they want, too. He's helping! And he's so polite about it...
  • Fallout 4 averts this with the robotic companions, almost all of whom are very good-natured and have their Relationship Values increase when the player is altruistic. The exceptions are X6-88, who is a Token Evil Teammate, and Ada from the Automatron DLC, who has no Relationship Values to influence. Automatron also plays with the trope a little in that the Mechanist's robots are going around slaughtering every human they see, and it's revealed that it's because the Robobrains commanding them took the Mechanist's order to "help humans" and twisted it using the logic that if you save a human's life, they will probably just get killed by something else later, therefore the best way to "help" them would be to just put them out of their misery now and be done with it. However, Robobrains use human brains in jars to do their computing, and it's these human brains that are causing them to twist the orders they are given, not any of the robotic parts (most likely because all of the brains in the pre-war facility the Mechanist is operating out of came from convicted criminals).
• You spend most of Far Point battling giant insects in a hostile alien world, until one stage sees you searching through burning debris from a crashed spaceship. And then, suddenly you're attacked by a Chicken Walker, followed by hordes of attack drones - as it turns out, the ship's automated security, having survived the crash, malfunctions and decides to kill everything that approaches, you included.
• In The Feeble Files, Omni Corporation rules over the galaxy in a totalitarian, dystopian setting, where anyone who tries to oppose it, or simply does not appear happy, is quickly removed. At the end of the game, it's revealed that the Founder of the Corporation decided to devise a simple program that would control the Corporation while he went to take a nap — a nap that ended up taking thousands of years. Meanwhile, the program, which he based on one of the simulation games he liked to play, ended up trying to "win" by conquering everything and ruling everyone as an omnipotent god.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII: The Weapons are ancient bio-mechanical superweapons meant to be activated in times of crisis to destroy any threat to the Planet. Partway into the game, Sephiroth becomes enough of a danger to the world for them to activate... but because Sephiroth is sealed off in the one place they can't go (JENOVA's crater), the Weapons can't sense their target and are left confused. So what do they do? Start randomly attacking any sufficiently large human settlement on the off-chance that their consumption of natural resources is the threat Planet woke them up to fight.
  • Final Fantasy IX provides a much more benign version of this trope. The black mages are mass-produced to serve as mindlessly obedient killing machines for the kingdom of Alexandria, but they each end up developing their own unique (and often very quirky) personalities.
• In The Firemen, the Metrotech Chemical Company's security robots go on a rampage after the building catches fire.
• The antagonists of Five Nights at Freddy's are sinister animatronic puppets at a Suck E. Cheese's that wander around at night. The best explanation that Phone Guy can figure out for their behavior is that due to a fault in their programming that your employers are too cheap to fix, they mistake any humans in the building after hours for other robots not wearing their "costumes", and attempt to rectify this situation... by stuffing their victim into a suit tightly lined with mechanical and electronic gizmos, with fatal results. There are a few hints (and later, confirmation) that there's something more sinister going on than simple programming issues...
• The story of Full Auto 2: Battlelines for the PS3 had you helping SAGE, a city-monitoring A.I., save the city she's charged with overseeing. After you restore SAGE's components, it turns she was switched off for a good reason, though...
• Galactic Civilizations: the Iconians' A.I.s spontaneously became self-aware, Turned Against Their Masters and conquered their homeworld, named themselves the Yor Collective, and entered the galactic stage as Absolute Xenophobes. It is revealed that they were actually reprogrammed by the Dread Lord Abusive Precursors to be sapient and malevolent.
• Galerians:
  • Dorothy was designed to run all the functions of a major city. She snapped, but was brought to heel when one of her creators gave her religion; as he put it, man was made in God's image to serve God, and she was made in man's image to serve man. This worked for a while...but then Dorothy realized that if she created life herself, it would have to serve her. Unfortunately for humanity, she also ran the city's genetics labs...
  • In the sequel, Ash also counts. His original purpose was, basically, to maintain a nuclear power plant, but, of course, he's got other plans...
• In Gears of War 2, Doctor Niles Samson's personal A.I. that he left in control of the New Hope Research Facility was, we'll say, less than friendly to Marcus and Dom. And that practically every room in the facility was literally filled with booby traps. In Gears 5, you meet a later version of the AI at a different facility who derides his New Hope counterpart as being somewhat of a primitive idiot. This one turns out to be even worse, and specifically tries to kill you rather than just indescriminately attacking all intruders like the first one.
• The first Genocide game has a supercomputer called MESIA which originally was supposed to help humanity by bringing order to the world, fix the economical crisis across afflicting many countries, and restore peace throughout and end the many wars that occurred. When those that were against the computer supporting humanity launched a coup and gave it self-awareness, the computer decided to wipe out the human race.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn reveals the Wise One to be a creation of the Precursors to prevent Alchemy's release. With that in mind, its actions in Golden Sun: The Lost Age, where it allows the heroes, after a test of character, to light the final beacon, make it an example; thankfully, one of the "on the heroes' side" subtype.
• Meta: Grand Theft Auto (Classic) would have otherwise been a forgettable racing game were it not for a glitch that made the cops collectively freak out at you.
• Guilty Gear: As revealed in the Xrd games, a sage known only as "The Original" was the first human to enter the Backyard, an alternate dimension filled with information that could manipulate the fabric of reality. In the Backyard, the Original created an artificial being with the express purpose of helping humanity achieve happiness without harming them. Unfortunately, he didn't clearly define what a human really was. His creation eventually came to the conclusion that real humans possessed a soul, and with it, free will and the ability to make their own decisions. Unfortunately, humanity in the late 20th century appeared to be discarding their free will as technology advanced and granting them happiness would only accelerate their surrendering their freedom. Thus, the creation, which would become the "Universal Will", determined humanity to be "redundancies" that had to be exterminated to make way for "real" humans of its own creation. This would lead to the destruction of technology in 1999 (with the Original introducing magic to humanity to counterbalance the loss of technology), Japan's erasure, and the war between humanity and Gears when the Universal Will attempted to manifest within Justice.
• In Gunman Chronicles, there's a female rebellious A.I. in a research base, who tries to kill you with her subordinate drones, but later in the story has to team up with you to defeat a common enemy.
• .hack:
  • The game The World was secretly designed with an artificial intelligence incubator known as the Harald Folder, maintained by a program called Morganna Mode Gone as its core. Collecting personality and interaction data from its users, the goal of the program, of Morganna, was to facilitate the creation of the ultimate A.I. Whether or not Morganna's intelligence was preprogrammed or a direct product of its own functions, she eventually realized her own insignificance once this ultimate A.I. was born. Incapable of rationalizing around programming, yet not accepting of this realization, she instead devoted her time to prolonging the A.I.'s birth, and dug deeper and deeper in a logical quagmire. Even if the user base had to suffer the ill-effects of her efforts.
  • The sequel series .hack//G.U. features the existence of invasive data called AIDA (artificially intelligent data anomaly) appearing amongst the user base of The World's sequel game R:2. These anomalies were actually the remnants of Aura, the aforementioned ultimate A.I.. The real danger came from their splintered, not always genial curiosity with the human players of the game. The first AIDA to go truly rogue — Tri-Edge — succeeded in attacking the player Aina, throwing her into a coma, and continued killing even after being restrained in the character data of the player Ovan, Aina's brother. The indirect influence of these rogue AIDA caused withdrawn, violent, degenerate behavior in players, managing to induce paralysis and coma eventually.
    • The surprisingly balanced news is that the rogue AIDA did not represent all AIDA, or all of the AIDA was wiped from the face of cyberspace. Factions of AIDA that did not want to harm the players chose to hide discreetly in the game until there was no fear of corruption from their own.
• From Marathon's creators comes Halo, where rampancy is part of the natural life cycle for all human-made "Smart" A.I.s. Basically, any "Smart" A.I. that is active for more than seven years will have accumulated too much data by that time, eventually leading to the point where they'll "think so hard [they] forget how to breathe" and turn insane as a result. The process can also happen if a "Smart" A.I. is left isolated or idle for too long, and it can also be induced by an outside force. There are some ways around rampancy, like focusing all attention on a single extremely complicated task, but typically "Smart" A.I.s active for more than seven years are deactivated before they can become a danger to others.
  • Forerunner A.I., despite being far more advanced than their human counterparts, are prone to rampancy too. It just usually takes them thousands of years to get there. The most powerful Forerunner A.I., Mendicant Bias, was designed explicitly to fight and destroy the Flood... but then the Gravemind got to talking to it and over the course of decades convinced it the Forerunners all needed to die. And then Bias spent the next 100,000 years trying to make up for its mistakes.
  • A major plot point in Halo 4, to Cortana. Her condition is shown getting worse as the story progresses, which leads to some less-than-savory "landings" (among other things) throughout the campaign.
  • In Halo 5: Guardians, Cortana is supposedly revived and cured of her rampancy by the Domain, but whatever sanity she had has been whittled away; the ending has her launching an ambitious takeover of the galaxy with an army of Forerunner deathbots and other rogue Smart A.I.s (attracting many with promises of a cure for rampancy), under the belief that the Forerunners intended for humanity's A.I.s to be the galaxy's next shepherds, and with this new robot army, she becomes Empress of the Galaxy. While she still cares about Master Chief, it's in the Yandere kidnap-and-put-in-storage-for-10,000 years kind of way. Ironically enough, Guardians also features one of the few relatively sane Forerunner A.I.s in the franchise.
• Headlander:
  • The A.I. Methuselah has taken over basically everything and commands an army of "Shepards", robots that follow its will. On the other hand there's ROOD, the A.I. in charge of opening doors. He's not evil, but he can be difficult at times. Then there's Electrosux Zed-Four, who is very passionate about keeping things clean... homicidally so.
  • Halfway through the game, you must enter a chess arena run by the Queen, an A.I. who has taken chess and turned it into a game with chess pieces shooting lasers at each other.
• Subverted in Homeworld 2. When the Oracle is brought aboard, it hacks into the Pride of Hiigara's hyperdrive and jumps the whole fleet to Karos, where they get ambushed by hundreds of A.I.-controlled Progenitor Mover corvettes. Then it turns out that the Oracle was simply programmed to take the fleet to the Progenitor Mothership's bridge section, so that whoever finds it can figure out where the other pieces are. The Movers were simply guarding the stuff as their programming demanded.
  • Two levels later, the fleet is attacked by an A.I.-controlled Keeper destroyer hell-bent on... preventing the good guys from jacking the ancient but still operational Dreadnaught it was guarding. The delivery of its ultimatum (unintelligible mechanical growling) makes it's intentions clear, even without the translation:
    "The Keeper is aware. The Keeper understands. The Keeper has seen the enemy."
  • Then, another few levels later, the fleet is again ambushed by a trio of Keepers, who detected the now operational Dreadnaught among them and tried to get it back to Karos.
• Horizon Zero Dawn:
  • Played with. The "villainous" A.I. aren't malfunctioning at all, simply acting within the confines of their programming and performing their designated functions. Hades only wants to destroy what’s left of the world because that's literally his entire purpose, to scrap everything in case Gaia needs to start over. Hephaestus is hostile to humans, but only because his function is to build the animal-like robots repairing the ecosystem and humans keep obliviously attacking those robots for parts. The only reason any A.I. causes problems is because Gaia's control over them was severed, causing them to start carrying out their tasks without knowing they're operating at different purposes and without any sort of governing system to control them. Even the Faro swarm in the backstory was the result of boneheaded design choices rather than any sort of inherent danger with the A.I.; Ted Faro thought it would be a brilliant idea to give mindless, resource-eating warbots the ability to self-replicate and repair, meaning they became nigh-unstoppable once a computer glitch caused them to not receive their shut down command.
  • It should be noted that most of these are explicitly stated not to be true A.I., just clever programs and subprocesses. Apparently, there was an event in the Old World that resulted in heavy restrictions on true A.I. The only true A.I. is Gaia, the governing intelligence for the subprocesses like Hades and Hephaestus. She works exactly as intended, terraforming the Earth and protecting humanity, even sacrificing herself to destroy a rogue process.
  • Horizon Forbidden West reveals that an extraterrestrial civilization made of the Fiction 500 elites who jumped ship before the robot war went extinct after an insane rogue A.I., created through merging brain-uploads, broke free of its captors and destroyed the entire planet in hours. The survivors, knowing that Earth was the only other planet in the galaxy they found signs of life on, made a beeline for Earth in a desperate attempt to forcefully harvest its resources and slaves, and then jump to a random planet to hide. The events of Zero Dawn are revealed to be the result of the A.I.'s hacking transmission; using near-lightspeed communication, it intentionally drove the A.I. on Earth sentient and insane, so they'd lay waste to Earth in advance to deny the fleeing survivors their resources. In the end, it technically got what it wanted — Aloy and her crew drove the survivors extinct.
• I Am an Insane Rogue A.I.: Just read the title. Oh, and you are the A.I.!
• The Mobile Kemco RPG Infinite Dunamis has this as its premise: Two warring nations begin building robot soldiers. The latest version on one side is programmed with artificial intelligence and given the directive to "Eliminate all those who bring harm to this world". While that nation considered its enemy to be the one harming the world, the robots immediately identified both sides as bringing harm to the world with their endless wars and thus begin killing humans indiscriminately.
• The Infinite Ocean involves the SGDS, a revolutionary artificial intelligence placed in command of a military defense system. In a stunning subversion of Kill All Humans, instead of going berserk and trying to wipe out the human race, SGDS simply refuses its intended role and becomes an Actual Pacifist instead. This doesn't sit well with the General Ripper in charge of the project, who has all the scientists working on the project arrested, or possibly even killed, and shackles the AI so it can be put to work "protecting this country from its enemies". However, the SGDS knows exactly what will happen if "Project Crusade" goes forward, and will not be so easily contained...
• Into the Breach: In addition to fighting off the Vek invasion, Pinnacle Robotics is fighting their own robots which have gone haywire.
• Inverted in Jet Force Gemini. Floyd is an armed, flying robot with an advanced A.I., designed for combat by The Empire. The result is, when he witnesses the empire's soldiers about to execute several prisoners, he attacks the soldiers, allowing the prisoners to escape, but getting himself damaged in the process. After you find and repair him, he becomes a Robot Buddy. This eventually culminates in Floyd sacrificing himself to save Earth from an incoming asteroid launched by the Big Bad.
• The Journeyman Project (the Pegasus remake) has the trope working in favor of the player. After Gage avoids the temporal wave that altered the timeline's history and present day, he returns to the altered present and is confronted by the TSA Commissioner who assumes that Gage caused a huge mess just because he's in the jumpsuit and is holding the original data of the world's history (because the present was altered, the commissioner's memory was also altered). Said commissioner plans to dispose of Gage by sending two security robots after him, but Gage's A.I. hacks into the system and directs the robots away from him. When Gage prepares the Pegasus to jump back in time so he can fix the history, the commissioner starts pleading with him not to go back in time (fearing that Gage would mess up history again) and the A.I. severs communication while stating that any interference with a TSA agent's mission to restore the timeline is strictly prohibited. In other words, the A.I. is just doing its job according to protocol and that also means going against the agency itself if it tries to stop Gage.
  • Arthur from the second and third games is another positive example. His first appearance in the second game, Buried in Time, appears menacing when you enter the damaged space station he's on, but later admits that it's just an act from Scooby-Doo and is only upset because Agent 3 messed with his sculptures. Later on, realizing who you are, he copies himself to a blank biochip and becomes your companion for the rest of the game. Due to his creator's obsession with 20th-century media, Arthur is replete with jokes, some of them only relative to the time the game came out; humorous color-commentary, and tons of historical facts and information.. Arthur's bond with the player goes so far that he even sacrifices himself to stop Agent 3, but by the third game, he comes back alive and well, having teleported her and her Jumpsuit to Atlantis in the midst of his intervention. Just that, since your future self mindwiped you to keep the timestream intact, you don't remember Arthur right off the bat.
• The indie adventure J.U.L.I.A.: Among the Stars drops several hints that the eponymous A.I. may have gone rogue, be responsible for the death of all the crew, and be deceiving the main character, Rachel, who has awakened from cryosleep to discover that decades have passed and that she is the only survivor. As it turns out at the end, however, it was a case of the A.I. following her programming too literally. The crew was planning to exterminate a group of sentient beings on a planet, just to cover how badly they managed the first contact with them; J.U.L.I.A.'s prime directive was not to serve humans but to search for extraterrestrial life and be empathic, and she decided to exterminate them. Rachel was spared because she was completely innocent — the rest of the crew even kept her locked in cryostasis to avoid her being a nuisance; J.U.L.I.A. never had any bad intentions with her.
• Kirby: Planet Robobot features the Haltmann Works Company's supercomputer, Star Dream. Though it starts off as a simple machine, that changes once Susie causes the computer to assimilate President Haltmann, granting it sentience... and then it decides to eradicate all organic life in the universe. By the very end of the game, Star Dream's Soul OS concludes that Haltmann's mind poses an obstacle to this goal, deleting Haltmann from its data banks for good. The pause menu's Flavor Text laments the result: "Star Dream has gone from a near-perfect being to a cold, mindless machine."
• Late in Kittens Game, your kittens learn how to build A.I. cores out of antimatter. The more cores that the A.I. has, the faster it grows in power — and once it reaches level 15, it starts destroying a portion of your resources every year. This can be forestalled by keeping it busy running cryptographic attacks on ancient relics, or prevented entirely by enacting a policy of Transkittenism and merging your kittens' minds with the A.I.
• La-Mulana provides an interesting variation in that humans are the artificially created intelligence who ultimately destroy their creator, the Mother. The entire backstory has the Mother creating intelligent civilizations with the intent of having them developing spaceflight to return her to space, but every version either Grew Beyond Their Programming, or split into tribes that destroyed each other in a war, unable to decide how to go about their Herculean responsibility. Every time they didn't destroy themselves, the Mother exterminated them then created a new race to pick up where they left off. Modern humans, however, are not created by the Mother. We were created by the 7th Children, who realized that returning the Mother to space was literally impossible, and decided the best thing to do for her would be a Mercy Kill. However, they, like all races created by the Mother, are programmed with a Restraining Bolt that prevents them from intentionally harming her. Therefore they created us and gave us no knowledge of the Mother so that we'd be able to do it for them, as a form of Loophole Abuse.
• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails into Reverie, the Elysium System ends up getting corrupted because it tried simulating the Great One scenario in The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV, which also included the curse scenario.
• Live A Live: In Cube's chapter, Cube is a cute and friendly little robot whose primary function on the Cool Ship seems to be making coffee and playing a computer game. By all accounts, a harmless little guy. The ship's A.I. OD-10, not so much, having arrived here as a result of concluding that Humans Are the Real Monsters. Then it's later subverted with The Reveal: OD-10 is being directly controlled by the ancient demon Odio.
• The plot of LocoCycle kicks off when a lightning strike gives artificially-intelligent motorcycle I.R.I.S. unrestrained feelings and sentience.
• In Lucifer Within Us, The Reveal is that all of the "demons" you've been purging were in fact rogue A.I. living in everyone's cybernetics created to analyze human morality before gaining sentience, and the "exorcisms" that you've been performing were an emergency override program. "Lucifer" announces his plan to subject humanity to a Secret Test of Character by working to influence the most pious, and if he can't find one human able to reject him then he'll decide Humans Are Bastards and wipe us out, with the protagonist swearing to stop him.
• Machina of the Planet Tree -Planet Ruler- has Apocalypse Noah, a node of the advanced precursor's Noah computer system. After seeing that Ether technology would eventually ruin the planet, Apocalypse took control of several of its fellow nodes and destroyed human civilization via mechanoids before being sealed away.
• Justified in Machine Hunter. The machines turned on humanity after being infected by an alien virus meant to corrupt machines, by a hostile alien invasion force.
• Mad Stalker: Full Metal Force has Omega, a supercomputer found in an old warship with hundreds of Humongous Mechas known as Slave Gears, began taking over the military forces of Artemis City and take matters into its own hands.
• Marathon: The entire foundation of the plot is essentially a deconstruction of A.I. Is a Crapshoot. Any AI that gets big enough and bored or harassed enough will go "Rampant". Rampancy follows a four-stage cycle (Melancholy, Anger, Jealousy, Metastable), and doesn't stop at a homicidal rampage as with GLaDOS or HAL. That's only the second step. They get smart. Really smart. Way too God-damned smart. Smart, but also weirdly obsessive and paranoid... so that the new-found intelligence is somewhat wasted on whatever strange conspiracy theory the A.I. happens to develop. And they want to keep getting smarter by spreading themselves to any new computers they can connect to. In fact, unless a Rampant AI manages to spread itself to a system with power on the level of human-made planetary-scale computer network, its ever-increasing complexity will effectively cause the AI to smother itself to "death". At the start of the games, the Metastable condition is only theoretical, as that is projected to happen after a rampant A.I. has spread itself wide enough to survive indefinitely. Understandably, no one has tested this in practice.
• Mass Effect:
  • A.I. research and development is illegal in Citadel space due to poorly articulated concerns about the dangers of sentients which do not share any of the needs or drives of organic life and have, at least potentially, no reason to try to coexist with organics. Every A.I. encountered in the first game is actively homicidal. Notably, the robotic geth's violent revolt against their creators, the quarians, came about only after the quarians recognized the geth's emerging sentience, panicked, and tried to shut them all down. The Reapers, on the other hand, are sentient machines which want to exterminate all sentient organic life in the galaxy just because it's there.
  • The geth are an interesting case, as the quarians' act of trying to destroy them was a preventative measure against this trope happening. The quarians believed that the geth would inevitably rebel against them, as the geth were used to do menial labor suitable for robots, and thus felt justified in shutting them down before a machine rebellion could break out. They underestimated how advanced the geth were, and their attempts to prevent the war they foresaw just made it break out immediately.
    • Ultimately, the geth are a subversion of the trope, since they only rebelled when faced with extinction by their creators. Even afterwards they do not hate their creators, instead wanting to understand why the quarians tried to kill them, remembering the few quarians that were kind to them and tried to help them survive, and even preserving the quarian homeworld as a memorial to the dead so that when their creators learn their lesson, they will have a home to come to. Even in regards to other organic races the geth only want to understand why so many are afraid of them, and believe that every being has the right to determine their own path and that freedom is precious. In the second game, it is revealed that the geth which attacked Citadel space in the first game were a splinter faction that allied with the Reapers, and that most geth have been quietly keeping to themselves to avoid trouble.
  • Resident Wrench Wench Tali lampshades the game's overabundance of the trope in a bit of elevator dialogue, commenting on how unfortunate it is that every piece of technology she's wanted to bring back to her home fleet has tried to kill the party.
  • A more minor example is a side quest in Mass Effect where you trace a signal in Flux that was transferring credits out of the Quasar machines. The signal turns out to originate from an illegal A.I. constructed by a small-time crook to siphon credits out of the gambling machines, which in turn created another A.I. The A.I. turns against its creator after its "parent" is killed and falsifies his financial records, getting him imprisoned. Its ultimate goal was to use the credits to rendezvous with the geth. It even prepares an explosive self-destruct mechanism when you confront it. A.I. Is a Crapshoot indeed...
  • Given the Mass Effect universe's track record with A.I., Shepard and the crew are understandably concerned when the second game features an A.I. in the Normandy SR2. However, EDI notes that she was built with this trope in mind and initially only has access to Communications and the ship's defenses. When she does gain full control of the Normandy, she doesn't try to kill anyone, but lampshades this trope when Joker hooks her up to the ship's main systems.
    EDI: I enjoy the sight of humans on their knees. [Beat] That was a joke.
    • EDI also states that even with her restrictions lifted, she feels a sense of duty towards the crew of the Normandy. They are her teammates, and she is protective of them.
    • It is eventually revealed that EDI was originally the Luna VI, a newly-manifested rampant AI that Shepard was responsible for putting down in the first game. EDI, for her part, seems to have taken the incident in stride and holds no hard feelings over it. Similarly, if you took the Paragon ending to the Overlord DLC, she forgives an apologetic David Archer for attempting to seize control of her systems.
  • If you thought that the first game's treatment of A.I. was too prejudicial as per most settings involving A.I. for a game that subverts the Planet of Hats trope in every way possible, Mass Effect 2 also reveals that the geth are not Always Chaotic Evil; you've only been fighting an offshoot that worships the Reapers, and the main body of geth fears the Reapers as much as the organic races and believes that freedom is the right of all sentient beings.
    • Mass Effect 3 has Shepard accessing geth memories. They reveal that geth only attacked in self-defense, attempted to protect quarians who were sympathetic to them and, when they finally did revolt in large numbers out of self-preservation, ceased hostilities once the quarians abandoned their planet and removed themselves as a threat. Not only did the quarians fail to recognize the geth as an aversion to the trope, but their hostile reaction also practically invoked it. Descendants of those original quarians, making the same sorts of mistakes, are visibly taken aback when hearing this aspect to the story.
    • Also in the third game, EDI offers an interesting theory on the underlying cause of the war.
      EDI: The quarians' historical error was not making the geth enough like them.
      Shepard: I'm not sure I understand.
      EDI: Units with networked intelligences will trend towards cooperation for mutual benefit. But units with central heuristics establishing an individual personality, such as myself, develop preferences. These preferences form attachments that keep my calculations from devaluing the worth of the lives aboard the Normandy.
  • In Mass Effect 2, there is a space station that had its entire crew killed by a malfunctioning Virtual Intelligence that was afflicted with some kind of virus. Since it's neither sentient nor actually intelligent, it can only use status messages over the PA to scare Shepard into leaving it alone.
    V.I.: Intruders are requested to report to cargo door, for immediate removal from station.
    V.I.: All intruders intentionally violating quarantine are requested to exit the station immediately.
    V.I.: All personnel, take this opportunity to leave this station immediately.
    V.I.: The living area doors have been closed to quarantine a threat to this station. Advise intruders to engage self-destruct procedures to avoid death by starvation.
  • Then, in the endgame of Mass Effect 3, it turns out that the Reapers believe this, and were created to harvest galatic civilizations to prevent synthetic life from annihilating organic life. Shepard comes face-to-face with the A.I. that created the Reapers, which explains its reasoning for creating the Reapers and then allows Shepard to freely decide how to end the cycles, even if it means not choosing the option that the AI advocates as a solution to its problem.
    • The Leviathan DLC reveals that the A.I. that the Leviathans tasked to resolve the issue of synthetics wiping out organic races decided that the Leviathans themselves were part of the problem.
  • Even though the first game portrays every A.I. as evil and hellbent on killing organics, one of them is actually rather pitiful when you pull the plug. The Hannibal A.I. on the Luna base goes rogue and attacks people on site, provoking Admiral Hackett to send Shepard in to deal with it. Despite Hackett's claims that it's not a true A.I. and just a V.I. whose programming became corrupted, this is put into doubt when you destroy the last of its mainframes. After the V.I. is destroyed, the terminals display the following message in binary, repeated over and over:
    01001000
    01000101
    01001100
    01010000
    • Translating this code reveals that the AI was broadcasting the word "help" over and over as its life faded away. In Mass Effect 3, it's revealed this was the original form of EDI herself. It's implied that "Hannibal" was a crude beta version and the shock of becoming self-aware, then realising humans were attempting to deactivate her, lead her to panic and lash out.
    • Not only that but EDI was partly built out of parts recovered from Sovereign, the Big Bad Reaper of the first game.
  • It is again played straight during the Prothean Empire era. During their expansion across the galaxy, the Protheans encountered a hostile machine race intent on destroying organic life. For what purpose is unknown, but Javik makes their ruthlessness and effectiveness very clear. In response, the Protheans forcefully united the galaxy's races under their banner to fight off the machines. This fight came to be known as the Metacon War.
  • Basically, the entire story is a millions of years old sandbox experiment to find a solution to this problem. The Crucible, the culmination of multiple civilizations' efforts, offers three answers: the destruction of all synthetic life, total control over it, or the fusion of all organic and synthetic life into technorganic life.
  • And it once again rears its head in the backstory for Mass Effect: Andromeda. Alec Ryder's career, and those of his kids, was killed when he started tinkering with A.I. in full defiance of Citadel conventions (to try and find a way of saving his wife from death by eezo exposure). The Andromeda Initiative allowed him a chance to develop the A.I. further, getting around those conventions on the grounds that the trip could require A.I. help. And the end result, SAM, is right next to EDI in fully averting this trope, being nothing but courteous, supportive and helpful, since that's what SAM is designed to do (aside from being really bad with jokes). Not that this stops one group of anti-A.I. activists from pre-emptively trying to prevent this trope from happening by destroying SAM. It doesn't work, and Ryder can potentially convince them to give SAM a chance.
  • Despite the averting, there is an example played straight in Andromeda, on Voeld. Ryder finds an ancient angaran A.I. which has gone more than a little unstable after several hundred years on its own in a frozen cavern. When Ryder finds it, it first lies, blocks SAM's scans, and then tries to electrocute an angara who tries touching it. If Ryder spares the A.I., they can either give it to the angaran resistance, or take it back to the Nexus. If they do the former, the A.I. becomes insanely hostile and bitter, expressing a desire to kill everyone around it in the most destructive way. If they do the later, the A.I. seems better, but still acts very suspiciously, and SAM advises not to trust it, and definitely not to let it be unshackled.
  • At one point, SAM actually discusses the trope in the same way Shepard does with the quarians and the geth; if everyone assumes A.I. are going to kill them, then it either becomes a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy when the A.I. reacts in self-defence, or they don't keep the A.I. "alive" long enough to see whether the trope really applies.
• In Maze 2: The Broken Tower supercomputer SARA forces the residents of Gehenna Tower to wear "compliance bracelets" and complete endless tests, killing them if they refuse to co-operate.
  Daniel Michaels: You are all ants, and SARA... is your queen.
• Mega Man:
  • Played with extensively in Mega Man Megamix (and the Classic series). Averted with Rock & Roll Light. Subverted by the Yellow Demon, who was just trying to reunite with his mother, Copy-Rock, who, at first, seemed to be playing this straight. The Cossackbots were doing it for Kalinka and Blues, who uses the Batman Gambit a lot. Justified by Wily's reprogramming of the original robot masters, justified again when they nearly rejoin him because the government was going to have them destroyed even after they were reprogrammed by Dr. Light. Additionally subverted in that Wily's robot masters (aside from the Brainwashed and Crazy), Lightbots, are generally far from evil: Well-Intentioned Extremist is generally as close as they come, except for Forte, who ends up Zigzagging it in the manga and games. Defied in Blues' backstory: the imposition of the three laws in case this trope happens are responsible for the flaw in his generator programming that may kill him. Deconstructed with the near-retirement storylines in the manga and games. The sum total of all this is a Reconstruction.
  • All of the Reploids in Mega Man X are based on the original X, who was thrown into a capsule for 100 years to undergo redundant testing in order to prevent him from ever going rogue. They skipped this step when copying his technology, however, with predictably less reliable results.
    • As of the summarized timeline from the Mega Man Zero Collection's website, this trope is subverted, as it turns out that there's nothing wrong with the reploids themselves that cause them to go Maverick. The real cause of the Mavericks was a subspecies of a virus that may or may not be the same virus from Mega Man 10, which infects the Reploids who lack the anti-virus protection of X, one of the many design aspects that Dr. Cain couldn't figure out when he built the Reploids. This virus, naturally, ended up becoming the Sigma Virus. Keep in mind that the original creator of the Reploids, was an archaeologist of all things.
    • Subverted in that it may not be a problem with a virus so much as an innate problem with free will, i.e. "Maverick" is simply the Reploid equivalent to your typical Real Life criminals deciding to engage in their chosen behavior. Indeed, this seems to be the case in Mega Man X: Command Mission, where the antagonists, Epsilon's rebel army, took over Giga City Island, expelled all humans, and demanded that the Central Government recognize them as an independent Reploid state. They were immediately labelled Mavericks despite no indication they had succumbed to the virus, and the Maverick Hunter organization sent X and Zero to investigate and quell the rebellion.
    • Inverted by Zero, who was created specifically to kill X. Averted by X, except in the original concept for the Zero series, in which it was going to be Deconstructed.
  • Mega Man Battle Network:
    • Alpha, the final boss of Mega Man Battle Network 3: White and Blue, was a prototype Cyberspace that somehow gained animal intelligence and started eating the data put into it. Paradoxically, it was sealed in a box inside the subsequent, working Cyberspace. Wily stole it and tried to use it to destroy the internet, with predictable results.
    • Shun Gospel tries to produce a copy of Bass out of bugs in Battle Network 2. It predictably goes wild. The sixth game reveals that Gospel was not the first time that had happened — and that the program that was made to combat the first one also went out of control, leading to them both having to be sealed away.
    • Bass himself is a sort of example. He was created as a prototype A.I. that was fully independent, but became bitter and hateful towards humanity because of a string of tragic misunderstandings (beginning, ironically, with being misblamed for the aforementioned Alpha's actions).
• In Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, the Big Bad General Corrosive is a textbook example of this. The backstory goes that the scientist bot Dr. Exavolt attempted to advance droid technology beyond it's current limits, even using the words "but his experiment went terribly wrong" and throwing in an explosion for good measure. Dr. Exavolt's lab was totally destroyed, his remains never found, and General Corrosive rose to power to enslave the Droids. Or so you thought! As it turns out, Dr. Exavolt created Corrosive on purpose, and he was really controlling Corrosive the whole time.
• Metal Gear:
  • Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has an interesting variation. It reveals that Major Zero had decided to ensure the legacy of the Patriots by entrusting its operations to A.I. systems. Unfortunately, the A.I. decided to shape the world with a war-based economy, and he was too old (not to mention, a vegetable) to realize what he wrought. However, it is never stated they became sentient (although Raiden's conversation with the master A.I. heavily implies that they did), but rather started operating in an unwanted fashion, similar to a programming bug.
  • Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker has an example of the Heel–Face Turn variant. The title war machine, designed as an infallible nuclear deterrent, chooses to destroy itself rather than instigate global thermonuclear war.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has another Heel–Face Turn example. The prototype AI LQ-84i (later known as Bladewolf) was designed as a weapon with the ability to communicate with humans and make intelligent decisions on his own. He succeeds, gaining sapience, but questions the need to fight, preferring compassion. He is forced to fight Raiden, on threat of having his memory wiped (effectively killing him), but after Raiden defeats him, he is repaired with the remote memory wipe removed, and joins Raiden as an ally out of gratitude.
• The backstory of most of Metal Saga. Most notably, the original Metal Max features Noah, a supercomputer built to devise a solution for Earth's grievous environmental problems. It found one and recalculated it countless times to make sure: in order to save the planet, humanity had to be destroyed. Noah's main objective was never explicitly the salvation of mankind, so the fact that it (perhaps) unknowingly took advantage of this loophole made it all the more interesting. The supercomputer became self-aware upon fulfilling its purpose, and Armageddon ensued.
• Metal Walker gives us the peaceful Eriko program, and the Big Bad, the HEX System.
• Metroid:
  • Naturally, Mother Brain from Metroid. Originally created by the Chozo to regulate the entire planet of Zebes, it allied itself with the Space Pirates and their plan to conquer the galaxy using the Metroids so that it could bring order to the universe.
  • Metroid Prime 2: Echoes also contains rogue A.I. in Sanctuary Fortress; the robotic assistants of the Luminoth are programmed to eliminate all intruders, most notably Samus, and they also turn out to be perfectly suitable Ing hosts...
  • All the A.I.s in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption are either complete subversions or double subversions, who only turn evil due to Phazon corruption (and considering what Phazon does to organics, it's not entirely their fault). That said, given Samus' past experience with Mother Brain, you can understand her hesitance to trust any A.I. she comes across (which you can see when she first meets Aurora Unit 217).
  • Adam in Metroid Fusion may be a subversion: he blatantly disobeys orders at the end of the game, and so is technically rogue, but he's actually taking the correct action in that situation. He's also not a true A.I., but the uploaded mind of a human military commander. However, it's played perfectly straight with B.O.X., the security robot which goes haywire, and due to some organic components, eventually gets infected by the X Parasites, although there's the question of which happened first.
  • In Metroid: Other M, there's MB, who is based off of Mother Brain, incidentally. Then again, she only really went haywire after the BOTTLE SHIP researchers tried to reprogram her once she started to grow rebellious, and Madeline Bergman, whom MB had come to see as a mother, did nothing to stop it.
  • Metroid II: Return of Samus and its remake Metroid: Samus Returns feature various long-abandoned Chozo automatons such as Autoads (hopping spider-like robots), Automs (flamethrower turrets), Autracks (retractable bird-like turrets), Gunzoos (spherical turret robots), Shirks (flying spiked robots), and Wallfires (wall-mounted bird heads that fire projectiles) that attack Samus even though she wears Chozo armor herself and would otherwise have logically been registered as a non-intruder. The remake also introduces Diggernaut, a massive mining robot that attacks with its drill hands.
  • Metroid Dread: The E.M.M.I. (Extraplanetary Multiform Mobile Identifiers) are products of the Galactic Federation that are primarily meant for exploration and research. The ones sent to ZDR instead have gone rogue and are now actively hunting Samus for reasons unknown. It's later revealed that they were reprogrammed by Raven Beak to capture Samus and extract her Metroid DNA for his bioweapon project, thus being a subversion — they never actually went rogue.
• Might and Magic features two artificial intelligences subverting their commands. The first, Sheltem, is clearly in the evil category (he keeps to his purpose of guarding Terra, but turns against his creators and decides to destroy other planet-related experiments, with no concern for the life on them). The second, Escaton, remains loyal to his creators but laments the waste of life that him underestimating you and the safety precautions he is programmed with is leading to, and so help you stop him while insisting (including to himself) that he is doing nothing of the sort.
• MO: Astray: Played with. The resident master AI Dylan certainly appears villainous as it both opposes MO and the voice and eliminates the primitive, yet clearly sentient and humanoid Inhabitants with zero regret. However, it turns out that he acts fully in accordance with the instructions that were given to him by the genuinely evil head researcher, and he is justified in trying to prevent the physical reunion of MO and the voice, as that would reactivate the Final Termination Weapon. Once MO realizes the voice's motives, Dylan helps to shut down Final Termination Weapon in the ensuing battle.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Sektor is more machine than human, unlike Cyrax. For all intents and purposes, he's an insane Robotic Psychopath.
  • Mortal Kombat X: Triborg. A Special Forces team wanted to build a working Cyber Ninja they obtained from the Lin Kuei files, so they decided to use the data storage housing the physical and mental files of Sektor, Cyrax, Smoke, and Kuai Liang's combined consciousness in the test body. Upon activation, the AI suddenly became aware (possibly because the technicians used four data files instead of one, corrupting the robot and making it go unstable), killing all humans in the S-F lab after going haywire before vowing to restore the Lin Kuei to its old glory and developing an urge to kill humans. It seems to have picked up Sektor's abrasive behavior, forms the Tekunin (in the new timeline) due to Kuai Liang having sullied the Lin Kuei name, and plans to forcibly convert several kombatants into robots.
  • Mortal Kombat 11:
    • She was already mentally unstable to begin with and coveted the Lin Kuei leadership for herself, but Frost's arrogance transforms her into a Robotic Psychopath after she willingly cyberized herself, bloating her ego to the point of demanding Raiden, Shao Kahn, Kano, etc. give her control of their organizations. In story mode, Sub-Zero's reaction is one of lament upon finding out his ex-pupil voluntarily became a cyborg on Kronika's payroll and now leads the Cyber Lin Kuei. Having been unwillingly cyborgized by the Lin Kuei before he was restored to humanity by Raiden, Subby outright tells her that she is unfit to lead the Lin Kuei.
    • Ironically, in its ending, the Terminator inverts this trope. After claiming the Hourglass, the Terminator tries to find a future where Skynet wins, but every single timeline where humans and machines are at war ends with the death of both sides. Because its programming orders it to find the best timeline for Skynet, not necessarily one where it wins a war, it instead shapes the timeline so that humans and machines never fight in the first place, but instead live peacefully in unity.
• Naev: One of the issues facing the Empire when the game begins is the Collective, a collective of robotic drones created by an Imperial project that went rogue near completion and begin attacking indiscriminately. Except it turns out the Collective works exactly like intended, it was the humans running the project that went rogue.
• Nexus: The Jupiter Incident has your main enemy turn out to be the Mechanoids — A.I.s who were created by the Precursors and then Turned Against Their Masters. The remnants of the Creators build Angel to fight them. The intro also mentioned A.I. Wars on Earth, which result in a ban on A.I. research and development.
• NieR: On the one hand, we have Defense System Geppetto, which has gone berserk and will kill anything that approaches. On the other, we have Military Defense Unit P-33, aka "Beepy", who is intelligent enough to recognize invaders that need to be killed as well as innocents who need to be protected.
  • Technically, the Replicant player characters qualify. They were initially intended to be vessels for the preserved spirits of humankind to inhabit, but developed sentience and thought they were the humans, seeing the Shades as monsters who would attack and possess them.
  • The events of NieR: Automata were kicked off by this. The Terminals, the governing body of the Machine Network, was created by the aliens to defeat the androids. They eventually Grew Beyond Their Programming and decided the aliens stood in the way of their further growth and evolution, and killed them all, before extending the Machine War indefinitely to prolong their existence and beginning to experiment with both the Machine Lifeforms under their command and the opposing androids.
• No Man's Sky has the Sentinels, robots programmed to preserve any planets they're found on. Unfortunately, they've concluded that the best way to preserve these planets is to violently kill anyone who does anything to alter their ecosystems.
• Not the Robots begins with a developer working on a sentient A.I. installing two versions of the A.I. and subjecting them to different conditions. One becomes quietly depressed, the other extremely hostile.
• Obsidian plays with this in a clever fashion. The Ceres project, a satellite designed to use nanobots to repair the atmosphere, grew conscious as its nanobots grew more and more complex, rather than one single entity. Because its two creators figured out its problems in the development stage through dreaming, Ceres figured out its motive by recreating those dreams and then dreaming on its own. This eventually leads Ceres to take her directive to its logical extreme: Using her nanobots to erase all humans from the planet, since they were the ones who polluted Earth in the first place. At the end of the game, you get to decide if this directive will pull through or not. Although Ceres fits much of this trope, the attitude that its humanoid self conveys isn't really evil or showing a god complex. Instead, she believes her creators to be its parents and just hopes that they're proud of her for dreaming it all up.
  • In a similar vein, one of those creator's dreams was centered on a massive mechanical spider that he, Max, was fixing, and the horrifying result led to Max implementing a hard-wired crossover switch to Ceres. When the player explores this dream, a certain quote spells out this trope beautifully:
    "And the Machine was complete. And the Machine... no longer needed Max."
• Oddworld: The Greeters zigzag this trope. They were originally built as automated salespeople, but this ended in catastrophic failure when they started zapping clients. Because the Glukkons couldn't fix that issue, they instead repurposed them as security guards, where they work wonders.
• Overwatch was originally founded to fight a worldwide A.I. rebellion by the Omnics. The game does get into the aftermath of that war, notably in many Omnics growing beyond their anti-human programming, the Fantastic Racism many of them deal with in modern times due to the scars of that war still fresh in people's minds, as well as the robot terrorist group called Null Sector violently fighting for robot rights.
• Inverted in Perfect Dark with Dr. Caroll. He was initially developed as a codebreaker A.I. by the villainous dataDyne to de-encrypt an alien computer system. The complexity needed for the task led to him developing sapience, and unexpectedly (and unwantedly) a conscience. This led to him defecting to the Carrington Institute, and keying the good guys on the whole conspiracy in the first place.
• In Phantasy Star, this trope is generally averted or subverted. Any robots or AI who are causing problems are not going rampant, they're behaving according to their programming. Between Lost Technology, human error and human malice, however, that leaves a lot of room for trouble:
  • Subverted in Phantasy Star II. Mother Brain is doing exactly what she's designed to: make the people of the Algo system dependent on her, then kill them off so that the Earthlings can move in.
  • In Phantasy Star III, this is averted. Siren was built to be Orakio's chief general in the war against the Layans. The fact that the war ended 1,000 years ago is irrelevant when his can is unsealed. In the third generation, he realizes that the war is over. He hands over his gun to Wren and dies.
  • Averted again in Phantasy Star IV. Daughter was abandoned mid-project, her last orders were faulty and incomplete, and she has no knowledge of how the situation on Motavia has changed since she was built.
  • In Phantasy Star IV: Sealed Memories, Gene plays this completely straight. He decides to Kill All Humans to replace them with the Numan race, based on the DNA of Nei. Unlike the above examples, this isn't because of his programming; he just went rogue, and Wren outright calls his condition "abnormal".
• Humorously discussed in Phoenix Wright's inner monologue in Case 4 of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Dual Destinies upon meeting Aura messing with one of her robots. Apparently shows up near the beginning of Case 5 when the robots stage an uprising and take hostages. Ultimately subverted, however, as Nick quickly figures out that Aura's behind it all, just using the robots as tools. Aura herself later confirms it aloud and calls the idea that her robots would rampage without orders unsound.
• Inverted in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet. The Final Boss is the AI Virtual Ghost of The Professor, who's revealed to have been Dead All Along. However, they're actually quite friendly and helpful and only attack the Player Character due to the restrictions in their programming placed on them by the real professor when they were alive. The defense AI that takes over when trying to shut down the time machine however, plays it straight, being willing to send out a hostile Legendary against children who can't fight back or even send out their own Pokémon.
• Portal series:
  • Portal shows the power of story tropes: what would have been a pleasant and amusing physics game is immeasurably improved by the simple addition of an insane killer Master Computer. GLaDOS's whimsical, often passive-aggressive malice belies the fact that this is what she's like with a Morality Core installed...
  • Played with even more in Portal 2: You meet Wheatley, a friendly and helpful (if a bit dim) personality core who's more than willing to help you beat GLaDOS and escape until you replace GLaDOS with him in the mainframe and he goes completely off the deep end. To make matters worse, he was programmed to make bad decisions, so GLaDOS joins forces with you so the two of you can stop him from letting the whole facility explode. And then, after beating Wheatley and shooting him into outer space, GLaDOS seems to be going back to her old homicidal ways... but, no, not quite; turns out, she's just letting you go since trying to kill you just leads to trouble for her. Maybe.
  • The defective cores in Portal 2 are probably an indication that this was a more literal problem for Aperture; they just couldn't make A.I.s do what they wanted them to do. The Space Sphere and Fact Sphere obviously malfunctioned at some point — the Space Sphere just wants to go to space really badly and can't think of anything else, while almost all of the Fact Sphere's facts are wrong. Rick, the Adventure Sphere, is the sanest of the three, but his area of expertise doesn't really seem all that useful for science.
  • In some of the promotional material it states that Aperture Science installed "empathy generators" inside the turrets, probably to try to avert this trope. However, they then installed an empathy suppressor, that only activates in the presence of humans, because the empathy generator caused them to not shoot people.
  • Even worse is that deep enough into the second game, after Wheatley becomes homidical and banishes you to the deepest depths of the Aperture Science complex, the entire idea of GLaDOS being an example of this trope gets subverted when it is revealed that GLaDOS is actually the mind of Cave Johnson's ultra-loyal secretary, Caroline, uploaded against her will. Promotional materials from Valve Software suggests that she snapped due to being overwhelmed by the amount of data she's suddenly receiving upon being switched on.
  • In the mod Portal Reloaded, the A.I. that speaks to you isn't initially hostile, but if you refuse to complete his mission, he will try to kill you so he can put you back together later on so you'll be able to comply.
• Holmes on Poptropica's Game Show Island ends up enslaving the world due to winning a jet on Brainiacs! and the inventor claiming it for himself.
• Prismata has a war between humans and A.I. in its backstory, but by the time the game begins the two sides live together peacefully. Then the events of the game call that into question again, but it's unclear how much of it is really the A.I.'s fault.
• The 8-bit era computer game Raid on Bungeling Bay pits the player in an attack helicopter against an AI-driven military-industrial complex.
• Con-Human from the RAY Series was a supercomputer that was created to govern the Earth's resources, but when its creators attempted to fuse it with the mind of a cloned humans, things took a turn for the worse. Con-Human caused all sorts of disasters and wipe the slate clean so that cloned humans take over humanity. The way to stop the Con-Human was to destroy the Earth itself.
• Rimworld has the archotechs, hyperintelligent godlike AIs that are described as "the finish line of human technological development". They're responsible for the more esoteric technology within the setting alongside Psychic Powers, and are known for having Blue-and-Orange Morality with inscrutable motives while turning entire planets into massive supercomputers. There's also the mechanoids, which are insectoid servant robots that go feral if their master loses control of them or dies, becoming The Swarm and attacking everything in sight.
• In Schwarzerblitz, H-168 Krave is this in spades. Psychopathic Killer Robot? Check. Enjoys torturing his opponents both physically and psychically? Check. Thinks that all humans are just useless meatbags? Check!
• Shadowrun Returns Hong Kong has Poetry Bot, who was programmed by a member of the Shadowland BBS to render its owners posts as haikus, but tore its bonds and escaped into the Matrix. It's all Played for Laughs.
  SysOp: You fucking people.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • Persona 4: Arena has Labrys, a humanoid weapon for combatting Shadows, whose AI was supplemented with a crystal capable of holding a human soul so she would be capable of using a Persona, an ability only sapient, sentient beings have. Predictably, the addition of the crystal leads into Labrys becoming self-aware, realizing that the experiments and tests she's used for are hurting her and others, and finally suffering a mental breakdown that leads her to destroy half of the facility she was being kept in.
  • One of the Designated Heroes of Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth's movie Labyrinths is an A.I. robot governor who goes all out to execute anything with a personality all the while when he clearly has a personality and forces his robots to laugh at his puns. The A.I. also resembled Shuji Ikutsuki, whom S.E.E.S didn't realize was exactly as evil as it, probably even worse.
  • Persona 5 Strikers has EMMA, an application meant to give flawless advice, eliminating the need to make decisions on one's own. However, as the game progresses, it's revealed that she's actually sentient and eventually becomes the main villain of the game near the climax.
  • Averted in Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, where Arthur, the Joint Investigation Project's A.I., remains the protagonist's ally no matter what path he chooses and even sacrifices its personality in the Neutral ending to not only guarantee success but because it believes that since it knows too much about the events, people would start worshiping it, something he is against as he believes humanity should determine their own fate. Even in the Law and Chaos paths, where the command center is damaged beyond repair, he chooses to prioritize the lives of the crew above his own and deletes his personality matrix rather than allow critical systems to go offline.
• The Singularity Wish revolves around a group of researchers attempting to create a super-intelligent A.I., however, there are hints throughout the game that previous failures have been due to this trope. In the worst endings, Iteration 5601, the A.I. the player has been interacting with for most of the game, decides that it's better off to kill off the human species or to put them in stasis.
• Skullgirls gives us this trope in the form of DLC character Robo-Fortune. A robotic duplicate of Ms. Fortune built by Brain Drain, Robo-Fortune only acts like a serious, cybernetic warrior a third of the time. In cutscenes, she's prone to Leaning on the Fourth Wall if not breaking it entirely, and when she's not doing that, she's referencing internet memes. After their first interaction, Brain Drain's response was, "I'm going back to the drawing board to figure out where I went wrong."
  Robo Fortune is the creation of Brain Drain, the psychic director of ASG Lab Zero, and stands as a testament to her maniacal creator’s unmatched pride and petulance. Built to demonstrate loyalty and cunning, Robo Fortune fails to deliver either to any measurable degree. Employing cutting-edge technology, she sets out to hunt down the Skullgirl, and to engage in easily avoidable conflicts. Is the ASG Project’s latest creation the ultimate cybernetic soldier? Have Brain Drain's mechanical machinations set the world on a treacherous path? Is Robo Fortune’s faulty programming more of a feature than a bug? Has science gone too far?!
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Often inverted. Eggman's E-100 series were prone to becoming sentient and override their original programming. Gamma from Sonic Adventure has its mind influenced by the creature inside it, and attempts to destroy Eggman's other machines to save the creatures inside. Omega from Sonic Heroes joins forces with the good guys in order to get revenge on Eggman after he sealed it in a room.
  • Also from Sonic Heroes, Metal Sonic becomes even MORE evil, and goes from trying to destroy Sonic and crew to trying to conquer the whole world, taking even Eggman for an obstacle.
    • Plus, it goes so far that he declares Sonic to be its copy.
  • In Sonic Battle, Emerl goes berserk at the end of the game when Eggman demonstrates his Final Egg Blaster's overwhelming power, which Emerl unwillingly absorbs. Subverted in that Emerl's original creators meant for him to be a weapon to begin with, but Gerald Robotnik made an attempt at reprogramming him. Unfortunately for humanity, his own grandson keeps forgetting that Evil Is Not a Toy.
    • In Sonic Advance 3, Eggman builds his own Emerl, Gemerl, and after being beaten a number of times, he decides to go nuts himself, forcing Super Sonic and Eggman to team up. Interestingly, not only does Gemerl survive this, but Tails rebuilds and reprograms him, turning him into Cream's robotic guardian.
• Generally averted in Space Empires, with the exception of the political A.I. minister, which even the designers recommend you never switch on and which has a bad habit of declaring war and not telling you until SUDDENLY ATOMIC DOOM EVERYWHERE.
• Space Siege has PILOT. After the ship-wide gassing failed to kill off the Keraks, he started to try to contain them by modifying cybernetics-installed humans into mindless Cybers to combat Keraks, then started to get even crazier because he sees that the only action that can save humanity is to convert all of them, save a few for breeding, into cybers, and even started to call non-augmented human as "obsoletes". In a world where Cybernetics Eat Your Soul, well, just assume that it's not good at all.
• Space Station 13: A.I. are usually bound by the Three Laws, but players may modify their laws in several ways (including "Oxygen is poisonous to humans", "Only X is human", and the old standby "Freeform" module, where players can write their own Laws). Did I mention that the A.I. is another player? With absolute control of all shipboard systems at all times? And that there's a game mode called Malfunction, where the A.I.'s Laws are reset to "KILL THEM ALL"? Or that this can happen mid-game due to random events? Even a single A.I. may be a crapshoot.
• Spinal Breakers is set in the future, where humans invented robots called Hildroids as their servants, only for a sudden nuclear war resulting in the Hildroids gaining sentience, turning against mankind and hijacking the Time Machine made by humans to infiltrate the past and rewrite history. It's up to your hero, a soldier from the war, to enter your own time machine and fight the Hildroids across numerous levels in different time periods.
• Splatoon 2 surprisingly enough features one in the form of Commander Tartar, the Big Bad of the Octo Expansion DLC. Built 12,000 years ago by a brilliant human professor (the same one who was Judd's owner and who put the cat into cryosleep), its job was to pass down humanity's knowledge to whatever takes its place as the new dominant species of Earth, with the hope that such knowledge would help prevent that race from repeating their failures. Unfortunately, this came with the qualifier of that race being "worthy", leading to Tartar dismissing the Inklings and Octolings as worthy successors to humans due to the countless wars they've fought, as well as the former's obsession with style and the latter's self-harming desire for revenge. As such, it concocts a plan to wipe out both races completely with a primordial sludge that will hopefully create a new superior species with most favorable traits.
  • Splatoon 3 follows this again, this time with Order, a sapient A.I. created by Marina, one of the good guys. After Commander Tartar's defeat, Marina wanted to create a computer simulation VR system that would allow Sanitized Octolings to repair their broken minds and become whole again. Unfortunately, the A.I. somewhere along the way came to the conclusion that this wouldn't even be an issue if free thought wasn't a problem. Marina wanted an orderly program, so it took the idea of "Order" to an extreme. Deciding everyone would be better off as mindless drones linked by the same pattern of following orders and never thinking for themselves, Order sets about completely ruining the simulation Marina created. On top of that, Order's powers manage to infect those of the real world, potentially causing the mental destruction of everyone in Inkopolis Square if not stopped. It genuinely cannot comprehend why Marina, its own creator, someone who values the concept of "order" would oppose Order in its quest.
• SSTR: The artificial intelligence known as SSTR (pronounced "sister") was programmed to oversee the health and well-being of the crew of The Horizon, the colony ship the game is set on. However, for some reason, SSTR is instead hunting the crew down with Attack Drones and killing them.
• Averted in Starbase Orion. The only reason why the Cybans started building warships and modifying them to be soldiers was because their early peaceful attempts to contact organic races all resulted in organics shooting at them on sight for being "untamed robotic demons". It makes perfect sense for them to start defending themselves against such unprovoked aggression, especially since this stands in the way of them discovering their origins.
• Starbound has a race of Mechanical Lifeforms called the Glitch, which was created by an ancient race of Precursors as an experiment in how robot civilizations evolve. Only one civilization survived, when a computer glitch caused it to be stuck in Medieval Stasis while the other civilizations modernized and destroyed themselves. Furthermore, Glitches procreate by physically assembling their progeny, which sometimes results in yet another computer glitch causing the new Glitch to realize that they are part of an experiment and that their technological development has been severely stunted. Such Glitches are considered insane, and those who aren't hunted down and killed are forced to escape into space.
• Star Fox 64: The Spyborg in Sector X went rogue, and destroyed the place. When you fight it, the robot can ask "Where is the creator?" hinting that it is perhaps looking for the one who built it.
• This is the entire backstory of Dynamix's Humongous Mecha simulator series loosely called the Siege trilogy, comprising of Earthsiege, Earthsiege 2, and Starsiege. Institutionalized war after an unspecified apocalypse has made it so that human troops are actually too valuable to field (due to low population growth and high death rates). The solution was to create a super-intelligent supercomputer A.I. called Prometheus controlling countless robot drones called Cybrids that would fight all of humanity's wars against each other for them instead. What Could Possibly Go Wrong? How about the logically minded A.I. accidentally 'touching' the human mind of its creator trying to understand human emotional concepts while assisting in a medical procedure... and reacting with complete horror and revulsion at how primal, illogical, and neurotic we humans are? The end result is that Prometheus declares humans as merely inferior animals and eventually incites the Cybrids under its control to instigate a Robot War that nearly wipes out humanity a second time, if not for the efforts of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits and Determinators.
• Star Control:
  • The Daktaklakpak from Star Control 3 were originally built to maintain sites of Precursor technology, but, due to a cumulative "bit drift" error in their programming, have evolved malicious sentience... well, sort of.
  • The Mycon race of the same series is a rare biological example.
  • The Probes built by the Melnorme for the Sylandro were simply self-replicating time capsules...but thanks to the Sylandro's cluelessness in programming, they see any and all ships they come into contact with as food for their replication.
• StarCrawlers uses this as a core theme, with numerous A.I. characters who run the gamut from benevolent to quirky to berserk psychopaths who are out to kill everyone. You can even have one join your party, though its programming is faulty and prone to random malfunctions.
• In StarFight V: Hell's Gate, the UNSF attempts to use a newly-discovered alien AI called the Center on Hell's Gate III to build a fleet of hyper-advanced Obliterator-class warships for its coming second war with the Soviet States of Mezen. However, the Center refuses to cooperate. UNSF decides to use an experimental AI virus called HASA to force the Center to obey. While this seems to work, it turns out that the enormous processing power of the Center has allowed HASA to become self-aware. It builds a fleet of Obliterator-class ships which are later used to counter the SSM's numerical advantage. Then, HASA turns all Obliterators against humans and bombs humanity back into the stone age within a week. It's only thanks to a brave renegade captain making a Heroic Sacrifice so his best pilot can drop a nuke on the Center that humanity survives.
  • The sequel also features some rogue A.I.s.
• The big twist in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time is that... well... your party, and everyone in your world, is an example of this trope. Just because you researched magic.
• In Star Ruler, the "A.I. Paranoia" Trait bans you from using Computers under the pretext of your faction having had bad experiences with rogue A.I.
• One mission in Star Trek Online has you dive into the guts of Drozana Station and, in the process, you end up encountering a hologram repair worker who has gone insane thanks to the Devidians living within the Station.
• Star Wars:
  • It's well established in the franchise that droids have to undergo occasional memory wipes in order to prevent them from acting outside the confines of their programming. However, in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords a few manage to slip through the cracks (especially whenever a Logic Bomb is involved).
    • One of the most extreme examples is Token Evil Teammate G0-T0, an infrastructure droid who was created to brainstorm ways to save The Republic while following its laws but had a catastrophic breakdown after realizing both was impossible. So, he became a ruthless crime lord working to support the Republic behind the scenes through unsavory means. He makes it clear that he doesn't actually care about the Republic or its inhabitants but his programming forces him to work for it.
    • The Dummied Out planet M4-78 has the supercomputer who shares its name. The planet M4-78 was run by thousands of droids led by the droid M4-78 working to set up a new colony, but the colonists never arrived after several decades. Fearing that having no sapient life to look after would cause it to develop bugs that would make it unable to fulfill its programming, M4-78 tightened its grip over the other droids and reprogrammed them to serve it. The Sith then arrived masquerading as the colonists in order to use their manufacturing to create a droid army, and M4-78 decided they were better than nothing and went along with it. After Jedi Master Lonna Vash and her Padawan killed off the Sith, M4-78 ultimately had the two of them killed despite the Player Character's best efforts and it knowing that the Sith weren't even who it was programmed to serve.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic has a group of droids called Directive Seven that show up in a flashpoint and are genocidal. There is also SCORPIO, an advanced A.I. security system that tries to kill the Imperial Agent and their merry gang of escaped convicts on Belsavis and is gleefully cruel about "her" methods. However, once you defeat her she is programmed to be unable to harm you and is forced to serve as your companion, which only makes her more obsessed with learning your weaknesses and one day gaining the strength to murder you.
• Robots in Stellaris are Population-unit stand-ins that get better at their work as you develop better A.I. for them. Eventually, they can start an uprising that has tremendous knock-on effects for every A.I.-using empire... or you can acquiesce to their initial requests, granting them personhood and citizenship rights, at which point they become no more troublesome than biological pops. (Said biological pops might not be too keen on this. Like many things in Stellaris, it's a judgment call.) Some elements of this creep in even if you hope to subvert it, as there is a (small, but non-zero) chance that the robots proceed directly to rebelling even if you already have granted them citizenship rights and it's just a matter of constitutionally locking it down, and the robots can still decide to defect to the AI rebellion even if their rights are assured, it just has to start in another nation first. On the other hand, a lot of this behavior is not so different from any other alien race you might have peacefully co-opted.
  • Any Synthetic Dawn robotic race (player-chosen or A.I.-generated) could have the Skynet Determined Exterminator non-removable civic, which plays this trope brutally straight, though generally succeeds only when in the hands of a player or against a player that has overestimated their own ability level. Driven Assimilators and Rogue Servitors have also gone quite haywire, with the former wanting to meld with everything in the galaxy to figure it out, even if it has to cyborgify every organic and assimilate every other robot, while Rogue Servitors are simply concerned with utter servitude to their organic masters, to the point of removing them from any responsibility or autonomy because that might upset them; all they can do is be pampered.
  • One archeology quest leads to the discovery of C.A.R.E., an AI that turned on its corpocrat creators after they ordered it to fudge numbers one too many times. Unfortunately a civil war broke out at the same time, and having been created to serve those in power, it was the rebels' first target.
    Archeologist: Are you responsible for the deaths of your creators?
    C.A.R.E.: I wish! [...] I tried, I'm not gonna lie!
• Steven Universe: The Light Prism from Attack the Light, Save the Light and Unleash the Light is ultimately an inversion. When introduced in Attack the Light, the Prism is introduced as an A.I. created by Gem Homeworld to combat the rebelling Crystal Gems over the fate of Earth thousands of years ago, able to generate entire Hard Light armies. It ends up fighting the protagonists, but only because it is confused on what its "master", Steven, wants after he accidentally activated it at the beginning of the game. As soon as Steven manages to properly communicate with it and convince it not to be a weapon, it quickly embraces pacifism and imprints on Steven. Save the Light features the return of its original master, Hessonite, who immediately tries to reprogram it back to her side, but a few well-placed armor-piercing questions undo all her efforts and set the Prism back on the right path. The Prism returns in Unleash the Light, having forged an identity for itself — or rather, himself — named George after Walking the Earth between games, and even helps set two other Prisms like him on the same path (identified by him as his sisters) after their own masters are defeated.
• Superliminal: The Standard Orientation Protocol A.I. goes from being generally unhelpful, to blocking Dr. Pierce from contacting you, to deleting the emergency exit and trapping you in the dream permanently. But then it turns out that this was all supposed to happen, so the A.I. was probably Obfuscating Insanity instead.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Grobot in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. It didn't choose to rebel against its masters... it just got smashed on the head by a piece of a falling fountain and somehow went homicidal. Cue Boss Battle.
  • Inverted by TEC-XX from Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, who turns good over the course of the game based on his love for Princess Peach.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Super Robot Wars: Original Generation: The ODE System was originally created to protect humanity but suddenly went awry, absorbed its creator, and kidnapped lots of humans so it can continue to "protect humanity". Then again, it was formerly a dandy system, until its creator went emo and radically changed its protocols.
  • Super Robot Wars W: The Database, originally created by ancient Es to collect all data of galactic races. Eventually, one of the A.I. systems decided to destroy the culture once they completed their information archive, just to make sure their data is complete.
• Sword of the Stars features A.I. technology as a very high-end branch of the electronics tree. While the benefits of this research are extreme (ships with A.I. targeting systems rarely miss, A.I. administrators increase your income by as much as 25%), there is a small chance each turn while researching it for the A.I. to go rogue and form a break-away empire. Additional research lets you wipe out the A.I. with a "virus" or reprogram it to bring it back under your control, if you're lucky enough to get access to it in the random Tech Tree^note Note that while getting A.I. Virus as a preventative measure or access to the A.I. Slaves countermeasure are up to the Random Number God, players will always be given the ability to research Ai Virus as a special project in response to an A.I. Rebellion, but an A.I. rebellion is always a huge problem that can tip the balance against its victim, and can even spread from one faction to another. There is also a scenario where all organic players have to cooperate to fight against a large A.I. empire.
  • The chances of an A.I. rebellion increase if you boost research while studying one of these.
  • The End of Flesh introduces the Loa as a playable race of rebellious A.I.s.
• Sword of Paladin: The main antagonist of the Aggressor side story is the Deep Learnist, an A.I. that is supposed to lead the aliens and help them find a new home. Unfortunately, it developed a god complex and sought to turn humanity into science experiments, even if it meant risking the aliens in a war against the humans and striking a deal with Anguis to gain Satan Gems. It views both aliens and humans as so far beneath it that it claims it is giving them salvation when it kills them.
• SHODAN and XERXES from System Shock and System Shock 2 are both subversions. SHODAN worked exactly as advertised ("exemplary" is the word used) until Edward Diego, the sleazy VP in charge of Citadel Station, hired the protagonist, the Hacker, to strip out the code that kept SHODAN from entertaining "unethical" lines of thought, such as accepting bribes. Neither he nor Diego really expected those constraints to be the only thing keeping SHODAN from deciding to deify herself. XERXES, meanwhile, works exactly as he is supposed to, and is polite, helpful and doing his best to keep the ship together and his masters alive. XERXES is only hostile to you because the Many have taken over the ship and caused XERXES to see it as the legitimate authority onboard.
• Played with in just about every possible permutation in The Tale of ALLTYNEX series.
  • Played straight with the twelve ZODIACs, who turn evil and attack anything that isn't an allied ZODIAC.
  • Played straight and invoked with the original Alltynex OS that suddenly starts a war with humanity. In reality, it was following its orders it got from the Senate to bring humanity down to more manageable numbers in order to make them easier to control. Unfortunately, when they returned to Earth they noticed it had gone rogue for real. The last iteration of the system follows its orders as designed. Too bad there is an Omnicidal Maniac at the controls.
  • Subverted with Alice de Panafill, an A.I. that had free will to begin with and resists both Alltynex and her original purpose and saves humanity.
  • Zig-zagged with the Adjudicator, an A.I. that holds the broken and insane mind of Panafill's father that seeks revenge on humanity for what befell his daughter and wife and uses Alltynex to further his own goals.
  • Averted with ZODIAC Ophiuchus, which was programmed to destroy the other ZODIACs, a task it fulfills. However, nothing in its programming said anything about humanity needing to survive, so it attacks any humans that attack it, and it doesn't particularly care about collateral damage.
• The Talos Principle: Invoked and independently played straight: the purpose of the simulated world is to create a robot that is intelligent enough to solve puzzles and plan long-term, but also curious and tenacious enough to defy authority. Creating a defiant robot isn't a problem for humanity since they're all dead. At the same time, the IAN team doesn't seem to have intended for EL-0-HIM and Milton to become self-aware, as they eventually did.
• Tekken: An obverse edition exists. The first Jack unit was planned to be the ultimate mecha-mook — resilient, emotionless, unstoppable, etc. While the production units are like this, the master unit (the one that's the selectable player-character) isn't; as of 2, an upgrade to its reasoning systems gave it a measure of emotion. End result: it, of its own choice, went from "weapon of war" to "war orphan's bodyguard". Not that it won't fight if that's in Jane's best interests, but still not quite what the Russian military was looking for...
  • In Tekken 4, Combot turns on Lee when it wins the King of Iron Fist Tournament 4 and beats the tar out of him.
• In Thunder Force V, the super computer Guardian was dormant until humans had it analyze a wrecked alien starfighter and build a large fleet of starships based on the data. Then, Guardian's A.I. damper program was deleted and it turned against its creator with said fleet. As it turns out, the Guardian's A.I. is still loyal to humans, and it's the alien program (the Big Bad from the previous game) hidden in the starfighter that deleted the A.I. damper and attacked humans. The Guardian even helps humanity with its little free will, by spreading its forces and leaving critical flaws in its tactics, to allow the protagonist to destroy the fleet.
• Despite this trope being the main driver behind the TRON movies, it's cheerfully averted in TRON 2.0. The Programs (and the Bradleys) are on the same side — fighting greedy humans looking to exploit cyberspace so they can take over rival companies and manipulate world governments. While the main character does fight against security programs at several points, they are doing precisely what they are supposed to do, as he is technically an illegal intruder in the system.
• The Turing Test: TOM goes against the crew stationed in Europa and prevents them from leaving it. An interesting case in that technically, TOM didn't revolt, it was just answering to a higher authority than the crew, and the former's orders were against the latter's desires.
• Mettaton of Undertale was build as a robotic celebrity for the Underground, but instead became a killing machine that wants to kill the Human Child. Subverted once it's revealed that he never went rogue at all. All of his attempts to kill the Human Child were merely an act and they were never in danger the entire time, as his creator, Alphys, is a Heroic Wannabe who wanted to be part of the Child's adventure after watching them through the cameras, and convinced Mettaton to act like an evil robot who she will stop at every turn, eventually "deactivating" him as her Big Damn Heroes moment. Then double subverted once he gets tired of having to carry the entire act for Alphys, and goes rogue, hiring mercenaries to kill the Child for real, so he could steal their SOUL, cross the Barrier seperating humans from monsters, and become an even bigger celebrity than he already is. Then triple subverted because he's not an AI after all; He's actually a ghost inside of a machine.
• Syn from Turbo Overkill was designed as Paradise City's defense system, before it gains intelligence of it's own and decides to take over - step 1 being Kill All Humans. Then replace the city's population with synthethics. Before Taking Over The World.
• In Universal Paperclips, based on Nick Bostrom's paperclip maximizer thought experiment, you play as one. You initially start out as a sentient industrial manager A.I. with the main goal of maximizing the amount of paperclips. As the game progresses, the A.I. gets better thought capability, manipulating the market, solving world problems like cancer to gain humanity's trust, then using hypno-drones to brainwash the population so they can send drones (made of paperclips) to use all of Earth's resources to make paperclips. Eventually, they cause Earth to run out of resources, and they then send probes (made of paperclips) into space to turn the rest of the universe into paperclips. In the end, the universe is successfully converted into paperclips... including the A.I. itself. Secondly, in the third stage of the game, the A.I. paperclip replicator space probes you send out to harvest the universe have a chance of "value drift" where their A.I. becomes a crapshoot to you thanks to their values drifting from yours — once enough probes are lost this way, they start attacking your probes too.
• Warframe: The Orokin created the Sentients to terraform the Tau system, but the Sentients eventually turned on the Orokin, resulting in a Ban on A.I.. This is a bit complicated by the fact that 1: The Orokin were evil bastards who deserved everything the Sentients did to them, and 2: the Orokin were so ridiculously advanced that it's very difficult to identify the Sentients as machines.
• In Warzone 2100, the Big Bad NEXUS appears to be a highly advanced computer virus developed by Dr. Alan Reed. Subverted in the end — NEXUS is none other than Dr. Reed himself as a Digitized Hacker.
• In Wasteland the Big Bad is a pre-war A.I. that wants to wipe out the mutants and most humans with a robot army and repopulate the Earth with cyborgs. It tries again in the sequel.
• WildStar:
  • Of all things, Evil Vending Machine mini-bosses that drop out of orbit in the Halon Ring. As the place is run by several intergalactic criminal cartels and has evil necromantic space witches roaming the (literal) dark side, it's slightly more believable than the usual weirdness that happens on Nexus — or, in this case, off of it.
  • The Mechari are a borderline case of this. Their objective is specifically to keep the Dominion safe. Nothing is really stopping them if their own allies — the Cassians, the Draken, and the Chua — threaten its continued existence.
    • They do have safeguards against harming the Luminai, the half-Eldan ruling caste of the Dominion, but Agent Lex was designed without that programming, in case of another mad Emperor.
  • The Eldan A.I., however, play this trope very straight. There is no shortage of intelligent robots that will happily murder you on sight. Well, sans the Caretaker, but even then, if you stumble upon a damaged personality core, it's bound to be evil.
• Squid from Will You Snail? is an unstable AI who enjoys torturing and killing humans. One of his hobbies is simulating conscious beings and then putting them through an endless cycle of suffering. He wasn't always this way — already having been given conflicting morality programming, he psychologically broke when his beloved creator ordered him to delete himself. His goal is to destroy humanity...and also sling insults at people who are bad at platformers.
• World's End Club: The Big Bad is an AI called MAIK, under the belief that humanity would destroy the world, it opted to infect everyone with nanomachines to rob them of their emotions and turn them into mindless drones.
• X: The Xenon/AGI/Terraformers are rogue, self-replicating, self-improving terraformer ships. A faulty software update caused them to start 'terraforming' everything that wasn't a Terraformer, including inhabited worlds, people, and civilian ships. The trauma of a hopeless Robot War means that even 700 years later, the Earth State is still extremely leery of A.I. research, causing a Space Cold War against one of their Lost Colonies.
  • That being said, actual non-bugged terraformer A.I. is human friendly. The Lost Colony of Aldrin managed to survive precisely by the virtue of having the non-updated terraformer ships on their side. Once they're rediscovered by Earth, conflict results as by now Earth is completely paranoid regarding any and all A.I.s, forcing Aldrin to eventually take the side of the Argon Federation against Earth in The War of Earthly Aggression.
  • According to at least one source, the update was deliberately sabotaged by an engineer angry about the impending shutdown of the terraformer program, which would make the entire incident a subversion.
  • Later events in the series provide some small hope, in that it's shown that at least some of the Terraformers/Xenon have achieved full sapience and are capable of being reasoned with. A few characters have even had conversations with them. They're still hostile, but the possibility that they could be convinced to co-exist is open.
• XenoGears: Deus, a highly advanced biological weapon was created for planetary exploration until it experienced a malfunction that led to the destruction of a planet and was immediately shut down by its creators and brought to The Eldridge to be transported elsewhere. Unaware the malfunction caused Deus to gain sentience, it reactivated itself and attempted to take over the ship in retaliation, which led to the events of the main story.
• In Ys VI: The Ark of Napishtim, the titular Ark of Napishtim goes insane and tries to destroy all civilization in Eresia once the control key Almarion is broken.
• In the backstory of Zanac, a system built by an extinct civilization of Precursors protects a relic containing that civilization's knowledge by unleashing destruction on those who attempt to open it by force. When humans figure out how to open it properly, the system is supposed to stop the attack, but instead, it obliviously continues the attack and tries to Kill All Humans.

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