Engineered Heroics in Video Games.
- In Baldur's Gate III, this is the plan of the Big Bad. The Big Bad Triumvirate of General Ketheric Thorm, Lord Gortash, and Orin the Red planned to Take Over the World by having Gortash take over the titular city, then protect it in a False Flag Operation from Thorm's undead army and Orin's legion of Serial Killers. Once the plan starts to go Off the Rails thanks to your party tearing through Ketheric and his forces, as well as Gortash realizing his associates planned to backstab him all along, Gortash tries to cut a deal with your party, the real heroes of the story.
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night: The Alchemist's Guild, fearing its power would dwindle as the Industrial Revolution replaced magic with science, plotted to summon an army of demons to the human world and then banish them, in order to show the world there were dangers that only they could deal with. It backfired spectacularly, as they summoned demons which they could not control and England turned into Hell on Earth.
- Crackdown: In the game’s ending, it’s revealed that the Agency deliberately aided the three gangs you fought to create a state of chaos so they could step in and instill order into the populace, and now they will rule as a Police State.
- Darksiders: Abaddon's plot to trigger an early Apocalypse hinged on tricking the demons of Hell into starting the conflict after breaking six of the seven seals, intending to rush to Earth afterwards to convince everyone that the angels of Heaven merely responded to an unprovoked attack. When Azrael questioned this plan by pointing out that the Council would see through his ploy and judge the angels accordingly, Abaddon retorted that they would simply restore the seals before that happened, and that ultimately it would be the word of Heaven against that of the Prince of Lies. Unfortunately for Abaddon and all of humanity, the demons of Hell learned of the plot and used it to their advantage by preparing their forces ahead of time, viciously overwhelming the Hellguard shortly after the start of the Apocalypse.
- In Dead Rising 3, Kenny Dermot is jealous of player character Nick Ramos for being a hero. In an attempt to prove that he's superior, he kidnaps a woman and unleashes a zombie on her, intending to save her from it. When Nick shows up and kills the zombie before Kenny can (in fact, Kenny was too slow and the zombie would have killed the woman if Nick hadn't intervened), Kenny yells at him for "ruining his big moment" and attacks him.
- In Devil May Cry 4, Sanctus and the Order of the Sword plot to use the Savior, a gigantic, animated statue of Sparda, to repel a demonic invasion that they themselves enable. Once people see them as the heroes, it wouldn't take them long to conquer the rest of the world. Nero and Dante end up working together to put a stop to that.
- Disgaea 3 has Super Hero Aurum, who, after defeating an apparently benevolent demon overlord, raised his son to be the biggest villain he could achieve, hoping to return to glory by defeating him in the climactic battle. None of the Noble Demon or genuine hero protagonists think this guy is anything better than scum when they learn this; his super mode doesn't do him any favors either, as his demonic implants show how little he thinks of humanity.
- Disgaea7: Mugai would normally be a straightforward all-conquering villain, but the problem is that his grand master plan required the mindless adoration of everyone in Netherworld Hinamoto for a specific ritual. Therefore, he set Demodore Opener up as an ultimate villain who murdered Hinamoto's ruler (himself) and reigned as a tyrant, while secretly mind-controlling Demodore as a spirit in Demodore's gauntlet, with the intent of making a 'heroic' comeback right before Demodore's plans (and Mugai's research) were complete.
- In Fallout 4, the quest "Confidence Man" involves the Sole Survivor teaming up with the Bobrov brothers to give a confidence boost to Diamond City Radio's DJ, Travis. The brothers hire two raiders to give him a hard time until he defends himself with the aid of the player. Vadim Bobrov is later kidnapped by raiders and the player must free him from their hideout...with the aid of the newly empowered Travis. And just like that, Diamond City Radio no longer sucks.
- At the end of Luca's Blitzball tournament in Final Fantasy X, Fiends suddenly started pouring into the stadium, attacking spectators until recently-crowned Maester Seymour (one of the main villains) shows off his power and annihilates the Fiends. Later in the game, a remorseful Guado (one of Seymour's men) admits that the Fiend invasion was done on the orders of Seymour himself.
- Hidden City: "Guest from the Past" introduces Mr. Goodman, who is first seen defending Clarissa Storke's house from a group of marauders attempting to rob it. However, it is later revealed that the marauders have been hired by Goodman to stage the fight so that he could win Rayden's trust and use him to bypass his grandmother's protective charms.
- In Hometown Story, Clarissa, the town self-appointed sole law enforcement worker, decides to do this to impress the town. She buys an expensive ring from the shopkeeper Player Character and asks him/her to claim it was stolen so she can "find" it. There happens to be an actual thief in the town at the time, who steals a ring from a villager to pass as the "missing" one. Clarissa is able to catch the thief, thus subverting the trope and providing her with a genuine act of heroics.
- inFAMOUS:
- inFAMOUS 2:
- In Nix's plan to help Cole gain public trust has her attack people at a rally so that Cole can conveniently show up and stop her. This is lampshaded on the opposing good karma mission, where Cole and Kuo compare it to something out of a cartoon.
- Cole eventually discovers that Bertrand, who is secretly a conduit, has been creating the swamp creatures attacking New Marais. Allowing him to seize power with his militia under the pretense of protecting the city.
- In Famous Second Son: With the DUP in danger of being shut down, Brooke Augustine engineered Fetch, Eugene, and Hank's escape. Creating a crisis to prove its necessity and gain public support. Her plan will either fail or succeed depending on Delsin's karmic path.
- inFAMOUS 2:
- In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past it is implied that the natural disasters plaguing Hyrule were caused by Agahnim himself, who then proceeded to use his powers to "save" the kingdom. As a result, he was hailed as a hero and the king made him chief advisor and heir to the Seven Sages.
- LunarLux: General Saros is considered a hero who is leading the fight against the Murks. It turns out he's the one turning people into Murks as part of his experiment to create the perfect antimatter transformation, and he has the Lunex Force hunt Murks both to reuse their anticores for additional research and to make himself look good.
- If you get 100% Completion in McPixel, you can get a scene in which McPixel ships a bomb to one of the stages in the game, along with a business card offering his services to defuse the bomb.
- Minecraft has this as a game mechanic:
- If you save a village from a Pillager raid, you'll be lauded as a hero for a while and given freebies and discounts. The only way to trigger a raid is to kill a Pillager captain, get the "Bad Omen" status, and then go into a village — Pillagers will attack villagers on their own but won't raid their villages unless you visit the village with Bad Omen, and you can either let it wear off or remove it by drinking milk, so the only reason to "save" a village from a raid is to start one deliberately and then "save" them for some freebies, a Totem of Undying or two, and the achievement. What a hero.
- If you cure a zombified villager, you'll get permanent discounts for life from that villager. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from trapping that villager, luring a zombie to him to turn him, and then "saving" him to get these discounts.
- In Parasocial, Nina's ex-boyfriend Rikiya does this. He pays a stalker to break into her apartment and attack her, with the intention of barging in and saving her, so she is grateful enough and insecure about her own safety to the point of dating him again. He succeeds in the bad ending (although your best friend Asuka will discover the truth and inform you of it later on), but gets arrested in the good ending, along with the three other people involved in the ploy.
- The "Koshien Hero" scenario in Power Pro-kun Pocket 7 involves a group of masked superheroes hijacking a school's baseball club while fighting monsters and criminals around the city. The protagonist eventually discovers that the heroes are Not Quite Human manifestations of his own desire to win, and that they've been engineering all the incidents in the story to consolidate their power because they're unable to live without fighting a vaguely defined idea of evil.
- Captain Qwark, enemy, friend, and all-around pest to Ratchet & Clank, is driven by the need to be loved and seen as a hero, with all the perks it includes. In the first game, he helps the Big Bad so he can be the hero of the planet Drek is making, and in later games, he's settled for taking credit for Ratchet and Clank's activities.
- This is central to the plot of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando. Qwark, disgraced due to his actions in the first game, puts in motion a plan to provide cute pets to the galaxy that are really vicious monsters, with him saving the day after the pets go on the rampage (Qwark is in disguise as the head of the company that makes them). Since Qwark is an idiot, the device that's supposed to cure the monsters makes them grow really big instead, and the titular characters have to fight this supersized monster as the final boss of the game.
- The Fan Remake of Quest for Glory II had hints that a previous hero of Shapeir had this kind of personality. When you go to the Adventurer's Guild it has various stuffed heads of Random Encounter enemies from that game. When you look at one it mentions the name of the guy who killed it. Ask about him, and you'll be informed that he killed a bunch of monsters and was generally a Glory Hound, but he became angry when he was "rejected" and the Guild stopped accepting all the heads he kept trying to donate. Unhappy at missing out on the adulation, he became a bandit instead. Put together some cryptic clues and he'll become an Optional Boss.
- The final plot twist of Seven Photos: The Photographic Detective reveals that the entire game consisted of Piper solving a crime she paid the culprit to perform.
- In The Sims Medieval, the Monarch has a quest where they can try to court the Prince or Princess of Effenmont. Part of the courtship process involves recruiting one of the other hero characters to pose as a robber so that the Monarch can "rescue" the Prince or Princess from them.
- Downplayed in Star Wars: The Old Republic, where the Sith Inquisitor can introduce themselves to their future apprentice Ashara Zavros by rescuing her from a gang of thugs they themselves hired to harass her. She figures out that her savior is actually a Sith Lord soon enough, but the Inquisitor is firmly entrenched inside her mind by that time.
