First Contact / Video Games

• Civilization and its derivatives:
  • The interludes popping up throughout Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri reveal that Planet is a Genius Loci. One of the endings involves blasting the combined human knowledge into the Planetary mind in order to force Planet to "mature". It works. The Transcendence victory has the humans then joining Planet's Hive Mind. The Expansion Pack involves a more traditional First Contact with descendants of the aliens who created Planet. In fact, the contact is with two of the factions of the same species, who are engaged in a bitter ideological war over Planet (AKA Manifold Six). Human factions can't communicate with Progenitor factions until either one researches a certain technology (Social Psych for Progenitors, Progenitor Psych for humans).
  • One of the possible victory conditions in Civilization: Beyond Earth is managing to achieve this with an alien race.
  • An interesting version in Civilization: Call to Power. One of the endings involves discovering a wormhole in Earth's orbit and sending an unmanned ship through to collect some samples. The ship comes back with samples of alien DNA. The final task is to create a cloning lab to make new aliens.
• In the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series, humanity's first official contact with sapient alien species (the Scrin) occurred during the middle of the Third Tiberium War between the Brotherhood of Nod and the Global Defense Initiative. Since the first action of the Scrin is to attack every human encountered, neither of the two human superpowers bothered to communicate and just add them to their target list. While still fighting each other. It should be noted, though, that humans do fire the first shot, when Acting Director Boyle orders the ion cannon to target the incoming alien craft, but the Scrin weren't planning on chatting anyway.
• In Evolve, humanity already encountered various non-sentient alien life. Their first encounter with extraterrestrial beings equal to or greater than humans in intelligence was a single, massive creature that slaughtered the population of an entire world and demolished their technology with its bare claws. Since its massacre was efficient enough to prevent any word from getting out, this situation replayed an unknown number of times before anyone realized first contact had been established.
• A few Final Fantasy titles deal with first contact, most of them bad experiences:
  • Final Fantasy IV: Goes good (advanced technology) and bad (mad scientists, rampaging mechs.)
  • Final Fantasy VII: Goes bad (Jenova kills off the precursor race and her body helps foster an Evil Army, plus she won't die)
  • Final Fantasy VIII: Goes very bad (The moon contains monsters and ended at least one civilization)
  • Final Fantasy IX: Goes extremely bad (Culminates in the destruction of one planet, and apocalyptic events for the other)
• In Halo, humanity didn't have nice first contact with the Covenant. "Hello, our Prophets say that you are abominations to all that is holy. Our Gods demand your genocide." It goes downhill from there until Halo 2, set some twenty-seven years later.
• Mass Effect
  • In Mass Effect, background information reveals that years before the start of the story, humanity's first contact with an alien civilization nearly lead to full-scale war with the turians, an event referred to as the First Contact War. The casualties on both sides of the war have caused a great deal of animosity between both species. It was basically a perfect storm of Values Dissonance, Poor Communication Kills, and plain terrible judgement: a turian peacekeeping patrol found a human fleet of merchant ships opening a mass relay—something that's illegal by Citadel law, though at the time, humanity didn't even know the Citadel existed or had laws to follow. Because the act of randomly opening mass relays led to a costly Bug War in the past, rather than peaceful diplomacy, the turian patrol opened fire on the merchant ships, destroying all but one that got away. Several relatively minor skirmishes led to the turians capturing the human colony of Shanxi and then themselves being caught by a human response fleet. It was at this point that the other Council members stepped in and pretty much diplomatically smacked the turians upside the head for shooting before explaining themselves, apologized, and offered to let the humans join the Citadel the right way. Humanity's first contact being a war (albeit a small one by interstellar standards) has led to some mistrust between them and the rest of Citadel; the violent first impression the turians made has led to multiple hardline human groups considering all aliens to be existential threats to humanity, and Citadel races who don't know the full context of the war tend to think of humans as aggressive interlopers who pick fights with everyone.
  • Played with in Mass Effect 2 with the geth. In the previous game, all the geth Shepard and company thought were worshipers of the Reapers, but as we come to learn from Legion, they make up a minority of all geth, with the mainstream geth just wanting to be left the hell alone. Legion was created to act independently of the geth consensus in order to make contact with Shepard, and if Shepard lets Legion join his/her crew, it becomes the first geth to make peaceful contact with a human, as well as the first since their war with the quarians to make peaceful contact with any organic. If Legion survives into Mass Effect 3, this becomes an important turning point for the geth, as Legion's and Shepard's first meeting allowed them to start considering peaceful coexistance with organics.
  • Mass Effect: Andromeda:
    • The Andromeda Initiative's first meeting with the angara plays with the trope. At first, it seems like first contact between the bold explorers and the twitchy locals... only for the aliens to speak comprehensibly in English, because they've already met some humans. The idea is explored with the angara having wildly different opinions. Some are nervous (since the last alien species they met tricked them, and have spent the last eighty years trying to kill them), some overjoyed, some suspicious, some violently disgusted, and in one case, thinking humans made themselves look more "familiar" so as not to freak the angara out.
    • Also approached with the kett. On first meeting, Ryder tries to look friendly and non-threatening, as the kett shout and beat another member of Ryder's scouting party for no identifiable reason, then open fire on Ryder and Liam. Later on, when Ryder has a chance to talk with one of the Andromeda Initiative's leaders, they'll ask what the plan for First Contact was. The person they ask retorts that Initiative expected someone who'd want to talk back, not just kill them on sight.
• The latest update to Pandora: First Contact introduces the Messari, advanced warlike aliens, who may or may not have originated on this world but abandoned it for some reason. If one of the human factions activates some of their technology, they will receive an FTL signal and come back in force, opening portals throughout Pandora to wipe out the interlopers. As a Higher-Tech Species, their units are extremely tough and frequently require We Have Reserves tactics to beat. The only way to stop them is to destroy their portals.
• This occurs with extraterrestrial life of the other dimensional kind in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon. Employees of the Aether Foundation make contact with a race of blue-skinned humanoids from an alternate dimension called Ultra Megalopolis after experimenting with the dimension-hopping powers of Cosmog. The details of the actual first meeting are never seen as they happened before the main story, but we can assume it went well as the Aether Foundation is seen throughout the game working closely with agents of Ultra Megalopolis, called the Ultra Recon Squad, to bring down an Eldritch Abomination that is draining their world's light.
• Inverted in most Star Ocean games, in which we focus on an alien species who learns that they are not alone in the Universe.
  • The prequel, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, features Earth in the beginning of its spacegoing existence. Not only does it feature Earth's First Contact (with Eldar via subspace radio), but the main character initiates and/or encounters the aftermath of so many First Contact situations that go/went horribly, horribly wrong that he persuades Earth to set up a prime directive.
• Starcraft: The Federation has experimented on Zerg for a while and already knew about the Protoss but the "official" first contact with both races involves a planet getting overrun with the Zerg and then getting blown up by the Protoss.
• In Stellaris, encountering another star empire's ships, stations or planets results in a special project to decipher their language enough to engage in diplomatic relations, and the first time you speak to another ruler you can choose from one of several responses based on your empire's ethos. Empires may have specific first contact policies that balance between making it easier for contact to be established or keeping one's communication protocols more strongly encrypted to protect from prying eyes. Militaristic and Xenophobic nations can also set their first contact policy to "aggressive" and treat any unknown encounters as hostile, which can lead to a permanent "first contact war" malus with said species.
• The Warcraft franchise started with the people of Azeroth's First Contact with the Orcs of Draenor which doubled as an Alien Invasion. The Orcs were so vicious that the Humans thought they were demons. Which wasn't too far from the truth. Of course, later games revealed that 10,000 years before that, the Burning Legion made contact with the Night Elf royalty and tricked them into opening a portal to Azeroth and invade.
• In XCOM series, first contact with the aliens takes the form of aggressive abduction of humans, quickly followed by terror attacks on civilian population centers. In response, a council of nations activates a secret multinational paramilitary organization, the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, to fight back. It's only after the fighting is ongoing on that the aliens try diplomacy, in the form of bribing or intimidating individual nations to sign non-aggression pacts with the invaders in exchange for dropping out of XCOM - which, the bad ending shows, the aliens do not plan on honoring.
  Newscaster: All attempts to contact the invaders thus far have failed. Their only purpose seems to be destruction and chaos.
• In the X-Universe, humanity knew there were (or at the very least, had been) aliens out there somewhere since 2041, when one of the jumpgates they built locked onto a gate of alien origin. But they wouldn't actually meet aliens until 2300, when the Argon Federation encountered the Paranids. The Argon and Paranids ended up allies and trading partners for a while, but then the Paranids elected not to help the Argon fight the Xenon and things went south.
• First Contact in Xenoblade Chronicles X involved Earth being blown up in the crossfire between two alien races. Fortunately humanity had been working on an Arc Ship program, even if most of them didn't make it. In actuality, First Contact was twenty years before that, when Elma showed up and warned world leaders this was coming.

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