Times where a villain's attempt to Screw Destiny and solve their problems through mass-murder completely backfires on them in Video Games.
- The third variant occurs in the Age of Empires III: The Warchiefs. Chayton Black has some moral reservations about killing women and children just to help the gold rush along, so he defects to the Sioux he was ordered to kill. This ends badly for Billy Holme.
- In Baldur's Gate II - Throne of Bhaal, almost all the Bhaalspawn is trapped in the city of Saradush, which is sieged by a powerful being attempting to kill them all. It almost achieves his purpose: there is one survivor, you.
- In Bastion, the Caelondian government had the Calamity created in order to completely eradicate the Ura to prevent them from ever having to go to war again. When he finds out, the Ura scientist that created the Calamity sabotages it so that it destroys the world instead.
- A fairly straightforward case in Bayonetta: The Big Bad Father Balder, the last Lumen Sage, began the Witch Hunts against the Umbra Witches (in which the titular heroine is a member of) more or less For the Evulz. Naturally, Bayonetta stops this plot.
- Cult of the Lamb: The bishops of the Old Faith eradicated the sheep in order to prevent a prophecy where one of them would free He Who Waits. Of course, as the last lamb is sacrificed He Who Waits contacts them and gives them the power to fight their way free and form a cult dedicated to destroying the Old Faith and freeing him.
- Doom Eternal: The Maykr have facilitated the sacrifice of numerous worlds to The Legions of Hell for their own benefit. The Doomslayer, secretly empowered by one of their own, proceeds to throw a wrench in their plans to create Hell on Earth and ultimately causes the extinction of the Maykr themselves.
- In Dragon Age: Origins, during the Human Noble origin, Arl Howe attempts to wipe out the entire Cousland line when the main army leaves Castle Highever to fight the darkspawn. However, thanks to the Grey Warden Duncan, the player survives, becomes a Warden, gains armies of support and powerful allies, and eventually returns to Howe's manor to express your disapproval of his ambitions by rearranging his face.
- In other origins, the latter still happens but for a different reason. It's briefly mentioned that the only member of the Cousland family to survive was the Human Nobles older brother, who has no involvement in getting back at Howe.
- Dragon Quest:
- In Dragon Quest II, Hargon kills everyone in Moonbrook, but turns the princess into a dog rather than kill her.
- In Dragon Quest IV, the Hero's village is destroyed by the Big Bad's minions, but he's hidden away at the time. Naturally, the Hero was the only person in the village that the Big Bad actually gave a damn about. At the time, the Big Bad thought the attack was a complete success, as one of the other villagers transformed into a copy of the Hero and died in his place.
- In The Elder Scrolls series' backstory, the Atmorans, a barbarian Precursors of the Nords, began migrating to Tamriel from the now-lost continent of Atmora, landing and settling in modern day Skyrim. The Falmer (Snow Elves), who inhabited Skyrim, grew concerned when they started to become outnumbered by the Atmorans. While there are conflicting details regarding exactly what happened that night, the Falmer would attack and massacre the Atmoran city of Saarthal, in an event that would come to be known as "the Night of Tears". Unfortunately for the Elves, Ysgramor and his sons survived. They returned to Atmora and raised an army of 500 of Atmora's greatest warriors. They returned to Skyrim and started a brutal war against the Falmer, which eventually became a full-on Purge, that ended up slaughtering the vast majority of their population. Save for a small population at a very remote monastery, the surviving Falmer were forced to turn to their Dwemer cousins for shelter. The Dwemer agreed to take them in, but only if the Falmer agreed to consume poisonous mushrooms to permanently blind them and essentially become Enslaved Elves to the Dwemer. Following the disappearance of the Dwemer, the surviving modern Falmer are now barely sapient Morlock-like creatures who continue to inhabit the Dwemer's abandoned ruins. However, by the 4th Era, the Falmer are growing more bold, venturing above ground to kidnap surface dwellers while their numbers swell beneath ground. They also seem to be regaining some of their lost sentience, forging better weapons and armor from farmed Chaurus chitin and practicing crude alchemy to create poisons from the plentiful mushrooms that grow in their underground lairs. The author of one in-game book in Skyrim even believes that the Falmer may be preparing to wage war on their surface-dwelling ancestral enemies.
- Eternal Radiance: The Shadowborn destroyed Clearbell Village because the village wouldn't give them an Akleim artifact. The sole survivor of the massacre, Eldareth, joins the organization with the intention of betraying them and destroying them from within. In the end, he doesn't get to unleash a full cataclysm on them, but he manages to kill most of the ones stationed at their base.
- Fate/Samurai Remnant has the Master of Lancer, Chiemon, who is the sole survivor of the massacre at Shimabara. He seeks vengeance against the Tokugawa, who were involved in his people's slaughter. In the "Flames of Resentment" route, he succeeds partially in his goal, having merged with the Waxing Moon to become a colossal monstrosity.
- In Final Fantasy IV, the king of Baron (Actually Cagnazzo, archfiend of Water, in disguise) tries to wipe out the Summoners. He does a pretty good job, but he misses one, the young summoner Rydia. However, it isn't played completely straight in that the backfire mainly came from the main character defecting to eventually take him down rather than Rydia herself. The main character also teams up with Rydia to defeat Cagnazzo's master, who the Summoner genocide was supposed to benefit.
- In Final Fantasy IX, the summoners of Madain Sari are also wiped out by the Big Bad long before the game... except for Eiko and Garnet, whose mother whisked her away to Alexandria.
- In Final Fantasy VI, Kefka poisons the populace of Doma, and one of the only survivors ends up being a player character who potentially takes him down. Kefka differs from most examples of this trope as he did it basically for the hell of it rather than some overarching goal of self-preservation.
- Fire Emblem: Three Houses has Nemesis, who with the help of the Agarthans, killed the goddess Sothis in order to gain power and as part of the Agarthans plan to enact revenge on Sothis for defeating them when they attacked her in their hubris. He then drank her blood to gain power, forged a sword using her bones, and slaughtered almost all of her children, the Children of the Goddess, save for 5 known survivors. One of the survivors, Rhea, takes the name of Serios and joins forces with Wilhelm Paul Hresvelg to fight off Nemesis and the 10 Elites who are waging war across Fodlan, culminating in Rhea killing Nemesis in the battle at the Tailtean plains.
- Flip Dimensions: The king of Theiweth enacted genocide on Kazuki's village, causing the latter to become a Dark Lord seeking to overthrow the kingdom. This turns out to be a fake memory due to the multiverse being fiction in Lily's mind.
- In Fallout 4, if the player sides with the Railroad, the Brotherhood of Steel's stated goal to eradicate the Synths and prevent a Robot War gets them eradicated.
- A variant occurs in God of War II. While Kratos is off on his quest to find the Sisters of Fate, Zeus decides to wipe out his beloved Sparta. One soldier (whom you met in the beginning of the game) survives the attempt and tries to seek out the Sisters himself. You end up fighting and killing the poor guy, but not before he tells you what happened to Sparta. This only serves to make Kratos even more pissed and hellbent on taking revenge on Zeus.
- In Guild Wars: Prophecies, the White Mantle ritually identifies the Chosen and then sacrifices them to their gods; discovering this is what drives the Player Character to turn on the Mantle. Then the Player Character is revealed to also be Chosen...
- Halo:
- The Covenant's attempted genocide on mankind ends up being its downfall. It started in 2525 when the High Prophets found out that the humans were the inheritors to the Forerunners, the species that the Covenant worshiped as gods, and they realized that the truth about it would splinter the Covenant if it ever was spread. They decided to wipe out humanity so that no one would find the truth. 30 years later, the war sets off a chain of events which leads to all the High Prophets being killed, many former Covenant Elites allying with humanity, the Covenant capital High Charity falling to the Flood only to be destroyed by Master Chief, and the Covenant itself now nothing but a myriad of opposing factions.
- The more direct trigger for the Covenant's fall was when the Prophets ordered their forces to genocide the Elites because the former felt the latter were no longer reliably loyal; instead, the Elites team up with humanity and destroy the Covenant.
- As first revealed in The Forerunner Saga, the Forerunners and the ancient human interstellar empire fought a devastating war, with the Forerunners winning and literally blasting humanity back to the Stone Age. Unfortunately for them, the humans had plenty of research and experience on the Flood, which was destroyed when Earth fell. Then the Forerunners themselves get wiped out by the Flood.
- The Haloverse has an even more ancient example, to which this trope applies regardless of which side is telling the story. The Forerunners themselves had Recursive Precursors, called...the Precursors, who created both humanity and the Forerunners. What happens next is rather unclear. According to the Forerunners, the Precursors decided the Forerunners were a mistake and tried to wipe them out; however, the Forerunners struck first, and all but wiped out the Precursors. According to the Precursors, they simply decided that the Forerunners shouldn't have the Mantle, with the Forerunners' attack being completely unprovoked. Either way, the few surviving Precursors broke down into a dust which, 10 million years later, would become the Flood!
- Heroes of the Seasons: In Cameo mode, Gobi reveals that the Holy Order of Vyena murdered his fellow goblins on Christmas. After training with Lord Ciceri and making contact with various Christmas-hating villains, Gobi orchestrates a war on Christmas itself, starting with Utania Village.
- In the first Homeworld game, this is how the Taiidan Empire meets its end. After the Kushan perfect hyperspace technology, the Emperor decides to invoke a four-thousand-year-old treaty that the race had forgotten, which was that they were not permitted to develop any hyperspace technology. This results in the near-genocide of said race, and in addition to causing the survivors to get royally pissed off and begin a war against them, also results in a massive rebellion rising up due to public outrage of an essentially unprovoked attack on a fledgling race that had just started interstellar travel. By the end of the game, the Kushan fleet and Taiidani rebels assault the Taiidani homeworld in joint force, destroy the defense fleet as well as the Emperor's flagship, then make landfall and shut down the cloning facilities that housed replacements, shattering the Empire entirely except for a few remnants with little power.
- The backstory reveals that this is how the original Hiigaran Empire fell. They were on fairly even terms with the rival Taiidani, until the Hiigarans got their hands on one of the Great Hyperspace Cores, allowing them to jump whole fleets enormous distances with pinpoint accuracy. They use it to jump their fleet into orbit of the original Taiidani homeworld and lay waste to it before jumping back. Outraged, the Bentusi and the other races demand that the Hiigarans surrender the Core, as they clearly abused its power. Instead of peacefully handing over the Core, the Hiigaran fleet attacked the Bentusi, who promptly wiped out the whole fleet. As a result, the Hiigarans were then defenseless against the pissed-off Taiidani in need of a new homeworld. Cue the Curb-Stomp Battle and the exile (and nearly retributory genocide) of the Hiigarans.
- Iosa the Invincible of Iji had her homeworld Alpha Struck by the Tasen. She didn't take that very well.
- For that matter, Iji is one of two known human survivors of the Tasen Alpha Strike and subsequent invasion of Earth, and the other is playing Mission Control for her.
- The Player Character in Jade Empire is the last surviving Spirit Monk, an order who were slaughtered so that the Emperor could steal the power of their goddess, the Water Dragon, to defy the Heavens and end a severe drought. The player character survives because of Master Li's plan and Master Li manipulates him into killing the Emperor for him so that Li can steal both the throne and the Water Dragon's power. In one ending, it works.
- The Last Federation: Proving the "good" guys are not immune, Betrayal mode begins, as usual, with the other races exterminating the Hydral, with the Acutians dealing the finishing blow with a moon-drop on their homeworld. In this mode, however, the Last Hydral watches the races they were trying to unite commit this act of barbarism on their people, and rather than finding it deserved... just cannot forgive it. The Acutians are the first to go, followed by everyone else, as the Hydral decides all eight species can go fuck themselves, those who don't leave the system should die, and that it'd be better to revive the Hydral race than try to band the others together.
- Luminous Plume: 60 years ago, the Praelians coveted the aura magic of the Farulians and slaughtered most of them when they wouldn't share their forbidden techniques. The surviving Farulians, led by Jade, used those forbidden techniques to create Harbingers of Calamity in order to attack the Praelians.
- Mass Effect:
- In the backstory, the quarian government launched an attempted genocide of the newly-sentient geth machine race in fear of the geth turning on them. The geth fought back, committed their own genocide
that eradicated 99.9% of the quarian population, and the few surviving quarians ended up driven from their homeworld. To add insult to injury they only survived at all because the geth, being unable to fully comprehend the ramifications of wiping out the last 0.1%, let them go. - As revealed in Mass Effect 3, the Geth didn't start fighting back in the first place because they didn't want to be wiped out. What motivated the Geth to fight was that there were several Quarians who didn't agree with the genocide and fought to protect the Geth. These sympathetic Quarians apparently all died in the subsequent war despite the efforts of the Geth to protect them.
- This trope shows up again Mass Effect 3, potentially taken either way. The geth (except for a Renegade Splinter Faction that works as mooks for a third party, who tried to commit genocide on all other life due to their worship of the Reapers) after the war proceeded to occupy the former quarian worlds for centuries and kill anyone who came near, not overtly bothering the outside world but essentially dooming the few remnants of the quarian species to slow extinction due to their biological dependence on said worlds,note which the geth openly admit they don't need. It gets a bit more complicated as Legion, a geth who can be recruited as a team mate, will also mention the geth are open to peace yet the quarians attack them 100% of the time if they believe they have an advantage. and the conflicting midset in response to their ancestors near genocide causes a large rift in the Conclave. Then in Mass Effect 3 present-day quarians, having developed a new anti-geth weapon, attack and try to wipe them out in an attempt to regain their lost territory. Depending on the player's choices, either the few surviving quarians can eradicate the machines their ancestors created, the geth can wipe out the last descendants of their creators as they are in the process of trying to eradicate them, or clever manipulation of demographics and politics on the player's part can end up in both sides agreeing to a peace.note
- In the main storyline itself, although the Reapers make a very effective attempt to erase all traces of themselves and information necessary to beat them before heading out to await the next cycle, it doesn't always work. In the previous cycle they were unaware of Ilos and the last Protheans sabotaged the Citadel's Keepers, preventing Harbinger from being able to remotely activate the mass relay for the invasion. And one Prothean survived in stasis, and became part of the crew that eventually ended the Reapers after an estimated 20,000 cycles of extermination.
- In the backstory, the quarian government launched an attempted genocide of the newly-sentient geth machine race in fear of the geth turning on them. The geth fought back, committed their own genocide
- Double Subverted in Mega Man ZX and its sequel, Mega Man ZX Advent. In a similar manner to the S3 Plan, Serpent (and ultimately Albert) deliberately spared only a handful of people during Maverick Raids in order to get them to become Mega Men and thus participate in the Game of Destiny to become the Mega Man King. In fact, Serpent himself was a victim of this due to Albert and in his attempts to find out the truth and make something of himself ended up making him perfect prey for Biometal Model W's influence. However, by the end of the game, regardless of the deliberate attempt to spare them or not, it still put an end to their plans and presumably the Game of Destiny by those very created heroes anyways.
- Played with in the Metroid series. Metroid 2: Return of Samus has Samus tasked with exterminating the Metroids on their home planet of SR388; the game ends with Samus sparing a single hatchling, which has imprinted on her. Super Metroid starts off with scientists studying the larval Metroid making the discovery that the Metroids have abilities that could be used for the good of galactic civilization, right before the Space Pirates massacre the researchers and abduct the larva so they can build another Metroid army; the next time Samus encounters the larva, it's grown to horrendous proportions and almost kills Samus before it recognizes her. Then, during the final battle, it performs a truly heartbreaking Heroic Sacrifice, saving Samus from Mother Brain's onslaught and giving her the unstoppable Hyper Beam weapon. (Then Metroid Fusion reveals that the Metroids on SR388 were keeping an even more dangerous threat in check, which is another trope entirely...)
- Samus herself is portrayed as the sole survivor of a Space Pirate attack on the mining colony of K-2L. Who would have thought that cute 3-year-old girl would come back to bite them in the ass so hard?
- In Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the Patriots deliberately invoked this when they had Dead Cell liquidated (IE, most of its members killed off) for terrorist attacks it apparently committed. In actuality, the Dead Cell unit was actually framed for the terrorist activities by the Patriots (in other words, it was actually the Patriots who committed terrorist attacks on their own country), and more importantly, they deliberately allowed some survivors to exist in Dead Cell specifically to get them angered enough to attempt to challenge them and more importantly further use them in the S3 plan.
- In Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands for the PSP (there are four different games on different consoles under that title), an ifrit hears of a prophecy stating that a lonely hero with royal blood will kill him, so he starts assassinating people who are part of Persia's royal family. The Prince of Persia, upset over the deaths of his cousins, then tracks down and kills the ifrit. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.
- The Lombaxes and Cragmites in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. The Lombaxes sealed the Always Chaotic Evil Cragmites in Another Dimension, save for one Cragamite child they took pity on. This lone Cragamite, Emperor Percival Tachyon, then raised an army and wiped out the Lombaxes for daring to pity him. But he missed Ratchet (and probably a handful of Lombaxes in other galaxies, such as Angela Cross), who proceeds to trap him in Another Dimension with the rest of his Heartless race.
- Sine Mora: Enkies are the mass-victims of Fantastic Racism. Enkies are also vital to psychic time travel. The empire (unadmittedly) runs on time travel. DO THE MATH.
- Sonic Frontiers: The End managed to destroy the Ancient's planet long ago, but few of them were able to flee successfully. This eventually led to it getting trapped and sealed in Cyber Space due to the Chaos Emeralds.
- Star Wars: The Old Republic introduces a heroic version as part of the backstory; A large part of the Sith Empire's motivation is revenge after the Republic exterminated the rest of their society.
- And in Knights of the Old Republic, Bastila, one of the few people who escaped the bombardment of Taris, is the exact person Malak intended to kill when launching the planet wide attack. As for actual residents of Taris that survive, there's Mission Vao, Zaalbar, and potentially Juhani that can all be part of the party to fight against Malak and his forces.
- The Jedi Exile in Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has mostly survived the ongoing Jedi Purge by being a) cut off from the Force and b) wandering the Unknown Regions; upon returning to the Republic and finding that the Sith have killed most of the Jedi and are coming after you, the Exile - motivated by either justice or self-preservation - proceeds to grind the Sith Triumvirate into dog meat and destroy both their remaining strongholds, the Ravager and the planet Malachor V.
- The entire Old Republic saga was the result of this; before The Exile's self-defense genocide against the Sith above in KOTOR II, they committed another one against the Mandalorians in the Mandalorian Wars. All the deaths on Malachor V led to the events of both games, the creation of Darth Nihilus, and the deaths of all the Jedi (which was exactly Revan's plan).
- In Stellaris purging will give an empire a permanent penalty to diplomacy as everyone else suspects they might be next. And if you only conquer part of an empire and purge the planets you seized the rest will dedicate their existence to revenge.
- In Supreme Commander a paranoid Earth Empire commander waged war with the Seraphim and their human followers, but they were easily defeated by their numbers and weapons, in their last ditch effort take them out they unleashed a bio weapon that only targets the Seraphim slowly killing them all. But what they killed was only a very small portion of the Seraphim race who live on the other side of the quantum realm, in Forged Alliance they cross into human realm and conduct their own genocide on the humans.
- Genocide attempts has happened quite often in the history of the World of Warcraft, though only a few have backfired. One that did backfire was the attempted genocide that the Mogu tried on their Servant Race the Saurok. To elaborate, after their conquest of Pandaria, the Mogu created the Saurok to police the enslaved races. Soon enough the Saurok realized that the Mogu had no way to control them, since they were given free will and fighting prowess in both sword and sorcery, so a few of their legions rebelled against their Mogu officers. This caused the Mogu emperor to decree the ethnic cleansing of the Saurok race. However 2 Saurok legions were stationed in the Mantid lands at the time, and managed to hide there despite the Mogu sending many armies of slaves after them, arguably since the Mantid were not too happy of having the Mogu invading their territory. Even worse, when the succesor of the Mogu emperor moved his palace to the Krassarang Wilds to oversee the genocide of the Saurok, the surviving legions took him by surprise and threw him off a cliff. Never succeeded indeed.
- In X3: Albion Prelude, the Argon start a interstellar war after they suicide bomb the jewel of the Earth State, the Torus Aeternal, an orbital shipyard and city ringing the Earth's equator, killing millions from the initial explosion and subsequent deorbiting debris. In response, the Earth State immediately goes on a rampage. In-game, the Terran fleets will handily curb-stomp the Argon courtesy of their technological might and superior capital ships, though plot-wise the Argon use reverse-engineered Von Neumann ships to push the Terran fleet to the brink of destruction. Of course, the Argon never got to finish the job because at that point the Portal Network was shut down by the precursors to stop the genocide, meaning the Argon were suddenly without reinforcements or even a government.
- In Xenoblade Chronicles X, the Ganglion tried to destroy humanity due to being descended from the Samaarians. This backfired before the genocide had even started as Elma had given humanity faster than light travel and warned them about the Ganglion, and although the Ganglion destroy Earth, Luxxaar is killed by Lao and the Ganglion is, for the most part, destroyed by BLADE.
