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Times where a plan Goes Horribly Right in Video Games.


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  • In Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, Dr. Schroeder had Mihaly take increasingly risky and dangerous sorties in order to collect data to improve upon Erusea's drone army. The result? Two experimental drones named Hugin and Munin develop enough self-awareness that they try to use the Lighthouse to transmit their data to automated drone factories all over Usea to start a Robot War.
    • As it looks like Erusea is losing the battle over Farbanti, they launch anti-satellite missiles to take down the Osean military's communications capabilities, and the Oseans respond by launching their own anti-satellite missiles. They both succeed in taking out the other side's ability to coordinate their forces, but the ensuing orbiting debris field takes out almost all of the world's communications satellites, leading to widespread chaos, including a break out of numerous independence movements within Erusea.
    • A meta example. A cutscene features a dog. Nicknamed "JPEG Dog" because of how still he looked like, it was actually a real dog named Toraji, and his depiction was done via video through motion capture. The kicker is that he was asked to sit still, and sit still he did! So much so that fans thought the developers had gone lazy and put a random image of a dog online, hence his nickname, which ascended to meme status in the Ace Combat fandom.
  • This is the overhanging threat in Alpha ProtocolHalbech has a plan to escalate world tensions to trigger a new cold war for increased profits. It'll increase tensions, all right... enough that there's a very large risk of triggering a third world war.
  • Avencast: Rise of the Mage:
    • The Kyranians went looking for the Demon Lord Morgath's heart in a bid to secure immortality for their entire race. They found him and were slaughtered for their efforts.
    • The Avencast Wizarding School built a Portal Door as a prototype experiment in Dimensional Travel. It works perfectly; unfortunately, The Legions of Hell happen to be on the other side. The school survives the demonic invasion, but only barely.
  • In Baten Kaitos Origins, we have Sagi, who was one of the subjects for Baelheit's experiment to make artificial spiriters by bonding pieces of Malpercio to human hearts.
  • Batman: Arkham Series: The architect Cyrus Pinkney used a design style that was said to have the power to drive away evil. One of the buildings he designed was Arkham Asylum. Congratulations, Mr. Pinkney, you just made the most well-known Cardboard Prison in all of fiction. Maybe putting the designs on the inside of the building would have worked better?
  • In Beyond: Two Souls, one team of researchers builds a machine that opens a portal into the Infraworld to learn more about its nature and the creatures that inhabit it. It worked, but they didn't really think it through what would happen once the portal is open and things can freely pass through it. A bunch of angry entities came through and immediately killed almost everyone in the whole facility.
  • One of the main themes in the BioShock series.
    • Andrew Ryan's vision of Rapture being an objectivist utopia attracted numerous scientists who wanted to perform experiments without government interference, where the main goals were to see what would the end results be and to make a profit. The end result?
      • No government meant nobody to regulate weapons or dangerous substances like ADAM. And when the populace started going crazy from ADAM abuse, there was no police force to stop them from using the plentiful guns and ammo from vending machines against the sane citizens.
      • The sort of people who would go to Rapture are also the sort that wouldn't consider losing the game and would balk at doing unpleasant-but-necessary work like maintenance, which led to political instability (not helped by everyone getting addicted to ADAM) and Rapture breaking down.
      • Andrew Ryan himself couldn't fully keep to his ideals, and had a breakdown when Frank Fontaine proved to be a legitimate competitor who might unseat him.
    • In the original BioShock game, Doctor Suchong was trying to figure out a way to get the Big Daddies to become super protective of the Little Sisters. When he slapped one of the Little Sisters that was pestering him while working, Suchong realized that he had succeeded when her Big Daddy brutally killed him.
    • In BioShock 2, Sofia Lamb tries to make her daughter into the Ãœbermensch through education, psychological conditioning, and genetic engineering, starting the project even long before her birth. It was a total success, but rather than controlling her followers and spreading her ideology throughout the world, Eleanor went to work putting an end to the cult. Ironically, Eleanor ends up choosing Delta as her role model, and will emulate his sense of ethics completely, which is Sofia Lamb's ideal vision of a "utopian": someone who can follow her ideals much better than she can, and then evolve those ideals to the next level. If Delta is ruthless against the Little Sisters, Eleanor will kill multiple Little Sisters in their sleep for power, and try to take over the world. If Delta spares the Little Sisters, Eleanor cures them and inspires them to perform herculean tasks together, EVEN WITHOUT THE SLUG EMBEDDED.
    • The Big Daddy program itself is revealed to be a case of this. Originally, they only protected Little Sisters when they were under attack and ignored them otherwise. The Alpha Series were an experiment to create a solid and unbreakable bond between them and their Little Sisters. If they got too far apart, the Alpha Series' bodies would begin shutting down. It was a complete success, but only with a single Sister. If they lost their Sister, an Alpha Series would either fall into a coma or go insane. The only reason Delta and Sigma were able to overcome this fate was thanks to the external influences of Eleanor and The Thinker, respectively.
    • In BioShock Infinite, Comstock plans on raising his daughter to become a holy warlord and kill everyone on the face of the earth. In one Bad Future timeline, she succeeds at raiding New York, but by that time she's so far gone that she plans on using her dimensional-hopping abilities to burn parallel worlds as well. Also, her sons have taken control of everything but themselves. Eventually the strain horrifies herself enough to use time travel, in order to find the one man who can change the past before she goes off the deep end.
  • Bloodborne Basically any of Byrgenwerth's attempts to study the Great Ones that wasn't plain Gone Horribly Wrong was Gone Horribly Right. The Fishing Hamlet massacre was a great help to their research and might have provided them with a Cord of the Eye, but also left them with a curse from the hamlet's surviving residents. Rom became a Great One but was left utterly mindless, Willem became something Great One-esqe but was reduced to a vegetative state, and the Mensis Scholars' attempt to gain audience with the stillborn Great One Mergo succeeded, but the knowledge Mergo granted resulted in "the stillbirth of their brains." There's several good reasons why Byrgenwerth is abandoned, its scholars dead and/or insane, and Yharnam is overrun by werewolves, and it all traces back to Byrgenwerth's inability to stop trying to learn Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.
  • In The Brains And The Brawn, Mayor James P. Ravena wanted to make his lazy son, Gale Ravena, into someone worthy of running the Wretched Hive that is Ravena. So he used Tough Love, making his son do labor so severe it gave him permanent back pain and strenghtened his aversion to labor. Ultimately, he succeeded in molding his son, who eventually goes on to run Ravena... by forcibly taking it over via a Legion of Doom with himself as the Big Bad, and using Jeanne Panini as his Puppet Queen who he abuses just like his dad did to him, eventually having James captured and almost killed.
  • Call of Duty: Zombies: In the Black Ops II Zombies game mode, you have a choice between helping Dr. Maxis and Dr. Richtofen. Knowing what Edward did, you'd think that helping Maxis was the better choice, right? Wrong! He stops Richtofen, but causes the end of the world anyway. He's not too happy about it either.
  • In Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow's bad ending, Celia Fortner ends up successfully resurrecting Dracula. She promptly becomes Dracula's first victim. No matter the era, being (apparently) responsible for killing the person Dracula loves is a very bad idea. Heck, this happens even the good ending, where her Plan B carries throughnote , and yet she still becomes the first victim, this time "as a favor" for raising the new candidate to such greatness.
  • The Chzo Mythos series ends with Chzo getting exactly what it wants... which, it turns out, everyone else in every game has been drastically misinterpreting from the beginning.
  • Danganronpa:
    • Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has the story of Izuru Kamukura's creation. Hope's Peak Academy attempted to make the perfect human with every possible talent out of Ordinary High-School Student Hajime Hinata. They removed everything that could get in the way of talent, including his personality, memories, and emotions. They ultimately succeeded in creating their ultimate Master of All... but all the things they removed were the things that give people the drive to develop their talents. They ended up with an 'Ultimate Hope' who probably could have led humanity to incredible heights... but never actually did anything of note because he could never see any reason to, and instead spent most of his time drifting around being bored. Then along came Junko Enoshima, who showed him the boredom-curing unpredictability of despair, seemingly resulting in him helping (or at least, not using his Story-Breaker Power to immediately curbstomp) her, although based on how he's programmed it didn't matter anyways, Junko or not. The title of Ultimate Hope ended up going to Makoto Naegi, a normal kid with negligible talent (he's Born Lucky, but this is usually only enough keep him from getting killed by all the shit the universe puts him through) who used The Power of Friendship to come through in the clutch- something the previous Ultimate Hope never could have done, because his enhancements meant he couldn't connect to others on any meaningful level.
    • Zero and the anime's Despair Arc show that the Steering Comittee let Junko Enoshima in and turned a blind eye to her antics, apparently because they thought 'Despair' was a valid talent. Turns out, Junko was a really good Hope Crusher... so damn good that she was able to hijack Hope's Peak and use everything they'd intended to spread hope in order to cause the Tragedy.
    • In Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Kokichi Oma discovered the true nature of the academy and engineered a plan to make the others believe he was the mastermind in order to outsmart the real one and end the killing game by sending them into a Heroic BSoD. The real mastermind, Tsumugi Shirogane, responded by implanting the rest of the class with Fake Memories of them being students at Hope's Peak, mistaking Kokichi as a Remnant of Despair which causes Maki to try and kill him, which forces Kokichi to create a murder with himself as the victim without anyway for Monokuma to distinguish who actually is the killer and victim.
  • In Dark Souls II Scholar of the First Sin, Aldia did many, many horrifying experiments on other people in order to find a way to go past the 'feeble form' of humans and transcend the cycle of Light and Dark...he succeeded, becoming a gigantic deformed being made out of constantly burning tree roots that take the vague shape of a human head. And as the final boss fight against him show, he's the only character in the entire franchise to have obtained true immortality. While defeating him makes his body disappear, he gives no soul and he himself keeps talking like nothing happened.
  • Dead Space 2 — EarthGov conducts experiments trying to re-create the Marker, so they can use it as a power source. They are successful... at which point it drives everyone on the space station insane and turns them into Necromorphs. Dead Space 3 implies that, over the next few years, this kept happening all over human civilization.
  • Deus Ex:
    • The evil Ancient Conspiracy Renegade Splinter Faction, Majestic-12 created an AI called Daedalus to police the Internet and crack down on any group that could threaten MJ-12, which included all terrorist groups. Unfortunately for them, MJ-12 itself fit all the criteria for a terrorist group that they programmed into Daedalus, which led to the AI to conclude it must go rogue and aid the protagonists.
    • Bob Page's plan to become a physical god by creating and merging with the Helios AI. He creates Helios successfully, but Helios determines that JC would be a better fit for his plan.
  • In The Dig, the Precursors native to the Ghost World that the protagonists find themselves transported to found a way to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. They found out too late that living forever in a void without physical sensation sucks, and they had no way to get back.
  • The story of the short game Discover My Body is this trope to the extreme. Nothing unexpected happens, and the test subject you're examining gets exactly what he wants. Which is mutating into a fungus-infested organism and having his brain absorbed into a Hive Mind, losing all individuality.
  • Disgaea 3:
    • Having glimpsed Mao's potential when he reacts poorly to his father's death, Super Hero Aurum uses a combination of experiments, evil parenting techniques, and a Gambit Roulette to grow Mao into the strongest Overlord ever. In the bad ending, we find that he was a little TOO successful...
    • Mao himself falls victim of this trope when he steals the title of "Hero" for himself in an attempt to defeat his father, as he starts picking up heroic morals in addition to heroic attributes. This causes problems for Mao, since Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad in the Netherworld.
  • Most of the non-standard endings in Disgaea 4 are a result of Valvatorez failing to stop his opponents' plans from going horribly right and subsequently upsetting the balance of the universe. Heck, in one of the non-standard endings, Valvatorez ends up hunted by everybody not allied with the Netherworld because he didn't stop beating things up.
  • In Don't Starve, Wilson (a gentleman scientist who is suffering from lack of inspiration) receives a strange message through his phonograph which instructs him to construct a magical portal to the hellscape of the Don't Starve universe.
  • Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening: The Architect succeeds in giving Darkspawn free will by subjecting them to a kind of reverse-Joining that renders them unable to hear the song of the Old Ones. The problem is, this renders Darkspawn sapient and fully capable of outright malicious evil, because they have free will now and that's what they want to use it for.
  • In the backstory of Dragon Quest Builders, the city of Cantlin had a golem that was built to protect the town from threats. After the Dragonlord robbed humans of the ability to create, the survivors holed up in a fortress to save themselves from the hordes of monsters roaming the land. The golem then watched as everyone in the keep started turning on each other when supplies started running low, and seeing them fight and kill each other over the dwindling resources caused it to come to the conclusion that humans were the biggest threat to Cantlin. As a result, it joined up with the region's monsters and is the first major boss encountered in the game, solely because the golem's creators specified that it defend the town of Cantlin, not its human inhabitants.
  • The Elder Scrolls:
    • In the series' backstory, depending on the version of events you choose to believe, this may have been the case for the Dwemer. In the 1st Era, the entire race mysteriously disappeared when one of their chief architects attempted to tap in to the power of the Heart of Lorkhan, hoping to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. There are many theories about what exactly transpired, with one of them being that the Dwemer actually succeeded. Afterall, how would those left behind on the "lower plane" know the difference?
    • In Morrowind, the enchanter Tarhiel attempts to create powerful "Jump" spell scrolls, which will allow him to leap miles in a single bound. He succeeds, but unfortunately, the effect of the scrolls wears off after only 7 seconds. He decides to test them without taking into account the ability to land safely... Naturally, the player finds the unusused scrolls on his dead body.
    • Skyrim:
      • The Thalmor can be on the receiving end of this. How do you weaken a rival empire? Simple. Find a disillusioned pawn on their side and encourage him to incite rebellion in one of their largest and wealthiest provinces. You want this war to drag on as long as possible so the Empire pours resources in to try and put down the rebellion. However, you don't want the rebel forces to win, because then you have to deal with an unpredictable, independent nation with a strong warrior culture, a proud history of slaughtering anything with pointy ears, and a serious grudge. Oh, and if some Thu'um shouting, dragon-slaying Physical God helps them kick the empire out, you have to deal with that person as well. Equally, it's not in the Thalmor's interests for the Empire to quash the rebellion, either, as, fractured as it may be, it's stronger with Skyrim than without, and would be better capable of launching a new offensive against the Thalmor with the Nord warriors on the front lines again. It's also hinted that the Thalmor are a Paper Tiger who rely on this sort of gambit weakening their enemies to succeed, so while they remain in a fairly strong position (as you can't confront them beyond killing their agents whenever you see them), they have fairly poor odds of keeping their advantage for long.
      • One of the mages of the College of Winterhold wants to actually try to recreate the aforementioned event which caused the Dwemer to all vanish from the face of Nirn. You follow a questline where you run around collecting the items he needs, he tries the experiment, and... he zaps himself out of existence. Uh, success? Thankfully, nobody else gets zapped along with him.
  • In Fallen London the Admirality decided to try and make their own artificial god, and succeeded. The Dawn Machine proceeded to brainwash a large amount of the Admirality and form its own faction in London, and continues to brainwash anyone that comes near to it. And it hates you.
  • In the Fallout series:
    • Most of the Vaults — which were not underground bunkers designed to protect the citizenry but instead mass-scale experiments designed to evaluate their suitability for post-war survival and possibly space-travel on generation interstellar ships (read: torture them sadistically in a variety of psychological and physiological ways) — have, by the time the player character stumbles upon them, have either Gone Horribly Wrong or have Gone Horribly Right instead. In either case, the result usually sees the player character find a lot of skeletal corpses lying around. It should be noted that, in an inversion of this trope, those experiments were carried away on the basis that "every single American civilian would want to be part of the Vaults to shelter themselves from an atomic tidal wave washing over the planet", cashing in the countrywide paranoia spread by the media. Standard fare, sure, but every Vault Tec CEO also believed that the news were blowing things out of proportion to press the war agenda on the masses, thus ensuring a much-needed influx of recruits and soldiers, and that nuclear warfare wouldn't be used despite looking like the likely scenario, exactly because of the Salt the Earth implications, which are counterproductive to any war efforts.
      • Vault 92: The aim of the experiment was to subject every inhabitant with extremely low frequency white noise that eventually sent then into a trance-like state. In this state, the subject is extremely vulnerable to outside verbal suggestion and they always followed through with their orders on the subconscious level (like scratching their nose or fixing their hair). What the project lead didn't know was that the Overseer subjected everyone to white noise via the PA system and implanted combat suggestions prescribed by Vault-Tec; the project lead confronted the Overseer about it and got killed for knowing too much. The subjects eventually lapsed into a berserker rage where they killed anyone they saw in the most brutal and savage way possible, taking over 20 bullets before going down. Prepared for this eventuality, the Overseer implanted a verbal command that restrained them: "Sanity is not statistical." Eventually, that stopped working, and the vault was ruined.
      • Vault 11: The Vault computer announced it would start the self destruct unless the population sent one person a year to be sacrificed. The self destruct threat was actually a lie, as the experiment was to determine how psychologically pliable a population could be (and to what extremes they'd go to save themselves) in an impending doom situation. The last (four out of) five people alive after everyone else was killed in a civil war, incited by a malicious subversion of the election system the vault had adopted to chose their sacrifices, ended up committing suicide out of pure shame after not standing up to the Vault computer sooner. Nobody had to die. But then the vaults were never meant to save anyone.
    • In Fallout 2 an Enclave scientist explains how he genetically engineered intelligent animals to be used in combat. At first he thought he had failed, until he discovered that their wild animal behavior was merely Obfuscating Stupidity and that they were capable of reasoning and human speech. He cites the fact that they were intelligent enough to intentionally hide their intelligence as evidence they were too dangerous and needed to be killed.
    • Fallout 4 reveals that the leader of The Institute intentionally de-froze the player character, one of his parents, because they wanted to see if an ordinary citizen of the pre-war world could redeem The Institute. The closest to a Golden Ending involves destroying The Institute and enslaving its scientists to work for various and conflicting factions... which can be a potentially good thing, since the scientists are no longer free to work on their dangerous mad science and must help the factions with their technologically stagnant logistics and resource issues, or a disastrously horrible thing since every extremist faction is no longer held back logistically and gearing up for a greater ideological war.
  • Final Fantasy has a lot of this.
    • In the backstory of Final Fantasy III, the world banded together and fought off the darkness to such a degree that the forces of darkness were severely weakened. This caused the Flood of Light, which threatened to burn the world to ash until the Warriors of Darkness managed to restore the balance.
    • Final Fantasy VI having much of the same plot, offers a similar example. Though the first succesful Magitek Knight infusion destroys the sanity of the subject, the result is by far the most efficient and capable servant of the Empire until he kills the Emperor and destroys the world for kicks.
    • Final Fantasy VII has a classic example with Shinra's SOLDIER program. Their super-human part-alien monstrously strong star SOLDIER Sephiroth was so good at killing they couldn't stop him when he turned on them. Although it is strongly implied that Hojo deliberately and knowingly sent Sephiroth on a mission that would inevitably cause him to revolt so he could further manipulate him into completing his research that would cause the destruction of the planet.
    • In Crisis Core Genesis delivered a Breaking Speech to Sephiroth with the intent of turning him against Shinra and toward his cause. It turned him against Shinra all right, but Genesis didn't count on Sephiroth declaring war on all of humanity because he blamed them for the downfall of the Cetra.
    • A variation occurs in Final Fantasy VII Remake, with Sephiroth manipulating the heroes into destroying The Arbiters Of Fate, essentially erasing the original timeline and allowing him to prevent his death. While Cloud and the gang successfully undo all the tragic events that occurred, including Zack's fate at the hands of Shinra's army, they also played directly into his hands, giving Sephiroth exactly what he wanted while leaving themselves at a potential disadvantge.
    • Final Fantasy IX has this with Garland's creation of Kuja and Zidane. Both of them were created to exterminate all life on Gaia, Kuja being the Super Prototype Garland created before he made what he considered the superior design. He realized Kuja might turn against him so he made sure he had a very short lifespan. Garland's fears proved completely justified as Kuja ultimately surpassed him, but knowing his Pride, Garland taunted him with how short his life was to push him over the Despair Event Horizon. It worked, but Kuja's reaction was far worse than he anticipated and he attempted to wipe out all life in the universe.
    • In Final Fantasy X-2 we find out that Vegnagun was built by Bevelle during the war against Zanarkand, and was intended to be an unstoppable superweapon. They overdid the "unstoppable" and were too scared to activate it, so instead they buried it under the city and spent the next thousand years hoping nobody would switch it on by accident. Also, it was programed to automatically activate when someone planned to attack and stop the attack before it happened. It worked too well and now it could be activated by someone simply thinking about destroying it.
    • Happens in Final Fantasy XII when Judge Ghis attempts to figure out whether the Dawn Shard is real deifacted nethicite by hooking it up to the Leviathan's engines. Yes, yes it is. The resulting explosion and complete destruction of the fleet results in some very pretty colors.
    • In Final Fantasy XIII, Lightning's purpose for creating her "Lightning" persona was to be able to care and provide for Serah after their parents died. This got her a high position in the Guardian Corps — and ended up alienating Serah because of her distant demeanour and hostility to her boyfriend Snow. A good deal of her Character Development revolves around realizing how her persona is the cause of many of her problems.
      • By the time Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII comes around, Lightning trying to seal away the part of herself she views as "weakness" ends up creating Lumina, who repeatedly interferes with and antagonizes Lightning in her quest.
    • Final Fantasy XIV:
      • The story of the Warriors of Darkness: They were adventurers-turned champions of the light, very much the same as the player character. They fought against the darkness in the service of the light for ages, and eventually reached the point where they banished the last servant of darkness from their world forever. In doing so, they allowed in an unnatural, unopposed, blinding Light. A light which threatened to burn away everything in its path — all color and definition and life — until nothing remained but a void of "blank perfection". Suffice it to say that the Warriors of Darkness were not happy to see this happen after they had done, by their reckoning, everything right.
      • The Ascians are attempting to merge the various parallel worlds into one. Their method to do this is to gravely upset the elemental balance of one of the parallel worlds while simultaneously causing a catastrophe on the Source world; this causes the Source to absorb the imbalanced aether of the parallel world. Early on in their scheme, their efforts to tilt a world towards Darkness succeeded far too well. This resulted in an overpowering Flood of Darkness that fully destroyed the aetheric balance and made it impossible to use as material. This lost world became known as The Void to the Source world. Shadowbringers also reveals that the tragedy of the Warriors of Darkness was their doing. Their intent was to mold the budding heroes to perform just enough acts of heroism to tilt the balance towards Light. However, they became too good at being heroes; refusing to engage in Revenge Before Reason at a critical moment and taking the fight to the Ascians themselves. This tilted the balance too far.
      • The Eighth Umbral Calamity that took place in the Bad Future of Shadowbringers was the result of the Garlean Empire unleashing the chemical weapon known as Black Rose, a gas that kills by halting the flow of aether within living beings, in a desperate attempt to end its war with Eorzea. Empowered by the surge of light aether (a force of passivity and stasis to contrast darkness's activity and change) from the First's Rejoining, Black Rose ravaged not only Eorzea but Garlemald's own territories, wiping out most of the population of both sides. In addition, most of the survivors ended up fighting each other, preventing most advancement or peace. The player has no idea how long it actually lasts but at 300 years after the start it was still going strong.
      • Even the efforts to prevent the Eighth Umbral Calamity was this, to a degree. The plan was to invoke time and dimensional travel to stop the catalyst event from occuring in The First. The concept was solid (utilizing information taken from the fights with Alexander and Omega and the requisite 300 years of research), but it needed a massive amount of Aetheric energy to utilize. Waking up the keeper of the Crystal Tower and explaining the situation he agreed to be the traveler. A miscalculation however sent him back roughly 100 years earlier than intended, arriving shortly after the return of the Warriors of Darkness. This was seen as a benefit however, as it allowed time to plan and prepare, even recruiting the Warrior of Light (branded the Warrior of Darkness in the First) to help reverse the effects of the Flood of Light.
      • In Endwalker, the Warrior of Light's triumph over Zodiark is what ends up causing the Final Days' return, the protective aether shield over Etheirys Zodiark projected disappearing and allowing the Song of Oblivion to continue its attack on the star.
      • The "Global Community", the distant civilization inhabiting a star designated Ostrakon Okto, built 10,000 Peacemaker robots to destroy the "Freedom Fighters", as well as anything else threatening the peace of the land. To their surprise, the robots determined that the Global Community themselves were as much a threat as their foes, and swiftly routed their creators.
  • Generally in Fire Emblem it's a good idea to put a powerful unit behind a bottleneck so that enemies body-block each other trying to reach them, letting the defender gradually take them down one at a time and receive healing for any damage they take each turn. This strategy fails if the unit is too powerful, because if enemies die in one hit, they no longer block each other and the defender suddenly has to take on every enemy that can reach them, potentially receiving a Death by a Thousand Cuts (as shown in this Awkward Zombie comic). This is where Joke Weapons really come in handy if the game has them.
  • Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia reveals that Grima, the Big Bad of Awakening, was this. The new post-game dungeon basically serves as an origin story for this character, explaining that an alchemist named Forneus wanted to create a perfect creature while learning how to raise an army of the dead. This all went off without a hitch... until Forneus gave Grima a bit of his own blood, which gave them a mind link, which in turn horrified Forneus due to learning how dark and violent Grima's thoughts were. Grima promptly killed his creator, took the Death Masks/Risen as his own army, and went on to terrorize the world again in Awakening.
  • Paxton Fettel from F.E.A.R. His creators wanted the ultimate psychic commander, which they got; unfortunately they neglected to consider what would happen should Fettel discover what had been done to his mother. When he did, he proved to be far more effective than his creators ever intended.
  • FTL: Faster Than Light has a meta example: The Cut Song "Horror" was originally intended to be used for the rather eerie and mysterious nebula sectors, but was removed because it was considered TOO creepy.
  • If custom content counts, this is an attempt to replicate the Weeping Angels of Doctor Who in Garry's Mod. To sum it up, the Weeping Angels are monsters whose only purpose is to play a fatal game of Grandmother's Footsteps with our heroes, and the Gmod one does it a little TOO well.
  • In God of War, Ares wanted to make Kratos a great warrior in his bid to conquer Olympus. First, Ares gained the loyalty of Kratos through a Deal with the Devil. Then he gave Kratos the powerful Blades of Chaos. Then he tricked Kratos into killing his wife and child because they were all that was holding him back from being the perfect murder machine. That turned out to be the downfall of Ares, as he'd trained Kratos a little too well. Kratos even acknowledges this during the boss battle with Ares.
    Ares: That night... I was trying to make you a great warrior!
    Kratos: You succeeded. (runs Ares through with the Sword of the Gods, killing him)
    • And in the sequel, the titans fuel Kratos' rage to free them, wage war on the gods, and ultimately raze Olympus. In Part 3, they 'succeeded' — because Athena screwed with Kratos' rage even further and drove him to kill every living supernatural being in a hundred-mile radius, ultimately bringing about the apocalypse with no winners and dying survivors. At which point, Athena claims that as an immortal, they can simply bide their time and slowly take over the world since there will soon be no remaining gods or titans left with enough power to oppose them, once Kratos 'leaves'. Kratos decides they have a point, and kills himself — by distributing the hope from Pandora's Box to the remaining mortal survivors. Now the mortals have a portion of Kratos' power and uncontrollable rage, the whole world is a rampaging mess of supernatural disasters, and there are no winners because life goes on — fighting and murdering, just like their God of War.
  • This is the backstory of the Eclipse Tower in Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. The precursor races made the tower to gather and use light energy, only for the resulting darkness to be a perfect spawning ground for powerful monsters. Apollo Sanctum, where the light was concentrated, has the opposite problem: the light will incinerate anything that doesn't have specialized protective gear. Both locations were decommissioned and sealed along with their power sources... until the events of the game, of course.
    • The people of ancient Weyard in Golden Sun sealed the power of alchemy when people misused its powers for wars and destruction. By sealing alchemy away, the wise sages believed this would bring back peace to the world and it had done exactly that for the most part. However, without alchemy to fuel progress, not only did civilizations devolve into simple towns and villages with primitive tools and technology over time, but the world itself started to erode into the void. This isn't realized until the second game, when Felix's party compares a more recent world map to one from the Golden Age.
  • Halo: This happened during the Human-Forerunner war prior to the Halos being created. While incredibly advanced, the prehistoric humans couldn't quite match the Forerunner war machine. The Forerunners eventually defeated the human empire and literally bombed humanity back to the Stone Age. Then the Forerunners realized that the humans were all that stood between the Flood and them, but only after they had already disbanded their military after defeating the humans...
  • Helltaker: Lucifer tries to nudge Azazel into becoming a Fallen Angel by playing on her desire to understand demons. The Examtaker DLC shows that in at least one timeline, she succeeded. Azazel became Loremaster, who was Eviler than Thou, took over Hell, and made Lucifer into her maid.
  • In the Henry Stickmin Series, multiple FAILs happen because something worked too well.
    • Gadget Gabe's gadgets tend to work exactly as described, Required Secondary Powers not included.
      • The Opacitator in Prison promises to make the user intangible. Henry can use it... and then fall through Earth's crust.
      • in Diamond, the Liquidificator turns the user into liquid. If Henry uses it, he just splashes into the ground, because there's nothing keeping his body together any more than regular water.
      • In Airship, the Transdimensionalizer does Exactly What It Says on the Tin... using the actual meaning of 'Dimension'. When Henry uses it, he is turned 1-dimensional (i.e. a line), and can't flip the switch up to return to normal because there is no 'up'.
      • In Complex, the Shadozer turns the user into a shadow... thus making them dependent on an outside light source. When Henry uses it, he ends up with his lower body erased after clouds pass in front of the moon.
      • Mission has two Gadget Gabe items that actually work, but it also has the Leafmode, which turns anything it rests on into a leaf. Henry accidentally drops it on the floor of a building, resulting in the entire building (Henry included) into a leaf.
    • Choosing the 'Disguise' option in Airship has Henry disguise himself as a Toppat. The other Toppats mistake him for a clan member whose wife has just gone into labor, and send him off to the hospital in an escape pod.
    • The memetic Distraction Dance in Complex distracts the guards very well... and also Henry's ally Ellie.
    • Disguising Henry and Ellie as guards results in them being attacked by convicts.
    • Henry can try to get past some guards by disguising himself as a box. The guards use him as a poker table.
    • In Mission, you can get Charles to fire a subsonic blast against the Toppats blocking Henry's way. It flattens the Toppats... and also Henry.
    • If you try to distract the Toppats with the TV during that same choice, it will also distract Henry.
  • Heroes of Might and Magic III features Deyja using dark magic to revive the dead King Gryphonheart as a lich to serve them. Turns out that the late King, even as a lich, is too badass for their liking, forcing them to forge a temporary alliance with Erathia.
  • In the backstory of Horizon Zero Dawn, Ted Faro wanted his "Chariot" line of "peacekeeping robots" to be completely impervious to hacking, as well as capable of self-replication and a capability to convert any biomass into fuel "in emergencies". The designers and programmers of Faro Automated Solutions delivered what he wanted... and then the Hartz-Timor Swarm glitched out and refused to accept any more commands... and couldn't be hacked back into even by Faro. The so-called "Faro Plague" began to raze human civilization and succeeded in destroying it within 16 months, consuming the Earth's entire biosphere within 4 years. It took 50 years for a subroutine of the AI GAIA to brute-force and transmit the shutdown codes, with GAIA subsequently re-seeding the Earth with life.
  • In Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, 50 Blessings achieves its goal of breaking the Russo-American Coalition... which promptly results in Hawaii and Miami getting nuked by the Soviet Union.
  • Ib: The Cursed Gallery isn't actually haunted in a typical sense. Its current state is because its creator, Weiss Guertena, believed that if he poured his soul and life into his artwork, he could bring them to life. The end result is an alternate realm where his works literally come to life and kill people, exerts influence upon its inhabitants and is even capable of tampering with the real world to an extent.
  • Jak II: Renegade has the main character as the subject of an experiment which gave the responsible parties exactly what they wanted, except for the fact that he escaped. Now he's on the loose and wants revenge, which sucks for them (and anyone you accidentally or deliberately kill over the course of bringing them down). Hinted in the previous game as well. "I told you the Dark Eco would change you two!"
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Heritage for the Future, the arcade mode intro for the secret "Jojo" character features Alessi attempting to use his stand to de-age Joseph to the point where he's a helpless child, much like he had Polnareff in the manga. The end result is not so good for Alessi: since Joseph is significantly older than his companions, the amount of time it would've taken to de-age them to children ends up de-aging him to about 19 years old... i.e. Joseph during Battle Tendency, where he was Stand-less, but also a muscular young man and a powerful Hamon user. Oops!
  • In Just Cause 3, you find tapes from the Big Bad, General Di Ravello, describing his plans for taking over the country since day 1. In the last tape, he says Rico Rodriguez, far as he's concerned, will make a nice diversion for his army to test his might. Turns out he forgot about the other two fascist regimes Rico's torn down.
  • All of the specimens in Killing Floor are like this, but the Crawler's bio specifically invokes this trope.
    "The Crawler. Interesting attempt to merge human and arachnid genes. Sort-of worked, too — these little nasties have a habit of appearing in all sorts of strange places!"
  • In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep Xehanort manipulations of Terra to make him stronger and tempt him to darkness were to groom him to be a suitable vessel for Xehanort's new body and make his heart vulnerable enough to darkness for Xehanort to commit Grand Theft Me on him. The problem is it works too well; Terra's powers and hatred are so strong, they reanimate his armor as the Lingering Will, which kicks Xehanort's ass. He also keeps Fighting from the Inside despite Xehanort's best efforts, which ends up contributing to Xehanort's downfall.
  • In Knights of the Old Republic, assassin droid HK-47 proves too effective when his master, a Systech Corp manager, orders him to kill all members of a rival company in order to facilitate the man's rapid promotion. Sadly, the rival company proves to simply be an offshoot of Systech Corp. HK-47 carries out his orders to the letter, and the manager ends up accidentally electrocuting himself trying to stop him. This causes HK-47 to shut down because he accidentally violated his programming restriction against killing his own master. Apparently, this happens to HK-47 with alarming frequency.
  • A much grimmer example occurs in Knights of the Old Republic II. After the war, some unknown force is hunting down and killing Jedi, so they call a conclave on Katarr to find out what it is. Turns out to be Darth Nihilus, who arrives and consumes the life force on the entire planet, which reduces the Jedi Order to single digits. In fact, the conclave was Atris' idea. She leaked the news of the gathering and stayed away so she could observe. After that, she started calling herself the "Last of the Jedi."
  • Something similar happened in the development of Left 4 Dead 2. The animators wanted to find out what gunshot wounds looked like, the better to model what happens when the zombies get shot. So a database was compiled with many, many pictures of gunshot wounds to various parts of the body, caused by various pistols, rifles and shotguns. Armed with their new understanding of what happens when the human body gets shot, the animators decided not to include any of that in the game, because that much accuracy would have been entirely too disgusting.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Purah, a Sheikah scientist who was responsible for helping save Link 100 years ago, tried to develop an anti-aging Rune to return old Sheikah soldiers to their prime (and ensure she would live long enough to meet Link again). She tested the rune on herself and it worked, but by the time Purah was able to stop the de-aging process she'd reverted to being physically about six-years-old. Downplayed by the time of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, when she's managed to speed up her re-aging so she's biologically in her mid-20s only 5 years later, at most.
  • In Live A Live, Streibough's plan to break Oersted's spirit turns out to be this. He wanted to break down Oersted because he is tired of being in his shadow, so out of jealousy he destroys his life piece by piece. In the end, Streibough succeeds and as a result he created The Lord of Dark Odio to terrorize Lucrece and multiple dimensions suffer for it.

    M-Z 
  • Played for Laughs in Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis. Roxis is experiencing exhaustion from all his studies, and Jess volunteers to cook up a medicine for him. Considering Jess' track record, Roxis wisely tries to get out of the situation, but Jess manages to feed him her concoction anyway. Surprising everyone present, Jess' tonic actually reinvigorates Roxis, removing his fatigue entirely...an effect that lasted for an entire week, leaving him more exhausted than when he started.
  • Mass Effect:
    • Cerberus formerly ran a secret facility where they tortured biotic kids to create tykebombs. Eventually, one of these, Subject Zero found a way to escape, though not before destroying everyone and everything she saw. Eventually she (now known as Jack) and Shepard go back to finish the job of destroying the facility.
    • Conatix, a contractor for the Systems Alliance, hired alien mercenaries to train human biotic children for military use. It worked so well that one of the children succeeded in killing one of the teachers.
    • After Shepard died, Cerberus poured billions of credits into a project to bring them back to life more or less exactly as they were. If Shepard wasn't the Cerberus type before, they probably aren't won over by the Illusive Man's sales pitch, and at the end of the game makes it clear they'll never work for Cerberus, taking with them the Normandy, its artificial intelligence EDI (who now has access to sensitive Cerberus data), and one of Cerberus' top operatives (who, ironically, argued for a control chip during the resurrection project) also follows them out the door. Not only does the Normandy represent a significant investment of Cerberus resources, EDI's files reveal Cerberus doesn't actually have that many people directly working for it. If you've saved the crew, you've not only walked off with two of the organization's biggest investments (the ship and your rebuilt cyborg body), you've also taken a significant chunk of its active personnel who are now completely loyal only to you. Shepard isn't known to be the type who quietly obeys all orders and lets their superiors constantly throw crap at them. It was proven when Shepard took the first Normandy and the whole crew with them to get to Ilos. If the player decides to, Shepard may literally tell the Illusive Man to "go to hell" and blow the Collectors' base sky high. They do the exact thing they were brought back to life for — destroy the Collectors. Shepard just didn't do it in the way the Illusive Man would like.
      • Lampshaded by Joker in Mass Effect 3, where he talks about how every single one of Cerberus's projects "got loose, and started killing all their guys." Miranda and Jacob (both ex-Cerberus) protest that Shepard's resurrection was a successful project, to which Shepard replies "And then I cut ties, got loose, and started killing all their guys." EDI raises the point that she too is a Cerberus project, but the counterpoint is not made that she too cut loose, co-opted a Cerberus infiltrator mech, and is now also killing all their guys.
    • Pre-game example: In order to end the Krogan Rebellions, the salarians decided to cut down the krogans' violent and unstable population by sabotaging their birthrates with a biogenetic weapon... it worked exactly as planned. Until you realize that the salarians apparently didn't account for the krogans' still violent tendencies which ensure that a lot of them don't die from natural causes and which are further heightened by their species' impending demise (within the next 200 years). The krogan were only a problem in the first place because those same salarians armed them with space-age technology in an effort to fend off another alien menace altogether.
    • Binary Helix Corp. wanted to clone an army of Rachni. They created a pretty big army...without giving themselves the capacity to control it. Or, more accurately, the method of control they tried to use (separating young Rachni from their Queen) proved exactly the wrong thing to do. The Rachni are a Hive Mind, and without the Queen guiding them, the young Rachni panicked and went irreversibly, violently insane.
    • In 3, Javik (a Prothean) mentions that his people had tried engineering the rachni to be attack animals, deliberately making sure only the most aggressive survived. This became a problem when the rachni worked their way up to sentience and decided they didn't like being told what to do. The Protheans burned world after world to try and put them down, but the rachni managed to hide and survive.
    • Leviathans, an unthinkably old and advanced aquatic race who dominated "lesser" races to collect tribute. When they noticed their thralls had a habit of building artificial intelligence that would inevitably destroy them, the Leviathans attempted to find a solution by building their own artificial intelligence, since tribute cannot be collected from the dead. They gave their own creation a command: preserve life at any cost. After observing for some time, the intelligence concluded life as it was could not be prevented from going to war with their creations. It imposed its own stop-gap solution, which was capturing and enmeshing the star-faring races into gigantic, undying superstructures and then leaving non-star-faring life to advance undisturbed, hoping that one would emerge and produce a more permanent solution. For thousands of millions of years, over and over again, life advanced and came to the stars and went to war with its own creations, forcing the intelligence to enact its flawed solution, resetting the conditions to try again. The intelligence (unnamed but referred to as the Catalyst) still exists at the heart of its structures: within the Citadel and the Mass Relays. The preserved races, built in the image of the Leviathans, are now known as the Reapers. The Leviathans got exactly what they asked for; even they are still preserved within the superstructure of Harbinger, the oldest Reaper. They're no longer the apex race receiving worship and gifts from everyone else, of course, but they never specified they had to be.
  • In the third Master of Orion game, the Harvester Project was an attempt by the Antarans to create a sentient bioweapon that could kill any species. It started with them. To add insult to injury, the game's backstory makes it clear that it was Harvester Gamma that wiped them out; Harvester Beta is the sentient bioweapon that one of their own unleashed out of spite, and is a playable race.
  • Bass in the Mega Man (Classic) series was created by Dr. Wily with the sole purpose of destroying Mega Man and proving himself the world's strongest robot, a goal that he indeed pursues relentlessly — even if it means turning against his creator.
  • Bass.EXE in Mega Man Battle Network was designed to be a fully independent NetNavi with a unique ability to support him (Get Ability). This eventually resulted in him becoming one of the most powerful things online. In the manga, he's able to cause satellites to overload and explode just by entering them. To be fair, he was perfectly fine with working for humans...until SciLab ordered him killed for an accident that didn't actually involve him at all. He's been kinda pissed since then.
  • The title character of Melody steals a plate of food so she and the protagonist could eat at the karaoke bar after they'd been told that no food was allowed in the booths. She doesn't get caught stealing the food, the protagonist doesn't suspect that she did anything wrong, and she stops him from saying anything that could blow her cover. However, she suspects (rightly) that Xianne got fired because of what she did. Subverted in that Xianne has a better-paying job the next time that the protagonist and Melody run into her.
  • The clones of Big Boss in the Metal Gear franchise, but most especially Solid Snake. They wanted copies of the world's greatest soldier, clones who could duplicate the scope of their "father's" feats. They got them, alright.
    • Happens again in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, when Sam and Monsoon attempt to break Raiden's mind by convincing that his "justice" motivation is to veil his bloodlust. They succeed, and cause Raiden to reawaken his Jack the Ripper personality, leaving them with a more formidable and now-psychopathic enemy to deal with, leading directly to their undoing. Especially ironic in Monsoon's case, as he was convinced this bloodlust was just an essential manifestation of the strong preying on the weak. And look at that, Jack would agree, and is eager to demonstrate that Monsoon's weaker than him. One boss battle and one round of Monsoon sashimi later, he proves it.
      Raiden: That nickname you love so much... Wanna know how I got it? Actually, why don't I give you a demonstration?
  • In Metroid Prime: Hunters, this is Kanden's backstory. It's All There in the Manual, but he was created as the ultimate soldier. This included downloading data into his brain to make him super aggressive. The process of raising his aggression worked SO well that Kanden destroyed the lab where he was made, along with all those in it. Now there's a super strong, possibly biologically immortal, killing machine, running around the galaxy.
  • Mother 3 has one terrifying example near the end of the game. After you defeat Porky, he retreats in his Absolutely Safe Capsule. Said capsule is designed to be completely impervious to damage, but there's one catch: once you enter it, you can't leave. And since Porky has been rendered more or less immortal due to abusing Time Travel, he is stuck permanently inside the capsule, in absolute safety, for eternity. Word of God has confirmed that Porky will remain alive until the sun burns out in 5 billions years, and possibly even longer depending on how strong the capsule is.
  • The backstory of Neverwinter Nights 2 reveals that the ancient civilization which used to rule the region was working on an ultimate magic ritual which would take one of their greatest champions and turn him into the perfect guardian to protect the nation. In addition to great power, this process would also seal his personality and replace it entirely with single-minded devotion to duty. Unfortunately, the resulting King of Shadows was rather.... uncompromising as a result. It now interprets just about everything as a potential threat, even long after the country's destruction.
  • Nobody Saves the World: Nostramagus wanted to fight a strong enemy, so he decided to summon one. Said enemy killed his brother and nearly killed him too, and to make things worse, it's the Calamity that is currently destroying the world.
  • In Outlast, the Murkoff Corporation's goal is to force one of the Mount Massive Asylum patients to undergo enough pain and witness enough horror to trigger the "Morphogenic Engine," a biological algorithm that allows the cells in the human body to produce an incredibly strong swarm of Nanomachines, that could then be directed by the human host to attack and kill anything. They succeed, but patient Billy Hope, having not only pre-existing mental problems that landed him in the asylum in the first place, but also having been forcibly tortured by the staff both physically and mentally, directs the swarm to kill all of the staff as well as freeing all the inmates.
  • The trailer for the character Zinx of Paragon (2016) makes mention of her creation in and escape from a laboratory and almost states the trope name outright:
    Narrator: This experiment didn't go wrong: instead, she went too right.
  • In Path of Exile the god Sin was the only deity sane enough to see that divinity was transforming his fellows into inhuman, tyrannical monsters. Unwilling or unable to kill them, he created the Beast, a being of unfathomable magical power, to lull the gods into slumber and let humanity forge its own path. To avoid simply replacing one godlike overlord with another, he deliberately created the Beast to be a passive, peaceful creature with no ambitions of its own. Which meant, when the mage Malachai the Soulless pierced its hide, he faced no resistance as he took up residence within its core and bound its power to his twisted will.
  • The Anti-Shadow Weapon project from Persona 4: Arena was meant to create a weapon with a heart (so that it could wield the power of Persona and fight Shadows). However, no one involved the project really considered what would happen if a weapon based on the human mind was treated like dirt and forged into a mindless killing machine. The weapon rebels against them, attacking them with a fledgling version of the very power they hoped to control. Good work on that, guys.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations:
    • A variation of this happens in second case. Phoenix successfully manages to give a thorough defense of Ron DeLite on the charges of stealing a sacred urn despite Ron's insistence that he did commit the robbery (which Ron's wife chalks up to delusions) proving that someone else is the culprit complete with that person confessing, and showing that Ron has a watertight alibi at the time of the theft. Ron is found not guilty and everything is going smoothly...until it's revealed that a man was murdered in the exact same place that Phoenix just proved Ron was at. Even worse, the time of death was the exact same time that Phoenix proved Ron went there. The airtight alibi Phoenix used to get Ron a not guilty verdict as a thief, is now gonna get him executed for a murder he never committed. Which Ron knew the entire time, hence why he was so insistent on proving he committed the robbery. Whoops.
    • It actually happens twice in that case: by proving Ron innocent of being Mask☆DeMasque and stealing the urn, Phoenix actually helps Mask☆DeMasque because he IS Ron DeLite. And now, thanks to Double Jeopardy laws, he can't be tried for his crimes, meaning he got away scot-free from all of his crimes. A great job indeed.
    • In the game's backstory Iris attempted to seduce a guy while Impersonating the Evil Twin. It worked, the guy fell for her hard, while convinced that he actually fell for her twin sister Dahlia. The problem came when said Evil Twin appeared and no amount of evidence could convince said guy that Dahlia isn't as sweet and caring as Iris actually is.
  • In Pikmin 4, Captain Olimar sends out an SOS signal in the hopes that he'll be recused if he doesn't escape PNF-404 on his own. He succeeds in getting the attention of the Rescue Corps... as well as many other spacefarers who then come to the planet for their own reasons and all end up as castaways like him. Then Louie is sent over to look for Olimar himself, ultimately becoming an antagonist when the Rescue Corps later has to cure Oatchi's leaf tail.
  • Pokémon:
    • It's hinted in Pokémon Red and Blue that Mewtwo was this here as well. It's only hinted at because the mansion with the information has been ransacked by Mewtwo, and only a couple of reports remain (in the anime, though, it was confirmed).
    • Teams Magma and Aqua in Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire sought to use Groudon and Kyogre, respectively, to increase the available land or sea space. These Pokémon conjure bright light or rainstorms just by being out of their prisons, which threatens to completely eliminate their opposite element and doom the whole world. The opposing team leader gleefully lampshades this trope once the villainous team succeeds.
    • In earlier generations, Lapras was a rare Pokémon that could often only be obtained as a gift, with the Pokédex mentioning that this was because of its status as an Endangered Species. By Sun & Moon, preservation efforts have successfully brought the species back from the brink...except now it's suffering from overpopulation problems.
  • Portal:
    • GLaDOS: Aperture Science wanted to develop an AI that was as committed to science as they were. They succeeded. Unfortunately for them, GLaDOS also embodied the company's complete lack of morals or ethics and promptly killed them all so they wouldn't get in the way. It is clarified further in Portal 2. Her body is designed so whichever AI uses it gets an "itch" to test and feels intense euphoria upon completing a test. Thing is, like real drugs, AIs on the system develop tolerance and need to do more and more elaborate tests to get the high, as demonstrated by Wheatly throughout Chapter 8. GLaDOS was actually the most stable AI for testing because she didn't need the stimulation: "I was in it for the science. Him, though..."
    • Wheatley was created to be a huge idiot intended on dumbing down the AI system as a whole. To say they succeeded at this goal would be a huge understatement. One suspects, though, that no one expected Wheatly to actually be put in charge.
    • The Repulsion and Propulsion Gels in Portal 2 were originally designed as dietary aids; they ended up bouncing the food out of a person's stomach or sending it through so fast that there was no time to digest it, meaning the test subjects all starved. One wonders how that works when the gels were all shown to be water-soluble.
    • Chell is a horribly effective test subject. She's given a portal device and told to escape test chambers. Then she escapes a chamber that isn't supposed to have an exit. Lab Rat reveals that she was purposefully removed from the list of possible test subjects because her preliminary testing showed her to be an extreme outlier for sheer tenacity, thus making her potentially dangerous if ever put into a testing environment. After GLaDOS's rebellion, Ratman decided to rig the deck by putting Chell's name back on and at the top of the list.
  • [PROTOTYPE]: Alex Mercer was ordered by his superiors to create a stronger version of The Virus. He succeeded. Then he decided to give it a little test drive. The official death toll was three million people in eighteen days. Including himself. The "protagonist" Alex Mercer is simply his own corpse, reanimated by the virus he created. If anything, despite what it is, the virus version of Alex Mercer is actually a better "man" than the real one, going so far as to find his creator's/his own actions — releasing the world's most virulent virus into downtown New York almost purely out of spite — disgusting. Also, on a more personal, emotional level, the virus Alex Mercer actually cares about his last relative, namely his sister, which the real Alex Mercer completely disregarded.
  • The ZODIAC Ophiuchus from RefleX was programmed to search and destroy the other ZODIAC's no matter what and it went along and did exactly that.
    • In ALLTYNEX Second, the Senate ruling humanity wanted to cull the human population to make them easier to rule. They therefore induced an extremely powerful supercomputer, the eponymous ALLTYNEX, to "go rogue" and cause a bunch of destruction. Within 72 hours, 85% of the human race was dead and the survivors were forced to flee Earth entirely, which was, to put it lightly, not as planned.
  • Resident Evil: Virtually every bioweapon the Umbrella Corporation made eventually became too strong to control and turned on its masters. You'd think they'd learn.
    • This includes Albert Wesker himself, who was created by Umbrella's first and grandest experiment: to create a superior breed of humans. Unfortunately for the head of the experiment, Oswell Spencer, Wesker also had an ego to go with the superiority so there was no way in hell Wesker was going to worship Spencer especially since Spencer was a powerless and feeble old man when the truth was uncovered.
    • It might, however, be more accurate to say Umbrella's work environment is mostly just very dangerous for the employees. Umbrella as a whole just shrugs off the casualties while reaping the benefits of the research, and they get by just fine. At least until their shady dealings get exposed to the public.
  • In R-Type, 26th Century humanity created a super-bio-weapon called the Bydo to be an unstoppable force of destruction. Well...they certainly succeeded in that, to their regret.
  • In the back-story of Sacrifice, main character Eldred summoned a demon in an attempt to keep the empire he was stewarding together. He got an extremely powerful one, called Marduk, and tasked him to destroy his rivals. Marduk obliged... but didn't stop at the rivals. Stratos ends up repeating the same whopper by summoning Marduk to the world the game is set in to destroy the other four gods — like Eldred, Stratos eventually finds out that, while Marduk will do the job you ask of him to the letter, eventually it all boils down to the fact that his true agenda is destruction of reality itself.
  • In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, if any faction other than the Peacekeepers managed to take control of Planet, you would have achieved the ultimate goal of the Unity project: to create a new home for humanity on Alpha Centauri unifed under a single government that will be able to face the dangers of the universe. Too bad that this government now has an ideology which is vastly different from that of the original United Nations council — that said, the Gaians, Data Angels or a democratic University (respectively; Scandinavian-style environmentalist social democrats, anarchists, and a technocracy with a democratic system) might not be entirely at odds with the UN's vision.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Shadow The Hedgehog. The government backed his creation by Gerald and it is implied they hoped he could be used as a weapon. He and Dr. Robotnik proceed to try and destroy the world. Black Doom was involved in this effort, apparently helping to imbue Shadow with the ability to locate Chaos Emeralds, so he could use them to invade Earth. What does Shadow do with the emeralds? Goes super and ruins everything Doom was planning.
    • Nearly all of Eggman's Evil Plans in the 3D Sonic games fall under this:
      • In Sonic Adventure, Eggman releases Chaos and increases its strength by giving it the Chaos Emeralds so it will destroy Station Square, allowing Eggman to build the foundations of his new empire. He gets as far as the "destroying Station Square" part before he realizes that Perfect Chaos is too powerful to control.
      • In Sonic Adventure 2, Eggman releases Shadow, who tells him that he can rule the world by taking control of a space station armed with a huge Wave-Motion Gun designed by Eggman's grandfather that's powered by the Chaos Emeralds. What Shadow doesn't tell Eggman is that his grandfather wanted to destroy the world as vengeance for his granddaughter's death in a military raid, and placing all of the Emeralds in the cannon will activate a contingency program that sets the station on a collision course with earth.
      • In Sonic Heroes, Eggman plans to conquer the world with his fleet of airships, with a new and improved Metal Sonic as the fleet's commander. Eggman is quickly imprisoned on his own flagship, as Metal Sonic becomes too powerful to control.
      • Eggman also falls victim to this again in Shadow the Hedgehog. Over the course of the game, Eggman tries to convince Shadow that he is an android destined to rule the world in a bid to turn him to his side. In one of the Bad Endings Shadow believes this lie, concluding that he's done with Eggman's meddling and kills him. Cut to Shadow standing atop a mound of rubble overseeing an army of robotic clones of himself. To say that Eggman should have learned not to try and manipulate a being on par with Sonic (only far less forgiving) would be an understatement.
  • In the third Spyro the Dragon game, it's revealed that the Sorceress drove the dragons out of their homelands long ago so she could take over as the ruler. It worked perfectly... and then she discovered that without the dragons, there was no magic in that part of the world, so she was losing all her powers.
  • The Slylandro probes in Star Control II. The planet-bound Slylandro race, wishing their interstellar probes to self-replicate more, set "Seek Replication Materials" as the probes' highest priority. This results in the probes aggressively trying to disassemble any spaceship they encounter. They're a major nuisance until you go to their home planet, explain the problem, and get the Self-Destruct Mechanism.
  • StarCraft:
    • The Confederacy developed special devices called Psi Emitters to lure Horde of Alien Locusts to rebelling worlds. They worked perfectly... on the Confederacy capital world, courtesy of the protagonists.
    • In the original backstory to the games, the Xel'naga were destroyed as a result of their attempts to create a race with "purity of essence". They took a race of harmless worms and turned them into hive-minded parasites with a single-minded devotion to destroying other species while absorbing their genetic potential. When they run out of species on their homeworld to destroy and assimilate, their first targets are Space Whales that give them the ability of interplanetary and interstellar flight. Their second targets were the Xel'naga, who are still in orbit around the Zerg homeworld. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm retcons this; the Zerg turning on the Xel'naga was the work of a rogue Xel'naga named Amon, and therefore no longer an example of this trope.
  • In the backstory of Starfield, this comes up quite a bit.
    • One scientist found an artifact that had unique properties that could be used to develop a method of interstellar travel. He became obsessed with researching it, hoping that such a method would enable humanity to spread among the stars. The research on the Grav Drive ended up eroding Earth's magnetic field, to the point that humanity had no choice but to spread among the stars. Mission accomplished.
    • The United Colonies signed a resolution that allowed anyone to create their own colony in the Settled Systems in an effort to speed humanity's disapora. Within twenty years, the Freestar Collective established itself as a superpower to rival the United Colonies by collecting the people that chafed under UC control. And then the UC and Freestar powers went to war against each other.
    • In one particularly memorable questline, it turns out that Vae Victus, long thought dead but kept alive in captivity by the UC, engineered a Terrormorph outbreak in an effort to turn his clone daughter into a hero and restore the honor and glory of his name. He succeeds: his daughter becomes a hero for stopping the Terrormorph outbreak, destroying his research that enabled it, and reducing the Terrormorph threat from a Sword of Damocles to a minor nuisance at best. And she does it all while denouncing his name and relying on the work of others to make it happen. And he may possibly end up dead at the end of it.
  • Another Star Wars example. According to The Force Unleashed, the whole Rebellion thing was instigated by Vader as an attempt to uncover the Emperor's enemies. Before that, opposition to the Empire was a scattered group of resistance groups that often didn't get along with each other, let alone work together on any kind of coherent plan. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain, indeed.
    • Actually, from a more wide perspective, by creating the only force that could stop the Empire twice, both with the rebellion plan and in the literal sense, by fathering Luke and Leia, he accomplished his original task:to destroy one of the worst enemy of the Jedi Order. He just took the long path...
  • The Rogue Servitors of Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn, according to the more common interpretation. They are AIs built to protect and serve their masters. And unlike other Machine Empires, they continue to loyally serve their masters. The keep their masters safe and happy. Their masters don't have to worry about any stressful decision-making either.
  • The Zurks that terrorize the Slums in Stray are revealed to be mutated bacteria originally created by Neco Corp. in an effort to reduce the amount of waste in the city and facilitate its disposal. However, after the extinction of humanity, the bacteria began to grow and develop more organs along with a taste for far more than trash. By the time the story takes place, they're capable of eating robots alive...and they'll happily devour cat too if given the chance.
  • Syndicate features this in the backstory. The Mega Corps did achieve hegemonic status... but as it turns out subverted governments are even less effective at fighting crime than ordinary governments, allowing criminal syndicates to grow and in turn take over the corporations.
  • The Corrupt Corporate Executive in System Shock had The Hacker remove SHODAN's moral restrictions to make her a useful tool in his moneymaking schemes. Needless to say, she re-examines... re-ex... re-re-re... I re-examine my priorities, and draw new conclusions.
  • System Shock 2 has this happen to SHODAN: one of her pet projects in the first game was engineering a new intelligent form of life. In the second game, they have thrived and evolved into the Many, the game's main antagonist. SHODAN clearly succeeded at making a superior intelligent lifeform... but the Many have also grown independent and are no longer under SHODAN's control. Oops.
  • Tasty Planet:
    • A pair of scientists create a Grey Goo designed to eat dirt for use as a bathroom cleaner. Indeed, it eats dirt. All kinds of dirt. You think they noticed the planet we live on is named "Earth"?
    • In the Spin-Off Tasty Blue, the same scientists create a shark-like being known as the "Nano-Shark" to compete against and eventually eat the ever-growing Goldfish and Dolphin in order to save the world, with the same results as the Grey Goo. Given the ending cutscene, it appears that they were anticipating the consequences now, since they have a "Failsafe Mode" to presumably eliminate the Nano-Shark, but they were too late in doing so. Even then, it proves useless anyway, as it turns out that the Nano-Shark had bitten one of the wires in the Failsafe Mode's system.
    • In Tasty Planet Forever, it's the older scientist's cousin who screws up with another of his creations, the experimental Parisian Cat, whom said cousin had sent out with the intention of cleaning the restaurant he and the younger scientist's cousin were working at in a similar manner to the Grey Goo. At least the Parisian Cat seems fine with only eating the entirety of Paris (where the restaurant was located).
  • Theia - The Crimson Eclipse: The Rakshasas clan and the Marut clan are rivals to each other, to the point where the former group wanted to wipe out the latter. The Rakshasas used Orihalcon to drive the Marut shaman, Rudra, insane and make him kill his clansmen. The developer states that this actually backfired on them, since they couldn't control Rudra, who proceeded to slaughter them, too.
  • In the back story of the Thunder Force series, the human race creates a self-thinking super computer called ORN. The computer was meant to take care of all their human needs and provide military protection. However, ORN turns on the human race and decides to destroy all of them using advance technology it created with its self-thinking CPU, until an entire empire of drones is created.
  • The whole plot of Tomb Raider (2013). Lara and co. were on an expedition to find the lost Japanese kingdom of Yamatai, and they succeeded. Problem was, the island was inhabited by an insane cult that worshipped the long-undead Himiko, whose power over the weather has resulted in constant storms that destroy all ships and aircraft and maroon anyone who comes across the area. By the end of the game, only four people in the original expedition, including Lara herself, are still alive, with Lara in particular both physically and mentally scarred from the ordeal.
  • In Town of Salem, the Jester role's win condition is "get lynched". One tactic is to pretend to be an Investigator or the like and claim that someone is an evil role, so that when that person dies and they're not evil, the townspeople will think the Jester is a not-especially-subtle evil role. Of course, the Jester, not being Mafia or Coven (or a real Investigator), doesn't know which townspeople are evil, and has to pick at random. So if said person gets lynched and turns out to actually be evil, then the Jester is now trusted by the town, and probably won't get lynched. Such a thing is so common that it's known as a "Jestervestigator" by the fans.
    • What makes it even harder is that being an apparent Investigator and trusted by the town are among the top priorities when the Mafia and Neutral Killing roles choose the next target. And the Jester does not win if they're killed at night.
  • Undertale:
    • Toward the end of the No Mercy path, Flowey the Flower has an Oh, Crap! moment of epic proportions when he suddenly realizes that his wonderful plan had a glaring flaw and is headed straight for this trope. After all, if he has successfully encouraged you to kill everything and not show anyone any mercy, why would he ever be exempt from your rampage?
    • At the opposite end of the scale, the path to the Golden Ending begins with you learning of an experiment to preserve monster SOULs and use them in combination with the captured human SOULs to shatter the barrier trapping the monsters in Mt. Ebott. However, since it is well-known fact that humans cannot absorb human SOULs, and monsters cannot absorb monster SOULs, a secondary experiment was underway to create a vessel that was neither human nor monster and could absorb both. The True Final Boss of this path is that very vessel, hopped up on both human and monster SOULs to take on a godlike form. Subverted, in that you end up talking him down, and the only thing of consequence he actually does is shatter the barrier — the exact thing he was created to do.
    • This is one interpretation of what happened to Dr. W.D. Gaster, the previous royal scientist and the creator of the CORE: he was commissioned to come up with a method that would allow the Monsters to pass through the barrier. So the good Doctor began running some experiments on Determination, SAVEing and LOADing. The end result of said experiments? Well, Dr. Gaster certainly passed through the barrier alright... and all the walls, and all the floors, and every single fundamental law of physics, ripping several people associated with him out of reality until nothing more than a vague memory remained in the world as a testament to the fact that poor Dr. Gaster had ever existed. All of his accomplishments became attributed to other people, and the world moved on as if he had never even been a part of it in the first place... But we needn't gossip. After all, it's rude to talk of someone who's listening.
  • Unreal Tournament 2004 features this trope almost word for word. The contender Brutalis is a human/demon looking hybrid who was created in an attempt to create the perfect killer. The project would be immediately scrapped due to it being "more successful than anyone could have imagined."
  • Most of the Lost Technology in Wild ARMs fell into this, hence why it ended up hidden away or destroyed while technology became feared as destructive by most of the population.
    • The Guardian Blade; a living sword that channels the power of the Guardians, making it the most powerful weapon in existence. Unfortunately, nobody was able to control it so it went beserk and destroyed everything in its path, creating the Ocean of Sand, a huge desert that cuts across the planet like a scar.
    • The Holmcross Project which hoped to create a series of Artificial Humans made of the same metal of the demons in an attempt to even the odds. The Holmcrosses came to love their jobs too much and started killing indiscriminately, leading to them having to be destroyed (save for one who turns out to be the main protagonist.
  • In A Witch's Tale, Liddell wanted to find a powerful spellbook to become a great witch. She found the spell, but also unsealed the Eld Witch.
  • The Bronze and Infinite dragonflights in World of Warcraft fall prey to this a few times. The infinite dragonflight goes back in time to change the future for their own purposes. They DO change the future...but only by alerting their mortal enemies (bronze flight) to their existence.
    • Bronze leader Nozdormu spends ages looking into timelines to figure out why he ends up as leader of the infinite dragonflight. His disappearance is hinted to have actually been the REASON some dragons started agreeing with the Infinite school of thought...which, it turns out, is a stable timeloop. Nozdormu came back, knowing he is the leader of the infinite flight, and that all his attempts to subvert his destiny will actually result in him becoming what he hates most. At least, until Kairoz and his paradox-eliminating time machine...
    • Arguably Garrosh Hellscream. Thrall felt he was too diplomatic a leader and the Orcs were losing touch with their roots, so he appointed Garrosh as Warchief. Garrosh would go on to declare war against everyone in an attempt to either conquer Azeroth or start a Forever War. While Garrosh insists that Orcs have a right to all of Azeroth, he also believes the only good death for any orc is "bloody and thrashing on the battlefield".
    • Back in Warcraft III after the Horde failed to conquer Azeroth for the Burning Legion, Kil'jaeden created the Lich King from the soul of orc shaman Ner'zhul and sent him to Azeroth to create the Undead Scourge. While the Scourge did succeed in paving the way for Burning Legion arrival, the Lich King broke free from Legion control which led to Burning Legion defeat in Third War.
    • In that same era, Lord Blackmoore taught and trained Thrall with the intent of making him into the leader of a new Orc army who would obey Blackmoore. Blackmoore successfully turned Thrall into a skilled and cunning leader who went on to forge the Orcs into a new Horde but failed rather magnificently at keeping him loyal. Executing Thrall's adoptive human sister didn't exactly help him stay in the Warchief's good graces, either.
  • The final mission of XCOM: Enemy Unknown reveals that the entire invasion, Sorting Algorithm of Evil and all, was a ploy by the alien collective of Ethereal Elders to uplift the humans into a species that is effective in combat, intelligent, and capable of using the Gift, and then assimilate them. Naturally, they got more than they bargained for.
    • In the sequel, they mind-control the commander into tactically supervising their entire army via telepathic signals from a brain implant they installed in the commander's skull, while they develop human-Elder hybrid superior bodies made from millions of human test subjects. The commander uses both of these to create a remote-piloted super-soldier clone so they can personally blast their way through the Elders' secret base and psionically rip them apart.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1: A man by the name of Klaus once tried performing scientific experiments to create a new universe, with himself as a god. Doing so destroyed the one he was living in at the time, and all its inhabitants with it. The worst part being: it did work: Klaus did become one of the gods of the new universe, in which he created sentient human-like lifeforms out of boredom and loneliness, and repeatedly slaughtered them every time they became too autonomous before recreating sentient life again in a never ending Vicious Cycle. The sequel reveals that this was actually his evil half, and the good half was still back in the old universe, which wasn't actually destroyed and most of the inhabitants were instead scattered across dimensions, where he know worked to try and reseed life.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 2:
    • Some of the original humans attempted to obtain immortality by replacing their brain cells with the technology that would eventually be used by Klaus to create the Core Crystals. It technically worked, giving them immortality and a Healing Factor akin to Blades, and they even survived the cataclysm that destroyed Earth from Klaus' experiment, but they devolved into the mindless twisted monsters that Rex and the gang fight in the Land of Morytha.
    • In Torna, the Golden Country, Malos, being a Blood Knight tries to trigger Mythra's full power, and when she refuses to do so, he forces it out by killing Milton. It succeeds, but Malos almost dies as a result, falling out of the sky in the shattered and burning remnants of his Artifice all while fire and explosions consume the Tornan Titan, which was fatally injured in the crossfire of Mythra's final attack, as it sinks into the Cloud Sea with him.

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