After The End - Television Tropes & Idioms

Violence Jack by Go Nagai is perhaps the first anime/manga example.
Akira
Appleseed
Blue Gender
Blue Submarine Number 6
Desert Punk
Ergo Proxy takes place after a "detonation of the methyl hydrate layer", and as a consequence, the humanity lives in giant domes protecting them from the outside world. Said calamity may or may not have been the direct result of nuclear war. Rapture looks suspiciously like those pillars of flame showing during end of the world flashbacks.
Fist Of The North Star
In 199X, the Earth was devastated by nuclear war. Almost all living things went extinct. However, mankind has survived. Also there's a goddamn oil tanker through a skyscraper holy shit what the fuck kinda nuclear war was this.
Future Boy Conan by Miyazaki who was well familiar with this trope.
Gundam X
Gun X Sword takes place on the prison planet of Endless Illusion after Earth has been destroyed.
Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind
To a lesser degree (in that only about half of humanity is gone), Neon Genesis Evangelion. The goal of the protagonists is ostensibly to stop various people and things from finishing the job. Ostensibly.
- In a meta-example, Hideaki Anno actually made a parody radio drama after The End of Evangelion. It was literally called "After the End", and in it the seiyuu discussed what they would do for a sequel now that everything had pretty much gone to hell. It was kind of Anno's own version of the now-famous Spike Spencer "Shinji Rant". Of course, all of that joking about a sequel isn't so funny now, is it??
Robotech, Super Dimension Fortress Macross, and Genesis Climber Mospeada - In Macross especially, where the remnants of humanity and Zentradi eventually manage to rebuild civilization after the planet suffered nuking. Macross City is the capital, built around the SDF-1, with homes, shops, schools and offices, and situated in a barren Alaska, with other cities miles away (possibly around Canada and some of the USA, although it's not specified where each city is located). The creators of the franchise eventually wanted to show a much cheerier image of the post-apocalypse after the big victory, however, the capture of a Zentradi satellite factory helps humanity to colonize the stars, meaning of course that there is a happy ending for most.
Scrapped Princess
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou - whether or not humanity gets better is up for debate, but it puts a very comfy, delicious blanket on what would in lesser hands be a Downer Ending.
Simoun (After The End on a different planet)
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann takes place After The End (in fact, some people think it happens centuries after the conclusion of Neon Genesis Evangelion). Humanity gets better.
ICE
Trinity Blood
Vampire Hunter D
Gilgamesh
Part of Kurozuka takes place after the world has been devastated by unintentional nuclear holocaust (the nuclear powers were trying to destroy an asteroid, but accidentally targeted each other instead) and the resulting nuclear winter.
Hyper Police — the apocalypse brought most fantasy creatures to Earth (gods, oni, beastpeople including werewolves), and left humanity as a protected, endangered species.
Overman King Gainer has the cast believing that the Earth has healed from mankind's presence, and trying to reach Yapan, the home of their ancestors, from Siberia where a good portion of humanity went to live in Domes.
Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, in Acid Tokyo, (a Tokyo destroyed by acid rain where the survivors protect the eponymous reservoir), and, consequentially, Clow.
Getter Robo Armageddon as well as the Hien and Āḥ installments of the manga.
The manga 7Seeds takes place thousands of years after an impact event destroyed human civilization. The only remaining humans on Earth are selected teenagers (and adult guides) who were frozen shortly before the apocalypse.
Trigun (Yes, simply listing it here is a spoiler!): An interesting variation. Turns out the current state of affairs came to be after humans ruined earth and then escaped into the universe. Then some drama happens among the crew, resulting in millions of people dying and the remainder being haphazardly dumped on the planet where the story is set.

Close Anime & Manga

Y The Last Man is a comic series that takes place in a world where a biological event has wiped out half the mammals on Earth; specifically, the males. The main character and his monkey, plus a few exceptions, are the last living y-chromosome carriers, and since our protagonist's fiancée was in Australia at that time and he's still loyal to her, things are nowhere near as rosy as that scenario might suggest. The civilization of the world falls into chaos as infrastructure and industry collapse (not so much because women can't run things, but because there aren't enough of them, and even fewer with the necessary training) but, a few years into the series' real-time run, the all-female society has more-or-less started to function again.
- The DC comic miniseries Me and Joe Priest postulated a lower-key version of Y, with all human males (save the eponymous cleric) and most human females losing the ability to sire children. Much like Children of Men, the population largely gets older and older and waits to die.
Kamandi, The Last Boy On Earth. This Jack Kirby series had Schizo Tech run rampant and Funny Animals ruling feudal nations. Done by DC Comics, although it didn't originally tie into The DCU.
The End League Post apocalyptic superheros who suck really hard at what they do.
Killraven was set in a world where the Martians from The War Of The Worlds came back in the '90s and won this time. It focused on one of the few free human rebels and his attempts to overthrow the alien scourge.
The Esperanto comic book 10 Jarojn Poste ("10 Years After") is set after a devastating nuclear war; the subsequent plague of male sterility, from which only a few men are immune, threatens humanity with extinction.
Judge Dredd is set After The End where outside of a few giant city-states (and a Lunar colony, for some reason), the entire is a barren radioactive desert filled with bizarre mutants.
At the moment, the entire Wildstorm universe is experiencing this. Just what happened, how many are dead, and whether things will ever go back to the way they were before is still up in the air.
Strontium Dog is set on Earth after a nuclear war.
Kingdom takes place after most of humanity has been wiped out by a race of Big Creepy Crawlies known only as Them, and the majority of the survivors are in Suspended Animation in Antarctica (and possibly New Zealand).

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The Land Before Time is, in fact, After The End for the dinosaurs, although whether or not it's their final extinction is never made clear. The too-numerous-to-count direct-to-video sequels would suggest that it's not for the universe's lack of trying, considering everything it's thrown at them so far.
Stalker I think.
The Disney film Dinosaur is similar, and is clear on the subject, explicitly showing the meteors falling.
Planet Of The Apes, and the various sequels and TV series based off it.
Equilibrium
Nearly any zombie movie franchise with enough sequels will eventually have an "after the apocalypse" sequel. Day Of The Dead, Land Of The Dead, Resident Evil: Extinction, and presumably any future sequels to 28 Weeks Later
12 Monkeys
A Boy And His Dog
In Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, much of the Earth has been reduced to a desolate wasteland by a nuclear holocaust, inhabited by mutants. The surviving humans (or rather, their descendants) live in isolated, hi-tech cities. In the TV series that followed, however, the Earth was depicted as being much more hospitable.
Children of Men
Cyborg
Damnation Alley
The original Mad Max takes place Just Before The End, while its sequels, The Road Warrior and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, take place After.
The Matrix
The Last Man On Earth, it's remake The Omega Man, and its remake I Am Legend.
The Quiet Earth, in which an attempt at building a global energy grid reduces the population of the world to three New Zealanders, who only survived because they were on the brink of death at the time. For a while, the survivors enjoy everything the abandoned world has to offer while trying to work out what happened: then the disaster happens again, and the movie ends with only one protagonist left, staring up at an Alien Sky.
Sky Blue
Star Trek First Contact uses the power of Time Travel to visit this time period.
Logans Run is set on a post-apocalyptic Earth where the only survivors live in a hermetically-sealed domed city — except for one crazy old man who lives in the U.S. House of Representatives with his cats.
Taken to an extreme in The Time Machine where Alexander travels to the year 802701, where humanity has started over and split into the normal-looking Eloi and the savage Morloks, and then again to the year 635427810, where the latter has taken over the planet.
The future scenes in the Terminator series.
WALL-E (They recover by the end credits.)
Waterworld
In Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, humanity is forced to live in shelters that protect them from the Phantoms, creatures that kill living beings by stealing their souls by touching them.
Titan AE mostly takes place after Earth was blown up by aliens, and humans are a minority searching for a home in the vastness of space.
9, following a Robot War.

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World War Z.
The Survivalist is a 1980s series of adventure novels by Jerry Ahern about a Crazy Prepared ex-CIA man searching for his family in a post-World War III United States occupied by the Soviet military. Unfortunately the series jumps the shark somewhat after the hero and his family are frozen for 500 years and wake up in a future world to battle neo-Nazis, and neo-Communists led by his old enemy.
Hothouse by Brian Aldiss.
R. Scott Bakker's Second Apocalypse takes place two thousand years after the First Apocalypse. Large parts of the continent are still wasteland.
By the Waters of Babylon by S. V. Benet. Remarkable because it depicts what feels like a world post-atomic-war, complete with ideas of what would and would not be safe to handle after the end—only it was written in the 1930s.
The Tripod series by John Christopher deals with a post-alien invasion future where the only humans not turned into zombie-like slaves are young children.
Neil Cross' Christendom takes place some time after a massive series of global conflicts during which, among other things, America fragmented, the entire population of Japan was wiped out by a Chinese bioweapon, and crashing nuclear satellites bathed large chunks of the planet in radiation.
Zoology of the Future series by Dougal Dixon.
In the fantasy genre, Stephen R. Donaldson's Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever take place in The Land after it's been changed in many apocalyptic ways.
William R. Forstchen's One Second After is a Cozy Catastrophe that begins with an EMP attack on the US and tells what happens in the following year.
Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank opens just before World War III.
David Gemmell's Jon Shannow trilogy is a postapocalyptic series, with elements of The Wild West
Mark S. Geston's first two novels are set in decaying future worlds, some thousands of years after an unspecified catastrophe. In Lords of the Starship a scheme is devised to revitalise the economy of a dying country by using its resources to build a seven-mile long spaceship. Once the ship is built a huge battle is fought over it, then the ship turns on its engines and fries the armies who are fighting over it - and then destroys itself. It has all been a hoax by a Mordor-like country, aimed at depopulating and demilitarizing the rest of the world. Out of the Mouth of the Dragon takes places some centuries later when the world's ecology is in its death throes. A young man sets off to prove himself as a soldier, only to realize that there are no noble causes left to fight for. By the end of the book he seems to be the last man alive sustained by prosthetic body parts, and as the world slowly dies and the sun goes out he realizes that his prosthetics may keep him alive forever in a dead world.
Robert A Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold starts off with World War III, and the rest takes place After.
Stephen King has played with this trope several times.
- The The Dark Tower novels, in which the world has been devastated so many times in so many different eras that reality itself is starting to break down. This trope is largely present in the final book, when Roland ventures into the tower, and King tells the reader they can finish there, or continue on. The "after-ending" involves Roland going all the way back to near the beginning of his quest, but this time, he has the knowledge (and a certain item) to finally complete his quest.
  - A more on interpretation is that Roland didn't quite get it right. He just got it MORE right, and will get it more right the next time, and the next, and eventually the entire ka-tet might make it to the Tower with him, meaning he finally did get it right.
- Cell opens right before a mysterious cell-phone-transmitted brainwipe brings about The End Of The World As We Know It.
- The Stand opens right before a viral bioweapon brings about The End Of The World As We Know It.
Sterling Lanier's Hiero's Journey and The Unforsaken Hiero are set mainly in what used to be Canada, prior to World War III (now long past). The protagonist's mission in the first book is to rediscover computer technology, because his people are running into information management problems and have enough historical knowledge to realize that computer information retrieval could solve them.
World Made By Hand, by James Howard Kunstler, is set in a future where industrial civilization has collapsed simply from petroleum depletion and resultant stresses on socioeconomic systems. (Terrorists also destroyed Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles with nuclear bombs, but there was never any all-out nuclear war.) This is one of a fairly new genre of post-oil novels
In CS Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, Charn is absolutely dead except for Jadis herself.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is an After The End book most notable for being dark, brutal and, at its core, optimistic.
Robert McCammon's Swan Song is a post-apocalyptic novel with fantasy/horror underpinnings.
A Canticle For Leibowitz, by Walter Miller, is an interesting version of this trope. The storyline spans over a thousand years, beginning in a post-nuclear war Dark Age. The second part is set in a second Renaissance, with the re-flourishing of scientific knowledge, and the third and final part is set in the equivalent of the contemporary age. The novel concludes with a second nuclear war. One assumes the cycle is due to start again, though, as human beings are by now capable of interstellar travel and at least some of them get off Earth before the bombs land.
Andre Norton examples:
- Breed to Come is set in a post-human world in which the disease that wiped out the humans led to the rise of several other intelligent species, among them the protagonist's. His eldest surviving relative has spent his life studying the remains of human civilization and acquiring any technological advances that might benefit his people.
- The short story "The Gifts of Asti" opens just as Memphir, the protagonist's homeland, is falling to a barbarian invasion. She - the last priestess of a mostly-forsaken religion - follows a standing order about what to do After The End (which was mentioned in prophecy), and takes a prepared escape route. She ends up on the far side of a mountain range to find a vast plain that was glassed in a now-forgotten war.
- No Night Without Stars opens several generations after The End Of The World As We Know It, which appears to have been due to a Colony Drop.
- Sea Siege opens on a small Caribbean island that is having trouble with mutant sea creatures - just before World War III.
- Star Man's Son (a.k.a. Daybreak - 2250 A.D.) opens generations after World War III. The protagonist is suffering from his culture's prejudice against mutants.
In H. Beam Piper's short story "The Answer", the protagonists - an American and a Russian - managed to survive the destruction of their respective nations, and are now working in South America. The titular answer is to the question, why was Auburn, New York, the first casualty of World War III - particularly since the Soviets then threw away the advantage of a first strike and didn't follow it up? The town wasn't destroyed by the Soviets, but by a Colony Drop - specifically, of an antimatter meteor - and nobody recognized it for what it was until after one of the protagonists, who witnessed the destruction of Auburn and investigated it, witnessed the results of a similar, artificial antimatter experiment in South America.
Reeves' Mortal Engines takes place after the Sixty Minute War, a conflict so devastating it caused centuries of geological instability and fundamentally changed the geography of the Earth (the North American continent is glassed, and severed from South America through the complete obliteration of Central America). The human race is forced into gigantic mobile cities... which then consume all surface resources and have to eat each other.
M.P. Shiel's 1901 novel The Purple Cloud finds a man returning from a Polar expedition to discover that seemingly all other humans and animals on the planet have been killed by the purple cloud of the title.
In Olaf Stapleton's Last and First Men, 99% of humanity is wiped out in a huge geological upheaval, with humanity thrown back to the stone age and forced to crawl back to dominance over several million years, and evolving into the 2nd, 3rd, etc Men. Eventually Earth must be abandoned when the Moon comes crashing down, and later Venus, Man's new home, is threatened and must be abandoned for a final home on Neptune. The book ends with the 17th (Last) Men awaiting the end as the Sun threatens to go nova.
Earth Abides, by George Stewart.
S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series begins with a mysterious "Change" in the laws of physics that abruptly makes all powered machinery (even steam engines) inoperable and explosives inert. (To date the cause of the Change has never been revealed and, without high-tech equipment, even scientific research to discover it is impossible; the default explanation is Alien Space Bats.) Before long most of humanity dies of starvation and the survivors have to rebuild society on a low-tech basis. "Ethnogenesis," the emergence of new cultures, ensues. One state, founded by SC Adians, is modeled on Medieval Normandy; another, founded by Wiccans or neopagans, consciously imitates a Medieval Scottish clan; etc. Large areas are inhabited only by cannibals who have forgotten about civilized culture entirely. The new states are often at war with each other, using armor, swords and bows.
- In his Peshawar Lancers the End came in the Victorian era in the form of a Big Rock From The Sky and so much effort went into survival the technology and culture has more or less frozen at the time period (at least in the dominant culture).
Harry Turtledove's Valley-Westside War is set in a fairly typical post-nuclear world. The twist is that it's set in an Alternate History (this is a Turtledove story after all) where the war happened in 1967 and the protagonists are scientists from a future history where travel across alternates has been discovered who are studying the world to see how and why things went wrong.
There is an entire subgenre of speculative fiction referred to as Dying Earth, named after the writings of Jack Vance. Often, these works have a sword and sorcery feel, but with clear hints that this is the future. The above show Thundarr is definitely of this mold.
The Uglies Series, by Scott Westerfield, features a world where nothing using gas works and apparently humanity's population is reduced and controlled, and segregated into the epynomous Uglies, and Pretties ( And Specials.)
The Pelbar heptalogy by Paul O. Williams is set in North America 1000 years after a nuclear war, describing how the communities along the Heart River (formerly the Mississippi) are trying to reforge anything resembling a nation.
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, who liked this sort of thing, is about a society recovering after a catastrophe, which the hyper-Christian characters call "The Tribulation" and is implied to be a nuclear war/disaster. In the protagonist's community, any living thing showing signs of genetic abnormality is considered a Satanic abomination, including human beings. His having telepathy is therefore something of a concern.
Roger Zelazny's This Immortal (which was originally serialized as ...And Call Me Conrad), which is better than his book Damnation Alley (which the movie of the same name is based on).
In the Pendragon novel, The Pilgrims of Rayne, Bobby discovers that the tropical island paradise of Ibara is actually Veelox after three hundred years have passed. The rest of Veelox is a crumbling wasteland and the people not living in Ibara aren't much better than animals. In Raven Rise, Third Earth could probably also fit this trope well.
The Gold Eagle adventure series Deathlands takes place in a post-WW 3 United States plagued by crazed mutants and power-hungry barons.
The Shattered World and The Burning Realm are fantasy novels set a thousand years After The End of a world that literally got broken into fragments. Desperate damage-control by the resident mages has preserved the fragments in a vast envelope of air, and equipped all the pieces big enough for settlements with Runestones that provide gravity and a regular orbit. Unfortunately, the Runestones' magic is almost exhausted, making these both After The End novels and Just Before The End novels.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, earth was nuked, a lot, the few remaining survivors wear clothes made of lead when going outside.
Patrick Tilley's Amtrack Wars takes place about a thousand years after a nuclear war and revolves around the coflict between the surface dwelling Mutes and the underground based Amtrack Federation.

Close Literature

Battlestar Galactica
- Doubly so in the 2000s version.
- Not really. That one more took place "before the begininng".
Jeremiah
Jericho
Survivors
Whoops
Ark II
Red Dwarf, though it diverges wildly, being, not after the end of Earth, but after everyone on the spaceship Red Dwarf died, except Lister, who was in stasis. Since it's 3 million years after, the characters assume that all other humans are deceased.
- The first episode was actually titled "The End". Take that as you will.
The Starlost takes place on a generation ship launched from an Earth that was destroyed by some unspecified disaster shortly afterward.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry made together three separate pilot movies for essentially the same series premise: Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Strange New World.
Star Trek itself could be considered an "After The After The End" story - centuries before the show, humans almost destroyed themselves in a nuclear war, but then climbed their way back up to become greater than they were before.
Two American TV movies made in the early 80s, Testament and The Day After, both attempted to dramatize the horrors of a nuclear war and its aftermath in as realistic a fashion as possible.
- Thankfully, the only channel likely to show them nowadays is the Sci Fi Channel.
The UK equivalents are The War Game (1965, broadcast 1985) and Threads (1984). Both build up to and feature a full-scale thermonuclear holocaust, then - Threads in particular - keep going and get worse. Threads continues to scare those who watched it almost 25 years ago.
- These films mentioned here probably take as their basic inspiration the Kruschev quote about nuclear war that "The living will envy the dead."
  - And yet, neither of the American movies will fuck with your head like "Threads". I saw it in my freshman year of high school and haven't been the same since. Additionally, my sophomore AP Bio teacher had graduated from my school(and was only eight years older than us); when one student mistakenly mentioned that the teacher in question showed her students The Day After, Bio teach(having gone through this himself) replied, "No, she shows Threads and that's a million times worse."
  - Just in case you need more convincing, the second half of "Threads" takes place in a nuclear wasteland - post-apocalypse England, which is populated mostly by ill and dying people, people scared to the point of total paranoia, and corrupt military and government officials. The narrator implies that things are MUCH worse in the US and Russia. Eventually the film fast-forwards to 10 years after the nuclear war, where the new generation is made up of thuggish, possibly retarded teenagers and sickly, often insane adults. And it's implied there may not be a generation after that as a girl's reaction to the baby she's just delivered suggests that it's horribly deformed.
Cleopatra 2525.
The fourth season finale of Babylon Five shows Earth being bombed back into the Dark Ages about 500 years after the end of the series only to emerge as Vorlon-like creatures a million years later.
Sometime after Power Rangers SPD (anywhere between a couple of decades to a century after 2025), the Earth has been turned into a apocalyptic wasteland, with most of the population dead, and with the survivors living in a single domed city. As late as the 31st century the ecosystem is still dead, and the population is being born in labs so that they won't be mutants.
In the Doctor Who special "Planet of the Dead", the Doctor arrives on a once-inhabited world which has been turned into a wasteland by an alien invasion.
- Also, the entire finale episode of season three explores the Earth a year after the Master has taken control of it.
Andromeda is set 300 years after the collapse of ~~the Federation~~ the Commonwealth so it's After The End on a galactic scale.
The Discovery Channel has a pseudo reality series based on this trope called The Colony, where a group of ten people with varying skills, professions, and backgrounds band together to try and eke out a living in a simulated post-apocalyptic environment. It's filmed in Los Angeles, so you conclude the joke.
The Dollhouse episode "Epitaph One" takes place after massive remote wiping and imprinting is used as a weapon, resulting in the fall of civilization.
A recurring sketch in the third season of That Mitchell And Webb Look parodied the concept through an After The End Game Show, "The Quiz Broadcast"; turns out, having a quiz show after 'The Event' is quite difficult when almost all human knowledge has been eradicated.

Close Live Action TV

The Postal Service song "We Will Become Sillhouettes" seems to be set in the aftermath of nuclear destruction. The titular sillhouettes are a reference to the ghostly images of people that were left behind on walls after the nuclear bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.◊ In a classic example of Lyrical Dissonance, the song sounds like a normal peppy, Postal Service electro-pop love song.

Close Music

Near the end of Johnny Hart's life, he revealed B.C. to take place in a post-apocalyptic world by having new character Anno Domini have copies of, among other things, phone books and The Bible in his cave.
- So it was Earth All Along sorta.

Close Newspaper Comics

Twilight 2000. The canonical example of an RPG which plays the post-apocalypse setting deadly straight and right at the latter end of the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, without using it as an excuse to have supernatural weirdness or mutants.
Deadlands: Hell on Earth features a pretty straightforward nuclear war. Oh, and then the bombs turned out to be fueled by angry spirits, too. And then the Horsemen Of The Apocalypse appear. And then it gets really bad.
Gamma World is set on an Earth which, centuries after some ill-defined global catastrophe, is populated with mutants of every mental and physical stripe, sentient animals and plants, insane malfunctioning robots and even humans. The players are strongly encouraged to not take this very seriously. The RPG credits Lanier's Hiero books, Aldiss' Hothouse, and Andre Norton's Star Man's Son as influences (see Literature).
In the backstory of Warhammer 40000, roughly around the 25th millennium, humanity's golden age was brought to a halt by "soulless" robots known as Men of Iron, and humanity descended into in-fighting until the God-Emperor managed to reunite much of humanity. However, the Imperium of man is now beset from the outside by aliens and demons and from the inside by mutants and heretics, and technological progress has effectively stagnated, with the "tech-priests" of the Adeptus Mechanicus content to seek the remnants of lost technology rather than invent new technology.
- Humanity's golden age was brought to an end by the Horus Heresy, where fully half of the human race turned to worshipping demons and wiping out the other half. The God-Emperor was permanently injured in a lethal duel with their leader, Horus (in a way, the Emperor's son), to the point that he is only kept alive by an extremely complex life support device. Since then, it has stood on the brink of destruction for 15,000 years... and considering that it has been said there are flaws in the device beyond repair, it may be coming soon.
  - For the majority of humanity, the "Dark Age of Technology" was a greater golden age than the height of the Imperium, but the attitudes and lifestyles of that era are not well regarded by the Imperium. The Horus Heresy occurred 5,000 years later, in A.D. 30,000, and some, including Tzeentch, one of the four main Chaos Gods, theorise that if the Emperor dies, he will be reborn as a full-blown god, destroy the Chaos Gods, and lead humanity to eternal victory.
  - To elaborate, in 40K, where all emotions are shadowed in the Warp, faith is literally power - and the Emperor is the object of worship for an unbelievably huge and ridiculously fanatical state-enforced cult.
- Until then, the latest edition explicitly refers to the 'current' time as the Time of Ending, and at least a dozen different doomsday scenarios are fast approaching. That Deus Ex Machina had better come soon...
- Not likely. In the grim darkness of the future there is only war, remember?
- Known apocalypses in the Warhammer 40000 'verse: The Age of Strife, at the end of the Dark Age of Technology; the Horus Heresy, at the end of the Great Crusade; the Age of Apostasy, following the First Age of the Imperium; and, arguably, the Time of Ending, which is going on right now. After each one, humanity recovered; after each, the recovery was less complete, and society became worse. Note that there are quite likely at least a few apocalypses that have simple not been named.
  - Now, now people, let's not be humanity-centric here. There have been at least several other apocalypses involving other races going on, the most recent and significant must be the fall of the Eldar, although there is of course the apocalypse that wiped out the Old Ones as well. In fact look at any race (bar the Tau) and you'll find an apocalypse or two somewhere in their background (though with Chaos they were usually CAUSING them).
  - How can the Fall of the Eldar have avoided mention yet? The space elves' galactic empire that existed long before the Imperium was brought to an abrupt end when they partied so hard they created a god of excessive pleasure, whose birth tore a hole in reality (the Eye of Terror) and created the fourth Chaos God (Slaanesh). Now all Eldar get tortured for eternity by him when they die and Chaos has a massive, impenetrable base of operations.
Battle Tech (Although the 'end' happens after humans have colonized space).
- Battle Tech has had multiple Apocalypses:
  - The Age of War before the Star League was founded
  - The War of the Usurper that collapsed the Star League
  - The 1st Succession War after the collapse which bombed the galaxy back to the stone Age (barely 20th century tech, with how to make mecha and starships all but lost, though not how to repair them).. this was followed by 2 more wars lasting 300 years all together
  - The Clan Invasion, where 1000 planets fell to outside invaders
  - The Federated Commonwealth Civil War, costing 100 BILLION lives
  - The Word of Blake Jihad, a deliberate attempt to once again bomb the inner sphere into the dark ages, costing several TRILLION Lives over a 13 year-long war. Planetary saturation nuclear orbital strikes were common.
Exalted takes place after 3 different Ends, and is set at End Of An Age. First was the Primordial War (named after the Primordials, the creators of the universe, who lose), involving the extinction of scores of civilizations and races; most of Creation was burned up by a sore loser's last act before surrendering. Then the First Age, was ended by the Usurpation. Lastly, a plague made by a ghost of a Solar killed in the Usurpation, and powered by the corpse/ghost of a killed Primordial, killed 90% of the population, and was followed by a invasion of The Fair Folk, who succeeded in unmaking half of Creation (by area).
The Dark Sun campaign setting for Dungeons And Dragons was in its ancient past a typical Medieval European Fantasy world, but centuries of wizards abusing magic turned it into a blasted desert planet whose inhabitants have mostly turned to barbarism.
- Game designers' early descriptions of what Dark Sun would be like actually referred to it as "the Forgotten Realms after they dropped the Bomb".
Palladium's After The Bomb setting (originally a spin-off of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, now separate) takes place in a post-apocalyptic world populated by both human survivors and mutant animals.
Palladium's later Rifts setting takes place in a world where the psychic energy generated by the many casualties of a nuclear war led to the opening of dimensional portals across Earth, unleashing magic and other-dimensional creatures on an already apocalyptic Earth.
Paranoia is set after a nuclear war.. or something.. ended with The Computer ruling over a huge population living underground in Alpha Complex which may be a dome city.
The Chronicles Of Fate. After The End + Earth Is A Battlefield + Schizo Tech + Weird Science + Fantasy Kitchen Sink + People Of Mass Destruction + Trope Overdosed + Beyond The Impossible + Turned Up To Eleven = good clean fun for the whole family.
Earthdawn is set in the Earth after a devastating invasion of other-dimensional Horrors wiped out most living things on the surface and mutated what was left. The Horrors (mostly) returned to their home plane after the level of magic dropped too low for them to stay, allowing the survivors to re-emerge from their retreats and begin to repopulate the planet.
The GURPS supplement Reign Of Steel depicted a post- Robot War setting where Earth is divided up and ruled by eighteen artificial intelligences and the human population is just 37 million, most of which are either in slave camps of one sort or another or are hunted like wild animals in the wilderness. The catchphrase: 'The war is over. The robots won.'

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DOOM, DOOM II and Final DOOM all take place with practically every other human on whichever chosen planet the game takes place on dead before you even start moving. Although (in DOOM II you return the favour and destroy almost every demon in existence.)
The sequels to the video game Half Life take place on an Earth devastated by alien invasion.
Fallout and its sequels take place in a world that's been ravaged by global thermo-nuclear war. Most of the world is a desolate wasteland, and of the few places that haven't been destroyed most are either highly toxic, radioactive, or inhabited by the worst scum of humanity. See the quote at the top of the page.
The House Of The Dead III takes place after the "world collapse", a Zombie Apocalypse brought about by The Virus thought to be unleashed by EFI.
The second half of Final Fantasy VI, which completely alters the world map and jumps forward a year in time...not to mention having one of the most depressing 2D cinematics of all time.
- Technically, Final Fantasy VI goes through this twice: the War of the Magi, set long before the start of the game, ripped the world apart so badly it took mankind 1000 years just to rediscover steam.
Advance Wars: Days Of Ruin (AW: Dark Conflict in Europe) takes place after a meteor storm that wiped most of mankind.
The Visual Novel Planetarian takes place in a future world that is slowly dying after a devastating war that killed off most of humanity.
The games in the Shin Megami Tensei series all take place after the end of the world, for the most part. The nuclear apocalypse occurs about a fourth of the way through the first game, when God sends Thor to own Japan.
- Actually the Second Megaten game Megami Tensei (NES) starts immediately After The End In other words the world is already laid to ruin from Nuclear war.
- Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne starts the game by ending the world. You spend the rest of the game rebuilding it in your image.
- Digital Devil Saga also takes place After The End. (Though not in the way it appears at first.)
Deus Ex: Invisible War takes place 20 years after the Great Collapse triggered by JC Denton, yet in that time, civilization has returned to its pre-collapse level. See Apocalypse Not.
The Mega Man timeline is complicated. The X and Zero series, while Darker And Edgier, were definitely not After The End. The ZX series takes place in a world that's recovered from the crap the last two series went through for the most part, and the only real one could be said to be Legends, and and even that one is questionable. A REAL After The End is shown in Star Force 2 with the Apollo Flame "second quest", where Geo discovers an alternate universe which demonstrates what would have happened if Lady Vega's plans had actually succeeded. And it's probably the darkest in the entire series, par none, considering every human on the planet has been killed off. The HSQ goes straight through the roof here.
- Mega Man Zero 3's backstory refers to a war after the X series that wiped out 90% of reploids and 60% of humanity.
Homeworld
2300 A.D. in Chrono Trigger.
Xenogears can count, after all, Miang decided to start a nuclear holocaust so grand that thousands of years later, there are only three big cities left on the surface of the world without most modern technology.
Phantasy Star III and Phantasy Star IV do this. It's heavily disguised in III, but it becomes apparent relatively early in IV.
- Phantasy Star Online did it twice. First with their homeworld starts to wither and second being the civilization that sealed Dark Falz away.
Etrian Odyssey is established as being one of these in the intro... but the exact nature of the world Before The End is intentionally left vague at first.
Mother 3, though you wouldn't think so until the end, when it's revealed the two small neighboring islands the game takes place on are the last inhabitable areas on earth.
Between Halo 2 and 3 the Covenant have captured and laid waste to Earth in their search for the Ark, supposedly reducing the population to about 300,000,000. And before the trilogy started, they wiped out Reach and most other human colonies.
- Sorto it's implied that the Covenant missed a few major colonies and the Glassing isn't nearly as effected as you think (the Spartan III's are children of thse glassed worlds so making thousands of them is never a problem)
The Post-Apocalypse era after the aliens created a Temporal Paradox and brought about The End Of The World As We Know It in Duke Nukem: Zero Hour.
Exmortis 2 is all about this: after the war between the human race and the Exmortis, the Earth has been reduced to a barren desert, inhabited only by the few humans still surviving and the Exmortis horde. For added effect, the sky has turned blood red, and the aforementioned survivors are continuously preyed upon by roaming bands of Exmortis travelling upon dark red stormclouds.
Tales Of Phantasia takes place several hundred years after an end caused by a great war weakening a hyperadvanced [[Magitech magi-technological]] society too much for it to fend off a large meteor, which wiped out pretty much everything. By the time the game starts, mankind is in the dark ages both mystically and technologically (you go back a few hundred years to a point still after the impact and things are even more primative). You also go to the future, where Magitech is juuust being rediscovered, and one of the first devices they're making is the very device which during the great war weakened mankind too much for it to defend itself.
- The prequel, Tales Of Symphonia, takes place some 4000 years after a great war very much like the above one but even more damaging in its effects (at any given time 50% of the world is suffering massive resource depletion), with mankind being prevented from advancing beyond the medieval stage by a powerful theocracy (to keep them from overtaxing the limited remaining resources). The heroes fix that, even restoring the magic tree which provides the resources and destroying the theocracy- setting mankind up for the disastrous great war mentioned in Phantasia.
Primal Rage shows in its Attract Mode that the world was hit by a giant asteroid, laying waste to all civilization... and awakening a number of powerful, ancient lifeforms. They now face each other in one-on-one deathmatches in order to determine which of them will be the god of "New Urth".
In Crystalis, the Protagonist Without A Past awakes from being a Human Popsicle 100 years after civilization was thrown back to the dark ages in a great war. "October 1997, The End Day" is a Shout Out to Terminator.
Might & Magic, or at least one of the worlds visited. Enroth/Colony was a thriving, high-technological and magically developed planet before, within a hundred years, the robots of the most important control centre for technology went crazy and overran it, a love drama lead to nukes being used in what was before one of the nicer areas on the planet, a massive rebellion occured against the increasingly tyrannical Governor, and a general alien invasion of the entire civilization led to the entire arm of the Galaxy being cut off from the rest of the worlds, with intrastellar infrastructure and communication being destroyed. The last is specifically cited as having caused 'a fall into barbarism and witchcraft' not only on this world, but on many others...
Metroid has an interesting variant in exploring the remains of fallen alien civilisations, often finding an Apocalyptic Log of how they fell. Particularly in the Metroid Prime series.
In Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Raziel is thrown into the abyss at the height of his empire's power and comes back 1000 or 10000 years (or more) later to find it a crumbling, decaying wasteland. Although in this case, there was no cataclysm, just a gradual downward spiral.
In Rayforce, Earth has been overtaken and transformed by the supercomputer-turned-Eldritch Abomination "Con Human". The game, of course, ends with an Earth Shattering Kaboom.
Super. Robot. Wars. Alpha. Gaiden. Starting with chapter 10, it's a future that had, as part of it's backstory, the backstories of Xabungle, Gundam X, and Turn A Gundam, fused togther in typical SRW fashion. "Apocalyptic clusterfuck" is about the only way to truely describe it.
In Wind Waker, the entire world is flooded, and only the Chosen have survived; the rest were killed off. The graphics make light of this, but over 90% of the population of the planet is still dead.

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Blade Of Toshubi is set on a future Earth where the only humans survive in arks orbiting Earth while animals have been artificially 'evolved' into sentient bipeds.
Similarly, the "Aylee" arc from Sluggy Freelance shows an Alternate Universe where "ghouls" have overrun the Earth, with most of humanity's survivors living in orbital spaceships.
Magical Misfits is set in the far future after magic returned & killed some humans while changing others into creatures of mythology.
Unicorn Jelly
Freak Angels is heavy with this. "London is drowning," seems to be the catchphrase here. Significant prtions of Great Britain (and perhaps the world) are submerged underwater, and it turns out that the eponymous protagonists are to blame.
Bubble Wrap - where most of humanity was wiped out due to a contagious virus. The surviving humans don't have to wear protective suits at all times...unless they have an aversion to dying, in which case it's a good idea to stay dressed.
Gone With The Blastwave is set during a post-apocalyptic war. It draws on a number of sources, and in many ways is something of a Black Humor parody of them.
This Amazing Super Powers.
White Noise takes place 120 years after a hostile alien race temporarily halted the rotation of the Earth, killing everyone and everything not on one of the three space colonies.
Post Nuke Comic takes place following Armageddon.
O31 is set in San Francisco in a world where all electricity has simply and mysteriously disappeared (which was followed promptly by gigantic explosions worldwide).
The Ends is set in a post-nuclear wasteland, but that's only the beginning of the wierdness. Apparently the nuclear apocalypse set up a Groundhog Day Loop, forcing its inhabitants to endure an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

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The Flintstones is debated whether the characters are truly prehistoric or post-apocalyptic, trying to mimick past modern conveniences.
- It has been established that The Jetsons is set in the future of The Flintstones. Then again, this could simply mean that the population in Flinstones eventually rebuilt themselves to their former glory. The fact that the ground is a wasteland in The Jetsons seems to support the idea of an apocalypse.
Ralph Bakshi's Wizards.
Surprisingly common in Saturday morning adventure series intended for children:
- Thundarr The Barbarian
  - The catastrophe happens in the far future year of 1994!
- Return To The Planet Of The Apes
- Captain Power And The Soldiers Of The Future
- Sonic The Hedgehog
Parodied in Futurama, in which Fry, believing that he has somehow been frozen for another thousand years, finds himself in a post-apocalyptic world; as it turns out, it's just contemporary Los Angeles.
- Note that in Fry's first millennium freeze, aliens in flying saucers came and leveled civilization on Earth (or, at the very least, New York), from which it rose again. Twice! One of which was apparently time-traveling Bender's fault.
An often overlooked movie called Rock & Rule (or Ring of Power as the chopped-up kids version is called) is about a world where, after a nuclear war, humans and animals merged together. The world has become surprisingly civilized, as most everything is done using rock music. The Big Bad of the film, a person known as "Mok" (a parody Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger) pilots a giant airship shaped like his face, and plans to throw a giant concert in which he hopes will raise the Anti-Christ.
Skyland was set after a point in which the entire world had broken up into sections, and required air vehicles to move between sections.
While at first glance the setting of Inherit the Earth may look like a fantasy world of humanoid animals, the intro reveals that they became that way thanks to genetic tampering by humans, who may have wiped out by a plague.

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Large parts of Africa & the Middle East.
Not to mention Chernobyl...
From a dinosaur's point of view, Earth.

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