Master of Unlocking

The master, herself, showing how it's done.

"And Jill, here's a lockpick. It might be handy if you, the master of unlocking, take it with you."

— Barry Burton to the Trope Namer, Resident Evil

In certain video games, the humble Locked Door is among the most complex devices the Player Character is likely to encounter, requiring years of specialised training to comprehend its intricate workings. Faced with this diabolical machinery, a lesser man will turn and run in terror, their mission forever incomplete. But one of the NPCs with you has no such fears; their senses have been dulled to the terror before them. They step forward boldly. Maybe they deliver a sharp kick or shoulder barge. Maybe they pull out some lockpicks, an Improvised Lockpick, a door-opening computerised contraption, or an explosive charge. Regardless, once they've worked their magic, the dastardly door lies forever defeated, the way forward clear.

You've just witnessed a Master of Unlocking at work.

Typically, the Master of Unlocking is a plot contrivance to explain why only certain doors can be opened, since only the master can correctly determine which doors are vulnerable to their awe-inspiring skills; that, or the developers are trying to make NPCs appear useful without having them actually do anything. It's also used to avoid Interchangeable Antimatter Keys. If a player character is Master of Unlocking in a game with more than one PC, it's probably to allow them into areas the others can't go. If they're the only character, their skill with certain doors is likely to just be covering up loading the next room; either that, or some doors will be harder or riskier to open than others, but have bigger rewards.

In a movie, a character whose skill with lockpicks or doors is noted is likely to have Chekhov's Skill or Chekhov's Hobby, with their talent being useful in a specific situation or bought up in a stressful one.

Related to Plot Coupon; one might be required before the Master of Unlocking can get to work, such as a set of picks or a passcard for their decoding device. Often related to Law of Conservation of Detail if the Master is an NPC; it means the pesky player won't try to open all those doors the developer didn't put anything behind. Utility Party Member is a more general variation of a Non-Player Companion who has several non-combat skills essential to advancing through the game.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Tooru Amuro from Case Closed is one of these, which is rather odd since Japanese law prohibits possession of any lockpicking tools and carries a penalty of one-year imprisonment or a 500,000 yen fine. It's revealed that Amuro's a public security officer tasked with investigating certain sensitive cases.
• Hiro Amanokawa from Digimon Ghost Game displayed his lockpicking skills a few times.
• This is Dario's main skill in Hana no Ko Lunlun. He saves a Sicilian little girl who gets Locked in a Freezer during a hide-and-seek game, and since Lunlun witnesses this she becomes rather interested in what he can do. It turns out that years ago he helped out in a huge robbery for Healthcare Motivation reasons, and now he's an Punch Clock Villain fugitive waiting for the Statute of Limitations to kick in...
• Sherlock Holmes of Moriarty the Patriot routinely picks almost every lock that inconveniences him, and even makes a joke about not thinking a jail cell was locked.
• Jyugo from Nanbaka often uses these skills to escape from prison. It is actually the only thing he is good at. He is so incompetent at everything else that he can't even take baths alone.

Comic Books

• The Authority: Midnighter can apparently pick locks faster than Jack can kick down doors, although why a man who can literally command cities would even need to kick down a door is never explained.
• Batman villain the Spook is a master locksmith and escape who can supposedly open any lock.
• Tolly in Castle Waiting is a Hammerling "doorman", which means that he has a near-supernatural ability to sense weaknesses in natural rock formations and constructed walls, and knock holes in them with minimal effort.
• This is the gimmick of Justice League of America villain The Key.
  The Key: Didn't your parents ever warn you there was a man you couldn't lock your doors against.
• Mortadelo y Filemón: Mortadelo proves quite often to be very efficient with a lockpick. He sometimes parodies the trope instead by using his "master key" — a giant key (taller than himself) with which he simply smashes the door to pieces.
• Unsurprisingly Harry Houdini fills this role in Rough Riders.
• Wonder Woman (1942): Serva actually laments how good she is at picking locks since Hypnota placed a trigger in her mind that she has to obey so even though she'd been sent to a safe location she picks the lock and escapes back to her tormentor Hypnota when she hears the trigger.
• X-Men: Jean Grey never had a key made for her dorm at the Xavier School since she could just use her telekinesis to manipulate the tumblers. Of course, since every X-Man has to lose their powers once in a while, it's surely come back to bite her a few times. Similarly, Kitty Pryde can just phase through.
  • Storm was a thief before she was a goddess before she was a superhero, and her skills remain sharp. That headdress most of her costumes have actually hides a set of lockpicks that have come in very handy over the years.

Fan Works

• Batman 1939: In Dangers of Being Cold Catwoman is sought out and hired for her expert lock-picking skill. In Three's Company both she and Zatanna are shown as highly skilled with lockpicks.
• The Bridge: Key Ring's Cutie Mark is a key inside a padlock. He says his special talent is to unlock anything.
• Deserted Distractions: Thanks to Yami Bakura's muscle memory, Ryou is able to pick locks and untie knots without fail.
• Fallout: Equestria: Littlepip is very handy at picking locks. At first she starts with the typical pick set, but later on, her telekinesis is so well-developed that she can manipulate the pins themselves inside the lock. She lampshades one of the oddities of the games, in that she appears to be the only person with any lockpicking skill whatsoever since centuries-old boxes with rather easy locks are still completely untouched. Steelhooves thinks she's a highly-trained covert agent partly because of her lockpicking skills.
• Little Hands, Big Attitude:
  • Rouge, being a thief for most of her life, makes a complete joke out of the military's black site where Shadow is stored.
  • Shadow can use Chaos Energy to manipulate electronic locks.
• The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: Omake-only character Reel, as Kamen Rider Skull the Second, uses this power to defeat the Nightmare in the fifth omake chapter - the attack he uses permanently unbinds every atom in its intangible body, banishing it to the next realm to be judged by the other Powers.

Gamebooks

• In the Kai series of Lone Wolf books, the basic Mind over Matter discipline is mostly used to open locks and disarm traps. It doesn't always avoid having to use the proper keys with some ancient or magical locks, or whenever Lone Wolf has no time to spare since it's a time-consuming process.

Films — Live-Action

• Sing, the main character in Kung Fu Hustle.
  Brother Sum: A bum like that could come in handy.
• The Matrix Reloaded: The Keymaker, a program that has the key to the Source. He also has all sorts of other keys.
  Trinity: I need a download to hotwire a motorcycle.
  Link: Not a problem. One crash course in motorcycle —
  Keymaker: [holds up a motorcycle key]
  Trinity: Wait! Cancel that. [takes key] You are handy.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series: Ethan Hunt carries and is very good with his lockpicks. In M:I-III he uses them to get through an old door in the Vatican so casually that a passerby probably wouldn't notice he wasn't using a key.
• In Now You See Me, Jack Wilder is undisputed king of this trope. However, at least Henley and Daniel can pick handcuffs themselves.
  Jack Wilder: Nothing's ever locked.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day:
  • John Connor has a laptop password-cracking program. He mostly uses it to commit ATM fraud, but it ends up being helpful in unlocking the storage unit where the remains of the original Terminator are kept within Cyberdyne HQ. Extended in the comics where in one case he used the exact same program to crack Skynet itself with a line of codes finishing "Easy Money."
  • In the same movie, Sarah Connor doesn't do too badly with actual locks, using just a bent paper clip. Meta example within the same film: Linda Hamilton learned how to pick locks for real for that scene (and did so, even while tied down). There was some struggle when it came to the British release because the censorship bureau feared that people would learn how to do it from seeing the movie.
  • Miles Dyson, the lead developer on the Terminator Tech at Cyberdyne has a master key and is able to pull this off for a bit, but once the building goes into lockdown, his master key is useless. Twice he starts working on complicated solutions, only to be beaten by the titular Terminator and John Connor, both of who prefer a low tech solution.
    Dyson: [swipes his security badge only to get an error] My key card isn't working.
    Terminator: [Loading his Grenade Launcher] Here, let me try mine.
    Sarah: John! Fire in the hole! [pulls Dyson to cover]
• TRON:
  • Flynn has a talent for electronic locks among his various skills and uses it to open the huge main door at ENCOM.
  • So does Flynn's son, Sam, in TRON: Legacy.
• Parodied (like everything else in the movie) in Undercover Blues. Jane is working on picking a lock, while Jeff is providing running commentary to their baby daughter, who they brought along on their burglary. Jane mentions she is better than Jeff at lock-picking, to which Jeff tells their daughter "Someday soon your Mommy will teach you how to pick locks. And at the rate she is going, it may very well be this lock". Seconds later, Jane unlocks the door.

Literature

• Jerin of A Brother's Price is this, due to his grandmothers having been spies.
• Jesper of Brotherband serves as this for the crew. Being an ex-Impossible Thief helps. (No one's quite sure whether he's telling the truth about the "ex".)
• The Dark Profit Saga: Heraldin is very insistent that he's a bard, not a thief (anymore), but put him in front of a lock and ask him to pick it and after a minute of insisting he's not a thief, it'll just fall open.
• Mister Brown in the Discworld novel Hogfather is a veteran thieves' guild-affiliated lockpick, and renowned in the city. Pity he decided to work with Mr. Teatime, who promptly has him killed once He Has Outlived His Usefulness.
• In The Dungeoneers, Colm can pick any lock if he sets his mind to it.
• Harry Potter:
  • The Weasley Twins from have taught themselves lockpicking for situations where magic doesn't work or would be ill-advised.
  • In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Sirius gives Harry a penknife for Christmas that can open any door, even if they've been enchanted against spells like Alohomora (the standard door-unlocking spell), which he uses a little over a year later in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix to break into Umbridge's office. Later in the book, Harry tries to enter a locked room in the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry of Magic using the knife, only for the blade to melt clean off as the room is just that well-protected.
• Maximum Ride: Iggy is self-taught and the only one shown to know how to pick locks. Plus, he's blind.
• The ability to open anything (not limited to doors) is an explicit superpower in Neverwhere, belonging to Door and her family. It comes in pretty handy. The first thing Door opens in the story? A portal to London Above. The second thing she opens? Somebody's chest. As in the part of the body holding the heart and lungs.
• Jason, from The Saints, is able to use his magic to unlock doors. So far he's the only character introduced able to do so.
• In A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born, Jim diGriz, faced with an unappetizing array of mundane, soul-crushing career paths, chooses to study locksmithing. Which he puts to use as a professional thief. In a later book, he brags that he can get through a locked door without even breaking stride.
• Sasha, the protagonist of The Tenets of Futilism, can pick locks and hotwire cars with ease. She apparently learned the skill in her younger, wilder years.
• Jamie and Sylvester in Twig. After ending up in a prison cell, both of them a dozen cuffs each, the two of them manage to crack their locks with the few picks Sylvester smuggled in. They're halfway out by the time it takes the guard to do a round of the cell block.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: Megumi's thief skills enable her to get through most locks at her evil Wizarding School, especially since a lot of students are used to relying on magic spells and don't worry as much about mundane security. As long as her roommate Emily deals with any magic defenses, Megumi can break through the physical locks themselves without difficulty.
• Words of Radiance (second book of The Stormlight Archive): Shallan quickly discovers that her spren, Pattern, is great at picking locks. A lock is just another pattern, after all, and he is so very good with patterns. It helps that he can actually slip inside the lock and manipulate it from the inside.

Live-Action TV

• This is the reason why Vila is so valuable to the team in Blake's 7, despite being a Dirty Coward who's Not in This for Your Revolution. He's genuinely upset whenever he finds something he can't break into. The episode "City At the Edge of the World" has the best depiction of exactly how Vila gets through a door.
• Castle's daughter Alexis in Castle (2009) proves to be a capable picklock in the episode "Target" when she uses a hairpin to break out of the cell where her kidnapper left her. Though to be fair it does take her an hour.
• Doctor Who:
  • The Doctor's sonic screwdriver allows them to open or unlock basically anything, be it electronic or mechanical, and whether it actually has anything that can be considered a lock or not. Unless it's "deadlock sealed", or made of wood. Earlier incarnations had another weakness, namely a limit on how much force it could exert; it could shift the moving parts in an electronic or mechanical lock, but not a deadbolt or a bar across the door.
  • Jo Grant, thanks to her espionage training. This was due to Early-Installment Weirdness back when she was intended to be an Action Girl instead of The Ditz, but it was one aspect of her character they kept, so Jo ended up rescuing the Doctor a lot, instead of the other way round.
• Elementary:
  • Sherlock Holmes; picking locks is one of his many hobbies, and he has quite a collection to practice on; this allows him to escape handcuffs fairly easily, among other things.
  • Sherlock's sobriety sponsor Alfredo is a former ace car thief, and today tests security systems for automobile companies. Lockpicking is the most basic of his skills, and he's very good at it.
  • Both Sherlock and Alfredo have been teaching Watson to pick locks, as well.
• In GoGo Sentai Boukenger, there was a lock-based Monster of the Week whose power was to be able to enter any place. Walls opened like portals for him, the better to steal MacGuffins without getting the heroes' attention too soon.
• In Hogan's Heroes, one of Newkirk's many talents is lock-picking.
• Hunter (1984): Sgt. DeeDee McCall is adept at picking locks. She and her partner Rick Hunter often gain entry to the homes of suspects or missing persons this way, which is especially convenient when they can't call a locksmith because they don't have a search warrant.
• iCarly: Sam Puckett. Most often used to avert a typical sitcom Zany Scheme required to get past the door.
• Parker of Leverage can unlock anything from safes to doors to handcuffs. Being a world-class thief, it pretty much comes with the job.
• Lucifer (2016): Ella Lopez has been lockpicking since middle school, taught by her own grandma. Lucifer just wills most locks open for him (or start, for lock-like cases like a car ignition switch — he "can turn everything on").
• Reese in Person of Interest. Ex-CIA, he always has a proper set of lockpicks on his person, and on the numerous occasions in which he has utilised them, close attention shows that he uses tension wrench and pick correctly, with a couple of possible exceptions that could be pinned on the demands of brevity. In addition to picks, he has also correctly tutored Harold in the use of bump keys, though Harold gets the hang of the technique impressively quickly.
• Sense8: Professional safecracker Wolfgang can make short work of any lock, whether it's mechanical or electronic. The rest of his Cluster often call on him via their Psychic Link to help them out when faced with locks they can't open.
• Supernatural:
  • Dean has escaped from handcuffs no less than four times, using nearby items like paperclips and, one time, a car antenna. This is implied to be standard training for Hunters — when he encounters a Little Miss Badass who's been trained by her Hunter father, he makes sure to confiscate her lockpick before cuffing her to the steering wheel. She gets free anyway.
  • Sam once used a credit card to unlock a door when he didn't have a lockpick with him.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons and other games based on it, this is the primary role of the Thief or Rogue, since bashing down doors or prying open chests is not always a wise option. (Bashing down doors makes noise that attracts monsters, and prying open chests can get you nailed by whatever trap the chest has to protect its contents.) This is of course the reason that only high HP characters are allowed to pry open chests. This is also the reason why a ten-foot pole is a crucial piece of dungeoneering equipment.
• Old World of Darkness: Anyone with a few levels of the Security skill will be able to pick locks and bypass other levels of security as well. Unlike most level-based games, starting characters can have a maxed-out Security skill as long as they aren't worried about Crippling Overspecialization.
  • In Demon: The Fallen the first evocation of the Lore of Portals gives a Neberu control of the portals she encounters: doors and windows unlock, open or close at the Fiend touch. The complexity of the lock determines the number of success required.

Video Games

• The Age of Decadence has a lockpick skill.
• Aliens vs. Predator 2 has the Marine equipped with two unlocking tools, a hacking device for computers and a blowtorch for locks. The Predator gets a "Charge Emitter" for hacking. The Alien just breaks things.
• In Another World, your alien cellmate helps you escape the prison in level 2 by jimmying the doors open. You've got the tough job of protecting him from the laser-toting guards while he fiddles with the controls though because if he dies you have no way out.
• A nice use in Area 51 where at one point the player has to hold off the zombies while the Master of Locks opens the next area. The master can't die but if one gets past then he has to shoot it himself and it breaks his concentration.
• In Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman adds this to his existing list of skills after being given the warden's keycard, which he uses with his handy decoding contraption. In comics, a lockpicking kit is in one of the capsules/pouches on his utility belt.
• Betrayal at Krondor has Jimmy the Hand, who was a sneak-thief of some renown before he joined the Prince's court. Gameplay-wise, he's the best picklock available unless you do a lot of grinding with other characters, and story-wise he gets hired in the town of Silden to steal a bag (of drugs in the novelization) from a locked house in exchange for information. There's also Abuk, an NPC found out on the main road somewhere who teaches the Lockpicking skill, whose only voiced line is literally, "I am Abuk, master of locks."
• In Beyond Good & Evil, Pey'j can use wire cutters to get through chain-link fences. Later on though, in a far more epic example, Double H can bust through barred doors by putting on the helmet of his Alpha Section uniform, shouting "CARLSON AND PEETERRRRRRS!!", and ramming straight through it.
• BioShock
  • BioShock lets the player character try his hand at being master of plumbing - certain locked doors can be opened through hacking, which takes place through a pipe-minigame.
  • BioShock 2 has hacking in the same way, but instead of plumbing you master stopping the arrow in the right part of a meter.
  • In BioShock Infinite, Elizabeth can pick just about any lock as long as Booker has a sufficient number of lockpicks. It's explained as a skill she picked up during her failed attempts to escape her lifelong imprisonment in Monument Island.
  • Burial at Sea takes Infinite's method one step further - in Episode 2, where you play as Elizabeth, you get a Lockpicking Minigame, similar to the one from BioShock 2.
• Claptrap robots in Borderlands serve to allow access to blocked off areas. As of Borderlands 2, the company that makes Claptraps, Hyperion, is trying to take over the planet and has every one of the things deactivated... except for one that got away. The last Claptrap proves an invaluable resource in the rebellion against Hyperion due to his ability to bypass Hyperion security measures — as he says, he was made to open doors. Of course, this being Borderlands, he's not very good at it.
  Claptrap: I said "aaaaaaannndd open!", not "aaaaaaaaaand close a secondary set of doors!"
• Rei in Breath of Fire III can open some locked doors, but the number of times it's used to advance the plot is exactly once near the beginning of the game and the best item you can find behind one of the doors he can open is a fishing rod.
  • Also, Danc/Karn from the first game can unlock every door that's locked and disarm booby traps.
• Every single Call of Duty game has the player accompanied by NPCs with the awesome power of the ability to kick open doors. Of course, if you don't know what we mean, it means that due to the heavy use of No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom, only NPCs can open doors after you've completed objectives in the area.
  • In some cases the player himself has this power, though very selectively. For a humorous example that also displays Take Your Time, see shoot the hinges!
• In the original Castle Wolfenstein, if the player finds a locked chest, he has to "lockpick" it (wait for a timer to count down) before it will open. The player can shoot the chest to speed up the timer; unfortunately, this uses up bullets and may attract nearby guards.
• Deus Ex requires the player to acquire a given number of lockpicks or electronic multitools to open a given electronic or mechanical lock, modified by their Electronics and Lockpicking skills.
• In Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, we have the Assassin. She can unlock chests without a key. Some have complained that it's a pointless skill since keys are so easy to come by in the game that you're usually selling the extras to make room in your inventory.
• Rogues in the Dragon Age series of games are generally used for unlocking chests and can increase their skill at doing so.
• Dragon Quest:
  • In Dragon Quest IV, Oojam, who joins your party in one chapter, can open locked doors that would normally require the Magic Key. As you can't get the key yet, this makes him a required party member in order to get to the boss.
  • Dragon Quest V: Dwight Dwarf is implied to be one since his dad is a master locksmith and he stole a book about lock picking.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Morrowind:
    • The player can use lockpicks to open locked doors and containers. The player's Security skill combined with the quality of lockpick is used to determine the success rate. If your skill level is too low, it will be impossible to pick locks with much higher levels. Also available is the "Open" spell, which will automatically unlock any door or container at or below the level of the spell. (It does not, however, disarm trapped locks — neither does using a lockpick, but using a probe to disarm traps falls under the same skill.)
    • The NPC who would be the master of unlocking, Hecerinde in Balmora, the Master Trainer of Security, ironically plays the exact opposite role in the Thieves' Guild questline — the quest involving the Master Trainer in Security is about finding that person and convincing him/her to help secure the local Thieves Guild hideout against unwanted intrusion (after all, a master of picking locks and disarming traps would logically also know how to make it harder to pick a lock or disarm a trap...).
  • Oblivion has lockpicking as a skill (you played a minigame that involved carefully pushing the lock's pins into place). There was no reason to actually invest in the lockpicking skill, however, as the mini-game was very easy regardless of lockpicking skill. Especially after you acquire the unbreakable Skeleton Key, which made an easy minigame laughably easy: normally attempting to force a lock breaks the pick if you fail, but automatically opens the lock if you succeed. Because the Skeleton Key is unbreakable, anyone with it can simply spam the Force option until they open any lock except for ones scripted to be unpickable. The Champion of Cyrodiil essentially stops picking altogether and just rams the Skeleton Key around the lock for a bit until it pops open.
  • Skyrim:
    • Skyrim adopts the aforementioned Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas method of picking locks instead, with the exception being that you can pick any lock regardless of your actual skill level. For the ascending lock skill levels, lockpicks will break faster and the correct position is smaller.
    • Mercer Frey, who is given to you as a companion for a certain Thieves' Guild quest and can open any door, including ancient Nordic doors that usually require both a puzzle to be solved and a specific variety of a unique type of key to open. As it turns out, he does it by using Nocturnal's Skeleton Key, which he stole, as you find out when he pulls a Face–Heel Turn on you - or rather, a Reveal. Sadly, in your possession it is merely an unbreakable lockpick, though it's implied that you simply lack the knowledge to use it to its full potential (Frey had the key to study at his leisure for a considerable amount of time).
    • Other than that, Vex is the best lockpick in Skyrim, being that she's the Master-level trainer for it.
• Eye of the Beholder (based on Dungeons & Dragons). A thief character with a set of lockpicks.
• The first two Fallout games had a lockpicking skill that would be checked against the difficulty of the door. If you wanted to pick something electronic, you had to find an advanced set of picks later in the game (this could be circumvented, but only with very high levels of the skill).
  • The minigame was revamped for Fallout 3, where it was simplified to twisting a bobby pin around a lock until you find the right spot to open it (amusingly, this occurs regardless of whether the door is a safe with a numeric keypad, a huge bulkhead with a handwheel, etc.; apparently pin-tumbler locks are both widespread and invisible). Hacking is similar but is based on a different skill (Science rather than Lockpicking) and you have to pick the right password out of a number of similar words.
  • Their immediate Spiritual Successor Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura also had a similar RPG lockpicking skill, which you had to practice and learn first before you could fully use it.
• Abella in Fear & Hunger: Termina has the "short circuit" ability, which allows her to open electronic locks, making her invaluable in Prehevil's bunkers. Karin, meanwhile, is capable of opening some mechanical locks, saving up on your Interchangeable Antimatter Keys and allowing for early access to some areas.
• Thieves in Final Fantasy III could unlock locked doors without using up a Magic Key.
  • In Final Fantasy VI, Locke does this when the party visits Narshe in the second half of the game with no explanation beyond a simple wink.
• In the Fire Emblem series, only thieves and assassins can use lockpicks to open doors and chests without keys. Later games would introduce the Rogue class, which one-ups them by being able to unlock doors and chests without lockpicks.
  • In Fire Emblem: Awakening, level 1 Thieves have Pick/Locktouch as their starting class skill, letting them open chests/doors without any special items a la Rogue. The Ninjas and Outlaws from Fire Emblem Fates can do this as well. A Thief/Ninja/Outlaw that gets married can also pass Locktouch to their children if the player so desires. Or, if s/he passes the class to said kids (well, those who aren't already in it), they can reclass into it and acquire Locktouch on their own.
  • Fire Emblem: Three Houses has the typical thief and assassin as a class skill while Ashe has the personal skill lockpick that functions in the same way without him being one of those classes.
• Gears of War has occasional sequences in which Jack, the Team Pet Do-Anything Robot, is tasked to weld open a tricky but necessary door, and the Space Marines have to hold out against waves of enemies until he's finished.
• Half-Life: Opposing Force has engineer soldiers - equipped with blowtorches - who can burn open specific doors that block your way.
• Half-Life 2: Alyx Vance has a door-unlocking device that can deactivate Combine forcefields.
• The Hitman series and its Russian cousin Death to Spies also feature lockpicking several times during a mission. Generally this becomes less and less useful as the games go on, at least in Hitman, as later stages tend to use electronic locks and keycards.
• In ICO, the main reason to keep Yorda around (aside from basic compassion) is her magical ability to open locked doors, which is the only way to advance between areas of the castle. The flow of gameplay alternates between finding a path that will get Yorda to the next door, and standing back while she does her thing. (The amount of magic lightning involved makes this a very cinematic version of the trope.)
• Locked doors can be a major nuisance in the Jagged Alliance series, which often entails having your mercs dig through the corpses to try to find the right key. Fortunately, they can be circumvented by having characters with good lockpicking skills, with lockbuster shotgun rounds, or with the old standby of plenty of 'splosives.
• In Killer7 one of Coyote Smith's special abilities is to pick open padlocks. He's so good at it that he can unlock padlocks by just manhandling them with one hand for a few seconds.
• In Killzone 2 this is Garza's special ability. Also, the player character, Sev, can plant frame charges, but only on certain doors.
• Despite being incredibly powerful, the main use of a Keyblade in Kingdom Hearts is the ability to open any lock (except for a couple of chests). The locks don't have to be physical and can be on a person or a world.
  • Hades is able to exploit this by kidnapping Meg, putting her inside the lock that Zeus used to seal the Underdome, and waiting for Sora to rescue her.
• Legendary has the player character be a skilled thief who knows how to re-wire security panels (without even using his hands). This is the "covering up loading the next room" version.
• The Legend of Zelda
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the Collapsing Lair suddenly has bars in front of a lot of doors that were open on the way in. Zelda can un-bar them for you with her magic.
  • Another example occurs in The Legend of Zelda Oracle of Seasons with Rosa, who can use her special key to unlock any door in Subrosia for you.
• IG-88 in LEGO Star Wars. Certain panels and doors in the games can only be unlocked by one type of character (either Astromech Droids, Protocol Droids, Bounty Hunters, or Stormtroopers), IG-88 is unique in that he can unlock three of the four panel types (all except for Stormtrooper panels).
• In Night in the Woods, Gregg is shown to have this ability. He's able to pick open two elevator locks in the dark while under extreme stress using nothing but a pair of pliers and a paperclip. Even before that, he's got a set of lock picks that could have made the job even easier. In the Weird Autumn Edition, we do see Gregg use a lock pick to unlock the basement door in the Historical Society Museum while Mae is holding a flashlight over him, but once he finishes picking the lock, an owl suddenly attacks him, causing him to lose the lock picks (and Mae to drop the flashlight) before they make their way in to escape.
• Stan from ObsCure can even sense nearby locks. Don't ask how it works.
• One Way Heroics
  • There is a perk with the exact same name as this trope. It gives you a skill allowing you to instantly open boxes and chests, which is better than having to bash it with your weapon for several turns and damaging it, although fancier chests may require multiple uses of the skill to open. The Adventurer and Pirate classes start with the skill, no perk required.
  • In another sense of the trope, Queen Frieda has to power to automatically open sealed doors, which guard powerful Holy items and would normally require a rare and valuable Key of Seals to open.
• PAYDAY 2 allows this with the Ghost class-a high-level skill increases the speed of lockpicking, eventually allowing you to open safes by hand (instead of relying on a drill), and another skill at the same level allows you to open security doors (which require the drill or a keycard normally) with your handy ECM jammers. Regardless if the team wants to do stealth or not, the Ghost's major role is to open doors quickly.
• PAYDAY 3 enables this with the Quick Fingers skill, which, with Rush active, causes a successful jiggle during the lockpicking minigame to immediately open the lock.
• Many of the NPCs in Phantasy Star Online can open doors that the player cannot. However, probably the one most notorious for his unlocking skills is Bernie, to the point where he and his "See? I have the knack" catchphrase have reached Memetic Mutation status.
• In the Quest for Glory series, Thief characters can get into McGuffin buildings and rob houses by this method.
  • In the Spiritual Successor / Fan Sequel Quest for Infamy the villainous counterpart the Rogue has the same.
• In Red Faction II, slinky stealth-expert Tangier is the only one capable of opening certain doors, despite the main character being a demolitions expert, and the game's gimmick being its utterly destroyable environments.
• The Trope Namer is Resident Evil, which gives a set of lockpicks to the female PC (Jill) to explain why she can get into areas the male PC (Chris) can't without having to find keys. Jill also picks locks in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, though she has to go back to the RPD to pick her lockpick up rather than just starting with it.
  • Gets a Continuity Nod in the Resident Evil 5 DLC Lost in Nightmares opening cutscene (pictured), when Chris and Jill break into the Spencer Estate, Jill picks the lock on the front door while Chris covers her.
  • Claire Redfield is the same in Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil – Code: Veronica. Whether she starts off with the lockpick or has to find it depends on the game.
  • In Resident Evil 4, Leon's Voice with an Internet Connection hangs a lampshade on why he can't pick a particular lock (most locks in the game are either shootable or need some sort of Plot Coupon rather than a normal key).
  Hunnigan: Didn't they teach you how to pick locks at the academy?
  • Another example is Alyssa Ashcroft from Resident Evil: Outbreak. She starts every scenario equipped with a tool that can be used to unlock certain doors.
  • It gets an explicit Continuity Nod in Resident Evil: Revelations 2 when Barry uses lumber swinging on a crane to break a locked gate as he remarks, "Who's the master of unlocking now?"
  • And referenced again in the 2016 HD Remaster of Resident Evil 0: after you defeat Dr. Marcus and use the two keys he drops to open the final locked door in the game, you get the achievement/trophy "Apprentice of Unlocking."
  • And of course, the Resident Evil 3 (Remake) references this yet again in a game starring the original master no less. Jill picks up a lock pick in the power station area and can use it to unlock small yellow padlocked areas, lockers, and the like. When the player uses it to pick every single small lock in the game, they get the achievement "RE: Master of Unlocking." The in-game shop also lets players start the game with a lockpick to get a headstart.
• In Solatorobo, Red manages to pick a lock using a wire (yes, just a wire) when captured by Gren in Shetland.
• Splinter Cell featured a lockpicking mini-game. Prior to Conviction, you could either silently but slowly pick the lock, or quickly but loudly destroy it with a disposable pick (in the original and Pandora Tomorrow) or your knife (in Chaos Theory and Double Agent). Chaos Theory also introduced the ability to bash open unlocked doors, but they wouldn't actually be smashed into splinters. They would still function as doors.
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords features three different flavors; party members can train in Security (with some better than others), security spikes can be used to force doors/chests that you don't have the skill for, and Bao-Dur has the ability to punch force fields open.
• In the Famicom forerunner to Resident Evil, Sweet Home (1989), one of the party members, Emi, came with a key, giving her the innate ability to unlock doors. Without her in your party, you would need to find a wire to be able to pick open locks.
• From Chapter 2 of Tales of Monkey Island onward, Guybrush can use his Hook Hand as a lockpick to unlock doors and treasure chests. It worked on any conventional lock in the game. Of course, there are only a few items that can't be unlocked by his hook alone, and that is in the final chapter.
• In Thief, it's one of the most crucial game mechanics besides stealthing. While it's pretty boring and simple in the first two games, the third installment made it surprisingly fresh and fun.
  • While the protagonist Garrett is the only one seen using lockpicks, the guards and civilian NPCs also often have keys and can lock or unlock doors as long as they're holding them.
  • This is stock-in-trade for all the Keepers; mastery of lockpicking is a crucial part of getting in and out of anywhere without a trace.
  • It's also not a guaranteed method of opening locks. Some locks can be quickly and easily picked, others take a good deal longer, and still other locks are advanced enough that Garrett cannot pick them, and needs to find the necessary key first.
• Yahtzee's Trilby: The Art of Theft, a stealth Gaiden Game set in his Chzo Mythos universe, also features some pretty cool and relatively advanced-looking lockpicking... for a game made in the no-thrills AGS engine, that is...
• In World of Warcraft, Rogues can learn to pick locks that are on safeboxes, treasure chests, and doors. Alternatively, an Engineer can just blow locks apart with explosives. Or a Blacksmith can make Interchangeable Antimatter Keys. Still, there are doors in the new version of Shadowfang Keep that only an NPC who's with you can open once they're ready for you to move on.
• Lucien Kaine, the Thief of Zork I, has a stiletto that is used not just for combat but also for unlocking certain things that would otherwise be unlockable. If you hand him a certain jeweled egg, you can come back later to see that he has already unlocked it. It's too bad that you have to kill him for it and the other treasures, though.

Visual Novels

• Spirit Hunter: NG:
  • Thanks to an incident in his past where he broke into his father's safe to try and get a gun, Seiji has become talented at picking locks. This is useful in the Urashima Woman case where they need to sneak some oars out of a locked shack.
  • Rosé is experienced with lock-picking, even more so than Seiji. While she puts it down to her dexterity from being a stage magician, there's obviously more to it than she lets on.

Web Comics

• Girl Genius: Aldin Hoffman is an expert lock picker.
  Agatha: "Master Safe Cracker?" Really? That's an interesting skill for a librarian.
  Aldin: When you've been captured as often as I have, you develop an interest in locks and escapology.
• Keychain of Creation: The Keys of Creation are basically this trope in artifact form - created from the essence of the God of Locks, even one Key is apparently enough to open or close any mundane lock. The more keys you have, the looser the definition of "lock" and the more you can do with them - two keys are enough to "unlock" the stitches holding a Flesh Golem together, and all five together would be able to release the Yozis.
• Cheram Han from Surviving Romance only needs a safety pin to open the lock of the chained principal's office. She says she picked up this skill when doing escape rooms.
• Unsounded: Sette practices her lock-picking in her downtime and has never had trouble getting a lock open, once any pymaric traps on them are unlocked. She has the added benefit of being able to smell pymary, which lets her avoid traps.
  "I ain't never needed a key a day in me life."

Web Video

• The Lock Picking Lawyer sits down with locks of all shapes and sizes and sees what it takes to open them, typically to demonstrate which locks are trustworthy, and as some kind of Buyer Beware for badly designed locks. That said, it can also result in anxious viewers (and lock makers), as the fact that most locks don't last even 30 seconds and even relatively "secure" locks take only a few minutes does not inspire confidence in one's ability to lock things up. Even a 500$ USD lock he declared as the strongest lock he has wasn't safe, they still dismantled it in around three minutes. And then shot the lock with .50 cal rounds for good measure.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: Parodied when Melvin declares himself to be one of these, as his "method" of unlocking a password-protected door was to enter in every possible combination, manually, over the course of several episodes. He's completely stymied when the door then requests the secondary password.

Western Animation

• Aladdin: The Series has Sadira, a Street Urchin who reveals that due to her lifestyle has known how to lock-pick since she was five years old. In one episode she even teaches Jasmine how to do it.

Real Life

• The vast majority of locks you see in Real Life are relatively simple devices that can be picked by anyone with experience (and even someone without it, given enough time). Of course there are also less subtle but still very effective methods for bypassing locks as well, such as bolt cutters to remove a bike lock. Seasoned lockpickers are also typically well respected amongst other criminals.
• When Richard Feynman was working on developing the atomic bomb, he made a hobby of cracking the safes and combination locks used to protect important documents. He mostly used various silly tricks to do it, and not technical locksmithing skills, and would sometimes leave snarky notes in supposedly secure places pointing out that they weren't.
• Professional locksmiths pick locks and crack safes as a part of their job. They even hold competitions.

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