Unperson / Video Games

Discrimination speaks for itself.

Unpersoning in video games.

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• In Arcanum there is this disturbing quest involving a Government Conspiracy, which among other things standard for this sort of story, also includes the man-disappears-and-is-replaced motif.
• Batman: Arkham Knight: It's revealed during the climax of the game that this is the Joker's greatest fear: that he will fade into obscurity and be forgotten by everyone in Gotham. The novelization reveals that even his ashes were dispersed via Gotham's sewer system.
• Similar to the Dragon Age example below, seems to be practiced by dwarven society in The Battle For Wesnoth.
  "The Law speaks: you are cast out. You are un-dwarf. I AM A WITNESS!"
• Pictured above has the ending of "Tirailleur" in Battlefield V showing Deme Cisse and his fellow tirailleur comrades erased from the photo, covering up their involvement due to the French Army's discrimination.
• BioShock 2 explains the absence of any mention of Sophia Lamb in the first game by Andrew Ryan ordering that all records of her existence be destroyed.
• BlazBlue: This is Ragna's ultimate fate by the end of BlazBlue: Central Fiction, he made the world forgot that he ever existed to allow it to move forward, as it was what made The Origin constantly resetting the world with Amaterasu Unit.
• In Breath of Fire II, this happens to The Hero. At age 7, a demon arrives in his hometown, kidnaps his father and wipes the memories of all the townspeople. No one recognizes him when he returns from a quick outing.
• The one of the primary directives of the titular organization in The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Government agency is to "Erase" any records or physical evidence of extraterrestrial invasion.
• The first story arc involving Crey Industries in City of Heroes involves the attempted assassination and unpersoning of a woman (and her sister, when she becomes suspicious and gets involved), all because she had convinced her husband to quit his job with Crey.
• The opening scene of Cold Winter have the player hero, Andrew Sterling, arrested by Red Chinese intelligence, and Andrew's superiors in the M16 choosing to erase all files about Andrew's existence to prevent an international incident, effectively making him a man without identity. After he escapes, Andrew became a freelance mercenary instead.
• In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, Yuri brands general Vladimir a traitor and a "non-person" after setting him up for Romanov's murder. Having known Stalin personally, he probably picked up the habit from the man himself.
• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc has an interesting case, where Mukuro Ikusaba, the Ultimate Soldier and the sixteenth student, was wiped from the memories of the other students, making it look like there were only fifteen. Once Kyouko finds Mukuro's profile, however, the mastermind decides to stage Mukuro's "murder", which becomes the focus for Chapter 5.
• Dark Souls:
  • In the backstory of the first game, Gwyn's firstborn, an unnamed War God, had his name stricken from history and his altars destroyed for unknown reasons. Dark Souls III all but states that the Nameless King is Gywn's son, and his offense was siding with the dragons in the war that lead to the Age of Fire. It's implied that he was Forossa's war god, Faraam, but if he is, that's most likely not his original name.
  • Dark Souls III's final DLC, The Ringed City, reveals this wasn't Gwyn's only use of the trope - the whole mess that was the Undead Curse began with the Pygmy Lords, loyal servants of Gwyn who participated in the dragon slaughter. However, they and their knights wielded the power of the Dark Soul, which Gwyn feared. To keep them sealed, Gwyn had the splendid Ringed City built to house the Lords and the Knights, branded them all with the flame sigil that would become the Darksign, used his youngest daughter Filianore to seal the city in a bubble of frozen time, expurgated their memory, taught a sanitized version of history to the Pygmies' descendants, humanity, and taught them to fear the dark, robbing them of the knowledge they could have used to master the Abyss and overthrow him. All of this ultimately contributed to the creation of the Undead Curse and aided in the death of the First Flame Gwyn so feared.
• Destiny 2: Nokris is the second son of Oryx, the Hive’s Top God... or rather, he was. After he communed directly with Xol and began practicing Necromancy (two massive sins in Hive culture), his family was so enraged that they not only disowned him, but tried to scrub out any references to him in every records they kept and basically pretended he never existed. They did a pretty good job; the Guardians only learn of Nokris when they stumble upon a statue in a long-forgotten subsection of Oryx’s ship that the Hive gods evidently missed. Even then, they learn nothing about him besides his name until he personally shows up in the solar system to cause trouble.
• One Non-Standard Game Over in Disco Elysium has this happen to Player Character Harry. In the Moralist Vision Quest you make contact with a Moralintern Dread Zeppelin, and if you reveal that you know too much about the hole in reality, they send a task force to collect you. It's then revealed that you're never seen again, and the officials refuse to comment on your status.
• In Doki Doki Literature Club!, after Sayori's suicide, the game restarts the opening scene, but her name and sprite are glitched out. The game then abruptly cuts to a different version where, instead of talking about how he and Sayori always walk to school together, the main character says that he's always walked there alone. The rest of the game carries on as if she never existed. This only marks the beginning of the game's horror.
• Dragon Age:
  • Dragon Age: Origins:
    • In addition to being exiled and sentenced to die in the Deep Roads, the Dwarf Noble is permanently erased from the Memories of the Shaperate. As far as the rest of Dwarven society is concerned, the second child of the King of Orzammar never existed.
    • The Casteless were never written into the Memories to begin with, and thus actually start out having never existed, as far as greater Dwarven society is concerned. Czibor even outright tells the Dwarven Commoner Warden that their ever having been to Orzammar at all are "delusions", and that s/he does not exist.
    • In both cases, after the defeat of the Archdemon at the end of the game, the Dwarf Noble and Commoner Wardens are risen to Paragon status by the Dwarven Assembly, leading to their names being restored/recorded within the Memories of the Shaperate as "Living Ancestors".
  • Defied in Awakening. Visions of the past reveal that a warrior rallied the Casteless of Kar-hirol to help him buy time for everyone else to escape the Darkspawn. They all perished, but the warrior spent his final moments right before an Ogre killed him inscribing all of their names into a stone tablet. He wanted their bravery to be remembered forever.
  • Also played straight in Awakening. In an especially cathartic moment if you're a Human Noble Grey Warden, Howe's actions against your family and the kingdom end up causing his family to be tainted and every bit of evidence of Howe's contributions to his lands wiped away. His one remaining son, who later becomes a party member, starts out bitter about this but through Character Development becomes aware that his father was a horrible person who brought his fate on himself.
  • In Dragon Age: Inquisition, Solas mentions that in his travels through the Fade he encountered a spirit that had once ruled an empire more vast than any in recorded history. When Solas asked what kind of spirit it is, it said:
    Spirit: They have forgotten. There is no longer a word for what I am.
    • The Descent DLC reveals that the Shaperate has made major edits to Dwarven history, including erasing an entire second Dwarf civilization living deeper down and the Titans that created their race.
• After declaring himself the new God of Time in Dragon Ball Xenoverse, Demigra swears that, for the interference of the Player Character, they will be erased from all of history. Needless to say, it doesn't quite stick.
• In Einhänder, both Selene and the Earth Forces delete every record of the protagonist's existence and endeavours. Only "those who actually fought and were wounded in the war know the name of 'EINHÄNDER'."
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In the backstory, the Ayleids (Wild Elves) of Cyrodiil took the Nedes, human ancestors to most of the modern races of Men, as slaves. Eventually, after much Dog-Kicking, the slaves revolted and, supported by the Aedra and some rebel Ayleid lords, overthrew their former masters. The Ayleid lords who supported the revolt were allowed to keep their lands as vassals in the new empire of Men. However, about a century later, the Alessian Order, an extremist anti-elven religious order led by the "monkey prophet" Maruhk, came to power in the young empire. They attempted to completely erase all trace of the Ayleids from history. While they obviously weren't completely successful, they did enough damage that the Ayleids are left shrouded in the mists of history while their magics and technologies are lost.
  • Also from the backstory, Yokuda (the ancient homeland of the Redguards) was once the home to the Sinistral Mer (or "Left-Handed Elves"). The two races fought a devastating war, which left the Sinistral Mer extinct. To this day, the Redguards do not speak about them for talking about them tends to "darken their days."
  • In Oblivion, the curse on the Gray Cowl of Nocturnal causes this to happen to the wearer. The Cowl was stolen from Nocturnal, the Daedric Prince of Darkness and the Night who is also associated with Thieves and Luck, centuries prior. She cursed the cowl to erase the identity of its bearer from history. The cowl's owner took on the identity of the thief known as the Gray Fox, and the curse was passed on each grandmaster of the Thieves Guild. The plot of the Thieves' Guild questline is, ultimately, to steal an Elder Scroll and use its power to break the curse once and for all. Regarding the curse:
    "Whosoever wears it shall be lost in the shadows. His true nature shall be unknown to all who meet him. His identity shall be struck from all records and histories. Memory will hide in the shadows, refusing to record the name of the owner to any who meet him. He shall be known by the cowl and only by the cowl."
  • In the Shivering Isles expansion for Oblivion, it is eventually revealed that this was the fate of the Daedric Prince of Order Jyggalag. Due to his immense power thanks to his ability to predict anything through pure logic, the rest of the Daedric Princes ganged up on him and defeated him, cursing him to become his antithesis, the Prince of Madness Sheogorath, and further cursed to routinely shift between the two beings and destroy the Shivering Isles in an eternal war that hobbled his powers. By the modern era, there are only passing references to Jyggalag in obscure texts, and no one really knows who or what Jyggalag is or the Prince's sphere of influence.
  • In the 4th Era, the Thalmor-led Aldmeri Dominion are attempting to do this to the deity, Talos. Talos, the Ninth Divine, is said to be the ascended god-form of Tiber Septim (and possibly others), the founder of the Third Cyrodiilic Empire. As part of the treaty that ended the Great War between the Dominion and the vestigial Third Empire, worship of Talos is officially banned throughout the continent of Tamriel. Officially, their reasoning is that they do not believe a man could become a god. (Altmeri religion states that elves are the direct descendants of the Divines, and the thought of a human joining their ranks is insulting.) However, outside sources (supported by in-game evidence) indicate that what the Thalmor really want to do is to unmake reality, as they believe the creation of the universe was a cruel trick which forced their divine ancestors to experience mortal suffering and death. They believe that Talos is one of the last things keeping the mortal world extant, and they believe that they can Kill the God by banning his worship.
  • According to C0DA, an "Obscure Text" online graphic novel by former series writer Michael Kirkbride, the Numidium possesses an ability known as the "ancestroscythe" which can cause this. In C0DA, rather than being destroyed by the Underking as previously believed, the Numidium was instead caught in a time warp and emerges in the distant 5th Era where the Aldmeri Dominion, led by the Thalmor, dominates Tamriel. Picking up where it left off in the 2nd Era, it wages war on the Dominion and uses the ancestroscythe to refute the entire Altmer race from existence.
  • In Skyrim, the sons of Archmage Gauldur, who after discovering the source of their father's power was the amulet he wore at all times, betrayed and murdered their father to get ahold of the enchanted amulet and went on a killing spree before being shut down by another Archmage, Geirmund, have all record names and deeds purged to seal away the power of the amulet.
• Used by name in FAITH: The Unholy Trinity in Chapter 3. The seventh floor of an apartment building simply does not exist: the stairs leading up from the sixth floor and down from the eighth floor are just not there. You can only access it by playing the elevator game successfully and going to Beyond. Once you've taken care of your business there, you have to drop down into a hole explicitly labeled "Damnatio Memoriae" to reach the seventh floor and find out what happened there.
• Fallen London has Mr. Eaten, someone who got unpersoned with enough vigor and magic involved that just trying to seek his actual name needs you to perform horrific, suicidal, tragic and otherwise pointless rituals and sacrifices that will destroy everything you have. Everyone you speak to about this will try to dissuade you, be it subtly or just bluntly telling you "Don't look for it". Heed their advice, or you're going to suffer. In fact, completing the entire questline is so brutal that if you follow through with the very last choice in the story, your account gets hit by this as it is permanently disabled.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, you can get yourself declared "in damnatio memoraie" by Caesar's Legion, similar to the Roman practice described on the real life subpage — not that you'd care what they'd think of you if you earned enough infamy to reach that point. This also happened to Legate Joshua Graham after the Legion's first major military defeat at the First Battle of Hoover Dam, so now the slaves can only whisper about the Burned Man who somehow survived Caesar's wrath...
  • If you convince the Great Khans to break their alliance with the Legion & side with the NCR but side with the Legion yourself, Caesar has them wiped out for their treachery and forbade any mention of them with the narrator noting that their legacy was "swiftly forgotten".
• In Fallout 4, Brotherhood Paladin Danse is discovered to be a synth (artificial human who are used as sleeper agents), and you are dispatched to execute him, since the Brotherhood views synths as an example of gross misuse of technology. If you convince Elder Maxson, the commander in chief of the Brotherhood to spare Danse, he is unpersoned by the Brotherhood, declared officially dead and all his belongings including his Powered Armor are transferred to you. You even get his rank and his position in the Brotherhood command structure.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the Ten Elites actually had eleven members. One of its members was erased from all known history texts after his Crest transformed him into a Demonic Beast, causing him to go berserk and kill scores of innocents. Because of this, future generations would view his bloodline as cursed, and anyone bearing the Crest of "the Beast" (as it was later known) were believed to bring great misfortune to others.
• One of the endings of Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator results in Fazbear Entertainment determining the player is too much a liability risk even for them, and they end up firing you and saying they're going to scrub any record of your employment from their files.
• Freelancer has the forced disappearance and the deletion of all the records of anyone that had something to do with alien artifacts. Juni finding this out is the moment that kickstarts the conspiracy theory plot.
• In Final Fantasy IX, this is implied to be Freya Crescent's biggest fear, hence her quote "Despair - To be forgotten is worse than death". This is made clear in Cleyra, where Freya's long lost lover arrives, only for her to find out that he has forgotten her existence entirely, leaving her utterly heartbroken
• This was actually one of the devices used by the Five Gods in Guild Wars to imprison their fallen brother, Abaddon. His followers and any literature, art, or structure associated with Abaddon was banished into the Realm of Torment. Even long after his defeat, souls touched by Abaddon's power were taken to the Realm to be cleansed. Unfortunately, enough escaped their efforts to guide new followers in bringing about Nightfall. In the case of Abaddon, it was actually very important this happen. He was the God of Secrets, so a mortal simply possessing knowledge of his existence was enough to give him a connection to Tyria.
• In Guild Wars 2 Mad King Thorn found his son, Bloody Prince Edrick, to be a severe disappointment and a constant source of trouble. After Edrick's latest attempt to overthrow his father by riling up the peasants, Thorn had him sealed in a sarcophagus to consider his actions. Before he could be released, the peasants stormed the castle and butchered Thorn. One of the king's last orders was for his courtiers to erase all evidence of Edrick's existence from their library, resulting in Edrick being forgotten for four hundred years.
• In Hades, Hades has forbidden any kind of mention of Persephone in his household. When Zagreus learns of her existence and that she was his mother, he is incensed.
• Hi-Fi RUSH:
  • Kale Vandelay does this to his sister Peppermint so he can take over Vandelay Technologies unopposed. His Propaganda Machine claims that Kale is an only child that developed the idea of Project Armstrong all on his own, when in reality, his mother and founder of the company, Roxanne Vandelay, came up with the idea after making Peppermint a robotic leg to replace one she lost in an accident.
  • This also begins to happen to Korsica following her Heel–Face Turn; when Chai arrives at the Vandelay museum, all of their portraits have been removed from the exhibit halls and can be found dumped unceremoniously in the back rooms.
• In Hogwarts Legacy, Posthumous Character Isidora Morganach was a Well-Intentioned Extremist who defied the Big Good Percival Rackham and his Keepers, getting Drunk on the Dark Side and attempting to create a World of Silence. After killing her in self-defense, the Keepers attempted to erase her Villainous Legacy and destroyed her enchanted portrait to try to keep her from corrupting future generations. It's up to the Player Character to determine whether their efforts were All for Nothing or not.
• In Hollow Knight, the Wyrm/Pale King tried his level best to erase the Radiance when he took over Hallownest as its new god-ruler. By all accounts, it worked well enough for long enough for a thriving bug society to develop, complete with technology. However, the bug society he created later accidentally dug up a long-forgotten statue of her, resulting in the Radiance being able to invade their collective unconsciousness and individual dreams. In time, the Infection that came from those dreams robbed the bugs of sapience and eventually led to their society collapsing into what was effectively a Zombie Apocalypse.
• Though it doesn't actually happen in Kingdom Hearts II, this was what Organization XIII intended for Roxas in the data world simulation of Twilight Town. When the lesser Nobodies steal photos of Roxas (since they can't tell the difference in the data world between images of Roxas and the real Roxas), they even steal the word "photo", preventing anyone from saying the word. Had they managed to kidnap Roxas, his name and all likeness would have been removed from the data world.
• In Long Live the Queen, if Elodie decides to join Togami in the "To Serve Evil" ending, then she is stricken from all Novan records and her name forbidden from ever being spoken again.
• Mass Effect 2: Tali states that if her father were found guilty of bringing live geth to the fleet, he'd be written off all records and become a bogeyman used to scare children.
  • Ex-C-Sec agent Harkin has taken up a job where he makes people "disappear" under the apt pseudonym of "Fade".
• In the Mega Man Zero series, Dr. Weil is said to have been so heinous (having kicked off a war that wiped out 60% of mankind and 90% of reploidkind ) that all records of him have been suppressed by Neo-Arcadia, to the extent that libraries containing records of his actions have been flooded and anyone who finds out about him is declared a Maverick. This is intended to prevent anyone from doing what he did again.
• Nancy Drew: In The Captive Curse, it's implied that tales of "the Monster" had their roots in the case of a medieval criminal who'd been declared an Un-Person after he escaped from the castle dungeon. As no one was allowed to speak his name, rumors about this fugitive eventually re-cast him as an anonymous inhuman freak.
• In a very literal example, in one of the endings of NieR, the memory of your protagonist and all his actions are purged in-verse, and your real life save data is deleted!
• In The New Order Last Days Of Europe, the All-Russian Black League does this to Pavel Batov after defeating his insurgency in the regional phase.
• Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire: Eothas actually wants this to be done to him; he views his plan to destroy Berath’s Wheel and the untold amount of death it’s causing as a tragic necessity, but is fully aware of how evil it is regardless. He truly hopes that he is forgotten or demonized for his actions, seeing the destruction of his legacy and the hatred of those he loves as a fitting punishment for himself. Not to mention the whole motive for his plan is to rob the gods of their power over mortals, so even if he wasn’t happy about it, he’d certainly expect it.
• The Virtual Console release of the Pokémon Trading Card Game was unable to accurately emulate IR emulation and thus simply pretends that neither the Phantom Cards nor two-player capability ever existed within the game.
• It never actually happens, but in Puyo Puyo Tetris 2, Ringo and her friends are threatened with being erased from existence by Squares, who sees them as hinderances in keeping his idea of "order".
• In Quest for Glory III, being deemed "Without Honor" in Tarna does this: No one will trade, or even talk with you. The hero catches a thief at the beginning of the game. Said capture leads the thief to being declared honorless. The hero showing kindness to the thief and giving him food leads to said thief becoming an ally at a crucial moment.
  • Under normal circumstances, those declared honorless could still at least catch the nearest caravan out of the city. But since caravans stopped coming to the city due to the looming threat of war, the thief would very reasonably starve to death without the hero's intervention.
• In Scratches, after Robin, James Blackwood's son died, he bricked up the door to the boy's former room and erased all traces of his identity from the family's records. Except he didn't die, he was locked up in a prison cell below the house because of his severe birth defects.
• Featured in Sharin no Kuni in the form of The Maximum Penalty, the worst punishment an individual can receive. You're virtually isolated from society; no one can befriend you, no one can speak to you, no one can touch you, no one can even look at you. No jobs, no fun, nothing. The only person allowed to interact with you is your assigned Special High Class Individual, and only for strictly monitoring purposes. Everyone subject to this punishment has a strange spiral-like mark tattooed in its skin and sewn in its clothes, so everyone can know its punishment.
  Ririko, being the daughter of Saburou Higuchi (the one that started the uprising years ago), receives this punishment, and Houzuki is the Special High Class Individual in charge of her. He uses her to put pressure on Kenichi (actually Ken, Ririko's brother) to become a Special High Class Individual, promising him that once he does, he'll let him take care of Ririko.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: At the end of the Imperial Agent storyline, the Agent is given a chance to do this by using the Black Codex to erase all information regarding Cipher Nine from the galaxy, thus making them a "ghost" free to do as they wish, including protecting the Empire without Sith oversight.
• In Stonekeep, one of your dwarven companions is declared an "uck-togoth" and cast out of his clan for disobeying his clan elder.
  "An uck-togoth cannot be heard or seen!"
  —Two clan elders when he objects.
• In the first System Shock Edward Diego removes all mentions regarding the presence of the Hacker from the records aboard Citadel Station. It works so well that SHODAN has no idea about his existence while he spends six months in an artificially induced healing coma.
• In The Princess, the Stray Cat, and Matters of the Heart 2, this is the fate of the Kingdom of Uncry due to the Oblivion Act cast by the Netherworld, which not only erased all memory of the kingdom and its inhabitants from existence, but also makes it so that anyone that does learn about it or meet its inhabitants will forget about them not long after.
• By the nature of the game's design, Tomodachi Life performs this with any mii erased from the island. Their appearances in previously recorded news broadcasts and family photo albums sees them replaced with other characters, with no hint they ever existed.
• Touhou Project's Keine Kamishirasawa is a were-hakutaku with the power to "devour" history, which she uses in Touhou Eiyashou ~ Imperishable Night to hide the human village from harm - afterward she returns it without any damage done. Fans have planted Epileptic Trees about whether Keine used this power on the PC-98 continuity, or on Rin Satsuki, the Dummied Out third protagonist from the first Windows game.
• In Triangle Strategy, Narve's grandfather, the archsage Grandante, was erased from Norzelia's history books for publicly opposing the Goddess' teachings. Narve seeks to spread the word about him and carry on his legacy.
• Done in Watch_Dogs where Aiden erases T-Bone's ctOS profile so that he can safely enter Chicago without Blume trying to kill him.
  • Also done as part of the tutorial mission for the sequel as Marcus erases his own profile to prove himself worthy to join DedSec, although it's also because ctOS mistakingly flagged him as a criminal and got him charged with a criminal record before he did anything. This goes horribly wrong since Blume were anticipating his break in. Not only do they reinstate his profile, they add a warrant for serious fake charges to get him arrested.

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