∇

troperville

∇

tools

∇

toys

• This is what happens in the Bad Future of Homestuck. John gets himself killed by fighting his Denizen far earlier than he's supposed to. Without him, Jade (presumably) dies since she is unable to enter the Medium and escape from the meteor that later strikes her house. Dave and Rose can't progress past a certain point without their help, and Dave is forced to travel back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong.
  • The whole kids' session of Sburb could be considered this too, at least as far as winning it normally is concerned, because they accidentally prototyped Becquerel and gave all of the enemies in their game ridiculous game breaking godlike powers that broke the game so badly that one of their bosses escaped their universe and messed the trolls' session up - sort've like failing on your video game so hard that someone else in a different city's game disk scratches. This is compounded by the fact that Jack started the Reckoning way, way early and the kids game basically started just as they ran out of time for some reason. The characters involved realise something went wrong and are trying to figure out how to salvage the situation.
• In the Game Within A Show from Scooby-Doo And The Cyber Chase, the gang is trapped in a video game, where they must find and pick up a hidden box of Scooby Snacks on each level to advance to the next. In the dinosaur-jungle level, Scooby is picked up by the trapped baby pterosaur he just rescued, and grabs up the box of Snacks an instant before it flies away with him, preventing the box from being destroyed by molten lava. As a player of the actual game might not spot the box in time, this looks like an Unwinnable by Mistake that would need fixing. Justified, as it's evidently a Beta-test version that they're caught in.
• This CAPTCHA◊, and others, apparently. Fortunately, it's only actually testing one word, the other being from a large-scale project of using the whole show as an OCR (normally, it's not this obvious). One can bypass a non-typeable word by simply writing "fff" (or, depending on your vocabulary and maturity level, the filthiest, dirtiest profanity you can imagine) in its place.