History ApocalypseHow / Class2

* "A Boy and His Dog" by Harlan Ellison in which the unnamed city is divided among scavenger gangs underneath which lies a CrapScharrineWorld that maintains a decent level of technology but which in dying out from inbreeding.

* In ''HeatGuyJ'', after humans appropriated the technology of the [[SuperiorSpecies Celestials]] in [[HumansAreBastards their conquest for power]], there were apparently large-scale wars. The result? Earth's human population is reduced to ''seven'' city-states (with some small towns and SpaceAmish villages surrounding them), who are mistrustful of one another and do not trade, communicate, etc. with one another.

** not to mention several thousand cryogenicaly frozen people.
* In IsaacAsimov's classic short story, "Nightfall", a planet with six suns experiences night only once every 2048 years. Each time, the darkness drives almost everyone insane and they destroy civilization. At the end the scientists are unable to convince the people of the danger and it all happens again, but they're able to save their data about the event so that the next cycle might avoid the same fate. (Of course, given that this has happened nine or ten times before, it's very much implied that all this might be for naught, as by the time the next cycle's civilization is advanced enough to understand the data, it may well have degenerated into myth.) This is the exact situation in the novel version; one of the reasons the scientists aren't believed is because it's revealed that their prediction ''exactly'' matches the apocalyptic prophecy of an ancient cult.

* New Zealand production ''Series/TheTribe'' had the worlds' adult population dead from an accidentally-engineered virus, and the surviving children living in a class 1 catastrophe, with mostly successful attempts to restore technology. However, in the sequel series, ''TheNewTomorrow'', set possibly some centuries later, the children's society has regressed to the point of basic small-scale agriculture, and tribes of hunter-gatherers, as well as worship of the Ancestors, and technology has all but become forgotten (some machines, still working on their own, are thought to be "monsters"), making this a pretty firm class 2.

* ''VideoGame/{{I Am Alive}}'' The entire world is massively FUBAR by some unknown cataclysm. The player must navigate the shattered, devastated ruins of what was once New York in order to find his daughter and girlfriend.

* ''TechInfantry'' had the ''Exodus'' spin-off project, where a much larger catastrophe wiped out most life in the galaxy, and one planet worth of survivors quickly lost most of their high technology and regressed to a Medieval stage of civilization.

* ''Anime/TurnAGundam'': This was the end result of the Turn A using the Moonlight Butterfly across all of the Earth's surface. The ability works by spreading nanomachines around that attack technology, turning it into sand. 2,000 years later, Earthborn humanity is barely up to early 1900s technology levels.

* This was actually the ending to the last cartoon of the "future trilogy" WesternAnimation/WesternAnimation/TomAndJerry cartoons from the Chuck Jones run.

* This was actually the ending to the last cartoon of the "future trilogy" {{Tom and Jerry}} cartoons from the Chuck Jones run.

* ''Yor: Hunter from the Future'' Aliens have literally regressed Earth back to the Stone Age. Spoony does an excellent job reviewing this campy movie.

* Kurt Vonnegut's ''Galapagos''. Okay, technically the human race does survive in the end, but you can't really consider them human anymore by the time they do get back on their feet. [[spoiler: Their brains have atrophied and their limbs evolved into flippers. The ghostly narrator sees this as a good thing.]]
* ''The Zombie Survival Guide'' dubs this a "Class 4 Outbreak" of the ZombieApocalypse -- when there are so many zombies that humanity is overwhelmed.
* ''Cell'', by StephenKing. We see only [=US=] residents, and the book doesn't really address other places, but there's really no reason to think any place with cell phones was spared.

* In ''The Wheel of Time'' series, an event occurs three thousand or so years previously known as the Breaking of the World. Caused by all male channelers going berserk, Human society is set back from near utopia to feudalism.

* Russel Hoban's "Riddley Walker". It's two thousand years - we think - after a nuclear war blasted everyone back to Iron Age technology. In the two millennia since the war, mankind has been getting by in a sort of neo-tribal existance, by digging up old rusting metal out of the earth to salvage the scrap metal. All history is orally related via Punch-and-Judy puppet shows and half-remembered accounts of the war are woven together with scraps of the legend of St. Eustace. And the English language is mind-blowingly different.

* ''The Wild Boy'' by Warren Rochelle-somewhere between this and the next, since it was unnatural means, but humanity wasn't totally extinct and was back in pre industrial mode living in the ruins (the ones not being bred by the Lindauzi anyway)

* The Great Rain of Fire, a planetary cataclysm that devastated the D&D setting of Mystara 3000-odd years ago, knocked human and elven civilization from scifi-grade technology back to savagery. The exact nature of the weapons Evergrun's elves and Blackmoor's humans threw at each other is unknown, but nukes were probably the ''least'' of them, as their conflict was so violent that it ''changed Mystara's axial tilt''. Note that this same event rates as a Class 3a for some of the other races that were around back then, and that still others only subverted a Class 3a ApocalypseHow because the Immortals preserved some of them in the Hollow World.

* The Yozis in Exalted are trying to do this to creation, but it only falls into this category because they're not going to kill all humans. If the Yozis were to succeed it would be worse than a Class Z.

* ''Might&Magic''.[[spoiler: An ''entire arm of the galaxy'' was cut-off from the main civilization by alien invasion. Cue a utter collapse of infrastructure, and a fall into barbarism and witchcraft, hard enough that the world Heroes 1-3 and Might & Magic 6-8 takes place are overall at a late medieval/early renaissaince level ''more than a thousand years after the Silence''.]].

* While the series started out with some aspects of civil order still around, the ''Mad Max'' films wind up here by the end.

* ''TheMatrix'', which sees a machine take-over of Earth lead to most of humanity used as batteries for the evil machines.

* ''TheSpyWhoLovedMe''. BigBad Stromberg plans to start a global thermonuclear war to wipe out civilization.

* New Zealand production ''TheTribe'' had the worlds' adult population dead from an accidentally-engineered virus, and the surviving children living in a class 1 catastrophe, with mostly successful attempts to restore technology. However, in the sequel series, ''TheNewTomorrow'', set possibly some centuries later, the children's society has regressed to the point of basic small-scale agriculture, and tribes of hunter-gatherers, as well as worship of the Ancestors, and technology has all but become forgotten (some machines, still working on their own, are thought to be "monsters"), making this a pretty firm class 2.

* ''TurnAGundam'': This was the end result of the Turn A using the Moonlight Butterfly across all of the Earth's surface. The ability works by spreading nanomachines around that attack technology, turning it into sand. 2,000 years later, Earthborn humanity is barely up to early 1900s technology levels.

* In ''[[Rifts]]'', a small nuclear exchange during a major surge in the planet's magical field wiped out all human civilization, and nearly wiped out humanity itself. In the three hundred years since, small pockets of civilization have emerged here and there, but 90% of humanity lives as subsistence farmers or hunter-gatherers.

** This is also what happens if the [[WerewolfTheApocalypse Garou]] ''win''. You don't want to know what it'd be like if they ''lose''.
* Observed with regularity in ''{{Warhammer 40000}}''. A significant number of Imperial worlds are ancient human colonies that fell into this, either independently or as part of larger-scale cataclysms and wars, then slowly worked their way back up to Stone Age or medieval-era levels over the course of thousands of years.

* Not sure if it is "Real Life", but it is proposed that human civilization has "cycles" and before the starting of THIS civilization (Babylon, Egypt etc), it was a highly advanced civilized world that was destroyed by natural disasters or nuclear warfare several thousand years ago. It is also said that Sumerians are the only people from the last civilization that haven't completely been knocked back to pre-agricultural state.

* ''Cell'', by StephenKing. We only see [=US=] residents, and the book doesn't really address other places, but there's really no reason to think any place with cell phones was spared.

* In VernorVinge's ''{{A Deepness in the Sky}}'', every planet-bound human civilization goes through this at some point due to the limits of technology, and has been doing this for thousands of years. The Emergents manage to stave this off through MindControl, but the true answer as of ''{{A Fire Upon The Deep}}'' seems to be to move to the parts of the galaxy where FasterThanLightTravel is possible. In the case of ''A Fire Upon The Deep'', this is the answer for poor weak sophonts of human-level intelligence. [[spoiler:The ultimate answer of beings beyond the Powers is to move the zones of space where singularity can occur closer to you.]]

* In TheBible, The Great Tribulation. Exact numbers are unknown, but the description "Mortals will be rarer than the gold of Ophir," combined with Revelation detailing the fact that over half of the population will die from the war, famine, plagues and various other disasters, and most of the Christians will be beheaded, burned or starved to death, while none of the unbelievers survive Armageddon means that you could expect maybe one out of a thousand people who enter the Tribulation to come out alive, perhaps a bit more.

* ''ChronoTrigger'', at least after the Day of Lavos. It's clear that a few isolated pockets of humanity have survived Lavos' wrath, but it's also clear that those isolated pockets are screwed, no matter how much "hope" is spread by the main characters. Luckily, the theme of the game is TimeTravel...
* The freeware game ''{{Iji}}'' begins with a vast majority of all life on the planet blown to bits, your job is to try to save the remaining life from being blown into even tinier bits.
* By the end of ''{{Xenogears}}'', most people either become [[OurZombiesAreDifferent -wels-]], are absorbed into the BigBad, are eaten by -wels-, or are killed by "angels." Only a handful of people survive, clinging to life in a couple locations. The game is supposed to have a happy ending.

* In 1939, MGM released ''PeaceOnEarth'', a strongly anti-war cartoon, in which the human race died in war, and forest animals rebuilt their own peaceful civilization over the abandoned battlegrounds.

* The plot of ''BattlestarGalactica'' -- both series -- is based on a multiple Class 2, the Cylons all but wiping out humanity's twelve planetary colonies and pursuing the pathetically small number of survivors through space.