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  • This unfortunate person who somehow managed to completely fail at making instant noodles to such an extent it sends their discord server into a meltdown.
  • Not many LPers die in the incredibly easy first part of a video game. That's where Crazy Commentaries comes in. In their first Mario 64 video, one of the members dies by losing health to Bob-ombs and rolling balls, while somehow not getting any health. While this was already a major fail, the thing that really cements this into Epic Fail territory was the fact that he died by jumping directly into a rolling ball, not even trying to get away from it.
  • Parodied in The Nostalgia Critic's crossover review of Child's Play with Phelous. Phelous tosses a sock at Critic, it hits Critic's forehead, Critic "falls" out of his chair and twirls around his house on his feet as he somehow takes up a random gun, loads it, and shoots himself in the head.
  • Sean Fausz, a member of Channel Awesome, has a whole online series of videos dedicated to various Epic Fails.
  • Since TableTop features players that are new to the games, quite a bit of fail is built in (but it's handled all in good fun). The Epic Fail comes in as the host and longtime gamer, Wil Wheaton, almost never wins. His most notable win came as a result of someone else's Epic Fail. During a game of Fluxx, one player did some mumbling and card reading to himself, lots of hand examination, and such for what he thought was going to be the game-winning play. He makes the play and discovers that, by misreading two different cards, he caused Wil to actually win as a result.
  • Carries over to at least one episode of TitansGrave: The Ashes of Valkana (though Yuri Lowenthal tended to roll far worse until gaining the Staff of Forlorn Hope) and his guest spot on Critical Role (not even Matthew Mercer switching their d20s helped his horrible luck in episode 20).
  • Also documenting Epic Fails: there is a website made of videos of trucks disregarding blatantly visible warning signs for a very low 11'8" railroad bridge over a road. With very predictable results. Since April 2008, there has been 158 crashes involving the bridge, this is despite there being several signs showing the low height of the bridge for 3 blocks leading to it, the height eventually being raised 8" and a flashing sign being added that says "Overheight: Must Turn".
  • Todd in the Shadows:
    • When Todd reviews Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" and finds a quotation saying they were trying to make something like INXS... well he throws up comparative clips of the two groups (hint: nothing alike) and then analogises thus:
      Todd: That's like if you try to make scrambled eggs... and instead you caught syphilis.
    • He also theorizes that Usher's rhyming was so bad his wife divorced him over it.note 
    • It's not called out by name, but Akon calling a girl "Sexy Bitch" after "trying to find the words to describe this girl without being disrespectful" definitely counts.
  • Matt from Two Best Friends Play has two. The first one, from when they play Donkey Kong Country Returns, happens at the end of a Minecart Madness level that they had lost all their lives on, when Matt jumps off a cliff right at the end of the level, in full view of the exit, because he thought there might be a token under the cliff. The second one is during Dead Rising 2 when Matt fails to complete any objectives, which Pat rubs in his face.
  • Atop the Fourth Wall: When Linkara is trying to break open a champagne bottle to christen his new spaceship. Adam Savage and Kari Byron could tell you that breaking a champagne bottle on something isn't as easy as it looks.
    Linkara: Break, damn you!
  • YouTube personality Tobuscus does a weekly video clip series called "Cute Win Fail" in which users vote on the most epic clip of three, one of which is from each of the aforementioned categories. Needless to say, the "Fail" clips are a celebration of this trope, and if they are chosen are glorified with the honor of "Epic Fail".
  • English Let's Player Over The Gun has made a career out of this: he actually calls his playthrough style "HTSF" ("How To Successfully Fail"). Some of his more triumphant examples include blowing himself up with a rocket - straight onto an electrified floor and somehow losing a plot-critical key to a basic Mook.
  • The Spoony Experiment:
    • Spoony demonstrates one way to Epic Fail in X-Com: Terror from the Deep when his entire party gets taken out in the aliens' first turn. He takes it pretty well.
    • He also had some harsh words concerning the enemy A.I.'s inability to hit a completely motionless ship in PC game Privateer 2: The Darkening. The entire tirade, however, can be summed up in the very last sentence of said speech.
      Spoony: Congratulations guys, your enemy A.I. is less effective than the fucking UFO in Asteroids.
    • In this video, Spoony describes a Spycraft game he ran where the players were trying to get onto a bullet train from a helicopter. By the end, one member of the team was dead and they utterly failed their mission because they kept rolling 1s, Spoony kept giving them the chance to recover, and they'd roll 1s for that too.
  • Kickassia was pretty much this from beginning to end, for the Channel Awesome crew. They don't even think to use weapons to take the micronation, until they have the second invasion. Once they take command, they proceed to run the place so incompetently that it's a wonder it lasts as long as it does. As it is, the vice president repeatedly tries (and fails) to assassinate the president, the Critic tries to keep his power (and fails) by buying a massive amount of explosives, several other characters try (and fail) to steal control of Kickassia - including Dr. Insano - Santa Christ gets killed in the struggle though he gets better, and it ends with them all returning the place to former president Baugh and going home, banished forever from Nevada. One gets the feeling that Baugh only let them take control of Molassia in the first place because he knew they were all too stupid and selfish to actually keep it.
  • Rooster Teeth:
    • Same for Rage Quit, especially with Surgeon Simulator 2013.
    • Of all of the Heists in Let's Play Grand Theft Auto V, "Ray's Heist" is the only one that utterly failed. Most end with either a Sole Survivor with money, a Sole Survivor without money, a Sole Survivor who is Driven to Suicide, or a complete success. Ray's is the first where everyone died. What makes this worse is that Ray is The Ace, the best player in the team. The RTX 2014 Heist and "The Grand Heist" were total failures as well, but Ray's stands out as everyone being incompetent.
    • Then, there's their playing of Madden NFL 25 using the teams that were going onto the Super Bowl. Jack throws an impressive seven interceptions (would have been eight, but one was flagged), walking out in shame after the last one. Ryan takes over and throws three more. Despite all the picks, one of which Michael returned for a touchdown, Team Gents manages to keep it a close game.
    • Oh yeah, and if you want to see their community fail a lot, check out their Fails of the Weak series (which used to be Halo-focused until Volume #200) and the GameFails channel.
    • Probably one of the best is Ryan's epic destruction in a game of Jeopardy! where he misses the Daily Double and proceeds to drag him down into $5600 in the red, taking him out before Final Jeopardy.
    • Then there was the time Jack and Jeremy brought in Geoff for a game of Wheel of Fortune for their RouLetsPlay series. Despite Geoff never playing, he ended up winning with a whopping $75,520 with Jeremy only getting $3,000 from a Toss-Up and Jack getting $1,000 as a consolation prize!
    • Soon after that, there was the "Bankruptening" where, on the first fourteen spins, Jack, Jeremy and Michael proceed to hit seven Bankrupts, two Lose-A-Turns and get two wrong letters!
  • An Angry German Kid gag dub has the kid go on the internet to get a girlfriend. After uploading his profile, he learns, much to his fury, that the amount of viewers he has is -2.
  • Roadkill frequently features these, due to a combination of breakages, insufficient time, and just sheer bad luck. Best example? The first attempt at the California-Alaska road trip. They wound up way behind schedule, broke their window by slamming the door in a gas station parking lot, failed to flat tow a complete hulk of a 57 Chevy, and finally wind up in the Grand Canyon with a metal donkey strapped to the roof.
  • Retsupurae:
    • There's one video where slowbeef and Diabetus watch an LPer do a Let's Play of Contra and cannot get past the first stage. He keeps trying it for thirty minutes. When uploaded, they only did the first fifteen because it was so painful!
    • There's another featuring Chip Cheezum and General Ironicus, where they watch an LP of Pokémon Yellow with the screen zoomed in so far that it removes a third of the frame. Besides this, Chip is left gobsmacked when the player loses to a Pidgey, a Flying type. The Pokemon he was using? A Pikachu, an Electric type. In other words, the LPer lost with a Pokemon type his enemy was weak against!
    • There's also one that's been reviewed by four different groups of a Final Fantasy XIII Let's Play where the player's camcorder's zoom function mysteriously kicks in and the camera focuses more and more into the screen finally stopping and having the rest of the video being focused on a few random pixels on the TV screen.
  • The Super Failio Cousins: Macaroni fails a lot, especially in their New Super Mario Bros Wii series.
  • Game Grumps:
    • At one point during the playthrough of Mega Man 7, Arin takes over for Jon after a long string of failures in the first Wily Fortress Stage, making fun of Jon for his incompetence. Cue Arin immediately summoning Rush, and then jumping right over him into a spike pit.
    • At one point during their Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) playthrough, they're put right next to a lake, and in plain sight is an island with a portal on it in the middle of the lake (which they're supposed to reach to get to the next stage) and a hint ring explaining how to get there. They proceed to ignore the hint ring, circle the entire lake, ignore the hint ring again, and then backtrack into the nearby hub area to wander around aimlessly while complaining that the game doesn't clearly tell them how to proceed (though eventually Arin looks up the answer on GameFAQs and realizes their mistake.) At a later point, after taking control of Silver, they reach a point where they need to use his psychokinesis in a specific way to proceed, before which is another hint ring explaining how to do it, which they walk right past three different times (while acknowledging that it's there, but they don't want to look at it) while once again complaining that the game doesn't tell them what to do.
    • One You Don't Know Jack match ends with Jon getting frustrated at always losing at the final Jack Attack segment and spending the whole segment hammering buttons and racking up penalties. His final score: -$513,082.
    • While playing the Nintendo Hard Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril, Arin is repeatedly dying on the first real boss of the game. He tries everything from randomly making up stories as he plays to making at least one attempt in total silence. Finally, he is prepared to just give up when Ross convinces him to give it one last attempt... at which point Arin accidentally hits "End" instead of "Continue", quitting the game.
      Ross: Didn't go well?
    • A relatively minor one occurs in Sonic Boom where they spent nine minutes looking for an interactive object that was right next to the force field they needed to get past, mentioned in dialogue, and Color-Coded for Your Convenience.
    • After more than eighty episodes of Pokemon FireRed, Arin finally evolves his starter to Charizard, and immediately ruins the moment when Charizard wants to learn Wing Attack and in his haste to replace Scratch, Arin makes Charizard forget Flamethrower. It had been a very long time since the last save.
      Dan: How do you fuck up using a menu?
    • In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Arin and Suzy spend two episodes fighting Quiet with the intention of bringing her back to motherbase, something that is immediately ruined by Arin defeating her and then shooting her during the cutscene by mistake. Suzy proceeds to get upset and start shouting at him about just how badly he fucked up; meanwhile Arin is insisting that it happened because he had no idea he actually could shoot her, and that "we'll go and get her back later."
    • During a playthrough of the PS2 version of Wheel of Fortune, Danny manages to hit Lose a Turn four turns in a row.
  • In a Murder episode of Sips' Garry's Mod series, Turpster spawns with the gun in one round, and Sips is the murderer. Smiffy and Ross both get murdered by Sips, but manage to shout out his in-game name, Papa Miko, and give him away before death. Turps therefore comes to the conclusion that it's Trott aka Lima Romeo, even though they don't have remotely similar names, and shoots Trott. This is after two people gave Sips away.
  • During the Yogscast playthrough of Garry's Mod Murder!, specifically in the second series, InTheLittleWood spawns with the gun and fails to notice a murderer walking around him, despite the rest of the cast such as Simon Lane and Hat Films outright screaming at him. When the murderer finally appears, Martyn tries to shoot him, misses and is cut down, causing the rest of the group to all lose since he dropped the gun in the pool. While Martyn was new to the game and aiming with the revolver is not as easy as it seems, it was considered especially stupid by the rest of the Yogscast.
    Martyn: So my aiming's on par wit Sjin's, then.
    Smiffy: [by now clearly frustrated] Well, it's less about the aiming, and more about just—
    Sjin: Seeing him.
    Smiffy: Blatantly not seeing him walk by you.
  • During this episode of SeaNanners' and Sark's playthrough of Grand Theft Auto V, the duo decide that they will pose as Swedish foreign exchange students and rob a petrol station. All appears to be going well, as they park their car outside calmly and walk towards the doors... except the gas station isn't actually a place you can steal from, causing them to be discovered. In the ensuing chaos, they end up destroying their car as well.
  • While CaptainSparklez is normally known as a very good gamer, his performance in Arma 3 is downright atrocious, since he dies constantly (even though some of the deaths were the fault of his friends) in ways which could have been avoided. Progressively, the other gamers such as SeaNanners and Gassy Mexican get more frustrated at his mistakes.
  • In the first two episodes of Hat Films' "SkyBlock -Take One" (in Minecraft), the Sirs, in a very short period of time, turn their lava into Obsidian, destroy their single water source, flatten their only plentiful block, dirt, into a non-recyclable bridge, and make it impossible for their only renewable resourse, saplings, to grow. To say that a restart was necessary is an understatement.
  • The Super Gaming Brothers do an LP of Super Mario Bros. and Elliot gets a game over... on World 1-1.
  • Jesse Cox's Let's Play of Game Dev Tycoon comes to a screeching halt when his MMO's maintenance costs exceeds his profits. Now, that wouldn't be so bad, but it turns out that he had billions of dollars before he lost it all. His MMO's maintenance was so expensive that it killed his game. How did this happen? Turns out Jesse essentially went balls-to-the-wall in game development and never realized how much that really costs! By the time he realizes it, he's deep in the red and he can't pull out.
  • This is Regular Car Reviews' opinion of the Dodge Aspen, a car so badly made that honoring its warranties almost bankrupted the company. After comparing it to a string of products that failed to take off and are generally regarded as having been bad ideas in the first place, he says that it "failed harder than the presidency of William Henry Harrison." For those not up on American history, he's the one who made a long inauguration speech on a rainy day, caught pneumonia, and died 30 days later.
  • When OneyPlays played a The Lord of the Rings DOS game, they typed in "Attack You". This is the result:
    "Ok, so wait: You try to punch yourself and somehow miss, and then you drowned?"
  • A Bonk.io youtuber Shyguymask made a series called "Do Not Move", where he constantly ends up being the last man standing despite doing absolutely nothing.
  • Epicurious's "50 People Try to [basic kitchen skill]" series, by placing untrained non-experts in a kitchen and asking them to perform a task with no instructions, has a tendency to produce these:
    • "Juice a Lemon": one participant thought the Slap Chop was a juicer. Needless to say, not much juice was produced.
    • "Fillet a Fish": When attempting to behead the fish, one person managed to chop the cutting board in two.
  • Bon Appétit's "Every Way to Cook a Buger" somehow manages to produce 50 different ways to slightly warm up mostly raw beef.
  • Ozzy Man Reviews: Screw-ups of giant proportions appear often in his compilations, most often the Destination F(ucked) series. For example, there is a ship that runs right into a crane, the crane falls down, then a building catches on fire and the fire spreads. The ship is a sneaky bastard and pulls back with: "See ya, wouldn't wanna be ya!"
  • The titular host of The Angry Joe Show invokes this with his "Angry Reviews" for video games: if a title, especially one that was hyped up by its publisher and fans (including Joe himself), winds up being a disappointment and/or abyssmal, Joe will slap on a seal of "Epic Fail" upon giving it a rating from one to ten, denoting how poor this game is compared to the rest of not only its respective genre, but to the entire medium. Examples of games that have caught such ire from Joe includes Sonic Free Riders, Mindjack, Ride to Hell: Retribution and Ghostbusters (2016).
  • Daniel Thrasher: In "When you pray to Gsus", Gsus has a "flood the world" button right next to the "go see the Ethereal Plane of Musicality" button on his phone, pressing the former by accident when he tried pressing the later.
  • VShojo:
  • Brandon Farris uses this as part of the regular humor of his YouTube channel. He finds life hacks and attempts to imitate them, either with the wrong materials or ignoring vital steps or warnings, so that, when the inevitable failure occurs, he is either in pain or covered in whatever substance he was using. One example is an attempt at crisscrossing duct tape on his shelves, ending with him jumping into the duct tape and pulling the shelves down on top of him, pinning his legs and leaving him unable to escape. Further review of the video revealed that it was supposed to be a "laser maze" for children to play in; he did not let it play all the way.
  • Critical Role: Due to the randomized nature of a tabletop game where all actions are deemed successful or unsuccessful by dice rolls, characters can fail spectacularly at any moment with an unlucky roll, though few instances were as spectacular as Fjord rolling three natural 1's in a row while trying to play a sandsack-throwing carnival game. His first throw hits a spectator (the mother of the little girl who went before him), the second gets caught on his armor and rips the sack, covering him in sand, and for the third he gets Yasha and Jester to pick him up and swing him to add momentum like they saw done with the small child, but they misunderstand the objective and throw Fjord at the target, faceplanting him into the dirt. To add insult to injury, Molly goes right after Fjord and lands it on his first try.
  • During the start of SMPEarth, Quackity clicked to spawn in South America at the advice of his chat, and ended up in what is roughly Santa Cruz, Argentina. What makes this qualified for this trope is that he wanted to spawn in the region of his real-life home country, Mexico, and proceeds to have a breakdown after seeing that he spawned at "the fucking tip"... then eventually spends 24 minutes rowing to the Mexican coastline.

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