In Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, you lead a landing party consist of Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, Dr. McCoy, and a lunkhead security officer in every mission. Guess which one can be easily killed (in some missions, more than one way)? In fact, getting a 100% mission rating requires you to keep him alive, which in later missions is a puzzle in itself. Sadly this feature is removed in its sequel, Judgment Rites.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation 16-bit game (SNES/Genesis) has over a dozen Ensigns who can accompany you on away missions, despite there being no advantage in doing so; series regulars like Data and Worf have more health, while Dr. Crusher has healing packs. On the plus side, you can kill off as many Ensigns as you want, whereas losing two officers will abort the mission. Even the game doesn't care if they die.
Star Trek: Elite Force: The game lampshades this by giving the "Redshirt Award" to whoever died the most in a holomatch.
Dying in single player may prompt the post-mission report to say "What color shirt were you wearing?"
Your ship's crew used to be made up almost entirely of these. The crew was represented as a bar shaped like a line of people, and it got colored and went dark as you take damage in space. Large ships in particular would have hundreds if not thousands of dead crew in every battle. This mechanic has since been removed and your crew is now unkillable. On the ground, any party member spot not filled with a bridge officer has a generic security officer to fill the spot, who is not customizable or upgradable. The only exceptions are the Captain (the player's character) and his/her NPC senior officers.
This trope was inverted in the old Federation tutorial when your Captain sent you over alone to a ship infested with Borg, a total red shirt mission. Instead of the Borg killing you, they boarded your ship and killed off every officer aboard. This left you, an ensign, as the senior surviving officer and thus in command of the ship.
A captain-tier Tactical ability, "Security Escort," allows you to beam in a couple redshirts from your ship to back you up in ground combat. Unlike your regular party of bridge officers or generic security guys who will be Only Mostly Dead at worst, these can and probably will actually die. And nobody cares because you can beam in more every few minutes.
Taken Up to Eleven with the distress call ability, which summons another entire ship full of these solely for taking fire when your own ship is at critical health. However, Sometimes the ability turns into Summon Bigger Fish instead as the entirely random ship that shows up can be several tiers higher than is available for playable characters.
Non-Star Trek
The amateur PC Adventure GameAdventures in the Galaxy of Fantabulous Wonderment, which is pretty much what it sounds like, takes the trope to its logical extreme by making redshirts into a commodity cloned and sold in 5-packs. They die in a great number of interesting ways. In fact it's actually impossible for an away mission to end any way but the death of the redshirt.
ANNIE: Last Hope has the New Mexico police who serves as backup in the opening stages, when the Zombie Apocalypse begins in proper. The entire squad gets overwhelmed quickly by the undead while putting a small dent in the zombie population, though you do obtain a machine-gun from one of the officers in the process.
In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2's Takedown mission, one of your squadmates is aptly codenamed"Meat", and is picked off shortly after the shooting starts. Royce, the next in line, is gunned down a little while later.
Hell, the idea of NPC redshirts is even a thematic element of the Call of Duty franchise as the massive amounts of friendly NPCs are meant to reinforce that the player is simply one among many thousands of soldiers engaged in real battles, as a contrast to the One-Man Army that the player character inhabits in other war FPSes. Gradually, this element diminished as the series went on, with the nameless cannon-fodder NPCs being there to make you feel comparatively more awesome.
In Crying Suns, your commandos are interchangeable goons with two hit points apiece and no sprites. They exist to act as meat shields for your officers during expeditions, and to be deployed during certain anomalies.
Dawn of War II: The first two games use a squad system, where your heroes will always be the last of the three or four Space Marines in the squad to die, losses being replenished at a teleporter. The third goes back to individual heroes, though these can be exchanged for Elite Mooks that cost nothing to replace at a teleporter.
The repair team in Dead Space consist of three named characters and some additional guards. None of the latter survive the first act.
In Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening you start the game with Mhairi. She is a serviceable tank during the first mission but her main purpose is to die during the subsequent Grey Warden joining ritual. The ritual has already been established as dangerous so it would have seemed like a contrived coincidence for all of the participants to survive.
In Morrowind's Siege at Firemoth DLC, you team up with three NPC companions who fit the Fighter, Mage, Thief trio. All three will almost certainly die in the first stage of the assault on the eponymous Fort Firemoth, leaving you to finish alone.
When you go to trap the dragon Odahviing in Skyrim, the people on the Dragonsreach balcony are you, the Jarl of Whiterun, his adjutant, and some nameless guard. No points for guessing which one gets snapped up and flung into the distance on Odahviing's first pass.
In EVE Online, there's a mission where the objective is to find a man named Red. When he's found he's dead and described as wearing a red shirt.
In Fallout 3, the power armored soldier in Operation Anchorage who runs into the pulse field and dies is labeled a Red Shirt in the GECK.
In the main game, the first named Brotherhood of Steel soldier to die during gameplay is appropriately named Reddin.
In Final Fantasy VII, this is played within Cloud's flashback and the ultimate resolution thereof. Sephiroth goes into the mountains near Nibelheim with Cloud, Tifa (as a guide), and two unnamed grunts. One of the grunts gets thrown off a bridge. He dies. The other is attacked later when Sephiroth goes nuts. Not only does he survive, he's Cloud. The "Cloud" that we saw in Cloud's flashback was actually Zack. The Production Nickname for the character was 'Zako', a pun on 'Zack' and a Japanese word for fictional cannon fodder.
In Final Fantasy X Generic Al Bheds tend to die en masse at points in the game. Starting with Operation Mi'hen.
Biggs and Wedge are a rare recurring example, thanks to having multiple instances throughout the series. Which tend to not survive showing up onscreen, most notably in Final Fantasy IV: The After Years (died protecting Ceodore), Final Fantasy VI (died trying to capture an Esper), and Final Fantasy VII (died when Shinra dropped the Midgar plate).
In Fire Emblem, since the games are known for having large casts, you would think that there would not be many red shirts. However, on numerous occasions green colored "Other" units will be found either as generic guards or NPC reinforcements. They are usually of the class "Soldier", which no characters that you recruit will ever have (though they are also sometimes seen as enemy units). Worse still, they have some of the lowest stats in the game. Soldiers are given better stats and made into a playable class in Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn, but they still seem to be the go-to class for neutral units.
In FTL: Faster Than Light, there is an achievement called "No Redshirts Here", which is unlocked if the player reaches the final sector without losing a crew member.
Anthony Carmine (whose name is a shade of red) is a rookie squadmember who is the only main character to wear a helmet which covers his face. He's also the first squad member to die in the game (and actually one of the only two characters who die), shot in the head by a sniper after the first couple of levels. His Redshirt status was lampshaded in Gears of War 2 by a conversation between Ben Carmine and Dom.
In Gears of War 2, Benjamin Carmine (Anthony Carmine's youngest brother) joins the squad, but survives almost to the end of the game, making him a Mauve Shirt.
Averted in Gears of War 3 with Clayton Carmine, the eldest Carmine brother. Several times he dodges death, but makes it to the end of the game alive. His helmet even deflects a sniper's bullet, a Call-Back to how Anthony Carmine died.
Surprisingly he was the least armored of the three brothers, wearing sleeveless armor rather than full body armor.
Also in the first Gears of War, the member of Alpha Squad who runs off and is instantly killed by the berserker is listed in the credits as Redshirt Gyules.
The oarsmen on the ship to Tolbi in Golden Sun exist only to be slain by sea monsters, thus giving the player a chance to veer the ship off its course — and they're all wearing red bandanas.
During a surprise attack on a supply depot in Growlanser 2, the enemy commander has the following exchange with a guard:
Byron: You... token guard that's gonna die anyway... try and slow them down! Burnstein Soldier 6:Uh... okay...
Almost every friendly NPC in the first-person shooter Half-Life is a redshirt. The security guards tag along and give support, but their low hit points and wimpy pistols mean they never last long. And the scientists, oh those poor scientists. Almost all of them only exist to die in scripted set-pieces to remind you of how insanely dangerous everything is. (One of the guards, however, got his own spin-off. You don't mess with Barney.)
In the Fan RemakeBlack Mesa, however, most of them can be saved. In any case, though, Opposing Force reveals that anyone who didn't get out by the next day died anyway, thanks to the Black Ops nuking the facility.
In Halo, your regular human allies have a high mortality rate:
The first two redshirts pop up right after the tutorial of Halo: Combat Evolved (one of them only shows up on Easy or Normal). One of the crewmen who was guiding your tutorial is gunned down by Elites, and the other is killed by an explosion as soon as he leaves the room.
Sergeant Johnson was likely intended as a redshirt until Bungie realized how much the fans liked him.
In fact, when Halo is blown up at the end of Combat Evolved, all non-Spartan humans bar the aforementioned Sgt. Johnson and three others are dead. The other three die getting home anyway.
In the whole Halo series, allied NPCs will shoot you if you murder or accidently kill a few of them. For some reason, they are much more competent when fighting you than the actual enemy; they shoot more accurately, more in general, and, somehow, their shooting does more damage. That's right, your allies are better at killing you than the enemy.
In Kid Icarus you can break open statues in the dungeons to recruit Centurions, who will come to your aid in the boss battle. Their AI is extremely rudimentary and they die in only a single hit, with more immediately coming in to replace them once they drop; finishing a boss fight with any still alive is a near-impossible feat.
Fairly frequent in L.A. Noire's street crime submissions. Valiant police officers are usually picked off in beginning cut-scene for the mission, and you'll never see or hear of him again. They're never even mentioned when you report back for a coroner at the end of the mission. No "officer down" or "notify this nameless cop's family he's been shot," just get a coroner for, most likely, the guys you shot.
Marathon (made by Halo creators Bungie) was among the very first FPS games to have friendly AI controlled allies note Operation Bodycount earlier that year also had them, which in this case were defense drones with machine pistols. It also introduced people who ran around in random directions screaming "They're everywhere!" during an alien attack. Guess which one you'll be seeing more of. There are even some of these people, known as BoBs, dressed in red, and they are the weakest color aside from yellow. In the sequel, however, all BoBs carry handguns, and the red ones are security guards, and are stronger than the other BoBs.
BoBs also have the similarity of marines in shooting you when you start to murder them, with even unique dialogue for that situation (pretty good for 1995). Bungie actually encourages you to kill them, with quotes like "BoB-jam? Apply grenades liberally!" However, when you do fight them, they are some of the hardest enemies in the game because their pistols are very accurate and, unlike alien projectiles, you can't dodge a bullet. In some levels of Marathon Infinity, you have to fight both regular BoBs and armored vacuum suit wearing BoBs, but the armored ones have slow-firing fusion pistols, making them easier to kill than the normal guys with pistols.
Subverted in a trailer for Marvel vs. Capcom 3: When Chun Li's helicopter is brought down by Super Skrull, both she and Captain America actually take care to save and protect the nameless pilot.
In Mass Effect, the introductory mission on Eden Prime begins with a squadmate named Richard L. Jenkins. Guess what happens the first time you encounter any enemies. Go on, guess. In a later mission, several Normandy marines are assigned to defend a device from the Geth. Your squadmate may or may not be the only survivor.
In Mass Effect 2, Pressly and at least twenty other crewmen are also killed during the destruction of the Normandy at the beginning of the game. One of the DLC allows Shepard to venture to the crash-site, where they are tasked with recovering the dogtags of the fallen crewmembers, as well as erecting a memorial. Another memorial plaque listing these names adorns the second Normandy in Mass Effect 3, after being appropriated and refitted by the Alliance.
Mass Effect: Andromeda has Alec Ryder's Pathfinder team. His kid, the player character, can chat with them before the mission to Habitat-7, where one of them gets killed in first contact with the kett, to show they're bastards. Another may or may not also be killed by the kett, if you don't bother going to save him in time.
Male Patsy: I'm not dying to prove the situation is critical! I won't go down like a goddamned redshirt! The Tudor: You know, we're all wearing red shirts... Female Patsy: Oh, *** me, none of us are safe! He could kill one of us at any time...! Mastermind: While I appreciate, and thank you for, the Star Trek reference, you got me. I was going to test this portable Doom Laser out on one of you.
Any non-plot-critical NPCs in the Medal of Honor series. Sometimes, your allies are scripted to automatically drop dead if they aren't killed prior to a certain point. Plot-essential NPCs will generally become these after they've served their purpose.
Subverted in Metro 2033. Since he appears, the character Danila seems set up as a throw-away Gas Mask Mook like the many other faceless mooks you encounter. Several times it appears that he is going to be killed off by Demons only for him to escape just in time. In the end a Demon crashes through a window of the building you're in, grabs Danila and tries to fly away, only to drop him when Miller(and possibly the player) opens fire. He falls a good distance to the ground but still manages to survive, though with serious injuries. Miller sends you on ahead as he gets Danila back to the station for medical attention.
Neverwinter Nights mod Dreamcatcher 4 has a red-shirted elven soldier named Issachar standing on the battlements of the Lakeside Keep. If you ask him why the red shirt, he says that it was given to him to wear along with something vague about being on security detail.
Orion Trail has Crew, a thoroughly interchangeable resource who exist to stand between the officers of the crew and danger, to be the first to starve when you run out of food, to be disintegrated and otherwise terminated in many exciting ways during away missions, and to be sold as slaves in exchange for more ship plating.
Quest for Glory V has "Kokeeno Pookameeso" as one of your competitors for the throne. This translates into "Red Shirt". Guess which of your competitors is first to die? (If you do the side quests, Kokeeno acts a bit more like a Mauve Shirt, getting a good amount of dialog that shows him to be a good and honorable man with admirable reasons for entering the Rites of Rulership. Sadly, it doesn't do him a lot of good.)
Rainbow Six is a particularly interesting example in that your squadmates can unintentionally become red shirts as a result of either poor map planning on your end or the game's famously spotty team AI. Of course, if you wanted to, you could just place your squadmates in locations where they're bound to be immediately killed and then go about the whole map by yourself. But that would naturally put you at a major disadvantage after the first level.
Red Shirt, unsurprisingly, is entirely focused upon the existence of redshirt characters, most specifically their social lives and the relatively mundane role they play in a much-mentioned but never seen intergalactic war.
Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis lampshaded this. All the named characters who died appear in the ending... in pictures, wearing red shirts.
Space Command has tactical crewmembers (The Bridge crew, weapons operators, armory crew) wear red uniforms. In a subversion, they are the only ones capable of fighting off enemy boarders. In this case, it seems like anyone wearing a blue or a yellow shirt is the Red Shirt, although they have alternative means of surviving (engineers/yellow can deploy sentry drones to defend them if the appropriate room is built, and scientists/blue can heal and revive one another).
Parodied in Space Quest V: The Next Mutation, in which miscellaneous crew members all wear blue shirts, and Roger Wilco, the protagonist (and ship's captain) is the one who wears a red shirt. Guess who gets shot at all the time?
Droole: This may be dangerous, lets split up so we can cover more territory. Roger: Don't you think we should stick together? Droole: Only if you do a quick wardrobe change, sir. Roger: This is hardly a time to play fashion critic. Droole: It's not that, it's your shirt... it's... well... so red... It's bad luck. [they separate, only for Roger to be attacked later]
Also, Droole is issued a weapon, while Roger isn't. That's right, the ship's captain can't get himself a weapon. To be fair, though, the crew is so tiny that there may only be one weapon aboard, and it must go to the tactical officer. Plus, nobody would trust Roger with a gun.
It's not entirely clear who gets what color uniform. In Space Quest V, only Roger has that color. Captain Raemes T. Quirk has a purple uniform, possibly because he captains StarCon's flagship. In Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier, Captain Kielbasa has a red uniform. The DeepShip 86 certainly looks like it could be the new flagship after the Goliath's destruction.
In Spore, there is an achievement called "Red Shirt" to obtain it you must lose 100 crew members while playing adventures.
In Star Control 2 your crewmates are effectively your vehicles' hit points; every time you take a hit during a space battle or exploration mission a few of them die, and once they all die the vehicle is destroyed. They're rarely ever named and exceptionally cheap to replace at only 3 credits apiece (as opposed to 20 for a single unit of fuel), so you'll be going through quite a few of them before the game is through. Although given that you're waging a guerilla campaign against a brutal galactic empire, losing "only" a few hundred people along the way isn't too shabby.
In Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, your allies, though few and far between, are still noticeable in their ineptitude. The few 501st troopers on Kashyyk are almost impossible to keep alive, being able to be one-shot by the Wookies, and doing minimal damage to them. The rebel troops on Felucia do not fare much better, despite their increased numbers, and the Wookies that you can free upon your return to Kashyyk, while being good at tanking the enemy fire, will eventually fall to the sheer numbers of the enemy. The only allies notable for not being offed quickly are the Bespin Guards, which can hold their own in their short appearance, but do not have a lot of screen time.
The ship's crew of Sunless Sea is these as the victims of hostile cannon fire, zee-beast attacks, sunstroke, cannibalism, and sacrifice to dark gods. Your captain will always be targeted last and your officers are completely immune to these threats.
Double Subversion in Tales of the Abyss. Because clones (here called "replicas") aren't bound to a prophecy that affects the entire planet's population, the Big Bad wants to replicate the world and everyone in it. Since cloning people in this setting tends to kill the original, the originals that the Big Bad used for his clone army become Redshirts to their replicas, since the Big Bad wants them to live in the place of the originals. However, that same clone army ends up becoming Redshirts themselves when our heroes storm his fortress and wipe them out.
In the Team Fortress 2 "Meet The Videos" this trope is inverted with the RED team mercenaries regularly defeating BLU mercenaries.
Touhou has both the fairy maids of the Scarlet Devil Mansion and the rabbits of Eientei, alternating between Red Shirts and Mooks depending on perspective, whose sole purpose is to get slaughtered by vastly more powerful characters, with Silent Sinner in Blue in particular not being kind to them. Fortunately for them, in Gensoukyou Non Lethal KOs are the law.
Faries also play with this a bit in that they can't actually die permanently, making sending them into otherwise suicidal situations feasible. Otherwise, they're at the bottom of the cosmic food chain, below even humans, of which both are targets of being eaten by youkai.
Introversion Software, creators of Uplink, included a bunch of bonus materials with the game. The catch? They (weakly) encrypted them via a encryption called "Red Shirt". Guess how long they expected it to take the fans to break the encryption? They also encrypted some game data (most notably, saved games) with the method, and replaced it with an update, called Red Shirt 2, in later versions. Their next game, Darwinia, also use a modified version of Red Shirt 2 for its saved games.
In Uplink itself, the LAN admins give their co-workers surprisingly obvious passwords, as if they want their friends' machines to get hacked into.
Not quite. Passwords start out weak, and are crackable with a dictionary attack (which is faster than brute force). However, as security breaches become bigger news, passwords get stronger and the dictionary attack becomes useless.
The Gallian army in Valkyria Chronicles. If the raw deal a Redshirt normally gets is a sushi platter, the one these guys get is still flopping on the deck with its eyes bugging out. For starters, their only representative is an asshole and none of them have faces, defining traits, or redeeming value (when their enemy counterparts get two cutscenes to show how human they are). Then the vast majority gets burnt alive in an explosion, which is par for the Redshirt course, except the explosion was a woobiefying moment for the person who blew them up, and no one cares that they're all dead afterward. And as if that wasn't enough, if the player somehow manages to kill off all the distinct personalities of Squad 7, they'll start filling slots in the militia, and still have no faces or final words, fully prepared to die in thankless, anonymous droves (and if the player didn't care about Squad 7, they probably won't mind killing off what amounts to ordinary, faceless Player Mooks). Apparently the difference between the militia and the army is that the army can train soldiers to be more disposable than toilet paper.
In Valorant, Phoenix has the ability Run It Back, which allows players to invoke this trope.
In the Cataclysm expansion of World of Warcraft, there's a quest named "Madness" in which you are to accompany a Horde Negotiator to speak with the leader of the Dragonmaw clan of Orcs. You're informed that two have already been sent and not returned, but the quest giver feels assured that if you accompany the negotiator, the clan leader will respect your strength. Along the way, the developers attempt a trope overload, as the Negotiator lampshades Retirony, informs you that "After these negotiations, I am looking forward to a long and prosperous life." If talked to, he questions you "Hey, does this red shirt make me look expendable?" Once you begin negotiations, as one might predict from the quest name, the following conversation eventually takes place: "This is madness!" "This is... DRAGONMAW!" with an accompanying sparta kick into the fire for the poor Red Shirt.
One particular player we all know about happens to have been in a party all wearing red shirts when his name became immortalized. Maybe that's why Leeroy...Leeroyed.
In Xeno Gears during the battle with Vanderkaum at Aveh's border you're accompanied by two nameless soldiers in bright red Gears. I'm sure nothing bad will happen to them!
