6 Incredible Spoilers Hidden In Famous Video Games
Even if you love video games, you have to admit that the stories are usually illogical, poorly translated, and not exactly known for their subtlety. That's why we're always blown away whenever a game's writing is so clever that it's even able to dangle giant clues to its own twist ending in front of our faces without us noticing. You may start taking notes now, Hollywood.
Note: This article is, like, wall-to-wall spoilers. Just a big, sweaty orgy of spoilers in here. Proceed with caution.
BioShock: A Random Audio Diary Gives Away The Game's Big Twist
BioShock is a game that dared to ask the question "what if we actually let libertarians run things?" before quickly arriving at the predictable and obvious answer of "horrifying monsters and the maiming of small children in an underwater city." The player, named Jack, arrives in the dystopian city of Rapture to find it leaking worse than a condom from the Vatican Planned Parenthood. The initial antagonist is Ayn Ran- er, Andrew Ryan, an Objectivist Walt Disney who built and ruled Rapture armed with nothing but a copy of Atlas Shrugged (we guess his army of mutants helped some, too).
Just like Rand, his main legacy is littering the Internet with nonsensical quotes.
When Jack finally confronts Ryan, it's dramatically revealed that Jack is Ryan's illegitimate son who has been artificially grown, genetically modified, and brainwashed. Ryan explains that Jack has been conditioned to obey any instruction that follows the words "would you kindly," before asking Jack, "Would you kindly beat the ever-loving shit out of me with my own putter?" (We're paraphrasing.) So, you end up becoming the weapon through which your evil dad commits suicide -- it's one of the most shocking scenes in any game, ever.
The Foreshadowing:
... unless you're one of those weirdos who listens to the audio backstory, that is. Throughout the game, the player collects audio diaries, because sometimes you need to take a break from fighting mutant supervillains and flying machine guns to listen to some talk radio. Early in the game, a nosy player can find the following diary stashed under the floor:
Audio diaries stashed under floors were the Vines of the '50s.
It explains that Ryan has restricted Rapture's bathysphere-based metro system so that only he and a few select people are able to use them to move around the city, which is verified by their DNA. But, the diary also reveals that there's a hitch -- the system isn't perfect, and anybody who is "in the genetic ballpark" of Ryan can use the bathyspheres, which the player does with no problem from the very beginning of the game. Apparently, your character just assumed he was Ryan's third-removed cousin or something, but nope: You can travel for free because you're the boss's son. Yay for nepotism!
This explains why the metro is so empty; unrealistically, you never encounter a single person publicly masturbating.
Dead Space: The Chapter Titles Literally Spell Out The Game's Ending
In the sci-fi horror game Dead Space, the player takes control of a man with the subtle first name of Isaac and just-as-subtle last name of Clarke and experiences a terrifying, astronomical hellscape as seen through Isaac's eyes (or, more accurately, the eyes of an invisible person standing 2 feet behind him). Isaac's mission is to investigate a mining ship that has been infested by vicious space monsters. If you think this is starting to sound a little bit like Alien, you're wrong, because the Dead Space monsters are called "Necromorphs," not "Xenomorphs." Totally different.
Fun fact: If you rub a Xenomorph head in the center of this thing and wait nine months, a Predator comes out.
Secretly driving Isaac through the hordes of space zombies is his desire to rescue his girlfriend, Nicole, who had been the ship's medical officer before the crew caught a bad case of dead. Despite encountering her several times in the game, when the player reaches the end, it is revealed that Nicole has been dead the whole time, and all of Isaac's visions of her have been hallucinations, which isn't to be confused with the ending of The Sixth Sense or that really sad episode of Scrubs. The hallucinations were induced by a giant alien stone -- a "monolith," if you will -- which was bent on the destruction of humanity, as these things so often are.
Man, who could have seen any of that trippy shit coming?
The Foreshadowing:
You, if you had just looked at the names of the game's chapters:
There's also the hidden 13th chapter, which plays 10 minutes after the last song when you've fallen asleep.
While unremarkable at first, look more closely at the first letter in each chapter's title:
"Nicole is DEA?! Flush the stash, dude!"
Yep, the fate of Isaac's girlfriend and the game's big twist is given away by a simple acrostic that would be rejected from a Scooby Doo episode for being too childish. But, if you hadn't bothered to meticulously write down the name of each chapter, you would have been totally in the dark ... until the game told you, that is.
Borderlands 2: The Most Shocking Death Is Spoiled The Second You Meet The Character
If you've only ever seen other people play Borderlands games, then you may be surprised to discover that it actually has a plot. Far from the murderous, looting free-for-all that it initially seems, Borderlands is the ongoing saga of "vault hunters" (read: grave robbers) who receive mysterious instructions to find an alien artifact ... goddammit, again with the alien artifacts? Ugh. Well, at least the game was original enough to have four playable characters, each of whom has a special ability.
Along with their default ability of getting people to make uncomfortable Rule 34 of them.
In Borderlands 2, four new characters enlist the four tomb raiders from Borderlands 1 to help in the hunt for the great alien not-a-monolith. After defeating a boss late in the game, Roland, an original Borderlands character, is suddenly and unexpectedly Deep Blue Sea-ed by the main villain.
The Foreshadowing:
If you were paying attention, you would have known that Roland's death was inevitable, and not just because he was the cool black guy that everybody liked. The first time you encounter Roland, it's when you break into his jail cell to rescue him. After fighting through an entire of army of heavily armed weirdos, Roland sits up on his cot, says something cool, and then immediately proceeds to punch his way out of prison.
As one does.
With the adrenaline of battle still pumping, you probably didn't give a lot of thought to the interior decoration in Roland's cell, which is a little dark, anyway. But, when we crank up the brightness and contrast ...
"That could mean anybody."
"YOU DIE." Well, shit. We mean that in more than one sense, since the previous inmate who left that prescient message presumably didn't have access to painting materials other than those provided by his own body.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain: Characters Flat-Out Tell You The Final Plot Twist Ahead Of Time
MGSV tells the tale of a once noble hero descending into villainy, alienating once loyal friends, and becoming an evil scoundrel reviled by the entire world. But, enough about Konami. The plot follows a similar story featuring Big Boss/Snake ("Big Snake" for short) before he became the baddie of the first Metal Gear game. However, there's a twist: At the end, you find out that the guy you've been playing as isn't really Snake but, actually, a random medic who underwent facial reconstruction and hypnotherapy so efficiently that even he didn't know he was a body double.
Which begs the question: Why does everyone want to clone Snake so badly when a Kurt Russell mask and a circus magician are just as effective?
This is all revealed in the last mission, confirming the past 40-plus hours were all part of a massive lie. Cheers, Kojima.
The Foreshadowing:
To be fair, people had been trying to warn you about the plot twist all along, and you just didn't listen. About a quarter of the way into the game, you're tasked with extracting Snake's old friend Huey, but he doesn't seem to recognize you. As if you weren't "you."
That, or he's trying to tell if you're the one who farted.
Granted, the fact that "Snake" has been presumed dead for a decade, is covered in scars, and has a goddamn horn jutting out of his skull may be a factor here as well. But, there's more. Earlier in that same scene, you're greeted by the Peace Walker, an advanced AI from the previous game. And what does it have to say about "Snake"?
"See, Huey? Someone else dealt it."
"It's not you." OK, if the smartest machine on Earth claims you're not who you think you are, then maybe you should listen. There are other little clues, such as a young clone of Snake not sharing your character's DNA, which would defeat the whole purpose of a clone. Finally, in the tutorial level, you meet a guy with bandages on his face who is obviously voiced by Kiefer Sutherland, Snake's current voice actor -- because he's the real Snake. That's why the game focuses so much on that guy's lovingly rendered ass. It's tradition!
A tradition that turns Liquid Snake into Solid Snake.
All of this means that the Big Boss you fought (and killed) in the early Metal Gear games was actually some random jackass with plastic surgery who's just really good at method acting ... which does help explain why he looked like Sean Connery for a while back then.
Solid's Mel Gibson period remains one of the series' most intriguing mysteries, though.
Life Is Strange: The Killer Announces Himself During The Tutorial
Life Is Strange is an episodic game with moral choices, like The Walking Dead but with selfies and privileged teenagers (so, even more terrifying). It tells the story of photography student Maxine "Max" Caulfield as she deals with time travel fuckery, investigates a series of murders, tries to prevent a city-destroying disaster, and goes semi-skinny dipping in a pool with her bestie (this is a France/Japan production, after all).
So, who's the killer? The jock whose father owns the town? The weird groundskeeper? The evasive principal? Colonel Mustard? Nope: It was the sexy, cool, and world-famous photography professor (yes, that's a thing), Mr. Mark Jefferson.
And we thought he was just guilty of dressing like someone who never shuts up about kale.
In a shocking twist, Jefferson admits he abducts and drugs attractive girls in order to capture the moment that innocence turns to fear. Or, maybe it's not so shocking, since he directly told Max and his entire class that he was going to do that ...
The Foreshadowing:
The game starts with a vision of a future disaster, but, ironically, the real spoilers come when Max flashes back to a boring photography lesson and the tutorial begins. As you figure out the game's complex point-and-click controls (you point and then you click), you're probably not paying much attention to what Mr. Jefferson is saying ... which is a shame, because if you had, you might have noticed this part:
"Too obvious?" was a note on the script that the voice actor accidentally read out loud.
"I could frame any one of you in a dark corner, and capture you in a moment of desperation" is not something a non-murdery school teacher would say. There are other clues, like the fact he's facing the attractive girls while literally turning his back on the boys and the traditionally unattractive girls. Finally, the campus is filled with his award-winning artwork, which you're more than willing to peruse when you're not tricking skateboarders into doing nutshots and photographing their pain. And what do his photos show?
Besides him abusing the "desaturate" and "posterize" buttons.
Images of scantily clad, vulnerable, and sexualized young women. His obsession with naked vulnerability was staring in your face and being shouted in your ears for the whole first half hour, and no one notices. The fact that the school is staffed and attended by whackjobs and bullies does somewhat shift the suspicion, though. Why would anyone ever go there in the first place? Especially since it's in Oregon.
Batman: Arkham City: The Game Can't Stop Telling You "The Joker" Isn't Really Him
In the second game in the Arkham trilogy (or the stunning conclusion if you're a PC gamer), the Joker is dying from a virus and infects Batman with it so he'll find a cure. Eventually, both get cured and meet for a final confrontation ... at which point the real Joker shows up. It turns out he was never cured, and the healthy Joker you had seen all along was actually Clayface, Batman's shape-shifting villain who looks like sentient whale poop.
And, yet, he's only the second shittiest Bat-rogue after the Calculator.
Some fans complained that the twist came out of nowhere, since Clayface is never mentioned in the game -- but, he is. All the time. You just didn't notice.
The Foreshadowing:
At the start of the game, you run into Joker's main squeeze, Harley Quinn. After you heroically kick this pregnant woman in the stomach, she goes off running to Joker, and you can hear them talking in the distance. At this point, she says:
"I mean, what's with all ridiculous HAHAHAHAHAHA tattoos?"
"The Joker" tells her to hush, which seems like their classic repertoire (she says something nonsensical, he verbally abuses her, the fans swoon), but, in retrospect, it's obvious what happened here: Harley confused herself and almost gave away the twist too early.
Later, after The Joker has supposedly been cured, he appears on TV to proclaim his health and virility, before seguing into a rant about Lost. As he hijacks your video game to complain about the finale (like a true Lost fan), the camera wobbles, and you can hear coughing -- because the actual, non-cured Joker is pulling duty as cameraman. Later still, Batman comes face to face with the Joker, who is looking in a mirror ... except, he's not. He's looking at the real Joker, who's pulling a Groucho from behind a glass. When fake Joker turns around, you can actually see the real one jump off his stage in the bottom-left corner:
For this scene, Clayface was replaced by his understudy, one Mr. Cruise.
Finally, the most blatant clue is in the fight itself. If you use Detective Mode (which X-rays enemies and possibly gives them cancer), you can see that "The Joker" has no bones.
Does Clayface have no dick ... or is he all dick?
The game spells it out for you so many times, and, yet, the Batman only figures out what's going on at the very last moment. Between this and the part where they telegraph the Joker's death through a painting, we get the feeling that the developers don't put a lot of stock in our detective skills.
When he's not planting fake alien monoliths, Chris writes for his website and tweets.
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Turns out foreshadowing can be pretty awesome. Like how a throwaway seat belt gag in Jurassic Park reveals the big twist. Or, how God spoils the whole damn ending of Red Dead Redemption. Thanks, God. See what we mean in 5 Brilliant Clues Hidden In The Background Of Movies and 6 Brilliant Clues Hidden In The Background Of Video Games.
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