Top 20 Most Hilarious Video Game Deaths

Top 20 Hilarious Deaths in Video Games

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Top 10 Hilarious Video Game Deaths

Welcome to WatchMojo and today we’ll be counting down our picks for the top 20 hilarious deaths in video games. For this list, we’re looking at the funniest and most ridiculous demise in gaming has ever seen. Which of these doomed characters made you laugh the hardest? Let us know in the comments below.

“Conker’s Bad Fur Day” (2001)

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You’ll be running all kinds of strange errands for the colorful cast of characters in “Conker’s Bad Fur Day”. One of the weirdest has to be when a dung beetle responsible for operating a Poo Cabin making dung balls enlists Conker to help him get some much-needed excrement. You do this by going above the Poo Cabin and finding a cow. The cow will enter the bullpen and help herself to some prune juice, which gives her what’s known as the “screamin squirts’. Thanks to the cows, you’ll have plenty of material for the dung beetle below. Unfortunately for them, they eventually get rammed by the bull and explode.

“Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune” (2007)

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The villains in “Uncharted” games are frequently destroyed by their own hubris. But few demises have been as funny and satisfying as the defeat of Navarro in the very first franchise game. Players spend the entire game being pursued by Navarro and his mercenaries, who are in search of the legendary city of gold, El Dorado. As it turns out, the fabled location is just a golden sarcophagus. But it gives Nate the chance to finally rid himself and Elena of the villain. Navarro finds himself conveniently positioned near a length of rope attached to a helicopter. After Nate pushes the entire downed copter from the platform, the chopper, El Dorado, and Navarro are sent crashing down into the sea.

“Gears of War” (2006)

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The cover system has always been a major focus of the “Gears of War” series. If you don’t take advantage of the cover and aren’t careful enough when you move up and aim, you’re going to get iced by the Locust. And that was hammered home early on in the first game when hapless fellow soldier, Anthony Carmine, gets upset about his gun jamming. He’s so frustrated he forgets he needs to stay behind cover and stands up. This immediately gets him shot down by a sniper. Though this scene is completely ridiculous, it’s a valuable teaching moment. Now you know both to stay behind cover and that there’s a sniper out there.

Did you think “your princess is in another castle” was annoying? Well, how about your princess has been taken out by a cow? That’s the unfortunate fate that awaits “Earthworm Jim’s” damsel in distress in one of the game’s endings. After slaving away for the entire game to try and save Princess What’s-Her-Name, Jim finally finds her waiting for him at the edge of a lava pit. It’s then that a cow that got launched into the stratosphere earlier on in the game lands on top of the princess. Seeing it land on her hammers home the game’s satirical nature. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the cow and princess eventually fall into the lava pit as well.

“Sega Rally Championship” (1995)

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We all lose in a video game from time to time, so it’s nice when a game doesn’t rub your failures in your face. But this game over screen from “Sega Rally Championship” might be a little too optimistic. Upon losing a race you’ll be greeted with a Game Over screen and a musical sting that seems to celebrate your embarrassing defeat at the hands of your competitors. The screen is so funny you might spend more time in the game trying to lose races than win. It’s a shame that while “Sega Rally Championship” was an influential racer, this bizarre, upbeat end screen hasn’t been seen in subsequent games.

“Fallout 3” (2008)

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While searching for your father you’ll eventually track him down in Vault 112. But unlike so many others, this Vault has a surprise in store. It’s full of VR pods where the residents have been kept alive for 200 years by the villainous overseer Dr. Braun. Both the good and bad karma routes lead to the demise of the residents in hilarious ways. In the bad karma option, you’ll be told by Braun, disguised as Betty, to become the Pint-Sized Slasher. This allows you to take out all the residents in increasingly creative ways. In the good karma option, you trigger the simulation’s failsafe, and an army of enemy soldiers will appear out of thin air and end everyone’s simulations the hard way.

You can famously beat “Undertale” without taking the life of a single character and get the best ending of the game for yourself. But if you go the opposite route and embark upon a “genocide run”, you’ll be in for progressively harder boss fights until you come face-to-face with one of the game’s first characters: Sans. The Sans fight is notoriously difficult. But luckily, if you’re struggling, Sans will decide to spare you. If you decide, for once, to take mercy, you’ll get a nasty shock. It was all a trick, Sans didn’t need to spare you at all, and uses your momentary lapse in judgment to finish you off and dunk on you.

The AI characters in “Dishonored” are generally considered to pretty intelligent. Guards will patrol, talk to their colleagues, and engage in other behaviors. Corvo can take advantage of them in order to stealthily take them out. But one guard certainly chose the wrong place to relieve himself. If you sneak up and startle the guard on top of Kaldwin’s Bridge at exactly the right moment, he’ll fall off the edge and plummet to his doom. Didn’t he see the “risk of falling” sign? It’s not the only time you’ll be able to dispatch a guard while they go to the bathroom, but it’s certainly the most memorable.

“The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim” (2011)

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When it comes to Bethesda, it’s never easy to work out if something weird is actually supposed to be in the game or not. The same goes for the infamous giant launch attack in Skyrim, where a giant will slam its club into the ground in front of you and launch you some 600 feet into the air, killing you instantly. This may be common knowledge among Skyrim players now, but for newcomers attempting to fight a giant and suddenly being thrown so high they could enter the earth’s atmosphere, this is a moment of hilarity that’s hard to forget.

“Madden 92” (1991)

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Like any sport, football comes with its own risk of injuries. Concussions, dislocations, breaks, sprains - anything can happen on the field. In Madden '92, if a player was downed for whatever reason, the paramedics would arrive and deliver what would otherwise be a very efficient service, if it wasn't for all the mass murder. While they get to the player they need to treat quickly, they do this by running over everybody in their path, comedically knocking them out of the way and then driving away with whoever was hurt. It almost made your players getting injured totally worth it just to see the ambulance come out and cause havoc.

“Mortal Kombat 3” (1995)

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First introduced in Mortal Kombat 3, animalities quickly became ingrained in the series. Not just because turning into an animal in order to brutally murder your opponent is pretty cool, but also because of the sheer ridiculousness of some of the transformations. The characters never seem to turn into the creatures you'd expect. Stryker turns into a t-rex and bites people in half, Kano turns into a tarantula and crushes them to death - but the funniest of all has to be Scorpion. Rather than turn into a scorpion, like his name would suggest, he instead turns into a penguin and lays explosive eggs.

“Dragon’s Lair” (1990)

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Watching a compilation of Dragon’s Lair deaths takes about the same time as playing through the game without dying, but it’s nowhere near as entertaining. However, the classic animation that made the notoriously difficult arcade game so endearing was scrapped for the NES port, along with the quick-time gameplay. They took out what made people want to play the game in the first place and replaced it with even more unfair deaths, most famously by just walking into a door. And while these deaths are insanely frustrating, they’re also undeniably funny.

“Borderlands 2” (2015)

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The Borderlands series is no stranger to wacky encounters, but run-ins with a guy called Face McShooty really take the cake. While exploring Thousand Cuts in Borderlands 2 you may come across a psycho character screaming at you in desperation to shoot him in the face. Him begging you to do so opens up the mission, “Shoot This Guy in the Face”, and when you go through with the objective – probably just because you get sick of listening to him shout–he even thanks you, in spite of the fact he’s now dead from being, y’know, shot in the face.

“Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero” (1989)

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Lockpicking is a skill many games will make use of. After all, how else are you supposed to go through life if you can’t just go wherever you want and steal anything that catches your eye? But if you take your lockpicking ability for granted in “Quest for Glory I”, misusing your tools could have fatal consequences. If you so choose, you can have your character pick their nose. But be warned, if you’ve got a lockpick skill under 40 there’s a chance you’ll be a bit too ambitious with how far you push the lockpick. This causes a brain hemorrhage and a hilarious screen to pop up.

“Mass Effect 2” (2010)

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One of the big appeals of “Mass Effect” is the ability to romance a large cast of characters, many of whom are aliens. In “Mass Effect 2” Shepard has the option of romancing one of two Asari: space-knight Samara and her seductive but more dangerous daughter Morinth. Morinth is an Ardat-Yakshi, which means anybody she “mates” with will die. She’s addicted to this activity because it makes her more powerful. If you choose Morinth to join your crew, she sets her sights firmly on Shepard and will try to convince them they’re the only one who could survive spending the night with her. But it turns out she’s lying, and Shepard immediately dies.

“Resident Evil 4” (2005)

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One of the most memorable monsters in the entire “Resident Evil” series is Del Lago, a giant mutant salamander that lives in the lake. Leon first discovers there’s a monster out there when a body is dumped in the water and promptly devoured. But if you didn’t learn your lesson from that demonstration, you can get on Del Lago’s bad side by shooting directly into the water. The monster will then launch itself at Leon and eat him in one bite. If you’re wondering why anybody would ever do this, it’s because you get an achievement for letting Leon get eaten once again. Luckily, once you reload you can exact your revenge.

“Total Distortion” (1995)

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There’s very little about Total Distortion that isn’t hilarious; a game where you travel to a parallel dimension based on rock music, and defeat enemies via guitar battles, all to shoot trippy music videos and make tons of money. Now that’s rock n roll. So it’s no surprise a game this ridiculous would have an equally fitting game over screen. Whenever you fail, one of the Guitar Warrior enemies begin to play a catchy tune and sing, “You are dead, dead, dead.” You almost want to die in-game just so that you can hear this mocking jingle again, again, again.

In “NieR: Automata” you play as an android. While androids are better than humans at all kinds of important things in the post-apocalyptic game world, there are a few activities that humans are still better suited for. For example, eating food. While roaming the world you can come across a fish, a mackerel, to be specific, and choose to have 2B eat it. If you do, you’ll be treated to a ridiculous game over. Everything fades to black as 2B shuts down and you’re informed via on-screen text that the fish “congealed” inside 2B’s body, leading to paralysis and a hilariously dark demise.

“Red Dead Redemption” (2010)

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You have to go across the entire map of New Austin, Blackwater and Mexico to complete this long fetch-quest. Your job is to help a total stranger, Charles Kinnear, build a glider, as he wants to be the first person to fly through that region of America. Despite the Wright brothers having already invented the plane by this point in time, Kinnear is dead-set on perfecting his invention. However, things take a turn for the worst when rather than actually glide, he just goes plummeting off the cliff to his death. We may have all seen it coming, but that doesn’t make it any less tragically funny when it finally happens. Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few Honorable Mentions:

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“Spider-Man 3” (2007)

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There’s no shortage of bad quick time events in Spider-Man 3, but one of them stands out for the lacklustre death scene you’re treated to if you fail. Spider-Man attempts to save a woman strapped to a bomb from the top floor of a burning building, jumping through the rooms while dodging flames and debris. But at the last second if you miss just one button push, he won’t shoot his webs and will land flat on his face. The camera pans to the woman who announces that she’s going to die, and then we see the whole building blow up, all in the space of a few hilarious seconds.