In this feature, IGN takes a look at the top 10 ways game designers fantasize the ending of the world. Popular choices include zombie infestation, unnatural disasters, and nuclear fallout.

T.S. Eliot once wrote, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." While that may be interesting enough for your freshman Introduction to Poetry class, it hardly works as a video game premise, which would explain why Activision hasn't yet secured the rights to Call of Poetry: Modernism Warfare. On the other hand, video games need intense settings and outrageous set pieces, and there's nothing more intense or outrageous than the end of the world. For this week's top ten, we're taking a look at the ten ways in which video games destroy (or at least seriously ruin) entire worlds.


10. A Fully Armed and Operational Battle Station

The nuclear bomb allowed us to ruin our world but that's still a far cry from actually destroying the entire thing outright. For that, video game designers offer up an array of world-smashing future weapons. First introduced in the Lensman stories and later popularized by the Death Star, planet-killing weapons have become part and parcel of many space empire games on the PC. In Master of Orion 2 and Star Wars: Empire at War you could demolish enemy planets one by one until only rocks remain. Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor's Terror Stars took things a step further by letting players build a weapon that could destroy entire star systems in one shot. And let's face it, not even Al Gore can save you from that.

9. Zombiez, Zombies, Zombies!

Here's another popular one. Whether they're intended as a symbolic commentary on conformity and consumerism in our society, or whether it's because they're the only minority group that doesn't have the funds to sue over their unsympathetic portrayal in the media, zombies are pretty much everywhere you turn in video games. Not content with the occasional zombies found in most roleplaying games, or the strange undead plagues in games like Warcraft and Morrowind, Valve and Treyarch each upped the ante with Left 4 Dead and Call of Duty: World at War, where the idea is to suffocate the player with an endless stream of zombies. And if it wasn't bad enough to have all of humanity wiped out by a zombie apocalypse, Left 4 Dead throws in the occasionally puking and tonguing. What a way to go.

McClubbin via pc.ign.com »