Feature: The gaming post-apocalypse

Games are fascinated with the end-of-days scenario, looking at kinds of ways that would bring humanity and its resources to breaking point. Some are practical and very real, such as global wars, while others are a little more fantastical, but the outcome is always captivating and very much suited to the medium. With the return of one of gaming's favourite post-apocalyptic franchises in Fallout: New Vegas, we look at many ways the world has ended, and how players must try and turn the tide in humanity's favour.

Zombies

Gaming's most abundant form of the apocalypse is also the one that's least likely to actually happen. It's easy to see why it's a popular choice - the undead make for a fantastic enemy-type, shuffling in vast numbers and ready to be blasted to pieces. There have been many games built around the concept, with Left 4 Dead seeing series of survivors team together for co-operative gameplay across relatable locales such as shopping malls, carnivals and highways, and effectively juggles arcade-style co-op gameplay with an ongoing narrative scrawled in marker pen across safe rooms throughout the game. Others such as Dead Rising take the survival aspect further by having you consume food, rescue helpless others and avoid danger from crazy humans as well as the living dead.

Zombies are so translatable that they often crop up in places where they probably shouldn't. Defending against the undead using vegetation in Plants Vs Zombies is one of the more outlandish ideas, while Call Of Duty: World At War's Nazi Zombie mode was a surprise hit with players, receiving a handful of additional DLC map packs months after release, and is set to return in Black Ops later this year. Wild West adventure Red Dead Redemption is set to transform its dusty, desolate open-world into a place where man and beast have fallen to zombification, with its own story chronicling the end of days, and even features four rideable horses of the apocalypse. Although the zombie theme has been criticised as being lazy and unoriginal, and arguably overused for well over a year now, there's no sign of it slowing down. You can read more examples of the undead taking over gaming in our feature Long Live the Undead.

Nuclear War

Once a very real possibility with the events of the Cold War, nuclear strikes have become less of a focus for the media in recent decades, but that hasn't stopped it being used imaginatively in games. The most prominent example is the Fallout series, which saw the United States and China trigger global decimation several decades into the future over dwindling petroleum and uranium supplies. Fragments of humanity managed to survive in bunkers known as Vaults, emerging some 100 years later to witness a world over taken by mutants and rogue groups. Spanning three games and numerous spin-offs, its use of both futuristic and decayed technology captured the paranoia of the 1950s perfectly, while retaining a sense of humour despite the bleak setting, such as Vaults subject to strange psychological experiments or a nation-state owned by a farmer named Dave.

Commodore and PC title Wasteland bore similar similarities to Fallout and is considered by many to be a spiritual predecessor, while Metro 2033 replaced Vaults with Russian metro stations as modern civilization was wiped out by nuclear attacks. G5 Software's Cuban Missile Crisis: The Aftermath looks at what might have happened if the decisive stand-off went sour, with the Northern Hemisphere moving its forces south after their lands became uninhabitable after being attacked. Easily the most unique use of nuclear war is DEFCON, which tasks players with enacting nuclear war against other nations, a strategy game that's equal parts harrowing and fascinating. Unsurprisingly 'winning' the game, which is more or less decided by who has the highest population at the end, is hard to obtain.

Invasion

Outside of other countries, mankind has waged war with all kinds of alien species. A prominent example is Half-Life 2, which sees Gordon Freeman work together with resistance fighters to overcome the Combine. Resistance sees an alternative history where World War II never happened, only for Russia to close itself off from the world and become victim to an alien invasion that soon spreads across the planet. X-COM, however, was a more traditional take on an alien invasion with abductions and experiments, although introduces sea-dwelling and teleporting species as the series progresses, and will be revived as a first-person shooter sometime next year.

While the majority of games look to the sky for invading forces, Gears Of War's troubles come from underground, with a colonist planet engaging in a lengthy war with the Locust. Mortal Kombat is more inter-dimensional in flavour, with billions of souls stripped from Earth as a result of Shao Kahn needing Earth's realm to revive his lost queen. Vigil Game's surprise hit Darksiders sees Earth become a battleground for an ongoing war between Heaven and Hell, with players playing as horseman War to govern the battle between the two biblical forces.

Pollution

Although global warming and environmental disasters are one of the more likely causes of humanity's demise, games haven't been able to exploit such an end-of-days scenario easily. Two examples are rather fictional and cartoonish in nature; 16-bit platformer Mick & Mack: Global Gladiators seeing players clean up pollution-covered Arctic wastes and rainforests, and the upcoming Epic Mickey, stepping into a fictional world covered in ink and pollution. The topic has been broached more effectively in education and flash-based games, although Microsoft recently established the Games For Change Challenge to create global warming games using the XNA framework, but it has yet to bear any fruit. Until then we'll have to keep relaying on zombies and aliens for our climatic thrills.