When a game software crashes, it's usually the result of an error, hardware limitation, or other system conflict — whether accessing invalid memory, incorrect program execution, or unhandled exceptions. These are generally not intended by the developers to happen... except when they are.
For certain games, they can be made to deliberately close itself in specific scenarios, usually in a manner meant to mimic an actual game crash, complete with a (fake) error message. There are also soft crash/resets, where the game abruptly restarts, continuing on as if the player had just opened the game, without closing the software itself.
The crash could be happening for a number of In-Universe reasons: a malevolent entity attempts to attack the player, the game itself is trying to discourage being played, or the player themselves are breaking apart the game somehow.
Game crashes are a staple of Horror in video games, especially those which are meta in nature, due to how it can disrupt the player's experience and give the feeling of helplessness in the situation — as well as fear for how the crash happened to begin with. With that said, not all examples are exclusive to Horror Video Games, nor do they necessarily have to be Played for Horror.
This trope is more often seen in games on computer instead of on console, as the latter's dedicated hardware is much stricter with its control and security measures that it won't allow for any intentional crashing, unlike the former with its versatility and accessibility. As such, when it comes to being ported to console, games of this sort have to find solutions to either preserve the "crash"note or simply remove it altogether and make it into a soft reset.
While the act of making the game "crash" is more technically simple than expected — running the code that simply closes the game, no different from the code of selecting "quit game" from a menu — certain Idiot Programming operates in the opposite way, where actual methods of crashing the game (via overloading the software data) is used in-place of exiting like a properly made program would.
Basically an exaggerated version of Non-Standard Game Over, in that the game really is over now. Certain games may (or at worst be rumored to) crash as a form of Copy Protection. If the game crashes under certain conditions that is likely unintentional on the developer's part, that's a Game-Breaking Bug. See also the Exaggerated Trope of Fission Mailed, if the game plays a fake crash sequence without actually crashing/closing the game.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Adventure Games
- Space Quest 4: In one of the late-game areas, you come across a computer which (among other things) has Space Quest 4 installed on it. If you delete it from the in-game computer, the actual game immediately closes.
Driving Game
- Driving in Tehran: If the player is in the taxi mode of either the Sia or Hootan routes, they will have to abide by the law, always. The most grievous offense when in the taxi mode is running people over, in which case the game briefly displays a Game Over message in Farsi, that, when translated, reads: You should not play with people's lives. The game then crashes itself afterwards.
First-Person Shooter
- Doom (1993) mods:
- In the source port psdoom-NG, the enemies are assigned a process id. If they're killed, the associated process is also killed. One of the processes also includes psdoom-ng, which kills the process — ie, the game itself — as soon as the enemy is killed.
- The WAD file The Thing you can't Defeat
ends with a game crash upon attempting to load E1M8, as no starting position for the player is defined, according to the script log. As this mod represents the declining mental state of Doomguy suffering from Dementia, this implies that after E1M7 they've died from their deteriorated state of mind.
- Rise of the Triad has a Secret Level called "This Causes an Error!" that involves deliberately triggering a game-crashing bug. A blue column can be seen sliding through the map clipping through its walls, which by the time it gets to the end of the level causes this image◊ to display while the game crashes.
- In ULTRAKILL, there is an Easter egg in level 5-2 which ends in this fashion. By bringing a florp, found in the boat's chimney stack, to the pedestal near the start of the level at the very top of the tower, Jakito will be freed from their cage, now free to lay waste to the world, leading the game to eventually crash as the screen goes white.
Flight Simulator
- Played with in Wing Commander. Upon quitting, the game would abort with an error message about memory usage. As the developers were unable to fix this under their deadline, they simply declared it a feature and altered the message to read "Thank you for playing".
Horror Game
- Anatomy does this at least thrice, firstly after a tape recording in the bedroom with teeth paintings finishes playing, then after trying to access the basement and then at the end of the randomly picked sequences after the player is swallowed by the basement. Curiously, the final tape at the very end of the game has to be manually closed by the player.
- Five Nights at Freddy's 1: Getting Jumpscared by Golden Freddynote will cause the game to close itself. This extends to the Custom Night Easter Egg of setting the animatronic's difficulty to "1-9-8-7".
- Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator: If you get the Bankruptcy ending, the game will close itself after the ending cutscene finishes.
- Lily's Well: In the "Ma" Hidden Ending, after Lily climbs up to the attic and deals with various warning messages from her Ma trying to stop her Papa from making his cult, you reach the top to find Ma hanging from a rope. The game freezes soon after.
- Luna Game: At the end of Luna Game 5, you get a black screen with the words "You're Next" and a Freeze-Frame Bonus image of a scary Pinkie Pie staring at you before the game crashes. If your computer has a CD tray, it will also pop out at that moment.
- Luto has a variation of this trope, as not long after lighting up the first shadowy figure, the narrator pauses the game and selects the exit to dekstop/main menu option all by himself while scolding the player.
- Voices of the Void: Encountering a few of the "Forbiddens", a few entities which are "non-canon" hallucinations, often leads to the game crashing. This includes catching the sight of an elongated shadow outside the map's boundaries, catching the sight of the Looker after the game warns you not to do so, and being touched by an entity which spawns after playing for a long time in one session.
Interactive Fiction
- In the comedy Interactive Fiction works created by Delta 4 in the 1980s, such as the adaptations of Bored of the Rings and The Colour of Magic, typing any kind of profanity into the command line will lead to the game responding "Swear not..." and reset the computer. Coupled with the fact that the parser only looked at the first four letters of each word, this led to the game forcing a reboot in response to the innocuous command BREAK WINDOW.
- Colossal Cave: In Mike Goetz's 580-point version, you can find a computer with a button marked "EMERGENCY STOP — Do not push!" Pressing it sends the computer into an infinite loop. Not the computer in the game, the one that you're playing on. The only thing you can do is reboot.
Platformer Game
- Ben and Ed: The game will crash upon attempting to complete the main campaign's final level as Ben, delivering a message about how "Ben can't free Ben" beforehand.
- Hamachi the Psychotic Killer: If Hamachi beats Riches Reef without killing anyone, the Demon Queen Entity will appear and ram the screen, which crashes the game with an error message.
- Played With in It's A Me! by Arvi Teikari (creator of Baba Is You). The game isn't coded to crash on its own, but rather it's designed around having the alt key as the run button and F4 as the jump button, which results in some obvious complications when you need to make a sprinting long jump...
- Karoshi 2.0 has a unique variant of this where the game closes itself and then opens itself back up after a joke credits sequence.
- Pizza Tower:
- If you wait long enough at the title screen without pressing start, Peppino jumps towards the player and the game crashes. The Switch version does not have this.
- In the "Tricky Treat" Halloween special stage, if you turn into a Ghost then fly all the way back to the entrance of the stage, the game cuts to a screen of Peppino ominously staring at you from a dimly lit room for a couple of seconds, then the game closes itself. This easter egg was added to prevent a soft lock.
- Super Mario 64 ROM hack SM64.z64 crashes at the end of each loop, displaying the message "SOMETHING CHANGED SOMETHING CHANGED SO-" in the crash handler.
Puzzle Game
- The live-action ending cutscene of The Looker, which parodies that of The Witness, forcibly closes the game after the creator slips and falls on a Banana Peel.
- NaissanceE: When you enter a specific hallway, text appears on screen saying "Not this way". If you proceed, when you get near the end of the hallway and near an opening into a larger space, another text will appear saying you were warned, and then the game closes.
- Pony Island features some In-Universe game crashes, including one out-of-universe case.
- Upon reaching the point in the introduction when the game asks for your soul to continue playing, the corresponding coding puzzle has the player forcibly crash the game, complete with "Pony_Island.exe has stop working" window, allowing them to exit out of the software to explore the (in-game) desktop.
- After clearing the Pony Island game for a second time with the unlocked Pony Laser, Satan gets mad at the player "cheating" and crashes the system hard enough for the monitor to shake and give off a burst of steam.
- After the Final Boss sequence of the game, an out-of-universe example plays out when the Hopeless Soul requests that you delete the game to free them — the game itself forcibly closing to allow the player to do so.
- Parodied in There Is No Game: Wrong Dimension. One of Game's many attempts at discouraging the player is by trying to fake a game crash. Game overloads his RAM and plasters onto the resulting screen a fake loading bar, with him soon overlaying on top of that an "error message" written on stationery paper, shortly after sending the player to a fake operating system menu (which is just basically his own personal desktop) as if the "game" had closed. This is played straight In-Universe in the ending, where after getting to play the actual game, it suddenly cuts to a fake Blue Screen of Death after it loads for a bit — with Mr. Glitch revealed to be very much alive.
- System's Twilight, which is themed around a malfunctioning computer system, requires the player to "reboot the system" by restarting the game.
Rhythm Game
- Friday Night Funkin' mods:
- Doki Doki Takeover!:
- After playing through Yuri's segment, following Monika transferring her file back into her game world to save BF and GF from the corrupted literature club members, the player's game automatically closes shortly after, making them boot up the game again to continue the story. Unlike with the source game, this crash happens as a result of Monika subjecting the game to a soft-reset, restoring the world and her friends to before they were corrupted.
- In the Brutal Bonus Song of "Epiphany", getting the 1 and 50 chance of getting Jumpscared after a Game Over results in the game automatically closing.
- Friday Night Funkin': Mario's Madness: In the V2 update, losing on "Paranoia" will cause Mr. Virtual to give the player twenty seconds to decide if they want to continue the game. If that time runs out, the game crashes.
- Doki Doki Takeover!:
Roguelike
- The Binding of Isaac: Epiphany, a mod for The Binding of Isaac, has one only obtainable via cheating. The Glitched Polaroid, the item required to unlock Tarnished Eden, is normally only available to Tainted Eden via beating the first floor boss in under a minute. If another character obtains it, the room floods with Glitched Gapers before crashing; as indicated by the game's codenote , this crash is deliberate.
Role-Playing Game
- Deltarune begins with you choosing a name for yourself and your "vessel", the former repeating if you begin any other chapter by starting a new save. As in Undertale, inputting "GASTER" (who may be the person you are talking to in the intro) will forcibly restart the chapter as soon as the last R is inputted. The initial, PC-only release of Chapter 1 closed the program entirely if it was your own name.
- EarthBound (1994): If the game's Copy Protection is tripped, it turns into a slog of a greatly increased enemy rate until reaching the final boss. At that point, the game wipes all the save data then crashes the game.
- In Epic Battle Fantasy 5, if you manage to capture the Final Boss as a summon on a New Game Plus run, using that summon will cause the final boss to kill everyone in the encounter, including your whole party, and then crash the game. Justified in-universe as the final boss simply being that powerful. The tooltip for the summon warns you of this Non-Standard Game Over in three words: "Deletes current simulation."
The Devourer: "YOU MAY HAVE DESTROYED ME, BUT I WILL ALWAYS RETURN! I AM AN INTEGRAL PART OF THIS UNIVERSE - YOU ARE WORTHLESS BACTERIA BEFORE ME! THIS PROGRAM TERMINATES NOW!"
- In OMORI, after collecting all the keys, including the incorrect ones, for the hangman game, the individual being hanged will be fully revealed: a girl with long hair, Mari, with it quickly turning into Something before crashing the game.
- Popgoes Arcade 2: While playing through the game, a Random Event will lead to a glitched-out purple rabbit sprite ambush the player, cutting to one of several newspapers detailing the incidents involving a serial killer, followed by the game closing shortly after. In the hidden ending, after the player outside the game cabinet gets Jumpscared by Springtrap, the game will suddenly close. Re-opening the game leading to a cutscene of what looks to be Jeremy Fitzgerald's office, starting on the computer screens showing the aforementioned newspapers to then panning over to a tied up Simon.
- Undertale
- Naming yourself a specific name in the beginning, Gaster, after the removed from reality royal scientist, causes a soft reset that brings the player back to the introduction again. Curiously, doing this on the PS4 version will actually hard crash the game, likely unintentionally.
- Upon defeating Asgore, Flowey steps in to steal the six human souls, which leads the game to abruptly close. Upon reloading the game and seeing Flowey assume control over the SAVE file, the player's soon into a boss fight against Photoshop Flowey, who'll crash the game if the player dies due to them — of which the first two deaths are punctuated by his psychotic laugh flooding the screen. The console versions change this to a soft reset.
- At the end of a "No Mercy" route, the Fallen Child destroys the whole world, regardless if the player agrees to it or not, with the game subsequently closing after the screen fills with "9's". Attempting to open up the game leads to an empty void and the sound of howling wind, there being no more game to go back to... unless you're patient enough and take up the Fallen Child's offer of restoring the world at the cost of your SOUL. People who reverse-engineered the game discovered that this was initially planned to go even further and delete the entire game off the computer, but this was likely scrapped for technical reasons. As with the previous, it's a soft reset on consoles.
- The You Testament bizarrely invokes this for its "exit game" function; instead of closing the game gracefully, it forces a crash-to-desktop.
Visual Novel
- Doki Doki Literature Club! features several resets and game closures corresponding with the events that play out.
- By the end of Act 1, when the game reaches an end screen following Sayori's suicide, the game reloads into an altered title screen where Sayori is replaced with a glitchy mess of the other characters sprites, and trying to load the saves of the prior game will just lead into a forced new game that plays out the same introduction with Sayori, except all text and images relating to her are glitched out, with the game either closing soon after or resetting the intro — altered to account for Sayori's non-existence.
- In Act 3, where after Monika's file gets deleted and she realizes why the player did so, restoring the other character's files to make amends, the game resets to the title screen, this time with Monika absent from the game... up until Sayori goes down the same path she went.
- After the credits roll, when Monika deletes the game's remaining assets (and leaves them with a letter formally dismissing the literature club in the Normal Ending), an error message pops up about the script file being missing or corrupted, asking for the game to be reinstalled before closing.
- fault milestone two side:above: To hammer home just how powerless Ritona, Selphine, and Rune are against her, Melano—a self-proclaimed Physical God—casts a Magic Nuke spell so powerful it causes the game to crash and reboot with an alternate title screen showing Melano standing in an ashen wasteland, asking the player if they want to "Undo".
- Kimochii Classroom: Late into the story, When Felicia shoots Simon, the game force quits. Once rebooted the main menu will be different. The cheery music is now silent, Chiko has vanished from the screen and a new red folder tab has appeared to continue the story in the aftermath.
- Monika After Story: If Monika's affection is in the negatives (likely a result of the player being deliberately cruel to her) and the Random Event of being outside of her room occurs upon booting the game, attempting to forcibly enter the room without warning will have Monika panic — the game glitching out and subsequently closing afterwards.
- Slay the Princess: When you meet the Shifting Mound, you are given the option to either continue the game or "wait forever". If you choose to "wait forever", the Shifting Mound will wax philosophical about what you will do when you wait and how you will eventually return, then crash the game. When you reboot, the game will restart at the very moment you left, and the Shifting Mound will remark on how long you have been away, even if thousands of real-world years have passed.
What textures will you weave for yourself to occupy forever? Will you put the images of 'You' and 'I' into a box for safekeeping? [...] You'll always come back to the box, because you'll always want to know what it means to be you. I will be here waiting by your side until you are ready to return to mine.
- this game will end in 205 clicks.: At 205 clicks, the game's graphics distort and it closes itself in the middle of Royal's Heroic Vow of Defiance.
- YOU and ME and HER: At the ending of Aoi's route, Miyuki goes crazy, reveals her Medium Awareness and kills Shinichi and Aoi out of jealousy. In the last moments, she is seen calling God to patch the world before the game forcibly closes. When you reopen it, a fake DOS updater runs and the interface gets messed up. This signals Miyuki's takeover of the visual novel.
Wide Open Sandbox
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: The way official patches for the PC version of the game disable support for the Hot Coffee Game Mod is by forcing the game to crash if gta3.img is even one byte off from its vanilla size.
- Minecraft mods:
- The Broken Script has some hostile entities that will forcibly crash the game/close the game "server" if the player dies due to them — in some cases, the game crashes even by simply provoking Null. One version infamously had the game go the extra mile and shut down the player's PCnote , which soon got the mod banned for being considered malware; an updated version of the mod removed this feature when it was brought back.
- The mod no_moon.jar, a mod based on The Broken Script, has a heavier emphasis on entities that'll crash the player's game upon being killed by them — particularly by the "faceless" entity and the Lesser Souls.
- Yume Nikki: In FC World, interacting with a specific wall tile will bring up an empty text box. Continuing to interact with it causes the world to glitch out, distort and then "crash", after which Madotsuki awakens.
Other Games
- The Corridor closes itself every time you push the button at the end of the corridor, because the narrator doesn't want you to keep playing.
- Ergon Logos: The "die" ending attempts to spawn an endless number of processing threads, intending to crash the flash player or web browser as well as to make the rest of the computer unresponsive.
- Goat Simulator: In the Goat MMO Simulator mode, there's a hidden Developer Room that contains the game's servers, which, upon repeated headbutting, will mess with the very game's graphics, textures and interface, eventually leading to the player being booted from the game.
- The Hex: There's achievements tied to doing specific things in each segment that cause the game to crash. The achievements aren't just for flavor— putting them together is how you solve the game's ARG.
- INSERT GAME HERE:
- Discussed by the Game Manager during the Game-Breaking Bug sequence; he notes that if the player comes in contact with "it", their game will likely crash — which is a different story if he himself encounters it.
- After the credits sequence ends and the Game Developer is left alone with the player, he admits to not knowing how to end the game properly, and so just decides to close the game himself, and true to his word, the game closes — but not before he asks the player to leave a good review to help with his next game.
- Mr. Krabs Overdoses on Ketamine: Lose the final coin flip against Plankton, and the game forcibly shuts down.
- Classic entries in the You Don't Know Jack franchise do this if you enter "fuck you" three times during a gibberish question, and there are exceptions, like entering your name as that during the opening sequence in The Ride or encountering a specific question in TV — one mocking Dallas's season 8 for its All Just a Dream twist, only for the host Schmitty to learn from a nude Cookie that he himself is dreaming, with the screen distorting and ultimately closing the game.
- Their Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? game, being a Creator-Driven Successor, also has some deliberate crashes. For example, if you idle too long on the game menu, Regis Philbin will Rage Quit causing the game to crash.
Non-Video Game Examples
Web Video
- Daiazal discusses this trope in two of his Minecraft horror mod videos. In his video on The Broken Script, while critical of its initial feature of trying to turn off the player's PC and thus earning the label of Malware, he gives credit to the mod for how effective the moment was from a horror perspective — taking away his control of the situation shortly after a Hope Spot. By contrast, his video on no_moon.jar emphasizes how this trope can become a problem if relied on too much for the sake of horror, as having too many ways of closing the game due to the added entities, it eventually loses its scare factor and just turns the experience into one of frustration.
