History Main / LateToTheTragedy

* The Golems of Amgarrak DLC for DragonAge offers a double dose of this trope. Not only are you exploring the fantasy equivalent of an abandoned laboratory where the researchers [[GoneHorriblyRight were killed by their creation]], but you are following in the steps of a previous expedition that attempted to explore the place and were slaughtered.

* ''SpaceQuest I'' In the very beginning, Roger Wilco awakens in his closet from the sounds of gun fire and commotion as the ship he is on is taken over by the enemy Sariens. By the time he exits the closet, the crew is already dead, the self-destruction sequence is already engaged, and he has to find his way to the escape pod while avoiding the invaders who are still looking for any living souls who they might have missed.
* ''TheSeventhGuest'' and its sequels. The main character in ''The Seventh Guest'' is late for a literal party ? so late that all the guests are ghosts! [[spoiler:It later turns out that he is, in fact, the eponymous Seventh Guest, and was on time, as he, too, is a ghost.]]
* ''{{Myst}}''. You, the player, find yourself on an abandoned island. After exploring a bit, you build up a picture of something dire that happened there before you arrived.

* And in Metroid fusion, where you arrive at the BSL research station after a mysterious explosion. Then the zombies show up.
* Also in Super Metroid where you arrive at the Ceres Space station post receiving a distress signal but finding all the scientists dead.
* Then there is MegaManZero 2. Arriving at Neo Arcadia 2 only to find every soldier involved dead (with the exception of one)

* ''[[StarControl Star Control 2]]''. The protagonist is sent to aid Earth and its allies in a war against hostile aliens, only to find that Earth was conquered twenty years earlier.

* ''SystemShock'' and its sequel, both of which have the hero waking from cryogenic suspension and slowly discovering the ship/station he's on has been through some interesting developments while he was out.

** Averted in VideoGame/BioshockInfinite, however. Both factions are still fighting, and Columbia hasn't been reduced to the horrific crumbling state of Rapture where everything seems to be hanging by a thread and ready to flood at the slightest provocation. It's still going to be very dangerous though.
** In VideoGame/{{Bioshock 2}}, there's a subplot of a busisnessman who stumbled upon Rapture looking for his missing daughter [[spoiler: who was turned into a Little Sister]] told through audio logs. [[spoiler: Right before you enter one area of the game, you hear - in the actual world and not an audio log - the man screaming to "get away from her." When you go inside, you can find a suitcase full of surprisingly-normal possessions and an audio log. The audio log ends with the businessman screaming the same desperate pleas you had just heard from outside the room. It turns out that you'd been mere minutes behind him for most of the way.]] You'd think that'd be the end of that plotline, but right before the finale [[spoiler: you're late to the party again, because apparently the businessman didn't die there, and was instead dragged off to become a Big Daddy who would serve his own daughter as a little sister. You find an audio log telling you this directly after you encounter (and let's be honest, probably killed) a Big Daddy with a name matching the businessman from the audio logs, right next to an operating table for the creation of Big Daddies.]]
* In Bungie Software's ''PathwaysIntoDarkness'' the player is part of an elite special forces team sent with only hours to stop the SealedEvilInACan at the bottom of a nightmarish jungle pyramid dungeon from waking up. But your parachute malfunctions before you can land, and your team leaves you for dead. Since ItsUpToYou, you awaken hours later (also finding that the barrel of the awesome M16 in your BagOfSpilling was bent in the landing, rendering all of your ammo useless) to discover that your team has failed.

* Played straight in DragonQuestVIII, wherein the heroes often arrive just in time to see their next lead or target go up in smoke.

* {{Shift}}, a game which evokes much of the spirit of Portal, uses this trope in [[http://armorgames.com/play/1846/shift-3 Shift 3]].
* ''{{Uncharted}}: Drake's Fortune'' does it a few times over - not only the hero and the villainous enemy mercs but also Nazis and Sir Francis Drake were LateToTheTragedy of a group of Spanish explorers who found El Dorado - and grew to wish they hadn't. In the present, the hero finds himself trawling through the wreckage of these multiple doomed expeditions.

* ''KnightsOfTheOldRepublic II'' Starts with the player being Late to the Party aboard the Peragus Mining Facility. After finding the culprit, the player promptly has his own party which makes the first party almost completely irrelevant.

* The general theme in MassEffect: it's galactic civilization that's late to the party, to the point of the last party being held for the Precursors.

* ''GhostTrick'' plays with this trope. Your character is regularly late to any party, leaving someone dead, but his abilities include [[TimeTravel traveling back to 4 minutes before the person's death]], making you catch the party after all.

* The last two episodes of ''NeonGenesisEvangelion'', with the ''narrative'' arriving late and [[spoiler: Instrumentality]] being the party.

*** "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead:" the Doctor and companion (and an archaeological expedition) arrive a century after the "event"

* ''{{Lost}}'' was partially inspired by games such as ''{{Myst}}'' in which the character finds himself in a strange place with little information, including the objectives of the game. As the characters have explored the island, they've found the abandoned Dharma stations, numerous skeletons, and what was once a large statue, which now has been reduced to a lone foot.
* Ripley and the Colonial Marines in ''{{Aliens}}''.

* ''StarWars: {{Shatterpoint}}'' has ''the Clone Wars and the Republic at large'' be late to the "party" known as [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Summertime_War the Summertime Wars]]. Basically, conflict between offworlders and natives led to a war that starts when the winter snows melt and end when the autumn rains began. Each year. For thirty years as of the start of the book. The natives only support the Republic because the offworlders are supported by the Separatists. Mace Windu, the narrator, notes that his young native companions do not speak of [[{{Retirony}} what they will do " after the war]]". Because it's all they've ever known. [[spoiler:Which makes it kind of heartbreaking when Nick admits his feelings about what he wanted to do with Chalk ''if'' the war ever ended, while holding her corpse.]]

* Downplayed in ''{{Sinfest}}'': [[http://www.sinfest.net/archive_page.php?comicID=4319 Criminy arrives back to find Fuchsia's painting things spread over the ground and no sign of her]]. But she emerges a second later to tell him of her {{Flashback}}.
* ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal_%28interactive_novel%29#Novel Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval]]'' by Rob Swigart is a novellization of the 1986 ''Portal'' game above. One-man interstellar expedition returns after a century and finds that humans left Earth. He uses a computer terminal to figure where did everybody disappear.

* In the movie ''Film/TwentyEightDaysLater'', main character Jim [[AbandonedHospitalAwakening wakes up in a deserted hospital]] after England has been ravaged by the [[HatePlague Rage virus]]. This leads to a "last man on earth"-type scenario, at least until he stumbles upon some zombies and ends up being saved by survivors who actually know what happened. This is very similar to the beginning of the 1951 book and subsequent film adaptations of ''TheDayOfTheTriffids'' where the protagonist wakes up from eye surgery to find the rest of the world has been blinded by strange lights in the sky and [[ManEatingPlant killer]] [[WhenTreesAttack plants]] have started attacking the helpless population. Also similar is Rick Grimes' situation at the start of the ''TheWalkingDead'', having been rendered comatose by a shotgun blast some time before the dead... well, [[ZombieApocalypse start walking]].

* ''TheRockyHorrorPictureShow'', with a literal party. Still, it's not ''quite'' over.

* ''PowerRangersNinjaStorm'' begins with our heroes-to-be late for training yet again... thus missing the BigBad's initial sacking of their training hall.

*** Maybe not totally insane: he has a medical mind and has accepted the concept of [[spoiler:life beyond death]], so protecting [[spoiler:her body]] wouldn't seem useless, and (while it might have been a glitch in the map or my video card) there seemed to be ''something'' else protecting her - [[spoiler:the corpse was only there from]] certain camera angles and locations. At least, none of the hostiles (the non-inhabitants, I mean) [[spoiler:had touched her body yet]], and some probably had motive to.

* Partially subverted in the ''SilentHill'' series -- although fitting most of the criteria, right down to the scattered journal pages and the notes written in human blood, you never ''really'' find out what's going on. The most you can hope for is some personal closure, a rescued survivor, or maybe a long-lost wife brought back from the dead. (!)

* In the pilot episode of ''Series/{{Crusade}}'', [[TheCaptain Gideon]] arrives to Earth days after the battle with the Drakh (see ''Series/{{Babylon 5}}: ACallToArms''). All the crew see are ship wreckage and infected Earth. Matheson comments that they were late for the party even before they jumped. Then again, there's not much they could've done with a research vessel with enough weapons to scare off an occasional [[SpacePirates raider]] or two.

* ''HalfLife 2'' has an overarching plotline of the player being LateToTheTragedy for the subjugation of earth. There's a nested trope in the Ravenholm portion of the game, where the player is LateToTheTragedy for the much more recent slaughter of an entire town.

* ''TheNeverhood'', a claymation game that starts off with the protagonist sleeping on the floor of a locked room with no explanation as to who he is or how he got there. The story is told bit-by-bit through little discs recorded by another character.

[[quoteright:346:[[VideoGame/{{Bioshock}} http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/bioshock19592_7019.jpg]]]]

* ''{{Bioshock}}'' (from the makers of the ''SystemShock'' games) takes place in an abandoned undersea utopia-gone-wrong, which the player character stumbles across, discovering more about what went wrong as they explore.

** In Bioshock 2, there's a subplot of a busisnessman who stumbled upon Rapture looking for his missing daughter [[spoiler: who was turned into a Little Sister]] told through audio logs. [[spoiler: Right before you enter one area of the game, you hear - in the actual world and not an audio log - the man screaming to "get away from her." When you go inside, you can find a suitcase full of surprisingly-normal possessions and an audio log. The audio log ends with the businessman screaming the same desperate pleas you had just heard from outside the room. It turns out that you'd been mere minutes behind him for most of the way.]] You'd think that'd be the end of that plotline, but right before the finale [[spoiler: you're late to the party again, because apparently the businessman didn't die there, and was instead dragged off to become a Big Daddy who would serve his own daughter as a little sister. You find an audio log telling you this directly after you encounter (and let's be honest, probably killed) a Big Daddy with a name matching the businessman from the audio logs, right next to an operating table for the creation of Big Daddies.]]

* In the movie ''[[TwentyEightDaysLater 28 Days Later]]'', main character Jim [[AbandonedHospitalAwakening wakes up in a deserted hospital]] after England has been ravaged by the [[HatePlague Rage virus]]. This leads to a "last man on earth"-type scenario, at least until he stumbles upon some zombies and ends up being saved by survivors who actually know what happened. This is very similar to the beginning of the 1951 book and subsequent film adaptations of ''TheDayOfTheTriffids'' where the protagonist wakes up from eye surgery to find the rest of the world has been blinded by strange lights in the sky and [[ManEatingPlant killer]] [[WhenTreesAttack plants]] have started attacking the helpless population. Also similar is Rick Grimes' situation at the start of the ''TheWalkingDead'', having been rendered comatose by a shotgun blast some time before the dead... well, [[ZombieApocalypse start walking]].

* JohnCarpenter's ''Film/TheThing'' got dug up by, and slaughtered, a [[strike:Scandinavian]] Norwegian expedition team before it found its way into the American outpost in Antarctica.

* Most of the ''FranchiseResidentEvil'' games. ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil2'', where Leon and Claire show up to a zombie-infested Raccoon City, takes it the most literally: Partway through, you find the party favors and decorations for a welcome party the Raccoon City Police Department was going to throw for Leon.

* Most of the ''ResidentEvil'' games. ''ResidentEvil 2'', where Leon and Claire show up to a zombie-infested Raccoon City, takes it the most literally: Partway through, you find the party favors and decorations for a welcome party the Raccoon City Police Department was going to throw for Leon.

* The entirety of ''AlienLegacy'' involves the colonists of the UNS ''Calypso'' waking up from their HumanPopsicle state to find that the system they were sent to colonize contains only ruins from the UNS ''Tantalus'' colonies (the ''Tantalus'' was sent later but had a better engine). Besides establishing colonies all over the Beta Caeli system, the goal is to search the ruins, find the {{Apocalyptic Log}}s, and figure out what caused the destruction of the first colonies.

* ''{{Odium}}''. All contact with a Polish city has been lost some time ago. Now, the city is in [[SceneryGorn ruins]] and bizarre monstrosities roam the streets. There is actually practically no exposition as to what happened until the very end.

* In the Lucasarts video game ''TheDig'', the human protagonists are "kidnapped" by an advanced spaceship and arrive at an alien world whose civilization has [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence apparently]] become extinct. At first they care only about survival and possibly finding a way to return Earth, but over the course of the game they discover clues as to the cause of the alien disappearance and end up [[spoiler:bringing them back]].

* In the movie ''[[TwentyEightDaysLater 28 Days Later]]'', main character Jim [[AbandonedHospitalAwakening wakes up in a deserted hospital]] after England has been ravaged by the [[HatePlague Rage virus]]. This leads to a "last man on earth"-type scenario, at least until he stumbles upon some zombies and ends up being saved by survivors who actually know what happened.

* ''Shivers'' and its sequel.

* Then there is Megaman Zero 2. Arriving at Neo Arcadia 2 only to find every soldier involved dead (with the exception of one)

* Played straight in DragonQuest VIII, wherein the heroes often arrive just in time to see their next lead or target go up in smoke.

* [[http://armorgames.com/play/751/shift Shift]], a game which evokes much of the spirit of Portal, uses this trope in [[http://armorgames.com/play/1846/shift-3 Shift 3]].
* ''Uncharted: Drake's Fortune'' does it a few times over - not only the hero and the villainous enemy mercs but also Nazis and Sir Francis Drake were LateToTheTragedy of a group of Spanish explorers who found El Dorado - and grew to wish they hadn't. In the present, the hero finds himself trawling through the wreckage of these multiple doomed expeditions.

* ''Bonesaw: The Game'' has one of these to help form its premise. The player character took a bit too long gathering some pulled pork sandwiches, and just happened to miss ''Ref M sucking the rest of his team into an interdimensional penalty box!''

* The ''Fatal Frame''/''Project Zero'' games revolve around this trope:

* In ''Starflight'' (So old the Sega Genesis version was a re-release) you find yourself centuries LateToTheTragedy. [[spoiler: You're from Planet Arth, whose star is about to collapse, on a mission to find a hospitable planet to which the populace can relocate. Along the way, adrift in deep space, you find a sleeper ship from Planet Earth...rendered inhospitable [[ApocalypseHow (see Apocalypse How, Class 5)]] long ago. So long ago, in fact, that your culture lost all knowledge that your civilization originally came from Earth. Eventually you find Earth itself, and on its surface locate 'artifacts' in the form of [[ApocalypticLog newspapers]] vaguely describing its downfall. Eventually you have to use three [[PowerCrystal artifacts]] together to stop a [[DesolationShot crystalline entity]] that was the cause of both Earth's downfall and the near destruction of your solar system.]]

* ''Angels & Demons'' has the heroes reaching each of the four cardinals less late each time, but too late to save them nonetheless.

* VideoGame/{{Doom}} 3 has you both early and late to the party, you're there when everything goes to hell (or hell come to it) but it's clear a lot has been going on before your arrival.

* Jonathan Boakes's DarkFall is another good example: "you" get a telephone DistressCall from your architect brother: "I know what you're thinking: you're thinking, 'He only ever phones when there's something wrong.' Well, something is wrong. Very wrong." You hurry to help him with whatever it is, and find yourself alone in a railway station fifty years abandoned. You get to explore and find out what the strange sounds are, and why the lights turn themselves on and off, and just who it is you hear singing in the restaurant kitchen, and why the star-map you find shows constellations unlike any we know, and what those strange symbols and words are in the bathroom, and what's in the basement ...

* The entire world of ''{{Fallout}}'' is based around this trope, having been destroyed by a nuclear war a few hundred years before the game begins.

* ''HalfLife 2'' has an overarching plotline of the player being LateToTheParty for the subjugation of earth. There's a nested trope in the Ravenholm portion of the game, where the player is LateToTheParty for the much more recent slaughter of an entire town.

* ''Uncharted: Drake's Fortune'' does it a few times over - not only the hero and the villainous enemy mercs but also Nazis and Sir Francis Drake were LateToTheParty of a group of Spanish explorers who found El Dorado - and grew to wish they hadn't. In the present, the hero finds himself trawling through the wreckage of these multiple doomed expeditions.

* In ''Starflight'' (So old the Sega Genesis version was a re-release) you find yourself centuries LateToTheParty. [[spoiler: You're from Planet Arth, whose star is about to collapse, on a mission to find a hospitable planet to which the populace can relocate. Along the way, adrift in deep space, you find a sleeper ship from Planet Earth...rendered inhospitable [[ApocalypseHow (see Apocalypse How, Class 5)]] long ago. So long ago, in fact, that your culture lost all knowledge that your civilization originally came from Earth. Eventually you find Earth itself, and on its surface locate 'artifacts' in the form of [[ApocalypticLog newspapers]] vaguely describing its downfall. Eventually you have to use three [[PowerCrystal artifacts]] together to stop a [[DesolationShot crystalline entity]] that was the cause of both Earth's downfall and the near destruction of your solar system.]]