Die, Chair, Die!

"Oh! My car!"

"About all I could figure out to do was punch things, so I punched some flowers. Yeah, eat that, flowers! And you too, patch of dirt!"

— Yahtzee reviewing Minecraft

In opposition to the traditional practice of setting games in spartan worlds with Everything Trying to Kill You, recent games try to add realism by inserting a lot of prop objects, such as chairs, tables, televisions, and the like, as well as the almost inevitable crates. These will frequently end up in your way.

There being only so many buttons on the game controller, the user interface is rarely set up to allow any kind of sophisticated interaction with these props. Sometimes, weapons or attacks are your only means of interacting with the world. In such cases, the usual way of dealing with such objects is to destroy them. Quite often, the game will actively reward you for this with various forms of in-game currency or powerups.

As the inclusion of Ragdoll Physics becomes commonplace, expect this to increase, as objects can suddenly become extremely useful as weapons. If destructible objects are useful only to show off how awesome the physics engine is, then you've discovered an example of Wreaking Havok.

Kung-Shui is a close relative that this trope often wishes to emulate.

...And no, the title of this article is neither Welsh nor German for "The chair, the".^note Those would be Y gadair, y and Der Stuhl, der!, respectively. The trope also has nothing to do with People Sit on Chairs.

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Examples

Action Adventure Game

• All the Links appear to have a compulsion to break pots, signs, skulls, and to cut grass to get some kind of reward.
  • This is subverted in a handful of The Legend of Zelda games, where not only are the chickens indestructible but attacking them repeatedly will cause them to summon an army of doom chickens that will hunt you down and kill you.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, however, attacking the chickens would force you to take control of it for a short duration. This was not so much a deterrent as totally freaking awesome.
  • And in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass you can kill the chickens, by picking them up and throwing them to the water. You have to jump into the water too, however; otherwise, they bounce from an invisible wall surrounding the land.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, the chickens, if put in water, will simply come to the edge and climb back up... no matter how far away the surface is. At one point, you use a chicken to slow your fall as you glide down to the ground far below. When you're done, you let go of the chicken, and he'll float across the water, back to the wall, and rise back up into the heavens as if there's an invisible elevator. (There's no way his wings could propel him back up the height of a skyscraper, no way.) It is hilarious.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, you can kill the chickens by using the Magic Powder or Magic Rod. Doing so might reward you with a heart.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword has Link face the consequences of this at one point. In the Lumpy Pumpkin bar, there's a breakable chandelier with a Piece of Heart on it. Break it and the bar owner makes you do a mini-quest to pay it off. The game also chastises you for looking through other people's cupboards, getting yelled by Henya for breaking vases in the academy and a woman named Goselle in Skyloft will fine you for breaking her antiques.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker there's a character who will fine you for breaking his pots.
    • In The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask as well, in the Great Bay area, except you also get rewarded if you can break them all in one use of the Zora Boomerang attack.
  • In Twilight Princess, Hena from the fishing hole lampshades this trope if you examine the jars on her shelf:
  Hena: "It sounds crazy, but I've heard stories of people who have nothing better to do than go around breaking every jar they see. I mean, is that the dumbest thing you've ever heard in your life?! Who would DO that?!"^note Link can roll into the wall, but it won't make the jars fall down. If he does it repeatedly, Hena kicks him out for being a jerk and makes him apologize the next time he comes in.
• The many, many, many licensed LEGO games operate on a simple rule: if it's made of LEGO, smash it.
• In the Ratchet & Clank series, you can get bolts from destroying lots of the scenery (computer screens, cameras, and all kinds of stuff). Some skill-points are rewarded for destroying ALL possible scenery.
  • There's also a skill point for taking out the spring-mounted Captain Qwark automaton on Metropolis in game 1... which requires anti-tank weaponry. Considering Qwark is revealed to be working against you in the storyline, it's really very satisfying reducing it to spare parts.
  • Hilariously inverted in Crack in Time. If you hit a broken object with Clank's time scepter it reverses and becomes fixed. You even get bolts comparable to breaking the thing.
• In Psychonauts, most items can be hit, thrown, or set on fire. This is actually useful since any enemy that bumps into flaming scenery catches on fire, and any other enemies that bump into them will then also burst into flames. Throwing objects is also the only way to defeat some enemies. An in-character example would be Sasha Nein, who hates Tiffany Lamps and uses them as target practice within his mind (helped along by the fact you can power psychic blasts with The Power of Hate).
• The Missing Link levels in the Monsters vs. Aliens videogame.
• In the original Castle Wolfenstein, all of the walls (except for the four main ones) in each room, along with all of the chests, can be destroyed with grenades. Detonating a chest full of ammunition isn't a good idea...
  • Many objects in Return to Castle Wolfenstein, including chairs, are destructible.
• Darksiders has many destroyable objects. Unlike many games, they don't actually respawn after leaving the area, which makes completing one of the trophies difficult. (There is one area where they do in the Xbox 360 version, but not the PS3 version.)
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow has lots of destructible objects. One of the hardest bonus challenges involves destroying enough of them in a given time.
• Scenery in Hollow Knight is full of stuff you can break as collateral damage or just because; stuff such as tall grass, signs, posts, mushrooms, or statues.

Action Game

• Thanks to Digital Molecular Matter, which can accurately model substances, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has some of the most satisfying Die, Chair, Die! moments of any game, ever.
  • Subverted at some windows near the end. Every window in the entire game (before the laser tunnel) sucks all enemies within reach into space. In the last stage: window force pushes YOU to the other side of the room.
• A good majority of the scenery in the Gungrave series can be destroyed. Fire hydrants, boxes, chairs, alarm lights, cars, signs, and then some. In fact, busting up inanimate objects is crucial to building the Demolition Shot Gauge—blowing up objects keeps the Beat Counter's flame lit, especially if there are no more enemies in the room left to kill.
  • Even funnier is if you've seen the full version of the original game's cover art—Grave is standing on top of a mass of destroyed objects and enemies (including a stop sign and a truck) that he, presumably, blew up himself.
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game allows players to destroy almost everything in the game with the proton pack. The game keeps track of the damage in terms of dollars - a sort of a "score". Trophies/Achievements awarded for finishing the game below a certain dollar amount, and above another.
• Injustice takes this two ways. Depending on the physical strength of the character, the player can use parts of a certain stage as weapons against the opponent, with chairs being options, depending on the stage. Stronger ones can use statues, dumpsters, and even cars. The more passive incarnation of this trope shows up if characters hit the ground with enough force that the damage spreads to the background. At the end of each fight, the player will get an XP bonus if objects were used as weapons or if the stage was substantially damaged.
• Robot Alchemic Drive features cityscape environments that can (and more often than not, will) have large sections of it flattened as your remote-controlled Humongous Mecha dukes it out with foes of equal mass. After each battle, a newscast gives you a rough estimate of how much damage was caused, with players encouraged to try and minimize damage as much as possible by offering bonus money for protecting key buildings.
• In Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance Raiden can cut most anything. Early demos showcased him using his abilities to slice through watermelons. The game actually keeps track of how many pieces Raiden cuts props into if the player is so inclined.
• In Cabal and its Spiritual Successor Blood Bros, practically any structure in the foreground will crumble into ruins and give you point items if you shoot at it enough times.

Adventure Game

• The flash game Daymare Town 3 by Mateusz Skutnik, include an achievement for destroying 10 breakable things: a clock, lightbulbs, windows, crystals, etc.
• Goblins Quest 3, Blount turns into a slightly more violent Wolf Man at one point and starts using a hammer to break the house of a Jerkass shopkeeper, who kidnapped his bird, stole his coin, and refused to cooperate him with anything.

Beat 'em Up

• Everything in the background of Crisis Beat can — and should — be destroyed. From benches to stools, glass storefronts, shipping crates, oil barrels, railings, lampposts, a scale model of the ship where majority of the adventure took place on, and even Christmas trees, which players will grab by the base and fling them in circles before using it to thrash the nearest mook. In case anyone asks, yes, this game takes place on Christmas Eve.
• Chipmonk! has levels set inside buildings, with the environment including chairs, tables, stools, wine barrels, and assorted furniture being destroyable.
• Final Fight and its sequels had a variety of crates, boxes, barrels, etc. one could smash open in order to obtain Power Ups. It was also the first appearance of a Bonus Stage where you can wreck a car. Semi-Justified in that the car belonged to a member of the Mad Gear.
• The Punisher (Capcom) allows nearly everything to be smashed to pieces. However, most of these objects can also be picked up and thrown at enemies for a good deal of damage, destroying the objects in the process. This includes chairs, barrels, pot plants, armor suits, or even an arcade cabinet - basically anything that isn't nailed to the ground.
• Sengoku 3 even awards hits on furniture with combo points.
• The X-Men Legends games feature plenty of this trope, especially in the Morlock tunnels in the first game. Even parts of the walls are destructible, and between the relatively close quarters and the variety of area effects, battles can quickly turn into spectacular displays of Stuff Blowing Up.
• The entire point of Rygar: The Legendary Adventure is not as much defeating greek gods but more about destroying pillars, arches and the general landscape with bonuses for 100% Completion.
• Streets of Rage features breakable street objects, such as mailboxes, parking meters, traffic cones, and such. Many of these have power-ups hidden inside of them. The characters also seem unable to work out how door handles work, and deal with any doors they have to get through by smashing them into pieces.
• Urban Reign has plenty of tables, chairs, shelves, and other minor objects to knock people through for bonus damage.
• In Burning Fight, all Bonus Stages are based on this type of vandalism, and the streets also have the occasional vending machines, oil barrels, and wooden crates that can be trashed. Heck, one area contains a piano you can smash apart!
• God Hand, in reference to Final Fight itself, has bonus stages where your objective is to destroy a car belonging to the enemy with nothing but the power of your fists. The regular stages themselves also, of course, contain various crates and barrels that hold all sorts of powerups and goodies.

Fighting Game

• All the games in the Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi series feature destructible environments, allowing you not only to destroy mountains and buildings with energy attacks but also by throwing or punching your opponent through them. If you do this in story mode, you might even find a Dragon Ball in the rubble.
• The most famous bonus stage in fighting game history: The return of Final Fight's car-destruction in Street Fighter II, for even less reason.
  • Brought back for Street Fighter IV, including the Mad Gear owner.
• The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact 2 not only features a stage where you can wreck a car, but also a Metal Slug.
• In Injustice: Gods Among Us, one of the S.T.A.R. Labs missions has Bane destroying the Batmobile.

First Person Shooter

• The later installments in the Call of Duty series had destroyable furniture.
• In GoldenEye (1997) and several of the later James Bond-themed games, every piece of scenery could not only be destroyed but would explode under heavy gunfire, often in a massive fireball that would injure the player and send foes flying. Even seemingly non-explosive items like office tables and bushes exhibited this strange behavior. And due to the way explosions work in the game, unloading a mag into a file cabinet or a crate could result in explosions which were peculiarly more fiery than concussive, and had the astounding ability to last for a full ten seconds.
  • GoldenEye (Wii), as well as is Xbox 360 and PS3 ports, avoids the exploding furniture, but otherwise plays the trope straight, as most bits of scenery can be destroyed with enough firepower.
• Half-Life issues Gordon Freeman's iconic crowbar for dealing with breakable objects. Almost the entire game is littered with large, breakable crate-like boxes, which often contain cool stuff such as ammo and health powerups.
  • Half-Life 2 has an object library loaded with mobile, seemingly-random junk, all fodder to be used by the player and his trusty Gravity Gun weapon. In fact, a flying hot-water radiator is capable of killing almost every non-humongous enemy in the game. Only in the Expansion Pack, Half-Life 2: Episode One, was a human-sized enemy introduced that took more than one radiator to kill: the Zombine, a headcrab-infected Combine Overwatch Soldier.
  • And in Half-Life 2: Episode Two, a new enemy known as "the Hunter" was introduced. Hunters have damage resistance against almost every firearm and explosive... but have a crippling weakness to junk launched by your Gravity Gun. Despite being able to take ridiculous amounts of explosions to the face, most would fall over and die if hit by a small log.
    • There's actually an achievement for killing a hunter with only the gravity gun and the Hunter's own flechettes.
• In Deus Ex, the landscape is dotted with wooden crates containing Power Ups; for ease of opening these, the player is provided with a crowbar... which is used to, you guessed it, smash them to pieces. Deus Ex also contains chairs, which may be picked up, carried, thrown, used as weapons, climbed on to reach out-of-the-way places... but not sat in, except in cutscenes. There's also throwable vases, flags, balls, cleaning trolleys, signs, and plants, all of which can cause damage (throw them at a friendly character enough times, and they'll attack), and newspapers will darken when hit, until finally shattering.
  • With a high-level Microfibral Muscle augmentation, you can use literally any physics object in the game as a one-hit nonlethal KO. There's a video lurking around Youtube of the player knocking out Manderley by hitting him over the head with the American flag next to his desk.
  • If you walk over a cat, it becomes hostile and if you do it again, it dies. Rats die the first time you step on them.
• Most objects in BioShock can be nudged or picked up via telekinesis. This means you can pick up a corpse and mentally throw it at another opponent.
  • Or strap a half-dozen proximity mines to an explosive barrel and hurl it at a Big Daddy for massive damage.
• Rise of the Triad was one of the first, if not the first, to have destructible objects, down to the coins you could either pick up in order to gain a life or simply blow up to have a chance to get a bonus at the end of the level.
• Duke Nukem 3D, coming about a year later, was one of the big popularizers of the trope for FPSes.
• Operation Body Count was also one of the first FPSes to have destructible environments: walls could be damaged with bullets or grenades, windows could be broken, and furniture could be either blown up or burned.
• TekWar was another mid-'90s game with destructible objects.
• Alpha Prime has levels literally strewn with hundreds of movable objects, from small soda cans to large metal beams. What it lacks, however, is a good way to use them (aside from a few put-battery-in-receptacle puzzles). The player can pick objects up and toss them with a variable amount of force, but enemies will remain pretty much unfazed if they are hit by them. A gravity gun (a la Half-Life 2) would have made things much more interesting.
• Far Cry 2 features the destruction of everything from Radios and TVs over vehicles to ammunition and fuel supplies, not to mention marked explosive barrels. Basically, anything that is not a tree or a building can be completely and utterly destroyed. Instead, you can just burn the trees.
• Of course, there's always Portal, where there is actually an achievement for destroying all 33 destroyable security cameras on the walls throughout the Aperture Science testing areas. Because of the virtually non-existent clutter in the game, this is one of the few things that actually has a visible impact on the game world (in a material sense, given that you cannot destroy anything else)...and even taking the cameras out doesn't destroy them, it just dislodges them from the wall, rendering them unusable by GLaDOS. Then again, that could be The Plan.
  • In Portal 2, we get video monitors as well, with an achievement for destroying all of them as well. These are a bit more rewarding than the cameras in that you receive rather humorous complaints from the person shown on the screen.
• Destroying these things in SiN's early missions causes J.C. to state that it isn't a shooting gallery.
• In Metroid Prime, the Chozo Ruins feature birds flying in the distance. They're pretty. They're majestic. They're docile. They can be shot at. Doing so causes them to explode in a flurry of feathers. The Metroid Prime Trilogy games also occasionally feature random bits of destructible scenery.
• In Deer Hunter 2005, there are occasionally birds flying overhead. Since you can kill everything else in the game (rabbits, raccoons, and of course deer) it's tempting to take potshots at them - until you hit one, and are told that your score for that round has been cancelled because you just shot an endangered species.
• In the FPS Sky Net, buildings would contain office-type and living-type furniture such as couches, refrigerators, desks, file cabinets, wall-mounted paintings, etc.. They all could be destroyed. And would explode.
• In Medal of Honor: Frontline and Allied Assault, in addition to exploding barrels and crates, certain destructible setpieces, such as radios, will explode and take out nearby mooks.
• Black has a lot of structures and walls that are destructible. The levels are also filled to brim with Exploding Barrels to make sure many things get blown up.
• Many world objects in FEAR can be broken or at least knocked around.
• Rainbow Six: Vegas is full of destructible objects, including slot machines that disgorge a load of coins/tokens when blasted.
• Battlefield: Bad Company gave us the ability to blow away entire walls. This removal of cover and concealment works both ways, however.
  • The second installment upped the ante by allowing for entire buildings to be made to go bye-bye.
• Halo: In the original Halo: Combat Evolved, only Covenant vehicles took damage, but in every other game, UNSC vehicles can also be destroyed by incoming fire.
• Some decorations in Shadow of the Wool Ball, such as tables and potted plants, can be destroyed (and occasionally yield bonus items).
• In Crysis, in addition to most manipulatable objects being destructible, trees and even small buildings can be shot or knocked down.
• Hexen II features a plethora of destructible objects in most environments^note in medieval houses and shops, you can break almost anything that isn't the walls, floor, and ceiling; midway through the Egyptian-themed hub, you can break separately each toe, foot, and calf of a pharaoh's statue, and you may just want to do it since there could be a secret behind that pile of rubble blocking a passage, or a trapdoor under the rug. There's even a collection of sound files for both damage and destruction of things depending on the material they're made of. Not bad for a 1996 game.
• Deep Rock Galactic: Only natural, with near-fully destructible terrain that suffers under normal gunfire and will be carved away by picks and explosives. The urge to tear up the land and mineral formations out of frustration or generally just because it's fun is irresistible. Even the dwarves seem to agree, what with having lines for destroying certain unimportant formations.
  Dwarf: Die, worthless crystal!
• In Batman Doom, chairs can be wrecked by Batman or the enemies. The same thing applies to the paper doors in the "House of Fear" level.

Hack and Slash

• Dungeons And Dragons Heroes contained breakable barrels that frequently contained money or potions. Beware, however, as some of them actually exploded, causing damage to anything in range.
• Also infamous for destructibles is Diablo II, where a broken crate could drop money, items, or even spawn an enemy.
  • Diablo III takes this to a whole new level, with destructible environment pieces apparently everywhere. You can even get small experience bonuses if you destroy enough of these pieces in quick succession, and some achievements give bonuses for doing this.
• The Devil May Cry games include this trope to the penultimate level; if it's clearly not a fixed portion of the scenery, it can be destroyed to pick up a few red orbs, the precious in-game currency which is supposed to be crystallized demon's blood. Sometimes, the destructible object is even part of the scenery yet you can interact with it by attacking it, which leads to the few cases of a destructible object not having currency in it being quite jarring:
  • Devil May Cry 4 took this idea and ran with it to initiate a cutscene, namely Nero having to get on top of a huge chandelier and slice it with his Red Queen.
  • DmC: Devil May Cry incorporates this as well to varying degrees, usually with the Demonic weapons and marked spots on the environment - Arbiter and Eryx can smash cracked walls, while Dante can deliberately use his Demon Pull ability to detach certain objects.
  • In Devil May Cry 5, V can also summon Nightmare in certain places where it can break through walls, creating new pathways.

Platform Game

• Crash Bandicoot has you smashing crates as a primary objective of the games. Aside from containing several goodies such as Wumpa Fruits and Extra Lives, breaking all of them in a level will get you a gem.
  • Except for that one level in the second game, where you got the clear gem for killing all the boxes, and the blue one for not killing any.
• Jak and Daxter though mostly in Jak II: Renegade and Jak 3: Wastelander where you can basically kick the crap out of cars and zoomers until they explode. However, this is inadvisable as being near enough to a zoomer to kick or punch it will probably result in you getting hurt by the eventual explosion and because destroying one of the wastelander cars by any means will result in you failing whatever mission you might or might not have been on.
• The Sly Cooper series gives you coins for smashing things. More interestingly, there are multiple missions where you are required to 'ransack' (smash) objects in order to find some key item.
  • "When the plan goes wrong, always fall back on the Golden Rule: break stuff."
  • The Simpsons Hit & Run similarly rewarded you with coins for smashing stuff, up to and including your own vehicle.
• The Spyro the Dragon games tend to have some destructible scenery, mostly plants. Burning the shrubbery to a crisp doesn't get you any points, but it is somewhat therapeutic.
  • Although in Spyro: Year of the Dragon, burning certain things in certain levels will earn you Skill Points. (For example, Burn All the Piranha Signs.
• Whiplash has this as one of the main objectives: Bankrupt the evil corporation that used you as lab animals through the sheer cost of property damage.
• Ape Escape has a number of breakable walls as well as, most fittingly, Specter's flying chair.
• In the flash game Coinbox Hero, your adversary is as the title says, a coin box. In addition to the standard method of jumping and hitting it, there are a variety of weapons you can buy to use against it. Nuking it destroys it and creates Nyan Cat. Seriously.
• Sonic Adventure 2: in City Escape, Sonic can bowl over cars during the opening downhill streetboarding segment. They even reward a modest amount of points!
• In Sonic Riders, Power-type characters work this way, punching out certain obstacles in their path, the obstacles in question varying depending on the track, and gain Air for doing so.
  • In Sonic Unleashed, there are many pieces of furniture that you can break for energy in the nighttime levels (or, in the daytime levels, just destroy them because they're there).
  • Also, in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), destroying crates (or other breakable objects) gives you points for no particular reason.
  • In Sonic Generations, you can destroy stuff to fill your boost meter. This is especially helpful in the City Escape level, as plowing through cars is a good way to keep the boost meter filled during the first section.
• Duke Nukem II has crates that can be destroyed for powerups and bonus items. In addition, security cameras are breakable, and if you destroy all of them in a level, you're awarded a bonus. The game also features glass containers which, when shot, reveal hostile slime creatures.
• The Beetlejuice game for Game Boy requires the title character to defeat haunted laundry, furniture, and other household objects.

Puzzle Game

• Puyo Puyo has you killing sentient, multi-colored jelly for fun and earns you points by flooding your opponent with more sentient but clear-colored jelly. Not to mention they have eyes...

Rail Shooter

• Time Crisis allows you to shoot all manners of inanimate, harmless objects. Doing so is often necessary to string together combos for large amounts of points.
• Arcade shooter Zombie Raid took this to a level rarely seen - you can shoot the opening credits that appear as you begin the game.

Real-Time Strategy

• All harmless animals in Blizzard Entertainment games may be attacked and killed. Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness brought this to new heights when one could repeatedly click on a critter and have the critter explode in a bloody mess.
  • StarCraft critters have a habit of exploding as well. It's somewhat of a running gag in Blizzard games.
  • Some crafty StarCraft players actually infect these "harmless" animals with parasites, allowing them a little more intel on enemy movement, knowing that most people don't bother killing them.
  • StarCraft II also features some of this. Not only can you choose to shoot/kill neutral targets, in the campaign mission "Media Blitz", but you can also have the Odin destroy some doodads just by making it walk over them.
• While blowing stuff up is a major factor of any RTS game, usually it's the other guy's troops. StarCraft's campaign made a point of having missions where you have to blow up otherwise random doodads on the map that were assigned a special value for the mission. Queue up a professional gaming scene in Korea, and suddenly you have professional map-makers making RTS maps with destructible environments, ranging from the necessary to destroy-if-you-want-to-win to the just-sort-of-there.
  • In Heart of the Swarm, one mission has you rampage across a city with supercharged Ultralisks. If you destroy one car...
  Owner: My car, man! I just paid that thing off!

In Legacy of the Void one mission has you fighting in a city. If you destroy one car...

Owner: Oh man, my car! Why does this keep happening?!

• Many missions that take place on Korhal have destructible statues of Arcturus Mengsk scattered around the map. It is very common for players to take special care to turn each and every one of these statues into piles of rubble.

• The Command & Conquer games allow you to order units to force-fire on objects in the world. These objects can range from harmless civilians or friendly units to beach towels, which explode violently. Red Alert 2 contains perhaps the most extreme example in the form of Crazy Ivan, who can strap explosives to pretty much any unit or prop he can get to.

Roguelike

• Dungeons of Dredmor has several breakable objects which can contain goodies, mostly crates and vases. If you smash a statue of Dredmor, however, you get "heroic vandalism" points.
• Useless objects in Enter the Gungeon are so fragile that you can destroy them by just walking into them, but if you shoot at them, they'll block the first bullet as they shatter. Doing so has a very tiny chance of spawning an angry Navi-like fairy who will attack you. Tables can break as well, if you either knock them over and then shoot them enough, or dodge-roll over them three times. Then there are the barrels, which can be shot to leave a puddle of their contents on the floor or rolled to leave a trail of it; and the braziers, which dump a line of flaming liquid if pushed over.

Role-Playing Game

• In Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, various crates not only drop health but in the Xbox 360 version you can also get an achievement for destroying a large amount of them.
  • "Large" being 250, an amount which (if you break every single crate you find) can be beaten halfway through the first level.
  • Scarlet Witch even has a power that turns mooks into crates that you can break.
• In Freedom Force, you can literally destroy anything (unless the objective requires you to protect it), including buildings, cars, lamps, benches, trees, signs... the only penalty is less "prestige" (bonus points) at the completion of a level.
• In World of Warcraft, the recently-introduced Achievement system contains a challenge to kill 15 turkeys in three minutes; players who complete the achievement are (in a brilliantly-staged tribute to the Zelda chickens) mobbed by a horde of angry turkeys.
• NCSoft's City Of Heroes Villains game features Mayhem Missions, instances where characters actually get bonus time for mission completion by destroying objects ranging from parking meters to SWAT vans. Newspaper vending machines, payphone kiosks, and parking meters all dispense coinage when destroyed, but most other objects explode — even common wooden packing crates and aluminum-framed plexiglass bus stop shelters. Hydrants shoot water into the air, but not nearly as much as one might expect.
  • In the fullness of time, this led to the other half of the game, City of Heroes, getting similar mission (Safeguard) with a similar mechanic. The catch? Being a hero, you actually lose time if you let the computer-controlled baddies break too much scenery. Instead, you gain time by busting waves of vandals that mindlessly destroy scenery and side missions.
    • Safeguard missions are still not even half as fun as Mayhem missions.
    • They did fix at least a few of the suckiest aspects of Safeguards - destroyed objects no longer lose you time, and Vandal waves give you a fair bit more time than Mayhem waves do. But still, Mayhems let you blow stuff up.
• Possible in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: you can attack and knock around pretty much anything in a shop and the shopkeeper won't mind. Pick anything up, however, and you'll have all of Tamriel's police force on you.
  • Try blasting a library's worth of books with a fireball-type spell with an attack radius. Books go everywhere. Tons of fun in the Mage Guild. Just make sure there aren't any NPCs in range first.
  • And yet Fallout 3, which uses the same engine, has bulletproof (also laserproof and explosion-proof) chairs.
    • Though you can knock most of them around. Not that you'd want to, since if you touch anything, even a tin can, NPCs gripe at you.
  • In Skyrim, you now have Shout abilities. The first you get is "Unrelenting Force". With one good FUS RO DAH! you can send an entire banquet flying across the room, food, plates, guests and all.
    • And even more fun with the Telekinesis spell, where your player can pick up any random object and use it as a thrown weapon.
    • The crown has to go to the Blizzard spell, though. It's got a massive effect radius, throws things around like nobody's business, and as a bonus, its damage rate is low enough that nearby allies won't turn hostile. Not only can you Wreak Havok with it, you can get a few skill points at the same time!
• Most placeables in the environment for Hellgate: London are destructible. While they occasionally drop money or items, players actually get Achievement Points if they destroy enough.
• Comparatively few objects can be destroyed in Fable, but you can break windows. And then get arrested for vandalism.
  • There was a mini-game of sorts to kicking chickens. A nasty nickname for the hero is "chicken chaser" and the more you up your Strength skill, the farther your chickens will fly.
  • In Fable II there are plenty of boxes and barrels to destroy, but they're all empty. One of the loading screens even tells you so, asking who would be silly enough to put any valuables in them.
• Over the course of Bastion, much of the scenery (such as walls, crates, and rubble) can be destroyed. In fact, the game's narrator even references the trope if the player breaks a lot of stuff in a small area, saying, "Kid just rages for a while."
• In the game Darkstone, smashing crates and vases will usually reward you with gold, magic scrolls, and the occasional minor quest item. However, sometimes the objects are booby-trapped and explode when you smash them. There is a learnable skill that makes it easier to detect the booby-trapped crates/vases, and another skill that can enable you to disarm the traps, but your character's ability is based partly on class; only the Thief ever gets very good at it.
• The Bard's Tale on the Xbox has a barrel maker who catches the protagonist smashing his barrels. He offers to pay you for every barrel you smash afterwards. This is so everyone has to buy new barrels from him.
• Champions Online not only lets you break, blast, shoot, crush, stomp, or whatever to everything from crates to tanks, it also lets you pick them up if your strength stat is high enough. And then you can throw them at the baddies, too.
  • A similar mechanic is in play in DC Universe Online, except it's scaled with a separate "weaponization" stat.
• In Phantasy Star Online 2, some elements of the environment, such as small trees, piles of snow, and cacti, can be destroyed. Crates also abound, providing items upon their destruction.
• Vindictus loves showing off the Source Engine physics. Nearly every piece of scenery can be destroyed and/or picked up and used as an Improvised Weapon. There are a large number of quests, titles, and bonus missions which require smashing up the scenery for drops, or using bits of scenery to kill mooks and bosses. Smashed scenery can also drop gold, but the amount is so small compared to the amount awarded for completing missions, most people don't bother.
• Dark Souls (and Demon's Souls and Bloodborne) combines this with Wreaking Havok. Smash tables, chairs, some trees, stuff like that. Most things than can be destroyed shatter from just dodge-rolling into them, which can be useful if you want to preserve your weapon's durability. And for those who like to take this trope literally, Demon's Souls provides a boss room that's just full of chairs for some reason. Though the majority of them form an enormous, unbreakable pile lining the back wall.
• Arx Fatalis Has a very literal "die chair die" for the PC version. At the very beginning of the game just outside the room, you start in is a chair, which if beaten 10 times with a bone in rapid succession, will result in the player receiving some end-game items among other things.
• In Dragon Quest IX the game is littered with breakable pots and barrels that practically beg you to smash them. Most of the time they're empty, but sometimes they contain some items, potions, and even some rare items. However, the placement of these pots gets a little ridiculous sometimes. In many cases, there are many rooms containing nothing except a few pots in the corner. Sometimes there is a room blocked off by a locked door that contains nothing but pots. And in one case, there is a hard-to-reach island whose only noteworthy feature is a small house with some pots inside it. Makes you wonder what you could possibly find.
• Adventurers in Dungeons & Dragons Online get increasing experience bonuses for destroying every barrel, crate, and pot they find. Over the years, the game's added Drow furniture to kill and robot companions you can train as barrel-slaying juggernauts.
• Many things in Dawn of Magic are breakable, from tables and chairs to logs and tree stumps. Smash too many of them when people are watching and you might get the whole town after you.
• Dawn of Mana: While you can destroy many stage objects that contain money and occasionally magic spells (plus, you earn a permanent upgrade if you destroy enough things), it's better to throw them at enemies, causing said enemies to panic.
• In Guild Wars 2, certain objects are marked as enemies and are targettable (these tend to be combat-related items like siege weapons, walls, or "supplies"). In some cases destroying these may be necessary to complete quests, although they don't drop items. Such objects are vulnerable to most if not all attacks- which makes very little sense with certain classes. Necromancers can steal life and place curses on inanimate objects, and shooting carts with arrows causes them to explode.
• Epic Battle Fantasy 4 has key items that let you destroy trees and rocks. Some of them must be cleared to progress the main story, and you get an achievement for the first use of each, but many - even nonessential ones - yield equipment crafting items (of logical type, such as Soft Wood from certain trees), and then there are the ones that block passages leading to shortcuts or treasure chests. All of this makes it generally worthwhile to take out every tree and rock that you can, once you are able to.
• Persona 5 has several types of breakable items scattered inside various Palaces. From common vases to piggy banks to mechanical brain jars to daruma dolls. Most of them either contained Shop Fodder, materials, healing items, or nothing.

Sports Game

• Skateboarding is dangerous in any of the Tony Hawk video games. Feel free to obliterate car windows, signs, traffic cones, chairs, tables, PEOPLE... even though it all mysteriously goes back to normal when you come back later.

Survival Horror

• Alone in the Dark (2008) also features "Burn Chair, Burn".
• In The Long Dark you can scavenge furniture for resources (mostly firewood). Smaller ones (crates, chairs) can be taken apart by hand, while larger ones (tables, shelves, etc.) require a hatchet.

Third Person Shooter

• What's better than beating up your rival's car? Tearing apart an upperclassmen's sofa with a CHAINSAW, followed by the Man-Locust that was hiding behind it.
• The BloodRayne games are chock full of destructible objects. One can even leave scratches on the walls from Rayne's blades.
• Transformers: The Game (Console) allows you to destroy just about anything. In many cases, there will be pieces remaining that you can pick up, carry around, throw, and sometimes even wield as weapons.
• In Max Payne, the soda machines spit out cans that can then be shot. In the original game, there is a scene where you are on an elevator with muzak playing. If you shoot the speaker, Max says "Thank You".
• Red Faction: Guerrilla takes this and makes it (more or less) the point of the whole game. Additionally, every object seems to be made from concrete but is destructible as though it's made from Styrofoam.
• In Earth Defense Force 2017, entire buildings will collapse if something so much as a firecracker explodes on them. With some of the later guns allowing you to carpet bomb entire blocks, turning cities into smoldering piles of rubble can become a game in itself. It's actually an essential strategy, as the enemy can crawl all over the buildings to attack you from above, and they'll also block your line of sight, making it harder to fight from a safe range, so it's definitely in your best interests to level as much of the city as you can before engaging the enemy.
  • This is continued in Earth Defense Force: Insect Armageddon and Earth Defense Force 2025.
• Fortnite takes place on a massive island lovingly decorated with various breakable props. If it's not literally the ground, you can probably break it for building materials. A Season 7 challenge took this literally and tasked the player with destroying a total of 80 chairs.

Turn-Based Strategy

• In the X-COM series, leveling fences, objects, and walls (or entire buildings) can be an important tactic since it denies cover to the enemy and in the old MicroProse games, often raises a smokescreen (which admittedly can also benefit the enemy). Entire farms and orchards (or a suburban neighbourhood) can be destroyed with impunity, and indeed may just be the end result of being liberal with the Blaster Launcher, while the main use of High Explosive packs is to kill or injure a weak alien on the other side of a wall. In the Firaxis continuity, explosives and other cover-destroying actions are good for creating sightlines for Squadsight snipers and access routes.
  • X-COM: Apocalypse counts property damage. You can reduce to rubble half of a building in a fight, but it means you owe a lot to its owner. Unless it was something that belongs to the aliens or the Cult of Sirius, who will hate you anyway.
• The XCOM tactic above doesn't work quite as well in UFO After Blank, where most things are resistant to being blown to shrapnel... however, it is sometimes possible to get through walls with carefully positioned Super Striker grenades, or to reduce a wrecked bus to iron shavings.
• The Disgaea series started having various destroyable objects on the battlefield ever since the third game, such as crates, desks, and various statues. All of them can be subjected to the same ridiculously destructive attacks as actual enemies. This does actually have a practical use in that you can fill the bonus gauge by attacking them, and is sometimes necessary if you want some of the better rewards due to the number of enemies on the map not always being enough to raise the gauge to the point required to obtain them.

Wide Open Sandbox

• Saints Row has plenty of destructible scenery. But alas the accursed telephone pole will not come down. Several missions (such as Mayhem) are entirely based around destroying as much stuff as possible in a time limit. In Saints Row IV there's even a Car Bowling XP bonus, which is acquired in general play by jumping out of a car in motion; you score points based on how much stuff it destroys, and in the right circumstances it can get to several hundred percent of the target value (such as a turbo-boosted flatbed truck smashing through several smaller cars and a petrol station).
• Dead Rising on the 360 takes place inside a zombie-infested mall, where almost anything imaginable can be used as a weapon. Benches, baseball bats, lawnmowers, potted plants, shopping carts, guitars, TV sets, mannequins, and of course chainsaws. And like all things, nothing lasts forever, and everything that could be conceived as a weapon will either be broken due to overuse (AKA too many zombies bashed in the head) or run out of 'ammo', (either when using actual guns or throwing stacks of dinner plates or CD's).
• Deadly Premonition litters its game world with mostly-identical wooden boxes that can, besides being pushed around, only be shot, blown, or broken apart. Not particularly egregious in and of itself, but this even holds true for the boxes in Greenvale's Police Department's records room. Apparently, the local deputies don't mind the sound of sub-machine gun fire and shattering wood around the office.
• In Assassin's Creed II you see the occasional street cleaner with a broom or some musicians with guitars. If you make them drop their stuff you can use the props as weapons. The broom essentially is a warhammer. It is hilariously stupid going on a killing spree with an unbreakable broom and clubbing into the heads and backs of your opponents.
• Practically all the scenery of [PROTOTYPE] is destructible, and anything you can destroy you can also chuck up to half a city block. That includes trees and living, screaming, flailing people.
• Scarface: The World Is Yours features many locales and objects from the movie, such as the neon 'World Is Yours' sign above Tony's pool. Naturally, many of these objects can be destroyed.
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Shooting things well was gun practice, allowing the player to eventually dual wield, fire while walking, and other such shooting improvements. Find a hubcap and just go nuts. Just don't shoot the gas tank cover.
• Minecraft is a peculiar example of this. Apart from the usual mining and gathering chores that require "destroying" (i.e. hitting a block with your fist or tools until it breaks), every block or placeable item, except for Bedrock, which is indestructible, has to be destroyed and re-picked up as resource if you wish to carry it. Failing to harvest the target block with the right type of tool will destroy it completely, however (the earliest example is punching a Stone block until it shatters instead of mining it with a Pickaxe).

Visual Novels

• At one point in Tsukihime, the main character Tohno Shiki trips over a chair, and as part of his Sanity Slippage in that route causes him to delve into a Madness Mantra smashing the chair to pieces in a blind rage. Said scene has become an in-joke in the Tsukihime fan community for how bizarre it was.

Non-Video Game Examples

• The indestructible nature of most non-plot-related objects in older video games was parodied on a long-lost gaming website with the "Indestructible Crate vs The L-Shaped Tetris Block" challenge.
• Used in Phineas and Ferb, which led to Sequence Breaking after Candace realized her hairdryer deconstructed enemies and objects in a jump-and-dodge game.
  Phineas: Let's just follow the carnage.
• A Properly Paranoid Dungeons & Dragons party might not attack the chairs, precisely, but any treasure chests or other "Hey, come touch me!" objects are likely to be on the receiving end of a quick whack with a weapon, just to be sure they're not Mimics. Also, a check for traps. Also potentially spells to detect anything that the first two tests might have missed... The cunning DM can of course find many, many ways to exploit this paranoia; there is no more distressing sound than the laugh of a DM who has watched your characters diligently check seven completely normal chests in a room with eight, only for someone to forget to call their check on that last one... "Roll for initiative!"
• College Saga goes from an Insurmountable Waist-High Fence ("a huge chair blocks your path") to Die, Chair, Die! via the party's new wizard. The resulting explosion turns the chair into an NPC with a Fetch Quest...who promptly gets the same Die, Chair, Die! treatment, and the party proceeds onward.
• In The LEGO Movie, Bad Cop regularly vents his frustrations at...well, everything, on random chairs. At one point someone actually pulls a chair out for him to kick around.
• Barry Manilow's song "Copacabana": "And then the punches flew, and chairs were smashed in two...." This was also done on live-action TV during Liza Minelli's performance of the song on The Muppet Show.
• Tom from Ruby Quest quite likes beating inanimate objects up with his crowbar.
• The Force Awakens has the infamous scene where Kylo Ren destroys his own computer in a fit of anger. Later, he has another fit and destroys a torture/interrogation chair.
• In The Generation Gap, Ling and Cindy, a pair of Star-Crossed Lovers who had fled their homes, ends up living together in a cramped one-bedroom apartment. Ling then uses his first, meagre paycheck as a labourer to get Cindy a new guitar, and for himself, a karate gi, revealing he's going to set aside some of his savings for karate lessons. Striking a kung fu posse, Ling lashes out on a nearby table... and ends up destroying it, since it's cheap furniture. Cindy then reminds Ling they're too poor to afford another table...
• Robot Chicken explains how the Street Fighter tournament works. Ryu meticulously organized the whole tournament, giving each fighter a very detailed schedule of who to fight, when, and where. Problems pop up immediately when fighters start calling in about the scheduling, like Guile being uncomfortable fighting E.Honda in a men's bathhouse, where all their sushi rolls are on display. Ken calls up, saying his guide says he's supposed to fight E. Honda, but Ryu corrects him, saying he's fighting A Honda. Ken dismisses the idea of fighting a car and half-heartedly takes a couple of punches at the side mirror. He then starts getting into it and has fun.
• A Running Gag in Avatar: The Last Airbender is the destruction of a cabbage merchant's wares ("My cabbages!"). His descendant suffers a similar fate in The Legend of Korra, on a larger scale ("My Cabbage Corp!").
• In the Pokémon Reset Bloodlines Holiday Special 2018, here's a moment of Ash's Charizard vs his training dummies:
  "Burn you pitiful, inanimate objects!"

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