Hey alien jerks, if you're going to do that at least get the right bridge from the song!note
Examples of Monumental Damage in video games.
- Deus Ex:
- The game starts with the NSF blowing the head off the Statue of Liberty in the Backstory. At the top level of the pedestal, there is a fenced-off area with a sign, "This building had been condemned"; presumably the statue was no longer structurally sound. In the sequel, the statue is gone altogether and is replaced with a hologram.
- On a similar note, when they didn't have enough space to add the World Trade Center to the game's skyline, they handwaved it by saying it was destroyed by a terrorist attack prior to the game's events. The game was released in the year 2000.
- Call of Duty:
- Call of Duty: World at War: Inn the final American mission you get to call in an airstrike on Shuri Castle, and in the last Russian mission, you lay siege on the Reichstag.
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare: During the helicopter rail shooter sequence at the beginning of "Shock and Awe", you can topple a statue of Al-Asad.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2:
- The level "Of Their Own Accord" starts in a damp basement assumed to be somewhere in the Washington D.C. area, filled with wounded and dead soldiers while artillery shells shake the ground above. When a Sergeant orders the player character to follow him outside into combat, the player emerges in a muddy trench and the first thing to be seen of the outside are the scorched remains of the Washington Monument, backlit by dark clouds that reflect the fires of Capitol Hill, which looks more like Berlin in 1945. The Washington Monument is still standing though, and the White House is later shown to be repaired. Half of the Capitol's dome has been destroyed as well, but it too is still standing.
- Also in Modern Warfare 2, in a desperate attempt to give the American forces a fighting chance, a nuke is launched and detonated in the vicinity of the International Space Station to trigger a massive EMP over the fighting, which kills everyone up there. Thanks, Captain Price.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3:
- The first mission in Modern Warfare 3 features a firefight on the Wall Street trading floor.
- The first two missions of Modern Warfare 3 prominently feature the New York City skyline in flames, pounded by a constant barrage of artillery and cruise missiles, though both the Freedom Tower and the Statue of Liberty are intact. The second Paris mission sees the Eiffel Tower literally destroyed by a series of friendly airstrikes meant to destroy Russian positions at the tower's base. These examples pretty much overlap with Scenery Gorn, given how much detail is given to the destruction.
- The church in "Blood Brothers" seems to be a stand-in for the St. Nicholas church in Prague, but it's not an actual recreation. It still gets blown up, with you inside.
- The Siberian diamond mine from "Down the Rabbit Hole" does exist in real life, but it isn't a monument. It too collapses, on top of Team Metal and the remaining Ultranationalist forces.
- Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare sees part of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge torn asunder by explosive drones taking out the cables of the bridge.
- Call of Duty: Black Ops III: In a post-apocalyptic Singapore, several Supertrees in Gardens by the Bay gets obliterated by drone missiles and later on, the entire Singapore Flyer Ferris Wheel gets toppled; all in the 54 Immortals attempts to kill the player(s) and his/her team.
- Command & Conquer series.
- If you won the original Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn as Nod, you got to watch some Hollywood Hacking and then you got to choose which monument to destroy, options being the Brandenburger Gate (Berlin), Eiffel Tower (Paris), Tower of London or White House (Washington D.C.).
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert has a cutscene of the Eiffel Tower getting nuked if you fail one mission as the Allies, and another cutscene of a Soviet airstrike levelling the Parthenon. This highly upsets General Stavros, who vows revenge on Stalin.
- In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, one of the Soviet missions involves turning the Eiffel Tower into a giant Tesla coil. Plus, you get to demolish the Pentagon and lots of other stuff. And in an unexpected inversion, the second to last mission of the Soviet campaign has you destroy the Kremlin. The Soviets also destroy the Statue of Liberty at the start of the Allied campaign. This later led to some unfortunate implications due to 9/11, since the twin towers were destroyable structures in the game (and doing so actually rewarded the player with powerups). The games were pulled and later editions avoided calling the buildings by any names at all.
- Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 takes this to its most logical conclusion, combining it with Weaponized Landmark; the last mission for the Allies has you destroying Leningrad's Sts Peter and Paul Cathedral, which turns into a massive shuttle launch facility. That's not even the silliest part - that would be Mount Rushmore's Eye Beams or the Moai Head Man Cannon. It also has the Soviets destroy the Statue of Liberty in their campaign only to build a statue of Lenin pointing ahead of him instead. The Empire of the Rising Sun destroys the Kremlin. All of it, in fact, not just St. Basil's Cathedral. Although you do get to stomp on the cathedral with the King Oni. Emperor Yoshiro's desire to destroy significant landmarks is in fact a point of contention between him and his son, Tatsu. Yoshiro believes crushing hearts and minds is crucial to victory, while Tatsu doesn't see why they should bother when they can just pummel the Allies and Soviets into submission.
- In Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars, the Scrin mission in London has you destroy Big Ben and Parliament, precisely because they are significant to the humans.
- Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty was scripted to have Arsenal Gear relocate the Statue of Liberty as it crashed into New York. This was cut from the final game because of being too close to the September 11th atacks. Its crash deposits you onto a different landmark (Federal Hall) for the final Boss Battle.
- Gaia Crusaders, a game set After the End, has the New York stage where the Statue of Liberty can be seen collapsed in the background, in a shot ripped from Planet of the Apes.
- Destroy All Humans!, as a series that combines fully-destructible environments with major world cities, lets you do this at your leisure in its Wide-Open Sandbox world.
- In the first game, while the preceding levels are a mix of anonymous small towns, a fictionalized version of Area 51, and an anonymous East Coast seaport, the final level is a pastiche of Washington, D.C. called Capitol City, featuring The White House, the United States Capitol, the Washington Monument (which collapses in a manner homaging Earth vs. the Flying Saucers), the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and The Pentagon (where you face the Final Boss).
- The second game heavily ramps it up by having much of the game take place in major cities. Bay City, based on San Francisco, lets you destroy Coit Tower, Alcatraz, Fisherman's Wharf, and the Victorian "painted ladies" houses, with the remake Reprobed adding the city's most famous landmark and one of the most frequent victims of this trope, the Golden Gate Bridge. Albion, based on London, lets you destroy Westminster Palace, Big Ben, the Tower Bridge, and Nelson's Column. Takoshima City, based on Tokyo, naturally features Takoshima Tower in all its glory, and indeed, you'll probably want to destroy it during the boss fight against Kojira before she gets to it (as she recovers health by destroying buildings).
- The third game starts in Las Paradiso, based on Las Vegas, and features multiple casinos on the Strip, with the final mission here seeing you destroy a parody of Caesar's Palace called Nero's Palazzo that's owned by your rivals in The Mafia. Sunnywood, based on Los Angeles, has the "Sunnywood" sign, Los Angeles City Hall, the Capitol Records Building, and the Chinese Theater. Belleville, based on Paris, naturally has the Eiffel Tower, along with the Arc de Triomphe.
- Subverted in World in Conflict. The first mission takes place in downtown Seattle, so you might expect the Space Needle to go down. Nope. Instead, the Soviets destroy the Kingdome, a landmark that is 1) only recognizable to actual Seattleites, and 2) was demolished in 2000, seven years before the game was released (though it was around in 1989 when the game takes place).
- You can however destroy the Space Needle by accident if your airstrikes aren't on the mark. It doesn't cost you the mission or anything, and it can't be garrisoned, but it's still destructible.
- Later on - the Soviets invade New York and seize, among other things, the Statue of Liberty. If you fail the mission, the Statue is destroyed by an American airstrike.
- Fallout:
- Fallout 3:
- One of the main draws is running around the ruins of D.C. two hundred years after a nuclear war and seeing what's still around and what's been reduced to ruin. Interestingly, the Lincoln Memorial is one of the least damaged structures in the Capital Wasteland although Lincoln's head is missing. You can get a quest to help restore it, though. The Washington Monument has steel rebar support inside of it, which is something the real world monument does not have: in the Fallout 'verse buildings were given reinforcement in expectation of a war with China. Though a big chunk is out of its iconic rotunda, the US Capitol, the meeting place of both houses of Congress, is mostly intact. You can even enter the congressional chambers and walk inside the rotunda (which is now a battleground between Talon mercs and Super Mutants).
- Played chillingly straight with the White House. It is not dilapidated and abandoned, it is not occupied by an evil overlord, it is just... gone. Apparently it was Ground Zero. Two hundred years after the Great War, there is still nothing but an incredibly lethally radioactive crater at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
- Fallout: New Vegas:
- Averted as not only has the strip (and Hoover Dam) survived the war, some of the casinos (due to the retro-futuristic styling of Fallout) are of styles that have long been demolished in the real-world Vegas. Justified in both cases; Mr. House's defense systems, while imperfect, still managed to shoot down most of the incoming nuclear warheads, thus keeping it mostly intact, while Hoover Dam is nearly six million tons of concrete and would be fine even with a direct hit.
- Parodied in the DLC Lonesome Road. If you have the Wild Wasteland trait (which activates the game's Silliness Switch) and launch a nuke at both the NCR and the Legion, you are treated to an ending slideshow that parodies Planet of the Apes. In place of the Statue of Liberty is the NCR's Ranger Statues near Mojave Outpost. The narrator, Ulysses, is a Cold Ham here as he speaks in the same dry monotone voice despite his words dripping with ridiculous drama.
- Fallout 3:
- Throughout the Twisted Metal series, this happens quite a bt. In Twisted Metal 2, you can blow up the Statue of Liberty and Hollywood Sign. The third level, fittingly titled "Monumental Disaster," is set in Paris, and you can blow up the Eiffel Tower with a well-placed remote bomb on the upper level. Not only does this look cool, it opens up the rooftops for combat — the top half of the tower tips over and forms a bridge to one of the roofs, while pieces of debris land elsewhere. You can also go in the Louvre and torch the Mona Lisa and a number of other priceless paintings. Apparently, this was so popular that the developers remade the level for Twisted Metal: Head-On.
- WarGames Defcon 1 has a mission where the Great Wall of China gets a hole ripped through it by the W.O.P.R forces.
- During the introduction to War of the Monsters, anti-UFO devices are seen being built at various landmarks. When they turn on, the UFOs crash, one of them crashing into the Eiffel Tower. The rest of the monuments remain virtually unharmed, until alien radiation creates the titular kaiju, who then rampage and destroy the landmarks anyway.
- SimCity's UFO disasters. As the SC3K Unlimited manual states: "Aliens who have attacked SimNation seem strangely attracted to landmarks."
- The FMV scene in Parasite Eve: Eve transformed into a giant blob form, traveled across Manhattan, and then appeared near the Statue of Liberty. Aya who's piloting a helicopter shot her with a missile taking out the blob and knocking down the statue.
- Mass Effect:
- Mass Effect 2 - In the Kasumi DLC, Donovan Hock, the man whose manor you're infiltrating, has a large collection of various ancient (or at least very old) artifacts. Including the Statue of Liberty's head after it was blown up in the Second American Civil War. In Jack's backstory, she mentions how she committed "Vandalism" towards the Hanar by crashing a space station upon their favorite moon.
- And in the debut trailer of Mass Effect 3 there are eight Reapers just annihilating London. Big Ben's already partially wrecked, and a Reaper is about to land on the London Eye. Big Ben gets a few scratches, but it actually stays up throughout the entire Reaper invasion, as you find out when Shepard lands in London. It's only destroyed if you don't put enough work into the Crucible.
- Tetrastar - The first seconds of gameplay show the Statue of Liberty being destroyed by aliens. Then the camera moves to the right to show the World Trade Center and the surrounding buildings. The player spends the rest of the stage trying to prevent the aliens from blowing up the city.
- Duke Nukem:
- In the Post-Apocalypse era of Duke Nukem Zero Hour, the Statue of Liberty is half-buried/submerged, a Stock Shout-Out to Planet of the Apes (1968).
- The entire endgame of Duke Nukem Forever revolves around Duke blowing up the Hoover Dam (it was to stop the Alien Invasion, again).
- Captain America's stage in Marvel Super Heroes is in front of a destroyed Statue of Liberty (who knows for what reason).
- In Emogame 2, the second level has you blowing up the Mall of America.
- In Star Control II, as part of the Ur-Quan's subjugation and imprisonment of the Earth, they destroyed every human dwelling, monument, and archaeological site that was more than 500 years old. This included several sites that humanity weren't even aware were important to their history (a stretch of the Atlantic Ocean floor, some of the Amazon Basin, and Antarctica).
- You don't directly see the damage, but Battlefield 3 has Paris getting nuked by a stolen Russian bomb, and since you and your squad were within reasonable distance of the Eiffel Tower, it's pretty easy to imagine what happened to it. Thankfully, you manage to avert the same thing from happening to Times Square by the end of the game.
- This is pretty much a staple in the Shin Megami Tensei series as you can find recognizable Japanese landmarks such as Tokyo Tower. In Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, the ruins of Shibuya's Scramble are one of the first places to be visited. A possible case might be the Diet Building, but it got dimensionally-distorted in a M.C. Escher way rather than fully demolished.
- In the first mission of Starcraft II you are given the optional sidequest of destroying Mengsk's holo-statues. There's some logic to this too, the statues have built-in speakers projecting propaganda.
- The fourth chapter of Sam And Max Season One, "Abraham Lincoln Must Die" takes things in a weird way. Agents seeking to replace the President animate the Abraham Lincoln statue of the Lincoln Memorial and when Max wins the election, it goes on the run. To destroy it, Sam and Max use the Washington Monument (in actuality, missiles) to destroy the statue. You can also direct one of the Washington Monuments to destroy Krypton, too!
- P-Jack's stage background in Tekken 2 has a Big Ben look-alike half-buried in sand; a possible Planet of the Apes (1968) reference.
- The campaign of Emergency! 2012 destroys or endangers the Cologne Cathedral, Tower Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, Brandenburg Gate, the Matterhorn, Red Square, the Kremlin, and the Acropolis of Athens.
- In Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, destroying the British houses of parliament is the Martian victory condition. The ending cutscene that follows culminates in a fighting machine shooting at the clocktower, which then crashes down on top of the camera.
- One loading screen in Sword of the Stars shows the Eiffel Tower being destroyed by the Hiver invasion of Earth.
- Wolfenstein: The New Order:
- One of the trailers shows the Nazis dynamiting Mr. Rushmore after America's surrender.
- Averted in another trailer, where The Statue of Liberty is shown imposed against a mushroom cloud rising over New York.
- Most of The Wonderful 101 is you protecting several Lady Liberty-lookalike statues from invading alien force. It's actually justified in this case, as the statues have reactors in them powering a forcefield around Earth that's holding the aliens off.
- Each of Octogeddon's titular cephalopod's rampages culminates with the destruction of an incredibly famous landmark, like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of the Liberty. The final one, the White House, turns out to be a war machine called Mech Force One.
- Invoked in The Omega Stone, in which you have to blow up a moai on Easter Island to access a hidden lava-tunnel network. Blatant vandalism, but excusable considering how the alternative is letting a comet collide with the Earth.
- Spider-Man 2: Mysterio's ersatz alien invasion features his equally-false defacement of the Statue of Liberty.
- The first boss fight in Super Godzilla is against King Ghidorah, who makes his entrance by destroying Osaka Castle.
- The teaser trailer for Splatoon 3 showcases a broken and upside-down Eiffel Tower, situated in a desolate desert.
- In the indie game Kaichu, meeting up to destroy a famous landmark is kaijus' idea of a date.
- Hakaiou: King of Crusher have it's Final Boss being a weaponized mech made from the Statue of Liberty, that you must destroy in a fistfight to end the game.
- Hearts of Iron IV: In the Flavor Text for the capture of Berlin by foreign forces, the unique description for Poland suitably has them going for a Roaring Rampage of Revenge that involves collapsing the Brandenburg Gate by ramming it with a tank.
- The Horizon series takes place in a bad future where humanity was driven to near extinction by an near-invincible robot horde, and as such, nature has taken over many landmarks:
- Horizon Zero Dawn takes place in a post-apocalyptic Colorado, Utah, and (in the Frozen Wilds expansion) Wyoming, and features the ruins of several area landmarks: the Air Force Academy Chapel, the Colorado Springs Pioneer Museum, Mile High Stadium, Red Rocks Amphitheater, the Mesa Laboratory, the Bridal Veil Powerhouse, the Provo Utah Temple, the Old Faithful Visitor Education Center, and Roosevelt Arch. Thunder's Drum, the mesa where Project FIREBREAK is located that's unnaturally billowing plumes of smoke, is also implied to be either Devils Tower or Squaretop Mountain. On the other hand, the fact that Lake Powell still exists implies that the Glen Canyon Dam has somehow survived a thousand years.
- Its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, moves the setting to the West Coast and prominently features the ruins of San Francisco, now partly flooded and covered by a jungle, as a major setting, including the Golden Gate Bridge, the Ferry Building, the Palace of Fine Arts, the Transamerica Pyramid, City Hall, Lombard Street, and several of the city's cable cars and Victorian "painted ladies" houses. Aloy also visits the ruins of the Las Vegas Strip, which, thanks to having been covered under geodesic domes before the apocalypse in order to keep the city habitable through Global Warming, have been remarkably well-preserved hundreds of years later even as the surface has been buried under sand. It's also inverted by Mono Lake, a natural monument that in real life is threatened by drought, water overuse, and climate change but which has returned to its former glory by the events of the game. The upcoming expansion Burning Shores expands the map to the ruins of Los Angeles, which are not only tropical like San Francisco but also ravaged by volcanic activity and covered in lava. The trailer showing Aloy flying on a Sunbird past the Griffith Observatory, the US Bank Tower, the Capitol Records Building, and the Hollywood Sign, the last of which gets torn up by a reawakened Metal Devil at the end of the trailer.
