Precursors / Video Games

Precursors in Video Games.

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• In the 7th Dragon franchise, the Lucier played this role, originally. A highly advanced race whose technology seems almost magical to modern humans, they were at their peak when humans were just transitioning from the Paleolithic to Neolithic. This is also when they ultimately sacrificed themselves to defeat the first Draconic invasion of Earth, saving humanity and the rest of the biosphere. They're revived via cloning in 7th Dragon 2020-II and given their own nation for their participation in thwarting that invasion, and by the original 7th Dragon, which takes place so far After the End that trope no longer applies — hinted at originally, confirmed later — they're just known as one of the races of Eden, as the Earth of that time is known to its inhabitants.
• The Remnant system in Achron (where the game largely takes place) has ancient alien ruins scattered throughout. The technology found in these ruins has become them basis of humankinds most advanced tech, most notably teleportation. The system is then invaded by aliens that use the exact same tech as those found in the ruins. And that technology includes Time Travel. Hmmm...
• In Ascendancy Xenoarchiological Ruins pop up all the time, sometimes giving access to a technology far up the Tech Tree, though these are not always useful without adequate advancements in production capability and/or power sources.
• The alternate history of Assassin's Creed had the Isu (also known as Those Who Came Before), the first species to evolve sentience on planet Earth. They were taller, smarter, and longer-lived than us humans, and also possessed a mysterious sixth sense they called "knowing" that meant they could somehow perceive the importance of objects and people around them. (Think of it as an in-universe Notice This sense.) They were highly technologically advanced, with things like force fields, energy weapons, and advanced computers that could predict the future. They created humans as a slave race—stronger, tougher, but dumber, shorter-lived, and able to be controlled by Isu mind-control technology. However, humans could interbreed with the Isu, and the resulting hybrids were resistant to mind control. They led a rebellion against the Isu, which they probably would've lost in the long run, but a massive solar event (which nobody noticed because they were distracted by the rebellion) wiped out the Isu and their technology, leaving humans the dominant species. Some modern-day humans have enough Isu DNA that they possess a limited form of the "knowing" sense and have a limited ability to use Isu technology. The resulting conflict over what to do with Isu tech is what drives the entire franchise.
• In The Bastard of Kosigan, a Neverwinter Nights community module series, the precursor race were early humans who lived on Atlantis, but after the natural disaster that resulted in its sinking split into the "control" faction and the "free will" faction. The control faction, led by Gabriel, eventually won the ensuing war with the free will faction, led by Elisa Than (read Satan, though she wasn't actually that bad). Their war was primarily fought by using their advanced technology to mimic deities and create religions among lesser humans, so the control faction are the angels of modern Catholicism (the game is set in approximately 1300, but with magic and monsters and such) while the freedom faction became the demons. Ironically, Jesus was actually manipulated by the demons (and you even get to meet the demon commonly known as St. John), and the angels created the Catholic church to subvert his message.
• In Borderlands, the Eridians fill this role. They had created an incredibly advanced civilization on the wasteland planet Pandora, but it all mysteriously vanished millenia before the game's events. Remnants of their civilization are all over the place, and simple artifacts of their technology hold immense power. But by far the most legendary aspect of their legacy is The Vault, a container for... something, no one really knows what, that is the most sought after power on Pandora. The Vault is revealed to be the Tailor-Made Prison for The Destroyer, an Eldritch Abomination which nearly wiped out the Eridians. They sacrificed everything to contain The Destroyer within The Vault, leaving "Guardians" to ensure that no idiot would open the vault and cause the apocalypse. It doesn't work... but the player(s) handle the Destroyer just fine, and the sequel shows them being set to keep doing that to the other nasties in any others of the Eridians' vaults. It's noted that the various corporations' interest in Pandora is due to alien relics being found on a different planet nearby, so either the Eridians were space-faring, or there is more than one Precursor civilization. Tales from the Borderlands has its protagonists open an Eridian vault that houses a chest within it, but them opening the chest is only shown to have made them suddenly disappear.
• Boxxy Quest: The First Internet, of Boxxyfan and his people, then came the Second Internet, where those of the First Internet were unable to survive. Boxxyfan himself is a Dark Lord on Life Support, even during the Third Internet, caused by the improper semi-deletion of the Second.
• Brütal Legend: The Titans are the precursor race, who harnessed the power of the fallen Ormagöden, the Eternal Fire Beast, to build wonderous things like cars that could drive extremely fast, great monuments upon the lands, and musical instruments that could play Heavy Metal. They also created the Tainted Coil, whom they loved and who loved them back, but then the Titans Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence, leaving the Tainted Coil to fend for themselves. There are still a few Titans left at the time the game starts, dwelling deep underground in locations accessable by the Mouth of Metal. If Eddie brings them Fire Tributes, they can craft new upgrades for his axe, guitar, and car.
• The Kingdom of Zeal in Chrono Trigger which in 12,000 BC (during the Ice Age) built floating cities in the sky and an "Ocean Palace" under the sea. Their civilization was powered originally by the Sun Stone (which harnessed solar energy) and then by the more abundant (but of course, more dangerous) Mammon Machine which extracted energy from Lavos the Big Bad from outer space.
• In the Civilization: Test of Time sci-fi campaign, the entire system is filled with ancient alien tech, including space platforms in orbit of Funestis and even more advanced ones floating in the upper layers of the gas giant Nona.
• Cultist Simulator has the enigmatic race of insectoids known as the Carapace Cross, who worshiped the Gods-from-Stone. Some in-game lore implies they were devoured by humanity, some states they became humanity, and other implies they will descend from humanity in the future.
• Dragon Age: The ancient elves serve as this setting's precursors, despite the fact that their descendants are still alive and kicking. Much of the magic that made ancient Tevinter so powerful is implied to have been stolen and reverse engineered from elven artifacts, and modern Dalish elves spend most of their time combing through ruins for scraps of history left behind by their ancestors. Interestingly enough, even though they were once immortal and capable of incredible feats of magic (such as creating entirely new species, physically walking in the Fade, and constructing the Veil between the waking and dreaming worlds), ancient elves don't inspire any of the awe that usually accompanies this trope from their human successors — probably because their descendants are now scrubbing floors. Another reason is that the other races have their own precursor civilizations to look up to; the setting in general is deep into a dark age that they're only just starting to crawl out of, and everyone is lucky if they can use things like the Imperial Highway and Deep Roads, much less make more.
• Don't Starve has the Ancient Civilisation, a race of arthropods that had a really bad taste in Gods. Initially worshopping the "Moon", they then went on to worship Them, who gave them shadow magic. This eventually turned the whole race into the Shadow Monsters that haunt the insane. Almost all of their technology lowers your sanity just by using it.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • For all the mortal races, save for possibly the Argonians (the lore is unclear), there is the Ehlnofey. They are the lesser et'Ada ("original spirits") from the creation of Mundus who remained in the mortal realm and populated it, becoming the progenitors of the modern races.
  • After the Ehlnofey, for the races of Mer (Elves), come the Aldmer. They came to Tamriel during the Merethic Era from the now-lost continent of Aldmeris (though other sources say that Aldmeris was another name for Tamriel prior to the emergence of the races of men). Whatever the case, the Altmer are their closest living relatives with the other races of Mer having split off over the ages for various reasons (usually religious in nature).
  • For the races of Men, except for the Redguard and maybe the Nords (again, there is unclear and contradictory lore) it is the Nedes. Septim propaganda claims that they came from the now frozen-over continent of Atmora, though this may have been a lie meant to appeal to the mighty Nords to make them supportive of the Cyrodiilic empire. Other sources state that they were among the many human tribes native to Tamriel. In either case, they are definitely the precursors of the Imperials and Bretons, with the Nibenese Imperials as their closest living relatives.
  • There were known to be actual migrants from Atmora, known as the Atmorans, who emigrated to Tamriel throughout the 1st Era after Atmora began to experience the "Frost Fall," a gradual complete freeze that would render it uninhabitable. They definitely make up at least part of the ancestry of the Nords.
  • The Dwemer ("Deep Elves or "Dwarves") and the Ayleids ("Wild Elves") were each Abusive Precursors toward the Falmer ("Snow Elves") and the Nedes, respectively. Additional details can be found on that trope page.
  • The Men of Akavir, possibly or in part to the Tsaesci "snake vampires''. The lore states that there was once a race of Men who lived on the continent of Akavir, far to the east of Tamriel. However, they were "devoured" by the Tsaesci and are now gone. While some believe this means they were literally eaten, another theory posits that this is a metaphor for being enslaved and/or culturally absorbed. (Another work regarding the Tsaesci uses "devour" and "enslave" interchangeably in reference to what the Tsaesci did to the red dragons of Akavir.)
• The Endless of Endless Space. Unlike most precursors, the denizens of the galaxy know exactly what happened to them; they ended up fracturing into factions (the Concrete and the Virtual) and wiped themselves out in a massive interstellar pogrom millenia ago; the frozen survivors can be counted on one hand. Before that happened, though, they nurtured species into sapience (including the Drakken of Endless Legend), terraformed worlds with their artificially intelligent robots (who are still around after completing their mission), and built vast megastructures; planetary core taps, orbital shipyards, et cetera. The Pilgrims, a human nation of scientists and mystics, seek out the Endless's lost homeworld, Tor. They're also heavily mentioned in the rest of the shared universe. Dungeon of the Endless is an escape through some long-abandoned Endless ruins. Endless Legend is set on a planet they interfered with; several races revere the Endless, all make secondhand use of their technology, and the central conceit of the game is factions realizing the planet is in an ecological death spiral without Precursors around to maintain the changes they made to the biosphere.
• In Escape Velocity Nova, the precursors are known as Those Who Came Before (no relation to Assassin's Creed's precursors). Very little is known about them, since they merged with the universe en masse centuries (if not millennia) before humans achieved space travel. They left behind bizarrchitecture like artificial rings around the planets Kont and Kel'ar Iy, and a ringworld called Tre'ar Helonis. And in four of the six mission strings, humanity ascends and becomes precursors in turn to an unnamed alien race.
• In EVE Online, we are the precursors. We used the EVE wormhole to travel to the Galaxy of New Eden, but when the wormhole collapsed, so to did civilization in New Eden, and as new civilizations formed, their origins faded into myth and legend. The Apocrypha expansion has given us a glimpse of some of the old technology which the precursor humans left behind: the sleepers. Ancient drone ships guarding long forgotten structures packed with technology that makes the most advanced player ships and weaponry look like we're using BB guns to fight enemies with nukes. The technology that has been scavenged so far has allowed the playerbase to build relatively small cruisers with the firepower and defenses equal to and even beyond battleships. It will be a terrifying day when we can finally build new kinds of battleships with sleeper tech.
• The Sky People were the once powerful ancestors of the Lufenian race of Final Fantasy. After mastering the power of the Wind Crystal, they constructed many ancient wonders such as the Airship, the Mirage Tower and the Flying Fortress. Their civilization was eventually destroyed by the Fiend of Wind, Tiamat.
• The Cetra of Final Fantasy VII were the first inhabitants of the Planet, which they cultivated in their search for The Promised Land. They looked exactly like humans, except that they were deeply spiritual and could communicate with The Lifestream. In fact, it's said that humans are descendants of Cetra who stopped the search for the Promised Land and chose a life of convenience. Two thousand years ago, the Cetra were nearly wiped out when the alien Jenova started infecting them with a virus which mutated them into monsters. Though the Cetra managed to seal Jenova, their numbers rapidly dwindled. The last known full-blooded Cetra was Ifalna, who was experimented upon by Shinra as they sought for her knowledge of the Planet. Before she died, she fell in love with a human and gave birth to Aerith. Although Aerith is only half-Cetra, she is still able to communicate with the Lifestream, can sense when people die (as they "return to the Planet"), and knows how to summon Holy, the only spell capable of defending the Planet from the Meteor.
• The Zilart of Final Fantasy XI. A few of them still remain but most of them are relatively insane and/or genocidal. Only two Zilart favor the current civilizations at all, and one of them Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• The Ancients of Final Fantasy XIV play a major role in the game's story, especially the Shadowbringers and Endwalker expansions: they were once a race of powerful humanoids who sought to create things for the betterment of their world. However, one of them unwittingly caused the End of the World as We Know It in his desire to understand happiness on other worlds. Part of the Ancients would go on to create a creature known as Zodiark to try and save their planet, but another of their number, Venat, would become Hydaelyn and sunder their world, creating the Source and thirteen alternate universe copies in order to force those Ancients into accepting that their world is gone. Those remaining Ancients who worshipped Zodiark would go on to become the Ascians and plot to restore Zodiark and their world. Hydaelyn would go on to bring about the Twelve, the gods watching over this new star, and wait for the day that someone would be able to stop the creature that brought about the end of their world.
• The "Ancients" from FreeSpace fit this trope, although for once we actually get a detailed history of their annihilation at the hands of the Shivans. (They recorded this so that later races would be warned not to piss the Shivans off... or, having failed that, would have some insight into the Shivans' weaknesses). The Shivans themselves qualify as Precursors in some respects: while not extinct, their technology is far more advanced than humans' and they've been that advanced for at least 8,000 years. There are Epileptic Trees both in-game and out about the origins of the Shivans (whether they were created as weapons by an even older race), and exactly how long they've been at their xenocidal mission (one character muses that there might be multiple Precursors extending far back in time, each annihilated by the Shivans when they grew too powerful and the later ones founding empires on the ruins of those that came before). None of this has been confirmed nor denied by the authors.
• In Galactic Civilizations II:
  • The unimaginatively named Precursors and their enemies the Dread Lords (who have become Sealed Evil in a Can). The campaign in the original revolves around you fighting the latter, and if the player is unlucky enough to encounter them in a standard game...
  • According to the game's expansions, the "Precursors" mentioned above were called the Arnor, and were the same species as the Dread Lords, but were ideologically opposed: the Arnor wanted to guide and look after new intelligent life, while the Dread Lords wanted to exterminate it. It isn't clear what happened to the Arnor after they defeated the Dread Lords, although one survivor is found in the Twilight of the Arnor campaign.
  • There are also the mysterious Mithrilar, a group of five immortal beings that were precursors to the Arnor and Dread Lords (indeed, they created the Arnor and Dread Lords). What happened to them is unknown, although it is known that one of them, Draginol, was a time-travelling ascended human.
• Galaxy Angel: The Precursors who created all the lost technology used in the games come from Eden, another name for Earth, making modern humanity the Precursors to the people of the game's time.
• Halo: The Forerunners are very much a precursor race, who believed that they held the "Mantle of Responsibility" for all life in the galaxy. All that's left of them are artifacts such as the titular "Halo" rings. They purposely destroyed themselves activating the rings as a last resort to prevent a traveling parasite called "The Flood" from consuming all life in the galaxy, but not before leaving measures for the reseeding of life afterwards. Oddly, humans seem to have a unique connection to them — much of Forerunner technology, including the Halos, can only be utilized by humans, and the major Forerunner installation on Earth is located in East Africa, right next to the area where modern humans are believed to have first evolved (since Forerunners were contemporaries of Original Man).
  • In fact, the Halo 3 terminals reveal that this connection was because the high-ranking Forerunner known as "The Librarian" felt that humans would be the rightful "reclaimers" of the Forerunners' legacy. Later, The Forerunner Saga books add a twist to this by revealing that most Forerunners felt otherwise, due to a long and bloody war they fought with prehistoric humanity's own highly advanced interstellar empire, which was invading Forerunner space in order to flee the Flood and cleanse infected planets; it ended with the victorious Forerunners completely dismantling all traces of human technology they could find, devolving the survivors into a primitive state (who would quickly (re?)evolve into many of the various hominid species we know about today, including modern humans), and shoving them back to their homeworld of Earth.
  • In Halo 4, we find out that at least one Forerunner still survives; "The Ur-Didact", the former supreme commander of the Forerunner military, who also happens to be the Big Bad. The game also provide evidence, namely a speech given by the Ur-Didact in The Stinger, that there are many more Forerunners living outside of the galaxy, which was confirmed by the audio epilogue to Halo: Silentium.
  • The Forerunners believed that they inherited the Mantle from a long-gone race of even more advanced beings they called "The Precursors", who are revealed in the Forerunner Saga to have played a major role in the creation of both the Forerunners and humanity, among many other species. They ended up being almost completely annihilated when they tried to wipe out the Forerunners for being unworthy of the Mantle. Most of the survivors turned themselves into powder with the plan of eventually re-constituting their original forms, but they all Came Back Wrong and became the Flood. They then apparently decided to eliminate the Forerunners, "unite" all life in the galaxy, and test whether humanity was worthy of the Mantle... or maybe they just wanted their creations to suffer for all eternity. Either way, their technology (which seems to have been made of thought) was completely destroyed when the Halos (the only things capable of destroying Precursor relics) were fired. The prisoner of Charum Hakkor, a scorpion-like creature with 4 arms and an impossibly ugly face, was a Precursor-turned-Flood-Gravemind, while the Forerunner Domain, an immaterial and self-aware galaxy-wide information network, is revealed to be one of their many creations. They themselves were not bound to any form, being able to assume an infinite amount of forms, physical and incorporeal, had minds that transcended realms and dimensions, they created entire realms and dimensions and they are potentially older than the actual universe itself.
• There are the Solon in Haegemonia: Legions of Iron. You only really find their starbases protected by advanced defenses, which can blow up any ship you have. Presumably, they're meant to hold off their ancient enemies. Once you manage to get past the defenses, though, you get some nifty technology, which helps in your own war against a powerful enemy who turns out to be working for those who have wiped out the Solon. Despite the name, the Expansion Pack The Solon Heritage doesn't explain anything, since it lacks a campaign mode.
• Homeworld 2 featured the aptly-named Progenitors, who left behind various relics including several Wave Motion Guns which the player and the enemy fight for control of. One of the Wave-Motion Gun ships gave its name to a deity that the current races have been worshipping for several thousand years.
• Horizon Zero Dawn: We^note or, at least, we when we reach the late 2060s are the Precursors (or simply "the Old Ones", as is the title we are remembered by). The game is set in a Post Apocalyptic future — somewhere around the late-31st century — where humanity has been reduced to primitive tribes comparable to the stone age. What exactly happened to us is one of the two great mysteries the game's story is centered around (the other being why half the planet's wildlife now consists mainly of cybernetic animals).
• In Iji, the Komato are the ancestors of the Tasen, and, although it's not clear how close they are to humans, first evolved on Earth, leaving without a trace some time before the halocene period.
• The Jak and Daxter franchise has an ancient race called "The Precursors". They leave deep-voiced oracular statues and various giant robots scattered about, and depict themselves as glowing Energy Beings, but that's just a Wizard of Oz act; they're really ottsels, otter-weasel hybrids like Jak's sidekick Daxter. In fact, he becomes one because all eco contains their essence.
• According to Journey (2012)'s confluences, the White Robes are implied to be this to the Red Robes.
• The Journeyman Project: The titular 'Legacy of Time' from the third game is a series of artifacts left behind on Earth by an extinct, advanced alien species called the Sosiqui. Each Legacy piece offers a different power; the Atlantean Legacy makes its guardians immortal^note One of whom eventually becomes the villain of the first game, three millennia later, the El Dorado Legacy grants detailed visions of the future to the city's shaman, and the Shangri La Legacy gives certain monks the ability to transmute matter.
• The Kirby series has the Ancients. According to Magolor in Return to Dream Land, the Ancients crafted many items of legendary power, including not only the Lor Starcutter and the Master Crown but also "mysterious items that bring dreams to life"^note the Star Rod and "clockwork stars that soar the cosmos"^note Nova and Star Dream. It's also implied that these same Ancients banished Hyness and his cult to the edge of the galaxy. Kirby and the Forgotten Land creates further connections to the Ancients, implying that they originated from the mysterious planet and left it behind using the star shaped portals created by the captured Fecto Elfilis.
• La-Mulana has several iterations of Precursors, although you only ever learn much about one of them. And then there's the Mother. In La-Mulana 2, the characters meet several survivors of the various generations of Precursors, Lumisa brings an end to the sources of conflict that caused each of them to go extinct.
• Legacy of Kain has two:
  • The Ancients, the species that directly preceded the vampire of Nosgoth; beings that had wings, pale blue skin, and looked angelic, with their most notable member - Janos Audron - being the creator of the vampire species and the Guardian of the Soul Reaver.
  • The Hylden, the sworn enemy of the Ancients; demonic and technologically-advanced beings who were imprisoned in the Demon Realm after they defied the Elder God's Wheel of Fate, sealed by the Pillars of Nosgoth.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: The Oocca are suggested to be the Precursors of the Hylians — as one Adventurer Archaeologist tells us, the goddesses may have made the Oocca first, then the Oocca made the Hylians before retreating to the City in the Sky. This is a slightly inaccurate interpretation in the English version: The Japanese text states they helped the Hylians create a society, rather than literally creating them.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword: A race of Ancient Robots can be found in the Lanayru Desert. They are all old and worn away. Once you strike a nearby Timeshift Crystal however, you return the local area to the state it was in hundreds of years in the past, where everything is still working. Their joints, and almost every single device within the premises are powered by electricity. This could justify where all of the Schizo Tech in the Zelda series originates from.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has the Sheikah Tribe, who had extremely advanced technology 10,000 years before the game's date. Remnants of it include what appear to be computers (including a handheld tablet with networking capabilities and apps ("runes") that can affect the material world around it), autonomous laser-spewing Spider Mechs, melee weapons made of Hard Light, and four Humongous Mecha known as the "Divine Beasts". This Lost Technology is crucial to defeating the latest version of Ganon that's attacked Hyrule. Unusually for this trope, the Sheikah are still around and thriving, but are only on the same roughly medieval level of tech as every other race in Hyrule; this is because they deliberately abandoned their technology after being banished from Hyrule thousands of years ago, though a handful of Sheikah are working to recover their lost knowledge.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: The Zonai are a Beast Man race from the sky with advanced technology like the Sheikah. One of them, the future king Rauru, married Zelda's ancestor Sonia and helped her found their version of the Kingdom of Hyrule.
• Luminous Arc 2 has the Navillian race, who had advanced knowledge in magic and were the ancestors of humans and witches/wizards. 4,000 years ago, a catastrophe ended their civilization and it is believed that the modern world rose from their demise.
• LunarLux: The original inhabitants of Luna are known as the Ancients, but their civilization was destroyed by the Nemesis civilization. Some of their members survived and founded the colonies alongside the Terra refugees. Additionally, Thea and Bella Grey are descendants of the Ancients, giving them the ability to use their Lux to sense the emotions of other people's souls.
• Bungie is fond of this. In most likely the earliest first-person shooter example of this trope, the Jjaro from Marathon were an advanced species that created the S'pht and left a host of technological artifacts on many worlds. They are considered by many to be mythical beings, but since All Myths Are True, Durandal does everything that he does in Marathon 2 to find them. In Marathon Infinity, their technology might be what's for responsible sending the player through different points in time and space to find a way to stop an Eldritch Abomination (which they had previously sealed) from destroying the entire universe.
• Mass Effect:
  • The Protheans are said to be this until Dr. Liara T'Soni joins your party and suggests that they probably weren't the actual precursors. It's revealed later that she's right: the real precursors are the Reapers, which are robotic Eldritch Abominations that are out for everyone's blood. Though the Protheans must have been interested in early humanity, since as the big silver unexplained ball explains; the Prothean research station on Mars would routinely abduct and mess with early humans. Mass Effect 2 eventually reveals that the Collectors are genetically and cybernetically-modified Protheans. In Mass Effect 3, there is one Prothean still alive, named Javik, in suspended animation.
  • It's also revealed that the Protheans themselves had their own Precursor race to learn from, called the Inusannon. And so on, and so forth. Each cycle leaves something behind for the next one to find. The ultimate artifact appears to be the Crucible, whose construction started millions of years ago and was continued each cycle by a new race culminating in humanity and their contemporaries in its cycle (possibly) finishing the Crucible and using it to wipe out the Reapers.
  • The "Leviathan" DLC shows that the Leviathans (true name unknown) are the first species, the original intelligent life that preceded the Reapers. The Reapers were made in their image, and they have mental domination abilities that the Reapers used to create their indoctrination ability. They were the ones responsible for creating the Catalyst, and therefore are indirectly responsible for the Reapers. Their kind was harvested and used to create Harbinger, the first Reaper. A few of them are still alive, deep under the ocean on an aquatic world, where they have been hiding from the Reapers ever since the cycles began. Shepard can find them and convince them to give their aid in the current war against the Reapers.
  • In the Refusal ending, the contemporary major races fill this role — Shepard and everyone s/he cares about get killed or worse, but the records you leave behind prove vital in a future cycle, allowing them to defeat the Reapers.
  • In Mass Effect: Andromeda, there's a series of ruins called "vaults" spread across the habitable worlds of Andromeda's Heleus cluster featuring blindingly advanced technology and tended to by strange synthetic constructs that Peebee dubs "Remnants". We know from the get-go that these were left behind by an earlier civilization for some unknown purpose; it's only late in the game that we learn they're the creations of a hyper-advanced race called the Jardann. The Jardann also created most of Andromeda's wildlife out of a test tube along with the angara, which explains why the angara don't remember their origins or most of their history. The story goes that the Jardann left behind their technology, including the vaults (which are essentially giant terraforming machines that can be manipulated to alter the environments of entire planets) for the angara to discover and use as they colonized the cluster. Whether or not they intended to make their presence known to the angara is unknown, because they aborted the project and fled Heleus centuries ago after the Scourge — a giant superweapon — detonated with the force of a large supernova and destroyed the environments of the garden worlds the Jardann had created. They weren't around to see that the Scourge, while a destructive and possibly permanent presence in Heleus, was not fatal to the angara and they continue to survive on multiple worlds despite the hostile invasion of the Kett. Interestingly, the Jardann were still in Heleus while the Andromeda Initiative arks were in flight, so all the events of the original trilogy take place centuries prior to the release of the Scourge.
• The Orions and Antarans in the Master of Orion series fought a hugely destructive war which led to the Antarans becoming Sealed Evil in a Can, and the Orion homeworld abandoned and protected by the enormous Guardian of Orion. In the second game, you can also recruit Loknar, the Last Orion, in a powerful ship, the Avenger. Also, some planets have Artifacts property — contain ruins of ancient civilizations, which boosts local scientists' performance; races with "Artifacts World" have one of these as the homeworld.
• The world of Mega Man Legends features robot-human creatures similar to the Reploids of earlier series. Too bad they're (mostly) under the directive of the vast computer system that controls them.
• The Mega Man Star Force series also has the lost civilization of Mu.
• Metroid:
  • Although they raised Samus to adulthood and had extensive contact with faraway races like the Luminoth, the Bryyonians, the Elysians, and even the Federation, the Chozo have vanished from all known space. Their entire legacy consists of decayed ruins, cryptic messages for Samus, and the odd upgrade module for her Power Suit. And, of course, the Metroids themselves.
  • The Alimbic race in Metroid Prime: Hunters went extinct long before the events of the game containing the Eldritch Abomination Gorea in the appropriately named Oubliette. They are said to have created incredibly advanced technologies, including an "ultimate weapon".
• The Ancients from the Might and Magic universe (at least when it was in the hands of New World Computing) were creating various worlds out of the four elements and seeding them with life as part of a great experiment. Their true agenda is never entirely revealed but there are hints that they had a specific outcome in mind for most of their worlds, before the Creators and the Kreegan interfered. And between VI, VII and VIII, it was established that whatever their original agenda was, their current goal is 'Stop the Kreegans'. The settings of the games (and the novels) just happen to be in the galactic arm that was cut off from the Gateweb, and the Ancients are a bit too busy with the Kreegan to bother restoring it (especially as the cause of the breach was Kreegan infiltration of the gate network).
• A Downplayed example in Minecraft. While exploring the world it's possible to come across abandoned structures like abandoned mineshafts, underground dungeons ^note Which are just one room with a chest containing some loot and a monster spawner and strongholds, jungle and desert temples (heavily implied to be funerary structures) and underwater ruins or shipwrecks. It's not clear who built them, or what happened to them, but the overall level of technology is not too different from what the player can construct (none of the blocks used are particularly difficult to craft or obtain through normal gameplay). The only really unique thing they built that can't be replicated without cheats is the End Portal in strongholds.
  • More complicated are the Ocean Monuments, which are underwater and very different in construction from the other generated structures. They're built from "Prismarine", a material that can only be obtained by killing the Guardian creatures that live in the Ocean Monuments.
  • The Nether also appears to have had its own Precursors, and once again who they were and what happened to them is not clear.
    • Introduced in version 1.0.0 were the Nether Fortresses, who are completely derelict if not for Blazes spawning from Blaze spawners and patrolling the corridors (and after 1.4.2, Wither Skeletons now spawn there too). The fortresses are little more than enormous bridges, corridors and empty rooms, making their actual intended purpose unclear.
    • Damaged and inactive Nether portals exist, both in the Overworld and the Nether, and they can be repaired and reactived. Overworld variants are surrounded by Netherrack and lava and chests with gold items (favored by the Piglins of the Nether). It's not clear if these portals were built by an Overworld civilization to travel to the Nether or vice-versa.
    • Burried deep in the Nether are rare "ancient debris" that can be smelted into "Netherite scraps" and further alloyed with gold to produce "Netherite ingots" that can upgrade diamond gear. There is no way to directly produce this metal, so anyone wanting a sweet Armor of Invincibility or an Infinity +1 Sword will need to salvage the ancient debris.
  • The 1.19 update added the appropiately named Ancient Cities - huge underground citadels consisting of what looks like temples, ruined buildings, and a whole lot of Sculk. There is also a gigantic portal-like structure, implying said ancient civilization summoned the Sculk from another dimension and were destroyed. They were also seemingly very advanced, as underneath the portal a sort of laboratory filled with Redstone circuits can be found.
• In the lore of Monster Hunter, there was an "Ancient Civilization" that was highly advanced in comparison to modern society, which was wiped out following the Great Dragon War, a devastating conflict with the elder dragons that led to its downfall. Ruins of the Ancient Civilzation are all that's left, although some of the technology from that time was salvaged and put to use by the Hunter's Guild today, including the Switch Axe, Charge Blade, and Dragonator.
• The Myst series of games gradually reveals that the long-lost civilization of D'ni was actually located on Earth; its founders originally came from an alternate universe, but they founded a city Beneath the Earth. However, the D'ni are not the ancestors of humans; the existence of a nearly identical race on the surface appears to be pure coincidence (although the Earth was specifically chosen because it was known to be hospitable to our kind of life).
• In Outer Wilds, your home star system is full of ruins and remnants of the Nomai, who had an advanced starfaring civilization before going extinct some 280,000 years ago. Research reveals them to be Space Nomads who came to your system in search of something called the "Eye of the Universe," had to Abandon Ship when their Vessel suffered fatal damage, and settled on two worlds before building outposts and facilities all over the system. Then they were suddenly wiped out when a comet full of "ghost matter" entered the system and erupted, flooding it with volatile energy that killed the Nomai almost instantly. They were mostly benign and enlightened three-eyed goat folk, and when they encountered the distant ancestors of your species while exploring your homeworld, they decided to relocate a mining operation so not to risk harming the local wildlife, and made sure to leave enough resources for a future intelligent species to use to reach space themselves. But there's one big caveat to them being purely Benevolent Precursors: the Ash Twin Project. As part of their obsession with finding the Eye of the Universe, the Nomai developed a plan to use a time loop to send probes in every conceivable direction until they found it, but to generate enough energy to power the loop, the Nomai decided to trigger your sun to go nova. While proponents of the plan argued that if it was successful, they'd get the Eye coordinates from the final loop and then end it, sparing the sun, other Nomai argued that the consequences of the plan going wrong were too much, but were unable to prevent the Project from going forward. On the Sun Station you can find a mural of a Nomai holding a set of scales, with the sun on one side and the Eye of the Universe on the other.
• Pac-Man World 3 features the Ancients (possibly members or ancestors of Pac-Man's spherical race), about whose lives little is known, although their deaths comprise a well-known story 'of greed, of tampering with unknown forces, and of running and screaming and dying', to quote an in-game archaeologist. As it turns out, the Ancients were wiped out when they tried to siphon energy from the Spectral Realm (the Pac-Man universe's afterlife), which is exactly what the game's villain is trying to do in the present.
• The Ancients from Panzer Dragoon qualify, having made many, many technological breakthroughs, most notably the many, many Towers, the drones to control them, the dragons to protect them, the monsters the Towers create to sustain the environment (or so Craymen claims), and Sestren to tie it all together. And then they conveniently vanished, leaving virtually nobody who understands any of the crap they left lying around, just that it's powerful and needs to be reclaimed. Of course, the Towers keeping the environment in its status quo means removing any factor that could be a detriment. Including humans, should they overpopulate. Thus, the Ancients are kind of the reason the series takes place in a Crapsack World. It's never really stated what the true nature of all of the above is, really, just that it's bad and you have to stop it (which you ultimately do in Saga, leaving it on a somewhat triumphant note — and then in Orta, it's implied that the consequences to the environment afterwards were hardly worth the effort).
• Pillars of Eternity has the Engwithans, a civilization that existed thousands of years before the time in which the game is set. Their understanding of how souls function was leagues ahead of what modern animancers have learned and their ruins still dot the lands, most prominently in Eir Glanfath (amusingly the ruins imply — and Word of God confirms — that the Engwithans were inferior in many aspects of science and technology to the modern day Eora. It's just that soul science is a very flexible science with lots of applications in the setting). The Glanfathan culture is based around protecting these ancient sites, a task supposedly given to their ancestors by the ancient Engwithans, presumably to prevent anyone from discovering the origin of the gods.
• Pokémon Legends: Arceus has the Celesticans, who were the original inhabitants of the Sinnoh region before they abandoned it and went off to live in other parts of the world. Mistress Cogita and Volo (and subsequently Cynthia) serve as the Last of His Kind, being the only ones knowledgeable about the history of the region and the Olympus Mons inhabiting it.
• The Azran from the Professor Layton series, most notably as the focus of Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy.
• In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, you keep finding remains of the so-called Progenitors and eventually discover that the entire planet was a grand Genius Loci experiment. In fact, it is but one of at least six and the only one still remaining. One of them went horribly wrong and wiped out the Progenitor civilization. You meet the descendants of the survivors of that race (whose degraded tech is still better than humans'), who have split into two ideological factions. Their crashed escape pods arrive with spider-like mechs that remain from the old Progenitor civilization. Unlike every other unit, they never heal damage, as that knowledge is lost.
• The Secret World has loads of these, naturally, due to the structure of the Ages. The most obvious are the Host who literally created everything in reality by setting up the Gaia Engines, but honorable mention goes to Lilith, who created most of the monsters you encounter in the game via mad science, and the djinn, who more or less created all of the societal and structural problems in current reality by throwing a civilization-scale temper tantrum when the Host created more beings and they were just the first children instead of the only children.
• Sentinel: Descendants In Time has the Tastans, who vanished 500 years ago. They weren't the first, as Beni lists to other types of people who came and vanished before them.
• The as-of-yet unnamed race from Sins of a Solar Empire who built the Phase Jump Inhibitors and, presumably, the other obtainable artifacts.
• Appropriately for a series where ancient ruins are one of the most populous level types, the Sonic the Hedgehog series is jam-packed with different precursors, most notably the Echidnas whose ancient weapons/relics/monsters set the stage for most of the world-threatening terror of the games. Interestingly enough, although absolutely all of them are shown to have possessed and/or utilized the Chaos Emeralds at some point, none of them claim responsibility for creating any of the Emeralds.
  • In Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, one of the races trapped inside the Twilight Cage is outright referred to as the Precursors.
  • Sonic Frontiers has the Ancients, a race of beings with humanoid water bodies (similar to their descendant Chaos) who were wiped out long ago by a mysterious power. They came from another world to Sonic's world to escape The End, who destroyed their home planet as they evacuated, and created the Titans as a method of fighting back, only beating it by sealing it away in Cyberspace. It also turns out the series' classic Mineral MacGuffin, the Chaos Emeralds, were native to the Ancients' home world.
• In the world of Splatoon, humans are the Precursors to the world of sentient formerly-marine animals.
• In the space stage of Spore:
  • You can purchase "Monoliths" which, when placed upon a planet with life at any stage of development, will cause that planet to develop quickly to the space stage, and gives you a relationship bonus with the resulting empire. Of course, after that you're free to do whatever you like to the poor guys, including conquering their cities by force and enslaving them to extract the planet's resources for your own empire's benefit.
  • Your planet can be visited by spaceships earlier in your own development, although they rarely do more than abduct a member of your pack or a livestock animal.
  • The Grox empire, which is violently opposed to your existence by default. They occupy 2400 systems around the centre of the galaxy, guarding the Galactic Core itself, which contains a robotic member of an unknown race (possibly from Earth). His name is Steve, and he gives you the most powerful terraforming tool in the game, although it is limited to 42 uses.
• In the Star Control games, there is a race explicitly called "The Precursors" which vanished but left behind many artifacts and installations across the galaxy. The second one is notable for containing artifacts and mysteries which are not explained away with the Precursors. The third one attributes everything to them to the point of retconning previous reveals. The Precursors are heavily hinted to having created at least one of the major alien races in the game, namely the Mycon, genetically engineered fungus who were apparently designed to (or malfunctioned into a state where they) do the opposite: return lush planets to a molten and unstable state. The third game posits that they also left a race of robotic caretakers to make sure things stay orderly while they're gone, although yeah, fans really really don't much care.
• In StarCraft, the Xel'Naga, who created the Protoss and Zerg, take this role, although the reason for their disappearance is less mysterious than most, or so it seems at first. In the sequel and its associated books, it is hinted that they aren't really gone, and they might well make a return before the end of StarCraft 2. Oh, and there's an Eldritch Abomination out there that hates their guts, wants to destroy the universe.
• Subverted in the first StarFlight. "The Ancients" were thought to be a race that left behind several artifacts and ruins. However, it's later revealed that they are unlike any other form of life, in that they are in fact sapient crystals. Modern civilization has been using these crystals as the fuel Endurium, and in self-defense "The Ancients" began causing stars to flare, setting the game's events in motion.
• The Star Ocean series plays with this trope. The games are filled with Out of Place Artifacts, mystical technologies such as the time gate on the apparently sentient planet Styx, and near the middle of the third game, there's even a precursor-like group of beings called the Executioners who rain havoc upon ALL the races of the galaxy. It turns out that the universe is actually a video game called the Eternal Sphere, and all the Precursor like artifacts, including the Executioners, were planted by the programmer. They're basically debugging tools and easter eggs, Styx basically works like the mother of all hearthstones. The series also has more traditional precursors such as the Nedians and Muah.
• The Remnants of Star Ruler, leftovers of a now-fallen space empire. At the start, their artificially intelligent ships are better than anything you'll have, and even if you can blow through those, they have even better (and bigger) ones. Fortunately, Remnants are content to guard systems without acting aggressively. The Galactic Armory mod makes the Remnants much more aggressive, making them send out routine missions to cull the lesser races, using even more powerful ships than in the base game, and the Remnant will keep pace with the player, causing them to eventually start sending planet-sized ships to cull systems.
• Star Trek Online:
  • It's quite likely the Iconians are being built up as the precursor race; the scant few times they are seen, they disable your ship completely to demonstrate their godlike power, and later they obliterate Borg cubes effortlessly. Demons of air and darkness, indeed.
  • At the end of the Deferi/Breen story arc, the Ancient Humanoids/Preservers are revived and decide to once again explore the galaxy and meet their descendants, making it one of the few cases where the Precursors come back.
• The Chodak from Star Trek: The Next Generation -- A Final Unity.
• Stellaris:
  • The galaxy features a small number of Fallen Empires, immensely-advanced civilizations that control eight to ten systems and mostly ignore the rest of the galaxy, unless someone presses their Berserk Buttons. Their remaining fleets will wipe the floor with anything short of an endgame flotilla, but they won't expand or replenish their numbers... unless they become Awakened Empires.
  • Some of the first anomalies your science ships discover will start an event chain to study the ruins left behind by one of five (seven with the Ancient Relics expansion) different precursor civilizations^note it is rare but possible to begin more than one, since each precursor was active in a different era of history. The Vultaum Star Assembly, a race of worm-like creatures, fell victim to a species-wide Suicide Pact 12 million years ago. The Yuht were a socially-stagnant and xenophobic race that was defeated by their enemies six million years ago. The multiracial First League collapsed into infighting two million years ago. The rulers of the Irassian Concordant died to a plague spread by their angry vassals one million years ago. The Cybrex led a Robot War against the rest of the galaxy a mere six hundred thousand years ago before having a Heel–Face Turn and going into hiding. In all cases, completing the event chain will reveal the location of a Precursor empire's home system, which typically has planets with substantial research or resource production, or even a ruined Ring World Planet you can repair much later with the right technology and resources.
  • You can become a Precursor — benevolent or otherwise — when you come across pre-space flight or pre-sapient species on other planets in the galaxy. You can establish an observation post over a world, enlighten the natives until they're ready to leave their home system, and keep them as a protectorate, perhaps to be integrated into your multicultural empire. Alternatively, you can crush their primitive armies with your invasion force and purge the planet of its original inhabitants, or Uplift a species just so you can use your mastery of genetic engineering to make them a docile, delicious Slave Race.
  • The Ancient Relics expansion added two more races, the Baol, an isolationist and slow-moving hive mind who may be responsible for most or all of the Gaia Worlds you encounter. They were wiped out by the Grunur and you can find the last member of their species, and use the information found in its corpse and suspended animation chamber lets you create new Gaia worlds and a non-hivemind version of them. The other species, the Zroni were the masters of and possibly the first species to unlock Psychic Powers. They discovered The Shroud, and discovered they could use it for transportation, draw upon it for power, and gain Reality Warper powers by living in it. Eventually however, it was discovered that to fuel manipulating the Shroud like that, they made the galactic core black hole bigger to the point where it threatened to annihilate the entire galaxy. The Saviors thought this was a good reason to not do it, while the Divine didn't care. The resultant civil war raged on for an untold number of years, with the Saviors more numerous and the Divine more powerful, the resultant conflict leading to the rise of the gods and monsters of the Shroud. Eventually, a Savior discovered that they could render themselves down into dust containing all the psi power a Zroni could express in its lifetime. The conflict was then resolved by all but one of the Saviors rending themselves down into Zro dust for the single remaining one to consume and unleash sufficient power to wipe out the Divine, leaving the Zroni extinct and trace amounts of the highly addictive dust scattered across the galaxy.
  • A player empire can have an origin of "On the Shoulders of Giants", where it's apparent the species had been visited millions of years ago by a much more advanced empire that helped them out before abandoning them for some reason. Finding out what exactly happened through several archeological sites scattered throughout the home system makes up this particular story plot.
• Much of the plot of Subnautica is fixing the mistakes of the Precursor Race, who accidentally infected much of planet 4546B with a bacteria that was devastating their race (which is implied to have later driven them to extinction) after setting up a research station there to find a cure. It's up to you to finish what they weren't able to so you can cure your sickness and escape the planet.
• The Super Robot Wars series mention several names. Shin Super Robot Wars had the Mu, who are aliens in this game. The Super Robot Wars Alpha setting has the "First People", Super Robot Wars W has the "E's" and Super Robot Wars K has the "Crusians". Some titles like Super Robot Wars Destiny or Scramble Commander 2 have relics left by a nameless race. This is a source of Epileptic Trees in the mythos.
• Sword of the Stars Morrigi are actually still around — and very smug about it — but until the last expansion, they had to quietly limp into hiding thanks to the efforts of the rather less nice variety of Precusors. And then the Liir had to go and kill off the bad kind of Precursors, allowing the Morrigi to return. Still worse, the pre-release information for the sequel suggests strongly that the Liir didn't finish the job. In fact, said evil Precursors are actually insane Liir Elders with incredible Psychic Powers, not a separate species. So yeah, the Liir have been lying to everyone.
• The dragons, giants, and elves from Tears to Tiara and Tears to Tiara 2, whose civilizations were destroyed by the heavens, but evidently a not insignificant population of each remains. The more powerful lineages of these races are worshiped as gods by humans.
• The Thief series has the long-gone civilization from the ancient ruined city of Karath Din (a.k.a. "The Lost City"), which is known only under the colloquial moniker "The Precursors". The environments of their ruins and various readables imply that at least part of The City's society and technology has very early roots in the survivors of this bygone civilization. Most of the details on the reasons behind the Precursors' demise are deliberately left open to speculation, given the series' elliptical approach to revealing the history and inner workings of its setting. One of the more notable facts revealed is that the Precursors had much more sophisticated technology than does the present-day civilization, in a way. To quote the Keeper faction's opinion on the Precursors :
  When we looked at the relics of the Precursors, we saw the height civilization can attain.
  When we looked at their ruins, we marked the danger of that height.
  — from the Keeper Annals
• Tyranny features the Spires (massive towers) and the Oldwalls (enormous walls, so long as to separate entire nations, infested by hostile magical entities called Banes) as relics of some older, gone civilization. In the Tiers, the region of Terratus where the game takes place, that civilization is called the Older Realms (hence why the Tiers call themselves the Younger Realms) — most of the exposition on them is from Tiersfolk so that's the only name mentioned. Bastard's Wound reveals the Older Realms had some form of connection with the Beastwomen by the presence of Beasts on ancient murals within an Oldwall, although it is ambiguous what the exact relation was.
• Valkyria Chronicles has the Valkyrur, a now extinct (mostly) race who learned to weaponize Ragnite and who possessed weapons with seemingly magical abilities that can't be replicated by modern science. Although not the first humans, all non-Darcsen inhabitants of Europa are descended from them and they are credited with starting the proto-civilization from which all others on the continent grew. Many people even worship them as gods. It turns out they were kind of dicks.
• Vega Strike Back Story has the Ancients, "Those Who Have Only Names" (species Ancients' records mentioned) and later "Alphan and Betan". They left lots of ruins, their "lab monkeys" who now rob blind everyone else for access to the best of said ruins, and... the nano-plague that breaks nanomachines, but ignores most lifeforms and non-construction nano scale devices.
• Warcraft:
  • The lore features the Titans, who went around ordering many of the worlds in the Warcraft Universe, specifically those with a World Soul, or nascent Titan. They would leave behind stone races to watch over the planet, though the ones on Azeroth mostly fell to the curse of flesh that turned them into either their modern version (Earthen to Dwarves) or a step before (Iron Vrykul to normal Vrykul, birthing humanity). One of these titans, Sargeras, would eventually become one of the main villains of the series and lead an army of demons to destroy the works of his brethren in hopes to prevent the void from corrupting one of the world souls.
  • The Old Gods once ruled over the entirety of Azeroth with their Faceless and Aqir servitor races. Their Black Empire was eventually shattered by the Titans and the Old Gods and their servants were bound in prisons. Remnants of their rule remain scattered across Azeroth, below its surface, and within Ny'alotha, the nightmare realm overlying reality.
  • Also fitting this, yet to a less extent, are the ancient Night Elves: They were ruling the whole super continent, fought off any competing race and had access to unlimited magic — until they attracted the Burning Legion, which resulted in the Sundering, destroying most of their race, a huge part of the continent, and all of their magic-based civilization. Their ruins are still everywhere to be found and, of course, contain most powerful artifacts.
  • Even before the Night Elves were the trolls who, while being less advanced than most other races, built gigantic cities and temples that were abandoned after the Night Elf takeover. Modern trolls live in these ruins today, worshipping their ancientry, but unable to achieve their greatness — the ancient trolls are their own race's Precursors.
• Warframe features the Orokin, who created the Tenno to fight a race known as the Sentients in the Great Offscreen War. The Grineer pursue Orokin technology in their quest to conquer the solar system, while the Corpus are more interested in selling the tech for profit; the Tenno don't particularly want either side finding anything. If the Stalker's Codex entry is to be believed, the Tenno were the ones who killed off the Orokin in the first place. Some of the Orokin's towers escaped into the Void, where their technology was preserved, but others were left behind to become filled with the Infested.
• Wild ARMs: On Filgaia a race of Precursors left behind a vast array of Lost Technology. In the anime series Twilight Venom it was revealed that the precursors were from Earth, but left due to the annoyance of Random Encounters.
• Wing Commander: Privateer: The Steltek were Precursors of the neglectful variety, though they did make an effort to clean up after themselves once made aware of the problem.
• X: The Ancients built the games jumpgate network and currently exist as a gestalt consciousness who have surrendered their individuality to become in effect a single entity. They use another precursor race, the Sohnen, as an intermediary to the young races. Their objectives are to preserve intelligent life throughout the universe, retard the heat death of the universe, and to become Type VI on the Kardashev scale, a civilization one that uses the energy of several universes and can alter the physical laws of universes. Basically, gods.
• Xenoblade Chronicles X: The resident Precursor race was known as Samaar, who are said to have come into this universe from someplace else soon after its creation. The civilization they founded, the Samaar Federation, still exists in the present day, and is stated to control a radius of over 6 million light-years (which means it spans many galaxies, including the Milky Way and Andromeda). The game is rather ambiguous on whether the original Samaarians are still around, they're never directly said to have died out or disappeared, but everyone speaks of them in the past tense, and humanity is revealed to be their direct biological descendants.