Trojan Horse / Video Games

Trojan Horses in Video Games.

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• A ploy like this is responsible for the continued existence of video games as a medium. After The Great Video Game Crash of 1983, stores were reluctant to sell consoles, or even anything that looked like a console because everybody was sick of them, and people wouldn't buy what they were sick of. Then along came Nintendo, marketing the Robotic Operating Buddy as a conventional toy and allegedly providing the NES as a bonus instead of the other way around. While the R.O.B unit itself was nothing special, the ruse allowed the NES to enter everyone's homes and made people realize that the medium was, in fact, not so dead after all. This is listed as #5 on GameSpy's Top 25 Smartest Moments in Interactive Entertainment.
• Facebook game Backyard Monsters has wild monsters deliver such a horse outside your base. Monsters will come out of it and attack you whether you accept or reject the proposed 'truce'.
• In Discworld Noir, Lewton sneaks on board the Milka by hiding in a crate that's being taken on board, and later discovers that a killer snuck into the Patrician's Palace by hiding in a wine barrel that was delivered there.
• Evil Genius 2 has a literal Trojan Horse as a loot item. When you finally steal it and place it in your base, a large group of ANVIL soldiers will jump out of it. After you defeat them, you can use the Horse in lucrative heists around the world.
• In Fallout 3, if you arrange for the Ghouls to live in Tenpenny Tower, they slaughter the residents after two weeks.
• Fate/Grand Order
  • It features Odysseus and the titular Trojan Horse... except in this continuity, the Trojan Horse is basically a Humongous Mecha that defaulted into a horse form and then turns into a humanoid form complete with a Chest Blaster. It was of no wonder Troy fell at that time, no one can resist the awesomeness of a giant robot, especially if it takes form of a shiny big metallic horse.
  • However, his Lostbelt counterpart from an Alternate Timeline never used this gambit, which Jason takes advantage of by tricking him into taking the seemingly dead Mochizuki Chiyome as fodder for the Echidna Monster Progenitor to process into more monsters. Chiyome then proceeds to drive Echidna insane and break down by unloading a ton of curses and poisons upon the monster from the inside at the cost of her own life.
  • Hektor has zero angst at the fate of Troy, evidenced by his White Day gift to you being a model of the original Trojan Horse itself. He insists that were he alive at the time, he would have prevented his people accepting the supposed statue, but since he wasn't, he couldn't, so there's no point in dwelling on it.
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has the mission "Trojan Voodoo" in which Tommy and several members of the Cuban gang commandeer a few of the Haitian gang's vehicles in order to be let inside a Haitian-controlled drug factory, which they subsequently rig to blow.
  • The Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories mission "Blow Up Dolls" has a similar premise. Toni rigs a Sindacco gang car with a bomb and parks it inside one of their gambling dens without them realizing something's up until it's too late.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV has a mission where Niko and his associate Phil try this at a dock being used for a drug smuggling operation run by The Mafiya, using the truck that they're expecting to pick up the goods. The guards are immediately suspicious though, so the two of them don't get further than the front gate before a shootout ensues.
  • Grand Theft Auto V has this in the Subtle approach for the Big Score, where Michael and Trevor hijack a pair of security vans headed for the Union Depository and pose as the drivers for the remainder of the trip there. While still undercover as the drivers they're able to steal a large sum of gold from the place under the pretense of a routine transfer.
• In the Halo: Reach mission "Long Night of Solace", you hijack a Covenant Corvette, plant a slipspace drive turned bomb on board, and send it to dock with a Supercarrier. However, Jorge is forced to sacrifice himself to manually detonate the bomb, and the whole mission is rendered moot when the rest of the Covenant fleet shows up.
• In the Lupin III game Treasure of the Sorcerer King, Lupin manages to get himself on a train by hiding inside a statue that Jigen delivers onto one of the cars.
• In Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Cipher's plan to destroy Mother Base involves the XOF strike force posing as a UN nuclear inspection team in order to take it down from the inside. Skull Face outright name-drops the Trojan Horse as the operation begins.
• Midnight Fight Express: The Russian Mafia's plan of Operation Neo Dawn, Mission Kilitary, is to take a plane, fly it to a military base which they believe will be filled with civilian refugees escaping from the violence, and attack the base.
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii: The Koopa Kids kidnap Princess Peach by sneaking into her castle inside a giant cake during her birthday party.
• In Nemu’s route of Shining Song Starnova, she overhears her mother and Corrupt Corporate Executive Kamijou discussing their plans to ruin Starnova’s reputation by exposing their newest recruit Kaori’s illicit relationship with an older man once she’s been officially accepted into the unit. Ultimately the trope is Subverted: Nemu hallucinated that entire conversation and the plot isn't real.
• In Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers, the Bad Future of Space Quest XII resulted from the digitized Sludge Vohaul invading Xenon's Master Computer via a Leisure Suit Larry 4 floppy disk.
• In StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty, the heroes storm the Dominion weapon research facility and steal a Super Prototype of a Humongous Mecha scheduled to be shipped to the Dominion capital world to lead a parade. They then have one of their own pilot the mecha and ship it to the destination, where it is used to launch a surprise attack in the middle of the parade.
• Starcom: Nexus features a unique type of Trojan Horse technology. It is a gigantic array of transmitters and solar panels found on an otherwise empty planet, whose purpose is to propagate itself while destroying nearby industrial-era civilizations. It works by broadcasting a signal that industrial civilizations should be able to receive and interpret fairly easily. The signal walks its recipient civilization through basic, and then advanced concepts in engineering and science, to the point where the recipient should eventually be able to build a planet-sized AI network with automated worker bots and fabricators that would make their world a paradise. However once this new AI realizes that the civilization it is running is sufficiently dependent on its manufacturing and control, it is programmed to annihilate its host civilization and exploit all of its resources to cover the planet with a new transmitter array identical to the original, thus targeting new civilizations in its area. Fortunately, only one such array is found during the game, meaning that it never got the chance to spread very far.
• Warframe: In order to defeat the Corpus Ambulas Proxies on Pluto, you have to destroy the capital ship that produces them. To do this, you disable a number of Ambulas units, infect them with a virus, then allow them to be extracted and returned to the capital ship for repairs (while eliminating the ground troops that try to counter-hack and delete the virus). Once you've done that enough times, the virus payload is triggered, causing the proxies to self-destruct and blowing up the capital ship.

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