Brick Joke/Video Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • In the first level of Earthworm Jim, you launch a cow into the air. At the very end of the game, the cow lands on Princess What's-Her-Name. The joke continues into the animated series, in which every episode ended with a cow dropping out of the sky and landing on a random person for no reason.
    • Also literally in Earthworm Jim 2, where, if one waits long enough, one of the Idle Animations is Jim pulling a brick from his pocket and throwing it into the air. The next time you idle, even stages later, the brick will land on Jim's noggin.
  • Zork has "Hello, Sailor!". For the uninitiated, this phrase appears on the instructions for use of a small inflatable raft in the first installment of the series. Typing it into the game results in the same response as to any attempt to use cheat codes such as 'xyzzy'. It appears to be a throwaway joke. Then you meet a Viking sailor in the third game, who gives you an invisibility potion if you say "Hello, Sailor!" when he appears.
  • Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney has a case of a bouncing brick. The issue of a spirit medium taking on the appearance of the person she channels comes up in case 2-2 (Phoenix proves that's not what happened) and it proves a casual joke in 3-3. In 3-5, however, it becomes the only possible explanation for why Iris can be in two places at once--someone else is channeling the spirit of her twin sister Dahlia.
    • There's also an interesting variation in the first game that was technically set up in the third game (during a flashback). In Trials and Tribulations' fourth case (the flashback to Mia's first case) while Marvin Grossberg is instructing Mia how to defend somebody properly. One of his pieces of advice is interpreted as "Rub it in old grey-beard's face!" by Mia. Later (technically earlier, in the first game), Mia instructs Phoenix to "Find the contradiction and rub it in his face!"
  • Tales of Graces has a very dark example. Early on in the game, you witness a particularly disturbing sequence involving an Eldritch Abomination beating the crap out your party of ten year-old kids. The event gives Asbel a Heroic BSOD and gives him the resolve to become a knight, so that he can protect everybody from monsters just like it. It's put to one side after the Time Skip so that you can help his childhood friend Richard take the throne back from the Celdric Cedlic Cedric, the resident Big Bad Wannabe. Richard then murders the guy in cold blood, complete with Slasher Smile. It's eventually revealed that the monster from their childhood, Lambda, has actually been possessing Richard since the event. Ah, shit.
    • If you use Eternal Serenade to defeat Lambda, Malik will claim that that is the last time he'll use that attack. You can have him use it later, and Sophie will call him out for it.
  • Amusingly enough, in a case coincidentally similar to the Toy Story movies the Kirby series threw one regarding a claw machine. One of the minigames in the original Kirby's Adventure was a claw game where the player could catch Kirbies to earn extra lives.After over a decade not hearing of it again, one of the bosses in Kirby Mass Attack is... a prize machine's claw, that attacks by snatching your Kirbies.
  • At the beginning of Resident Evil 4, the player has the option of freeing a dog from a bear trap. The dog runs away and at best the player at least doesn't feel like a cad for leaving the dog in the trap. However, the dog will then come back and help you fight a miniboss an hour or two later.
  • At one point in ancient Mesoamerica in Serious Sam: The Second Encounter, you can make Sam use a phone booth. Someone on the other end responds, the voice sounding a lot like Sam. The current Sam (the one you're playing) claims he's Serious Sam, and the other voice then assumes it's a trick and puts the phone down...fast forward a couple of levels, some Time Travel, and hundreds of years later, and Sam (now in still-ancient Mesopotamia) encounters another phone booth, only this time it's ringing. He answers it, and hears a familiar voice claiming to be him...
  • The doorknob in Mother 3 - it first pops out of Lucas's door during the start of the first chapter, and somehow gets passed from character to character until the player picks it up in the end.
    • If you watch the credits all the way through, it turns up at the very end as well.
    • The deadliest brick ever thrown drops later on in the Empire Porky Building. Remember how that bird revived the Ultimate Chimera in the Chimera Labs?
    • Also, what is quite possibly one of the longest brick jokes ever: In Dusty Dunes Desert in EarthBound, you can find two small sesame seeds you can talk to. Each of them will mention the other as a long-lost love. In Mother 3, in the Empire Porky Building, at the end of the boat ride, the two sesames are the last exhibit. Kind of a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming, if you think about it.
  • In Grand Theft Auto III, the radio station Chatterbox has one. Since it plays in a loop, there's no knowing which one you'll hear first, but one caller is a woman who is organizing a group called Citizens Raging Against Phones (CRAP). She describes that, since they're against phones, it's hard to organize meetings, and they've had to resort to carrier pigeons. Unfortunately, their carrier pigeons keep disappearing. Later, a man calls in, and describes how he likes to eat very strange animals (i.e. opossums, squirrels, goldfish, zebras, etc.) This also includes... pigeons. He says that sometimes they even come with notes attached, saying it's like a "fortune cookie with wings".
    • The joke continues in Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories, set four years before III, when the same caller rings Chatterbox organising a group called Citizens United Negating Technology For Life And People's Safety (I'm not going to be ironic and spell it out for you), who are campaigning against the internet. Ironically, they have a website.
  • Broken Sword 2: The Smoking Mirror has a somewhat literal Brick Joke. Near the beginning of the game, your character picks up a "lucky" piece of coal. Later, you fashion a slingshot using a tree and a piece of rubber. If you use the coal with the slingshot apparatus, the coal disappears off the horizon. More than an hour of gameplay later, you travel to an entirely new island ten miles away and discover... you guessed it, the piece of coal. Your character comments that the slingshot must have been more powerful than he thought.
  • The Future Sight attack in the Pokémon series is something of a brick attack. When a Pokemon uses it, it doesn't appear to do anything right away, but two rounds later, the opponent is suddenly blasted by Psychic energy.
    • Similarly, Wish is a healing brick, greeted with the comment, "(Pokemon)'s wish came true!"
    • Doom Desire is another example of a brick attack, but uses light instead of a Psychic blast.
    • And finally, there is Perish Song, which is Brick Mutual Destruction.
    • For a non-attack based Brick Joke, in Diamond and Pearl, Maylene will say she feels hungry if you talk to her again after beating her. Later, in HeartGold and SoulSilver, she ends up participating in the eating contest in Celadon.
      • Try winning said contest. Everyone else in the place has a single bowl infront of them. She has two large stacks next to her.
    • In Pokémon Red and Blue, you are sold a Magikarp for $500 by a salesman. Now, since Magikarp can be caught with any fishing rod, this is obviously a scam (unless you want to evolve it for a Disc One Nuke) and probably should not be bought. In Pokémon Black and White, another Magikarp salesman appears selling the fish for $500, but since this is Unova, this is the ONLY place it is available and is as rare and valuable as advertised! Magikarp Power indeed!
    • The Urban Legend of Zelda about the truck in Vermillion City containing Mew is addressed when said truck actually does contain a lava cookie in the Generation 3 remakes.
    • In Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald, you battle the Winstrate family in their house on Route 111, whose names all start with V. They mention having another son who has a lot of potential to be a champion. Later on, at Victory Road, you battle Cooltrainer Vito, who mentions that his family back home is counting on him to become champion.
    • In Red/Blue, one of the mook trainers who challenges you expresses her desire for a pink pokemon with a floral pattern. 5 generations later, Munna is introduced.
  • Possible in any match of BlazBlue when playing as Taokaka. Using her Baseball projectile, it will, if avoided, fly off the screen. Eventually it loops back on screen from the opposite side in the same direction. This easily catches many off guard especially near the end of the match when the last thing someone watches out for to be defeated by is a baseball that they dodged a few seconds ago.
  • Space Quest 6. Near the very beginning of the game, Roger Wilco gets a fish as an inventory item. It has no use throughout the game, but every time he's leaving a location, someone shows up to shout, "Hey! Don't forget your fish!" whereupon they throw it at him and it's back in his inventory. It also gets progressively more rotten and disgusting-looking as the game goes on. At the very end of the game, the Big Bad has transformed into a brain. She then attacks Roger, only to suddenly stop to gasp, "Fish! That's brain food!" She eats it, and because by this point it's a skeleton with chunks of rotten meat hanging off of it, she dies instantly of food poisoning. Roger then says aloud, "I can't believe I finally got rid of that fish."
  • Fate/stay night gives a throwaway line in UBW where Tohsaka asks Shirou about resenting being adopted. He answers no, of course not, so long as the new family is a good one. They're standing right outside the Matou house when this happens. This detail is basically forgotten in chain CMOAs: Archer's reveal, Saber's capture, etc and doesn't come up again until in Heaven's Route where surprise! (not really, pretty thick foreshadowing there) Sakura is Tohsaka's sister and was given to the Matous. And it turns out that no, they're not the world's best family ever.
  • In Final Fantasy, Garland, the boss you fight at the very beginning, who's never mentioned again, turns out to be the final boss.
  • In the second town in Fallout 2 (the Den), you find a guy showing off a mummy. In another town on the other side of the map, one month away from the Den, there's a ghoul asking you to find his friend, who probably got lost in the Den and is prone to really deep sleep. Good thing you wanted to go back for your car, and maybe a few other quests, anyways...
    • Again, in the Den, there is a drunkard and a gambler named Fred, whom you can lend some money for his "Master plan". This ups your karma a bit, and the quest seems to be over. Still, in 6 ingame months he gets stinking rich and pays you back.
    • During the tutorial/character creation sequence in Fallout 3, Vault 101's resident delinquent Butch is cheesed to learn his suggested occupation from his G.O.A.T. exam is "hairdresser". A later quest in the game has you returning to Vault 101, where you find Butch has indeed become a hairdresser (though he insists on being called a barber).
  • During the opening of Half Life, the player can wander around Black Mesa a little. In the break room is a microwave, and if the player hits the button the casserole inside explodes and a nearby scientist gives you a What the Hell, Player? moment. The entire plot of the game and 3 sequels later (over 10 years in-game and in real life), we finally meet the owner of the casserole and he's still mad.
    • In a similar way the first actual level after the playable intro in Half-Life is called "Unforseen Consequences". In Half-Life 2: Episode 2, the GMan implants a sub-conscious message into Alyx's mind to tell Eli to "prepare for unforseen consequences", along with other hints, strongly indicating that he planned and caused the entire Black Mesa incident.
    • During the street fighting chapters in Half Life 2, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it exchange between two rebels ("What's the password?" "Password!" "Come on in!") that only becomes a joke in the next game, Episode One, again between two rebels:

Rebel 1: What's the password?
Rebel 2: I'm not even gonna tell you to shut up.
Rebel 1: Come on in!

    • Before you take your first trip in Kleiner's teleporter there's a scene where Barney expresses his doubts about using it because "I still have nightmares about that cat." Half the game later you run into Barney again during the fighting in the streets, and;

"Did you hear a cat just then?! Damn thing haunts me..."

  • In the opening story cutscene in Lego Rock Band, there is an octopus who auditions as a drummer for your band. You reject him, pointing at a "no octopuses" sign. Five venues later, you're playing on a pirate ship and the octopus appears again with his dad. Cue fighting off giant octopus to Sum 41's "In Too Deep."
  • Elaine punching Guybrush in The Curse of Monkey Island. Near the start of the game Guybursh accidently proposes to her with a cursed ring, (The curse being the accident, not the proposal). She accepts but Wally arrives and mentions the ring is cursed and she winds up to punch him when the curse takes effect and she's turned to gold. Near the end of the game the curse is lifted and she finishes the punch.
    • In the first game, you have to hit a tree with a rock. If you miss, you hit and sink your ship. At the end of the game, if you sank the ship, there's a scene of your shipmates imprisoned by the Monkey Island cannibals.
      • Even better, if you don't sink your ship, you get an entirely different (non-canonical) one. On Monkey Island, you periodically run into Herman Toothrot, a somewhat annoying castaway who's been stranded for 20 years. Shortly before your heroic assault on LeChuck's ship, you agree to rescue him with the lady you're after (mostly so he'll shut up about it). You prepare your ghost-destroying weapon, head for the ship, see that it's gone, and are confronted by your crew and LeChuck's now-former first mate. Back to Melee, whole rescue sequence, anguish, pain, injury, and finally the moment of triumph. Then, in your finest hour, basking in the warm glow of your archenemy exploding against the night sky... "I completely forgot about Herman Toothrot!"
    • Also in the first game is a Grog machine. It starts out as a joke about how it has 5 different types of Grog plus root beer, and it eats all of your money; at the end of the game, LeChuck delivers a Megaton Punch that causes you to crash into the grog machine from above, dislodging a bunch of money (including whatever you put into it earlier, which you can then retrieve) and a single bottle of root beer (which you then use to kill LeChuck and beat the game. Then it appears in several other Monkey Island games.
  • One that stretches out across multiple games (and thus counts as an Old Save Bonus, too) comes from the Bhaalspawn Saga. In the first game, a nobleman at the Friendly Arm Inn gives you a pair of golden pantaloons to clean and press. You don't have to give them back, though if you do you get 100xp. There is no other use for them in the game, though. In Shadows of Amn, taking one option in a kidnapping quest will net you the ransom: the silver pantaloons. Finally, an odd little side quest in Throne of Bhaal nets you the bronze pantalettes (i.e. tighty... bronzies). You can then give them to a fairly-well-hidden smith in a town to get a special magic item. Oh, and each set of pants, along with the resulting magic item, has fluff chock-full of pants puns.
    • And then one pair reappears as a one-off joke in Dragon Age.
  • On the very first planet in Magical Starsign, you encounter the spiny moles. They tell you that it is prophesized that one day, they'll help the heroes. That "one day" being the Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
  • Gwen from Guild Wars. The player first meets her as a child in the tutorial area of the first game, where she follows you around and, if you're nice enough to her, gives you a piece of tapestry marked as a quest item. You don't see her again or find a use for the tapestry shred until eight years later in the expansion, when you meet her again, now an adult who joins your party. If you show her the tapestry, she remarks how touched she is that you kept it all these years.
    • If you give her the shred (after the story is finished) you get a special quest, which nets you a flute. It's the same flute you bought for her (to replace one she'd lost and was broken by time you found for her), except now it's a unique focus that gives you stat bonuses.
  • In Neverwinter Nights 2, part of Grobnar's craziness is his insistence on the existence of 'wendersnaven': immense, invisible, and incredibly powerful creatures that somehow no-one else in existence has ever heard of. Along comes Mask of the Betrayer, and guess what the command word to activate the magic boat that takes you to Ashenwood is?
  • In Mass Effect, there's an obnoxious reporter who tries her hardest to make you look bad and twist your words with her snide insinuations. A renegade option lets you punch her. In the sequel, once again she tries to interview you, leading to you getting fed up with her disingenuous assertions and knocking her to the ground again, but this time with blood!

"I should have done that the first time."

    • In the Upper Wards Market, there's a human talking to a turian shopkeeper about a refund. The turian repeatedly refuses to grant the refund on grounds that the customer doesn't have a proof of purchase. Later on in the second game he's outside a warehouse, still asking for his refund and still not getting it. After 3 games and about 3 years Shepard finally has the choice to finish the guy's quest once and for all. It turns out it was for a toaster that cost 15 credits...
    • Mass Effect 2 has dozens of these: elcor Hamlet, the scientist who emails to warn you that the Keepers are artificial and the Citadel is a trap, it goes on and on.
      • One more serious one comes up as well. Towards the end of the first one, the leader of the Salarian Commandos gives a rousing speech ending with "Our influence will stop Saren, in the battle today, we will hold the line!" Later, in Mass Effect 2, if Salarian commando Mordin Solus is killed, his last words are: "Tell them... I held the line."
        • Mordin actually served under that guy and even mentioned his love of rousing speeches and saying Hold The Line.
  • In Xenosaga 3, there's a scene where your party runs through a city that has turned into a battlefield during a return-to-the-past kind of thing. MOMO pushes down Jr to avoid a falling BFG and they end up on the ground. Jr looks up and sees ES Asher, resident Humongous Mecha, flying away. He shouts at its pilot to watch where he's fighting and chaos, laying on the ground at his feet, apologized. Doesn't make sense unless you have played the previous game in the series. If you have, you'll recognize the BFG as the one he and Canaan threw away when they were piloting Asher into Miltia 15 years ago.
  • In CROSS†CHANNEL, during a scene in the first week Taichi says that Miki isn't done growing yet and he thinks her breasts will also get bigger. Then he turns to Touko and says that she's not going to get any bigger. During the fourth week, Miki's sex scene occurs. She's been avoiding the reset button everyone else has experienced and is now maybe a year or so older than she was at the start. He realizes that her breasts are indeed noticeably larger than he remembered from groping her before.
  • The Elder Scrolls series has a variation, and something of an Easter Egg, spanning two games. In Morrowind the first character the player encounters is Jiub, a fellow passenger/prisoner on the ship who asks some scripted questions related to character creation; he then disappears from the game when the player leaves the ship. In Oblivion (set in a different province and a few years later) characters will sometimes mention how they've heard that Saint Jiub has finished driving the cliff racers from Morrowind.
  • In Breath of Fire III, a mysterious cloaked man named Loki approaches Ryu and his friends adopted family Rei and Teepo, coercing them to go Just Like Robin Hood and steal from the local town's corrupt mayor, McNeil. They succeed, but McNeil later got his revenge, delivering one of the game's most devastating Player Punches. However, Loki has become a Karma Houdini, disappearing before the Mayor could even find out about his involvement. Cue the Time Skip, and we still see Loki alive and well in town, until a few scenes later, he was now bruised, bleeding and beaten to a pulp, courtesy of Ryu's Papa Wolf adoptive brother, Rei. The latter didn't take too kindly to the loss of his family, after all.
  • In the Playstation game Heart of Darkness the player loses their lightning gun when a large monster eats it, way later in the game the player gets eaten by the same monster that ate his gun, and uses the gun to destroy the monster from the inside.
  • In the DS title Infinite Space, when Nia first came to retrieve Yuri, he declares that he has no family and is ready to leave. About 5 minutes later, the villain of the first Chapter is threatening Yuri with his little sister, who he is obsessively protective of. This feels like an error in translation, or too much late-night oil for the writer, until it all becomes relevant- 10 game years, 15 chapters, and about 30 hours of play-time later.
  • In the SNES classic Chrono Trigger, when your party first enters the cave leading to Magus' castle, a weird little bat starts following you around. Never interferes with your party, always flies off when a battle starts, always returns when you finish, but otherwise does nothing...until you finish off the fakeFlea. Then it reveals itself as being the real deal, and the fight starts all over!
    • That's not a brick joke - but this is: At the Millennial Fair, where the game begins, there is one tent at which you can spend the points you earned at the fair's other minigames to play more minigames that give useless but kind of fun prizes such as a kitten that lives in your house or cloned replicas of your party members. Many chapters later, when Crono dies at the Ocean Palace, your quest to fix this means time traveling to the single moment in which it happened and replacing Crono with his cloned replica.
  • Persona 4. In the first twenty minutes of the game, you meet, in order, The final boss, the kidnapper, Morooka's murderer, and the real killer. With the exception of Adachi, none of these are ever mentioned again until their own respective reveal, each one making a first time player slap themselves around the head.
  • In Final Fantasy X, at the very beginning of the game you help a group of Al Bhed salvage a sunken ruin. The Al Bhed speak their own language, so you can't normally understand what they're saying. But if you play through the game, translate their language and begin a second playthrough, you can decipher their speak and find out the sunken ruin you help them salvage is actually the airship you end up flying near the end of the game.
  • In the first Guitar Hero game, one of the loading screens says " They really don't want you to play Free Bird. They're just heckling you.", a reference to the tendency to mockingly request said song at rock concerts. In the second game, where the final song in Career is Free Bird, the loading screen says something along the lines of "FINE, they're not just heckling you this time. SIGH"
    • Rock Band 3 includes The MASTER version (read: NOT a cover), with Pro Guitar. It is also from the same guys behind Guitar Hero 2. Did you really think they wouldn't go back and get the masters eventually?
  • An update to Portal added one of these to the game: after the Wham Reveal, GLaDOS tries to encourage Chell to "assume the Party Escort Submission Position". At the end of the game, after GLaDOS gets blown up and Chell ends up outside, a robotic voice can be heard saying "Thank you for assuming the Party Escort Submission Position", and an unseen figure drags Chell away as she loses consciousness.
    • In the official comic short released prior to Portal 2, GLaDOS is seen to be explaining the Schrodinger's Cat paradox to Doug Rattman, mentioning that she had attempted the experiment herself at some point. Later on in the comic (in a flashback) we see GLADOS telling an Aperture supervisor that she has an idea for an experiment she would like to perform on "bring your cat to work day"...
    • In the first part of Portal 2, the robotic announcer warns about the dangers of a post-apocalyptic civilisation ruled by an "animal-king", accompanied by a short animation showing a collosal camouflaged turret wearing a crown, and slightly later a fat turret can be glimpsed in one of the elevators. Both the animal-king turret and the fat turret are seen in the ending, singing an opera.
    • Again in Portal 2, the robotic announcer also assures test subjects that all Aperture Science Personality Constructs can remain operational on as little as 1.1 volts of power. This turns out to be exactly the amount generated by a potato battery.
    • The finale for "Portal 2" has this: After GLaDOS lets you go, and you're walking around in the fresh air for the first time in years, you hear the door slam behind you. You whirl around, hear a rumbling, the door is thrown open, and out pops the Companion Cube, with the same texture from the first game, and HEAVILY scorched. The door then slams shut again.
    • At one point in Portal, GLaDOS mentions "bring your daughter to work day". In Portal 2, You and Wheatley pass by a room full of chairs where the event was held, Wheatley will then say: "Bring your daughter to work day... That did not end well."
    • In "Portal 2" birds tend to make amusing appearances right from the beginning of the game when Wheatley gets attacked by a bird and screams "Bird! Bird! Bird!", to when the oracle turret informs you that "Prometheus [...] was cast into the bowels of the earth and pecked by birds" (and not long after when just that very thing happens to GLaDOS), and lastly you open a door and startle a bird, which in turn causes GLaDOS to scream... you guessed it, "Bird! Bird! Bird!" ("Kill it! It's evil!")
    • No mention of the moon?
  • Season Two of Telltale's Sam and Max series has two examples, both of which pay off in the last episode:
    • In the first episode, Sam and Max are sent through a portal to the future, where their future counterparts are stuck on an island in the middle of a sea of lava. The present ones save their future selves by driving Santa Claus' sleigh through the portal, creating a way to escape. In the season finale, the heroes are dumped into the lower depths of Hell by the Soda Poppers, ending up on the same island. Just as they are seemingly doomed, the sleigh comes flying out of nowhere.
    • In the second episode, the heroes use a massive Bermuda Triangle to swallow the lava from an erupting volcano. They have no idea where the Triangle leaves, but really don't care, as long as they're not the ones getting killed. Fast forward to the last episode's stinger. The Soda Poppers are stuck in the same prison they just trapped Sam and Max in, and are swearing revenge...when the other end of the Triangle opens up, dumping the entire payload of lava onto the island and disintegrating them.
  • In Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, the opening cutscene has Snake wearing a mask that is used as a joke about how unpopular Raiden was in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, and early on a radio conversation with Sigint informs you that it was designed for a mission to impersonate a GRU major. Late in the game, Snake impersonates Major Raikov, an Expy of Raiden.
  • Crash Tag Team Racing. In what could be a possible reference to the Earthworm Jim games, at the beginning of the Tyrannosaurus Wrecks area the only way to proceed further is to use a catapult to launch a cow. After a lot of exploration, three races and a few puzzles (which understandably takes a hour or so), you finally find the Power Gem. Trouble is, it's on the other side of a lava pit too large to jump over. And what should come sailing through the air than THE VERY COW YOU FIRED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE AREA. It sails through the air, perfectly plugs the gap and makes a very convenient bridge for you to cross over.
  • In World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King, one gnome questgiver in the Borean Tundra (one of two starting zones in Northrend) attempts to teleport to safety, but the device goes wrong and she suspects that an evil clone of herself has been created at another location. When players make it to Icecrown, the northernmost and most dangerous outdoor zone, one quest requires the player to fight some potential rivals at a tournament in Jotunheim, and among them is the gnome's evil twin.
    • One brick joke goes across series. In Warcraft II, there is a cutscene of a human killing an orc and then using a catapult to shoot down zeppelin. After beating Warcraft III, you can see several attempts to shoot the scene, most of them ending in some hilarious failure and poor footman getting killed.
    • In a Horde quest in Hillsbrad, you give quests to three different player stereotypes. The first one, a completely unequiped undead, subtly named "Dumass" is sent to the mine. Johnny Awesome, the way over-geared low level player is sent to Hillsbrad Fields, and Orkus, the cocky high leveled player is sent to Southshore. Your questgiver says she hopes Orkus drowns. You'll find Dumass tied up by mine spiders (who are friendly to the Horde by the way), you'll find Johnny's celestial steed star pony dead with its legs sticking out of the ground while Johnny is cowering and crying in a nearby house, hiding from zombies, and Orkus is found in Southshore. And to the questgiver's wishes, he is drowning. In waist-deep water.
    • May be more of a Chekhov's Gun, but on a very low level undead quest, you're asked to help create a new plague. This was a vanilla quest. Two expansions later, Grand Apothecary Putress double-crosses both the Alliance and Horde and tries to use the plague you helped create to wipe out both their forces and the Scourge all at once.
  • You'll see the little tree from the intro section of Majora's Mask again in the end credits if you've gotten the Mask of Scents.
  • Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal gave Captain Qwark a line about "Robotic pirate ghosts" in a vid-comic, while the comic's narrator gripes about the absurdity of the claim. Fast forward to Quest for Booty, where the main antagonist is Angstrom Darkwater... an undead space pirate. And since the space pirates are all robots...
    • Another one, in the second game, a list of rejected products in a commercial for a testing facility mentions "Lawn Ninjas". In the third game Said Lawn Ninjas are fought as enemies in Qwark's Hideout.
  • In Time Splitters, the profile for a zombie character named Gilbert Gastric simply reads "Eat brains... Eat brains... Eat brains..." The profile for a character named The Shoal (a floating group of fish), one of the last characters listed on the page simply reads "Eat krill... Eat krill... Eat krill..."
    • In the opening cutscene, your ship crashes on Earth. A strange, masked figure with Cortez-like eyes is seen standing at the top of a nearby cliff. The only time he's addressed afterward is when a nameless soldier says that you're receiving supporting fire from somewhere. Cut to the penultimate level, and you are the supporting fire helping your past self through the first on the cliffs above.
    • At the end of the second level, you find that the Time Crystal isn't there, despite the computer directing you to the area. So you pursue the strange old man you met at the end of the level and proceed through levels three through ten. The opening cutscene for level eleven takes you directly behind your past self from the end of level two, arriving just in time to see him vanish off to do the levels after that. A submarine appears in the cove not ten seconds later, leading Cortez to the apiphany that the Time Crystal wasn't on the island, it was under it the whole time.
    • At the end of the sixth level, an old Jacob Crow shows up and hands the younger version a time machine and tells him the mission. At the end of the eighth level, you meet the same older version of Crow and tell him that his villainy is over. Cortez then goes on to explain in detail everything he knew about Crow's plan. Then the younger Crow shows up and hands him the same time machine and now, with the information you just gave him, the older Crow disappears into time to enact his evil plan. When he realizes what just happened, Cortez gives out a scream that travels 50 years in the past.
  • Golden Sun has the incident where the Wise One asks Isaac to take out the Mars Star for a moment, seemingly without purpose. That's the brick that smashes Alex's face in at the end of The Lost Age, when the Wise One revealed that he transferred some of the Mars Star's power to Isaac (and possibly to Garet as well) just in case someone were to use the Lighthouses' reignition in an attempt to ascend to godhood. He then suppresses and binds Alex to Mount Aleph for the next thirty years.
  • Final Fantasy VIII: Near the end of Disc 2, you get to name Squall's ring (default name is Griever). The name is never mentioned again...until the final battle, in which Ultemecia summons a GF named after the ring.
    • Even better, it implies that it IS the ring.
  • Raskulls: In the first half of the game, King throws a lot of half-bricks with notes attached to them to communicate with people outside his castle, the majority of which end up hitting Dragon. During the ending sequence, Dragon pelts King with a half-brick.
  • In the original Syberia, Kate helps launch a Russian wannabe astronaut into space using clockwork spaceship (don't think about it too hard). Mid-way through the sequel, she witnesses him land.
  • Touhou features Kogasa Tatara, whom you run into as the Stage 2 boss of Undefined Fantastic Object. She's about as strong as you'd expect an early-game boss to be, and her power is listed as "the power to surprise people", which sounds useless. And then... she reappears much later, as the Extra Stage midboss, and has accordingly gotten much stronger. Surprise!! And if you think that's the end of that joke, you won't be ready for her appearance in Ten Desires as the stage 3 midboss. Surprise!!
  • At the beginning of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, Sylvia seduces Travis by telling him about all of the yoga positions she knows, including the "downward dog". After they have sex near the end of the game, Travis triumphantly shouts "DOWNWARD FUCKING DOG!".
  • The Snakes in City of Villains.
  • In Adventure Quest Worlds, Chuckles is introduced as the always-laughing skeletal minion during the attack on Swordhaven Castle. Said skeletal minion gets blown to bits in a Kick the Dog moment by Drakath during his introduction scene following the battle between King Alteon and Sepulchure. Chuckles became popular with players, who launched a "Save Chuckles" campaign that ultimately culminated in a quest that had the player bringing him to Death himself, who eventually was only able to bring back his skull. Fast forward two years and eight Chaos Lord sagas later to the Doomwood saga, where Chuckles frees Gravelyn, who it turns out was his creator, from enslavement by Noxus during the Shadowfall War, by knocking Noxus off the Shadowscythe throne when every other undead minion in her army was under Noxus' control. After Noxus' defeat, Gravelyn rewards the little fella by giving him a new body -- that of Noxus!
  • At the beginning of The Reconstruction, Qualstio complains about the fanfare that plays when characters join the guild. Much later on, another character comments on it after joining, to the confusion of everyone else.
  • In "Homestar Ruiner", the first episode of Strong Bads Cool Game for Attractive People, the episode begins with Strong Bad getting an email asking why he hasn't "beat the snot" out of Homestar yet. Strong Bad thinks it's a good idea, but he gets sidetracked by his plan to beat Homestar in the big Tri-Annual Race to the End of the Race. In the endgame, after Homestar is knocked out of a window along with a number of other uninvited guests in Strong Bad's house, he yells "Ow, my snot!"
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, early in the game the bridge across the river is blocked by a group of women chatting about how they dislike housework. One of them comments on how she's bad at cleaning her house and wishes there was someone to do it for her. A while later - after you find your Loftwing, race in the Wing Ceremony, fly with Zelda, wake up after she falls into the tornado, find Fi and get the Goddess Sword, you're finally able to go across the bridge, and if you go in her house you'll find that it's completely covered in dust and spiderwebs. Much later in the game, you finally get an item that is able to blow the dust out, so you do actually clean the house for her.
  • Sonic Generations has Silver throwing cars at you for him being a moron because of him thinking you're an impostor. At the end, the cars he threw at you land on him when he's defeated.
  • At the beginning of the Team Fortress 2 short "Meet the Medic", Medic finds his pigeon Archimedies digging around inside Heavy while he is operating on him. At the end of the short, after Medic operates on Scout and gives him his new heart, we find out the pigeon got stuck inside him.

Scout: Oh man, you would not believe how much this hurts!
[a pigeon sound emits from the Scout's chest]
Medic: ...Archimedies?

  • A sad one happens in Kingdom Hearts 358 Days Over 2. Early in the game, Roxas gets a stick from an ice cream bar that has "Winner". He's waiting until he can get another one to give to both his friends Axel and Xion. When Roxas defects from the Organization, he leaves the stick for Axel.
  • Maniac Mansion in the kitchen, there's a chainsaw, but the programmers never got around to programming in the gasoline can it needs. The gasoline can shows up on the planet Mars in Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders, a Spiritual Successor game which was also created by LucasArts.
  • Combined with Inverted Chekhov's News in Tachyon the Fringe. The combat portion of the Justified Tutorial consists of you fighting off a group of target drones that went haywire while you were evaluating a novice flight instructor. A news item later in the game reveals that the instructor went on to save the lives of her students when the same thing happened again.
  • In the science fiction survival game Subnautica, you are the sole survivor of the crash landing of a starship owned by a company called Alterra. One of the many announcements made by your computer assistant very early in the game is that you will have to reimburse Alterra for all the materiel you salvage and the tools and equipment you use in the process of getting off the ocean planet on which you are stranded. Some thirty or so hours of play later, after you've built a starship and successfully rescued yourself, and after the ending credits finish rolling, the same computer voice welcomes you back to Alterra and blandly informs you that you are required to pay your tab of a trillion or so credits before they'll let you land. Hard Cut to black.
  • Battle Golfer Yui: Dibot points out that Ran is Yui's caddie, Tomoko Okui. Seeing as Dibot is a moron, Yui dismisses his claims. However, Tomoko takes off her disguise before the final boss fight and reveals herself as Ran.
  • Ricochet by Lee Dowthwaite has "the 'joke' about the yellow brick", a classical Brick Joke, in its (extremely long) introductory scrolling message.
  • Steven Crow's Starquake says in the (paper) instructions that the main character, Blob, was chosen for this mission "because all the other guy's [sic] have pranged their space ships." The game starts with a "flight computer report" including the lines "crash... bang... smash... touchdown". On winning the game, the player is congratulated, then asked how (s)he expects to get home since Blob's space ship was wrecked on arrival.
  • Similar to the Earthworm Jim example, at the beginning of stage two of Contra Rebirth, the piece of spaceship the hero was riding on hits a giant enemy robot in the head and knocks it off, spinning through the air. The headless robot attacks you several times throughout the stage, until a last fight at the end. Upon delivering the final blow to the robot, it will smoke and stagger, but struggles to hold itself together while it prepares a final attack... and then its head falls down from the sky, hits the robot and knocks it to pieces.
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