Back from the dead

Easter is a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus (and chocolate eggs), who rose from the grave after being crucified three days earlier. This was clearly a big deal back in those days, but miracles like this are a common occurrence in video game land. Today we take a look at the best of them; the moments when our favourite games and characters give death the middle finger and returned to our screens.

Be careful going forward from here – while spoilers are kept to a bare minimum, the nature of the article requires speaking about the death of certain characters.

Captain Price – Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 ends with Captain Price lying in a pool of blood on a dilapidated Russian highway as a squad mate frantically tries to resuscitate him. Suffice to say, things don’t look good for the moustached hero, not good at all. As the credits roll, we can only assume he’s popped his clogs. But then, two years later when Modern Warfare 2 arrives on the scene – there he is! Alive and well! Well, not that well, actually – he was incarcerated in a Russian Gulag for the several years separating the two games, after all. Even so, the return of Price made his army of fans very happy bunnies indeed.

Aeris – Final Fantasy VII

Put that Phoenix Down away. Aeris is dead and there’s no bringing her back. But that didn’t stop the rumour mill from churning out story after story. Some said you needed to help her ghost in the Sector 5 slums church, others said there was a mysterious man at Bone Village that could aid her resurrection, while others still explained that you needed to catch a purple chocobo and fly it to the moon with a mastered Revive Materia to raise her from the dead. It was all baloney. She died, and there was no bringing her back.

Unless, that is, you owned a Gameshark. By whacking the right string of characters into a cheat cartridge, you could glitch the game to pop her back in your party, although she wouldn’t take part in anything story related. The assets were on the disk to support this, as apparently Square had the original intention of bringing her back, too.

Solid Snake – Metal Gear Solid 2

Remember when Solid Snake died in that sinking tanker near the start of Metal Gear Solid 2? And we were lumbered with that pansy Raiden for the remainder of the game in his wake? Yeah, that sucked. But it did set up one of the coolest returns in gaming history; the moment of realisation that, yes, Iroquois Plisken is indeed Solid Snake. Few people will have believed Snake had actually died in that tanker, but his return from a watery grave was a memorable moment for fans of the series nonetheless.

APB

Poor sales figures killed APB after five months, with developer Realtime Worlds placed in liquidation shortly beforehand. That wasn’t the end for the GTA-inspired MMO, however. The K2 Network purchased the ashes of APB for £1.5 million in November of last year. A subsidiary company, Reloaded Productions, then announced that APB would be relaunched during the first half of 2011 as a free to play game, renamed APB: Reloaded. While it’s not out just yet, the fact that such a monumental failure is still clinging onto life is worthy of a mention here.

Commander Shepherd – Mass Effect 2

Mere minutes into Mass Effect 2, and the Normandy is ambushed by a mysterious alien species known as the Collectors. Commander Shepard is killed, his helmet broken leaving him to asphyxiate in the cold depths of space. Pro-human organisation Cerberus weren’t content with this outcome, however, choosing to bring him back to life with fancy new-age science. As well as being a dramatic opening to the game, this also allowed players to change the appearance and class of their Shepard before beginning the game. Clever.

Duke Nukem Forever

It might be a little premature to include Duke on this list considering the game isn’t actually out yet. Right up until the moment a physical disc goes on sale in an actual shop, Duke Nukem Forever remains the games industry’s biggest joke. After 3D Realms laid the project to rest in 2009, most people assumed that was the final nail in the coffin for the King; Duke was properly dead this time. But then, out of seemingly nowhere, he showed up at PAX 2010, and Duke Nukem Forever was reborn. Gearbox and the enigmatic Randy Pitchford would become the studio to finally ship the unshippable game. Probably.

Stubbs the Zombie

Stubbs the Zombie wasn’t just missing or assumed dead, nor was he brought back to life by a cheat cartridge; no, he actually died, and actually rose from the grave. Eddie Stubbs, a travelling salesman during the Great Depression was murdered by his girlfriend’s father, who dumped his body out in the wilderness. After a city was built over his resting place some years later, Stubbs rose from the grave, terrorising the new settlement by gorging on the brains of its inhabitants.

GLaDOS – Portal

GLaDOS is a robot, an artificial intelligence – therefore she can’t really ‘die’, as such. She can, however, be blown to pieces and taken offline, which has largely similar results to regular human death. If you’ve seen any promotional material for Portal 2, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that she’s back in the sequel. And she’s pissed off. Not that robots can feel emotions of course, but there is simulated anger running through her circuits, or something, which grants the game its hilarious insult-heavy script.

Heihachi Mishima – Tekken series

Be thankful you don’t have Heihachi Mishima as a father. He threw his son Kazuya off a cliff into a ravine, telling him that if he were truly his son, he’d be strong enough to make his way back up. He did, of course, but had to make a pact with the devil to do so. Kazuya went on to win the first King of the Iron Fist tournament, and proceeded to throw his father off the same cliff he was thrown all those years ago. Heihachi survived too, naturally, and went on to win the next tournament, choosing to throw his son into a live volcano this time. He then gets resurrected some years later by G Corp. More so than anybody else on this list, those Mishima boys have an inability to stay dead.