Limbo offers many good ways to die. B&W deaths look better too!

Fallout 1 & 2

Many of the old Sierra games have funny deaths.

For example, in Quest for Glory 1, create a thief and try entering the command
"pick nose"

If your lockpick skill isn't high enough, you will get a rather silly death. (What if your lockpick skill *is* high enough?)

Here's another funny Nethack death:
While levitating, throw an object. This will end up damaging you, which means, of course, that it can kill you if your HP is low.

Golden Axe original! Those groans...!

Could you search at YouTube for that? Might be easier if you have played the game.

In Super Mario World (and many other games): Glitching into a solid object, and then dying because the game decided "Oops! You've been crushed!"

Bard's Tale 3: Getting into a fight with an empty party. An enemy attacks (who does the enemy attack?), either kills its target or misses, and then you get the "Sorry, Bud!" screen.

Wizardry 4 (Apple 2 version): An enemy attacks a Greater Demon and misses. "The Greater Demon was killed!" (Note that this is the result of a glitch I discovered by accident that messes up monster stats so the Greater Demons had 0 HP.)

Here's one that is probably one of many gamers' least favorite deaths: Classic Wizardry games: "You teleported into rock!" This permanently destroys your party, and there's no reload (unless this happens in Wizardry 4 or you are using something like save states).

Skyrim had being launched into outer space by a giant.
That was pretty special.
And Die By The Sword was pretty brutal for its time I thought.

Here are some Elder Scrolls deaths:

Arena: While swimming, let an enemy paralyze you. (Yes, they actually coded this special case into the game, and it did happen to me once.)

Daggerfall: Fall out of bounds, then press Alt-F11. Then suffer enough falling damage to kill you outright.

Daggerfall: Equip a weapon that has been enchanted to cast an instant death spell "when strikes". Enemy attacks with a bow and arrow, causing the instant death effect to trigger and kill the player. (What?)

Morrowind: Read a Scroll of Icarian Flight, and then jump. Too much falling damage. (As a side note, if you fortify your Fatigue way above your maximum, you can not only survive the fall, but *gain* HP because of it, and this HP gain ignores your maximum.)

And one non-TES one:

Might and Magic: World of Xeen. Shrine of Ultimate Evil. Destroy? Yes. The entire dungeon collapsed, with you in it. (You did save recently, right?)

That reminds me of an older one.

It's not really a death, but being launched out of the ring in 'Ring King' was always a classic. :P

The Sierra games had some impressively stupid death possibilities.
Colonel's Bequest felt like it had at least one death possibility per screen.

These ones of course...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC2CtU72W2w

Stasis has a scene where you have to perform surgery on yourself. Of course, you can screw it up and it's not going to be pretty...that's all I'm going to say here.


I also like the expertful diagonal slicing in half of humanoid enemies in Shadow Warrior Classic. One of the last games with campy bitmap animations before everything went 3D:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFL6rXcSvBE

The lava death in the new Doom deserves a mention:

You give a Terminator 2 style thumbs up as you sink into the lava.