Ancient Astronauts in Popular Culture - Video Games

Video Games

• Final Fantasy VII features an ancient astronaut, Jenova, as the main antagonist who gives rise to Sephiroth and SOLDIER.
• The American computer game SPY Fox: Some Assembly Required" playfully showed a flying saucer buried beneath the World's Fair.
• In the Halo series, ancient humanity was a spacefaring society technologically superior to modern humanity, with many worlds colonized and contact established with several alien species. After losing a large scale war with an even more technologically advanced species, the Forerunner, humanity was stripped of their technologies and quarantined to Earth, their home planet. For millennia, the Forerunner exercised influence over humanity's behavior, evolution, and even memories. When an invasive parasitic species threatened all sentient life, the Forerunner eventually decided that their only option was to sterilize the galaxy. Though they established automated preservation and "reseeding" technologies in order to reestablish humans and many other species across the galaxy after the sterilization, the Forerunner sacrificed themselves in order to see the plan through. Later, some of the alien species discovered remnants of Forerunner technology. While they derived many technological innovations from the artifacts, they also misinterpreted much of what they found and worshipped the extinct Forerunners as gods. Eventually regaining spacefaring technology, humans studied the Forerunner artifacts with a more scientific approach. Both the alien species and humanity were surprised to discover that the Forerunner granted humanity alone stewardship over the Forerunner technology that had been left behind. The reasons for this were only made clear in the most recent novels and Halo 4. The Forerunner themselves were created by aliens far more ancient, of which the Forerunners had only a mythological understanding of.
• Dark Void features a race of humanoid shape-shifters called Watchers, who ruled over ancient humans as gods, bringing technology and civilization to Earth. Their human subjects rebelled, and exiled them to the titular Dark Void, an alternate dimension that exists between Earth and the original Watcher homeworld.
• In the game Mass Effect humanity discovers a cache of alien technology buried on Mars, built by an alien species known as the Protheans. The Protheans had apparently maintained a vast interstellar empire encompassing the entirety of the Milky Way; the empire collapsed suddenly and mysteriously 50,000 years ago, leaving almost no traces of its existence. It is revealed later in the game that the Protheans, along with numerous interstellar civilizations before them, had been systematically exterminated by a race of artificially intelligent machines called Reapers.
• The arcade shoot-em-up Xevious (from Namco 1983, designed by Masanobu Endō) were also deeply inspired on ancient astronaut theories.
• In Assassin's Creed II it is revealed that humanity was originally created as a slave race by the then-ruling people tentatively known as the "First Civilization" eons prior to the game's setting. Humanity eventually revolted against their "gods" and full-scale war erupted. This race, as well as humans, were nearly wiped out by a solar flare, forcing the two to compromise a truce to ensure the survival of both. Since the truce between the races, the First Civilization have since, as a distinct species, become extinct, though hybrid bloodlines of the two species still exist; their presence in history has been erased, leaving only remnants of their technology behind which became powerful religious artifacts (the reason behind the Templars' and the Assassins' ongoing war). However, the "First Civilization" did not originate from outer space, having resided on the Earth and evolved over time.
• The Cuotl in Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends is a nation of Mesoamerica-inspired tribes subjugated by four extraterrestrial beings who install themselves as deities.