List of Fiction Employing Parallel Universes - Games - Computer and Video Games

Computer and Video Games

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds

• City of Heroes contains a set of levels that include many missions set in parallel universes, including one controlled by Nazis and another with evil versions of the games' well-known iconic heroes.

• Chrono Cross (2001), the main character must travel between two dimensions, known as "Home World" (the world from which the main character originates) and "Another World". This was followed by the similar Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes.

• Crash Twinsanity, the main protagonists (Crash Bandicoot and Doctor Neo Cortex) travel to the mysterious 10th Dimension, where everything that is good in their dimension is evil, and vice versa.

• Curse of Enchantia

• Digimon World and Digimon World DS

• Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem

• Eversion

• Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

• Final Fantasy X, Tidus is transported from his hometown of Zanarkand into Spira, a land where everything is radically different to him. The other characters explain various things to him, and these explanations are actually aimed at the player. As the game progresses, he finds that Zanarkand was destroyed 1,000 years before the start of the game, and the Zanarkand he is from is a just a dream created by the Fayth, the souls of those who died when the city perished.

• Grandia: Parallel Trippers

• Growlanser Wayfarer of Time

• Half-Life series features a number of parallel universes from which both hostile and friendly alien species originate. One inter-dimensional alien race, the Combine, conquers Earth and attempts to harvest and enslave humanity. Only in Half-Life and its expansion packs, however, does the player ever visit one of these parallel dimensions; the so-called 'border world', Xen.

• Killer Instinct

• Kingdom Hearts

• League of Legends, in the canon, the video game primarily takes place in a continent named Valoran in a world named Runeterra. Normally the back-stories of a few champions state about beings coming from another realm whether summoned or invited by summoners (such as a character based on Anubis named Nasus being pulled from his home planet into Runeterra), or by beings crossing inter-dimensional rifts to arrive in Runeterra (such as void creatures crossing a space anomaly from a lost city named Icathia).

• Legacy of Kain

• Lost Odyssey, four immortal protagonists, and one immortal antagonist, are sent from a parallel universe in danger of collapse to observe the game universe's residents and return after a millennium (one year in the parallel universe). The antagonist, wishing to retain his immortality, erases the others' memories and plots to destroy the link between the worlds.

• Marathon Infinity, a seemingly unstoppable creature, The W'rkncacnter, is unleashed, and the player must transport himself to different parallel realities until he finds the one in which he may prevent the release of the creature. In certain levels the player will appear before the release of the creature, and can then attempt to stop it. Every few levels, usually at the end of a chapter, the player would find himself in a surreal "dream world", in which his surroundings had little to no relation to the W'rkncacnter or even his original reality at all. It is suspected that these levels are not universes at all, but in fact a dreaming interlude before the player reaches his actual destination (this is debatable however since the player can be killed in these levels like any other). After the player succeeds in trapping the W'rkncacnter in a gigantic gravitational field, he is "freed" from the control of the artificial intelligences that had previously governed nearly every one of his objectives, and subsequently teleports to another reality, at which point the game ends. It is unknown what reality the player goes to next, but it is assumed that he is using his new freedom to explore various universes at his own leisure.

• Metroid Prime 2: Echoes features the planet Aether, which is struck by a meteor. The strange, energetic substance (called Phazon) within the meteor, along with the force of the impact, split the planet's reality into light and dark dimensions. Samus, the heroine, must travel between the two dimensions, transferring energy back to the light dimension before the two competing worlds destroy one another.

• Mortal Kombat series features a massive war between realities, known as "Realms". This crossed over into the DC Universe in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe.

• Myst, a people known as D'ni colonized Earth from another universe, and kept traveling to other universes (known as Ages) through Linking Books. According to their cosmology, each universe is a leaf of the Terokh Jeruth, the Tree of Possibilities. Myst also includes the use of Trap Books as empty universes for storing criminals, although they were later retconned to be complete universes of their own, called Prison Ages.

• Ni no Kuni

• ParaWorld is set in a parallel dimension discovered by a group of scientists in the 19th century. This new world is periodically connected to ours via natural gateways. In order to cross into that world, one must predict the exact time and location of the opening rift. ParaWorld is a world where electricity does not and cannot exist, and the word "lightning" is foreign to the natives. As such, technology has not gone beyond steam engines. Most tribes, however, prefer to utilize other means of transportation and warfare – dinosaurs. As discovered by three modern-day scientists who are trapped in ParaWorld, dinosaurs never existed on our Earth, and all the bones found by archaeologists have somehow crossed over through the portals. In ParaWorld, however, they exist alongside human tribes, some of which are similar culturally to ours (e.g. Norsemen, Dustriders (Beduins), and Dragon Clans (East Asia)).

• RuneScape has a mirror universe named ScapeRune which players can access through certain random events.

• Silent Hill horror video game series incorporates a concept of parallel worlds that are related to main character's emotions, memories, fears and other projections of his or her subconsciousness. The most common distinction is between the normal world (as the world is seen in reality) and the evil world (as the world is seen when it is devoured by evil powers). Characters are switching (i.e. altering) between these two worlds numerous times during the game's plot. There is a number of ways in which a character may switch between the worlds (for example, he or she may experience a pounding headache and, after this event, he or she "wakes up" in the evil world). The architecture of the evil world (also referred as an alternative world) is basically the same as the one of the normal, "real" world (for instance, a hospital in the normal world has its equivalent in the evil world). However, images of the evil world demonstrate how the real world would look like if it would be devoured by evil powers (for example, a hospital in the real world is no longer a hospital in the evil world – it is in fact a torture block full of hellish images of pain and suffering).

• Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, Sonic Rush, and Sonic Rush Adventure

• Spider-Man: Edge of Time and Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions

• Spyro the Dragon series, an evil sorcerer sends all of the inhabitants of the three realms to their Shadow Realm counterparts, leaving the normal realms empty save for Spyro.

• Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, the characters unknowingly live in a "video game" created by people in another universe called 4D Space. Eventually, the creators of the game see fit to reboot the game server, effectively destroying the universe in the process, however, once the process is complete, the characters find the universe as they know it intact, and all links to 4D space inaccessible. Suggesting that by destroying the universe, contact between the two planes of existence was severed, without resulting in the destruction of either plane.

• Star Trek: Shattered Universe

• Super Paper Mario

• Super Smash Bros. (series) and Super Smash Bros. Brawl

• Tales of Symphonia, the two world exist next to each other without knowing of the other's existence. The two worlds unconsciously battle for control of the energy the worlds share, something like Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, except in that game, the two sides of the war know of each other's existence and the energy they must share.

• The Legend of Zelda series include alternate realities: A Link to the Past and The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures include an alternate "Dark World" along with the normal "light" one, and Majora's Mask is set in a parallel reality of Hyrule, Termina. Other games feature the same world in two different time periods. In Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess there is a Twilight Realm where Link becomes a Wolf. In Link's Awakening there exists a kind of alternate universe inside the unconscious, dream state mind of the Wind Fish. There is also a parallel universe in Phantom Hourglass simply called the "World of the Ocean King" by the spirits.

• The Longest Journey features a story about two parallel universes, Stark and Arcadia. Stark is a futuristic universe with cyberpunk influences, while Arcadia is a fantastic medieval world.

• Ultima Online used the parallel universe concept to rationalize the existence of multiple instances of the game world (called "shards"), so that players could be partitioned onto multiple servers for capacity reasons.

See also: :Category:Parallel universes (video games)