Look, back when we were kids, we've all desperately whispered under our duvets at the end of a long holiday, praying, "I hope the school catches fire or collapses in an earthquake." Fast forward to adulthood, and we no longer wish for our offices to burn down. Because if just the workplace goes up in smoke, our livelihoods are suddenly on the line, leaving us weeping tears of blood to catch up on the backlog. We finally know that a misfortune that only makes you miserable is sloppy work at best. So, adult wishes have gotten bigger and far more egalitarian. We're talking about the entire human race disappearing together.

Well, total planetary annihilation is a surprisingly common trope in video games. But most of the time, the destruction stops at crumbling civilizations or a scorched surface. It always leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, because whenever the world ends via radiation or zombies, someone usually manages to survive anyway. If you really want true equality for everyone, you can't just scratch the crust; you need to blow the whole thing from core to surface without a single piece left behind. We've gathered some of the most spectacular 'Earth-shattering' moments from video games where our lovely blue marble gets utterly obliterated.

Our protagonist goes from street gang boss to the leader of the free world in the Saints Row series. But before they can even enjoy the inauguration, an alien overlord named Zinyak and his Zin Empire roll in for an invasion. After getting trapped inside a virtual Matrix simulation forced to star in a cheesy 1950s sitcom, our temper-tantrum-prone hero decides to smash up the system and make a break for it. Now, a normal baddie would just recapture the fugitive or send in the grunts, but Emperor Zinyak operated on a completely different scale.

Running on the solid logic of 'if they won't listen, just vaporise their home planet', Zinyak orders an alien mothership to fire an orbital planet-destruction beam straight at Earth. In no time, giant orange cracks split across the surface, the core expands, and the entire planet disintegrates into subatomic particles like a massive firework display. That was the exact moment a series that started as a petty street gang scuffle evolved into an over-the-top sci-fi sandbox filled with time travel and superpowers. Still, at least you don't have to go into work tomorrow!

Back in the year 2054, humanity was living it up with peak technological prosperity. Then, boom, the planet was wiped out in a flash. It wasn't because humanity pissed off aliens like in the Saints Row series, nor was it self-inflicted doom through forbidden tech. It's just that two hyper-advanced alien factions happened to pick Earth's orbit as the ultimate battleground for their turf war. Naturally, fearing they'd get crushed like ants in a catfight, humanity packed their bags onto the giant immigration ark, the White Whale, and made a run for it.

Sure enough, right in the opening cinematic, anti-matter artillery and high-dimensional beams fired by the alien mobile weapons and warships graze the surface, and a purplish dark matter reaction instantly swallows the entire globe. In the end, Earth gets smashed to bits in deep space like a chunk of fermented soybean paste, scattering into mere meteorite debris. Leaving behind a suddenly exploded Earth for the alien planet of Mira probably felt just like being a regular bloke kicked out onto the street because your neighbor burnt their house down.

Spore is the ultimate creature simulation where you evolve from a humble microscopic cell all the way through tribal and civilised eras until you're finally conquering the cosmos. Once you hit the endgame space stage, you're free to roam the vast galaxy heading straight for the galactic core. During your travels, you might even stumble upon our actual solar system and have that emotional moment of locking eyes with our lovely blue marble. Since you've found the cradle of humanity, common sense dictates you should observe peacefully or forge an alliance, but let's be honest, the very first thought crossing any gamer's mind is always, 'I wonder if I can blow this up?'

The moment you slam the ultimate planet-buster weapon right into Earth's atmosphere, the planet shatters into cosmic dust amidst a dazzling shockwave. Your very own hand-crafted alien lifeforms are the ones turning humanity's cradle into space debris. Pull this off, and you'll unlock the 'Oh the Humanity!' achievement. Watching it happen from the perspective of an absolute destroyer fills you with a weirdly satisfying sense of triumph. Students and office workers living on that Earth should really be thanking the player!

The Mortal Kombat series is basically defined by its brutally merciless 'Fatalities', but when developers keep trying to dream up fresh ideas, the scale sometimes goes completely off the rails. Released back in 1995, Mortal Kombat 3 was the final entry built using digitized live-action sprites, capturing the absolute peak of 90s B-movie camp. Among the roster, the cyborg ninja Smoke boasts a Fatality that is nothing short of earth-shattering.

To execute a fallen foe, Smoke flips open his chest plating, dropping dozens of live explosives right out of his torso. Before the detonation even hits, the camera completely abandons the arena and abruptly warps out into a cosmic perspective. On the screen, our lovely blue globe is shattered cleanly into pieces. To make dead certain that a single loser stays down, Smoke takes out not just himself, but throws in the entire population of seven billion humans as a cheeky bonus entourage to the afterlife. You won the match, sure, but with neither an Earth nor a body left to speak of, isn't that the true definition of a transcendent state?

Helldivers is a top-down cooperative shooter where you step into the boots of a defender of Managed Democracy tasked with wiping out alien bugs and cyborgs. The absolute highlight of the original game is the 'Galactic War' campaign, where every single player across the globe shares one massive, real-time war effort. When players band together to push back the hordes, they bask in glorious victory, but if everyone gets complacent or fumbles the frontline management, the alien menace creeps right up to the doorstep of humanity's last bastion: Super Earth. And the moment that final defense of Super Earth completely falls, a horrific catastrophe unfolds.

As soon as the defense line caves under relentless enemy bombardment, the surface of Super Earth erupts in crimson cracks, and the entire planet shatters into pieces amidst a colossal explosion, scattering into the dark void of space. Born entirely from the collective trolling and botched teamwork of gamers worldwide, this ending leaves Helldivers with an indescribably bitter aftertaste. The sheer sense of emptiness when the defeat cutscene finishes and the Galactic War timer mercilessly resets, forcing you right back to square one, is quite literally the exquisite taste of total mutual destruction.