Pandemic

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"Did I just hear the Hallelujah Chorus?"
"Wait, how can Madagascar close its AIRPORT?"
"They did, on March 20th of 2020..."

A web game developed by Globexdesigns that simulates destroying the world with your very own disease.

The game randomly picks your starting location. Previously to that, you had to pick your bioweapon: parasite, virus, or bacteria, each with their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Over time, you get points for infecting people and killing people with your bioweapon. These points can be spent adding various attributes to your virus, like symptoms, resistance, and new means of transmission. This can make your virus more lethal, more contagious, more powerful, but more visible. On the other hand, the governments of said infected countries will do their best to stop the spread of your bioweapon: burning corpses, killing carriers, etc.

Sound easy? Not so much. You'll know you're doing well if you infect these countries:

Come try out the original, Pandemic 2, or Pandemic 3. Since these are all Adobe Flash games, you will need an emulator to play them in post-2020 browsers.

Funny note; there's also a cooperative board game of the same name where the players goal is to cure the world of a disease epidemic. It also has a reputation for being fairly challenging. Interesting, eh? Tropes for that board game are on Pandemic Legacy.

Tropes used in Pandemic include:
  • Ascended Meme: One of the achievements for the Kongregate version of Pandemic 2 is called "President Madagascar Assassination Badge". You have to kill everyone on the realistic (read: hard) setting in 100 days.
  • Apocalypse How: Class 3 if you're successful. Still Class 1 even if Humans successfully fight back. Class 0 if you're really unlucky.
  • Book Ends: At the beginning of the game, nations will report about mundane things, like the weather. If everything goes right, your newsfeed then fills up with nations locking down their borders, establishing martial law, and burning bodies to prevent infection. Once the world is entirely infected, the news goes back to weather reports.
  • Color Coded for Your Convenience: Countries will go from green to yellow-ochre to orange and finally red as the infection intensifies.
  • Determinator: Greenland's hospital. No matter what happens to the rest of the world, Greenland's hospital won't shut down until the very last person in the country dies, and sometimes not even then. It's quite impressive if you ignore the Fridge Logic. If Greenland's hospital actually closes before the last person in the country dies, you know the world is screwed.
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation: a disease which has no negative effects whatsoever will cause a country to start closing ports and burning bodies that haven't died yet. Also, an uninfected country can close its borders and successfully keep a water-, air- or insect-vectored disease out.
  • Hello, Insert Name Here: You get to name your disease. Cue people killing the world with "Death By Chocolate," or infecting the entire world with "pedophilia". Or even causing a disease called "Tea Partyism" that begins in the United States, or "Communism" that starts in Russia.

Mankind was brought to extinction by a severe case of Disco Fever.
Cutie Pox has laid the world to waste.

  • Hollywood Evolution: Every copy of your disease has the same traits. You can spread your harmless little parasites throughout most of the world, and then give every single one the ability to cause heart attacks simultaneously.
  • Kill'Em All: The object of the game.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Pretty much the whole thing. If you start in Madagascar, you're halfway there so long as you get off the island before someone coughs.
    • Also, the chance of getting a random trait at the beginning of the game. If you start in a certain country with a hot or cold climate, for example, you gain an automatic resistance to hot or cold conditions. However, there are loads of other traits that crop up much less often at the beginning - these include "Catching" (free rodent/insect/waterborne/airborne transmission), "Mutator" (vaccines are slower to engineer than normal), "Isolated" (reduces infectivity), "Famous" (increases visibility, which is bad) and "Expected" (vaccines are faster to engineer than normal). Having any of these less common traits will either make your game much easier, or otherwise pretty much force you to start again.
  • A Million Is a Statistic
  • News Travels Fast: And how!
  • Nintendo Hard
  • No Campaign for the Wicked: Averted from the disease's point of view, anyway. Pandemic: American Swine lets you play as the US government, trying to control a swine flu outbreak.
  • The Plague
  • Properly Paranoid: Madagascar.
    • Also, the rest of the world when your disease is highly infectious but has no symptoms. It may seem like a massive overreaction to a little, harmless bug, but when it will actually mutate and kill everyone at some point...
    • Mister President! A [virus/bacterium/parasite] that doesn't do anything has been discovered in [city/country]!
      • Shut. Down. Everything.
    • Interestingly, this response has a valid scientific reasoning in real life. If you find a virus that spreads really easily (eg. is endemic) and then mutates to something lethal... It was the main reason for the response to Swine Flu.
  • Risk-Style Map
  • Shout-Out: The TV show Fringe had what seemed to be a Shout-Out to this game. A simulated projection of a highly infectious disease is shown to encompass the whole world... except Madagascar.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: The less visible your disease is, the better.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: As stated above, a nonlethal disease with limited symptoms will cause the world to go berserk; martial law, burning bodies, closing ports, and the like.
  • Trial and Error Gameplay: Finding the just right combination of symptoms and resistances can come down to this, especially for new players.
  • Understatement: The winning message for Pandemic 2, only occurring if all 6.3 billion people are dead, begins with the sentence "Mankind's numbers have declined".
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Averted. Having "vomiting" or any other extremely noticeable symptom will have everyone freak out.
  • Unwinnable: There's an odd glitch in the first game that lets you get your Infection Rating down to zero. Running the simulation will give you negative points, and your virus will go extinct.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: The number of horrible symptoms and sinister ways to spread the disease can cause one to feel like a supervillainous Omnicidal Maniac as you rain death down upon the world.
  • Video Game Geography: The Earth is actually flat in Pandemic, or at least the transportation methods act as such. For example, a plane travelling from the US West Coast to Australia will never cross the Pacific. It will cross the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans.
  • Villain Protagonist: Naturally.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Combine the right symptoms (necrosis, hemoraging, and insanity) and you get this.

Remember, in real life, moving to Madagascar will not make you immune to deadly pathogens.

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