Destroy All Humans! is a weird title for a video game. I mean, you never destroy all humans. It’s not really the goal. You can’t destroy all the humans. They keep spawning in forever. That and the game had at least three sequels, (one of which was strangely Wii-exclusive, IIRC) which means that your little alien fella has a pretty bad track record of completing his title objective.
I bring this up because I bought the PlayStation THQ Nordic Humble Bundle a couple of weeks ago. Specifically because I remember really enjoying Destroy All Humans! and wanted to play it again. At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself.
Full disclosure: it was mostly so I could watch Teenagers From Outer Space again. Which I’m almost certain I could have just watched for free on YouTube.
Anyway, replaying Destroy All Humans! has been a somewhat revelatory experience. See, I’ve been watching Unsealed: Alien Files (which is engrossingly dumb) lately, and I’m mildly shocked that DAH borrows a number of real-life alien conspiracy theories. For example, the plot of the game is about aliens returning to Earth to harvest human DNA, because their alien DNA has degraded through generations of cloning, and humans have pristine alien DNA in them from some random copulation millenniums ago. This is a thing that some people actually believe as truth! How insane is that!? The game’s shadowy government agency that exists to deal with aliens is called Majestic, and in real life, conspiracy nutters believe that an organization known as the Majestic 12 runs all the extra-terrestrial-related recovery/investigation/whatever. Neat!
I guess there’s probably more in there, but I haven’t noticed any other significant connections. You’ve got the regular stuff like abductions, probes, and cow mutilation, but nothing that suggests any specific conspiracy theories that I’m aware of. Anyway, it’s cool that the references/inspirations are there, and I had no idea about them the first time I played the game. And that’s really about all I have to say about that.