The Environmental Apocalypse
It's probably been scientifically proven that the process of manufacturing games and games consoles is so toxic that owning just one current generation machine and five copies of Call of Duty: Black Ops is actually the environmental equivalent of killing a baby polar bear.
It would be a kind of cosmic justice then if we found ourselves smack bang in the middle of an environmental type apocalypse. Ironically, it would be the years of gaming - powered by electronic boxes full of thermoplastic polymers and played on gargantuan, energy swallowing TVs - that would save us.
Lava levels, ice worlds, desert sections, overgrown jungle bits - we've all navigated these potentially hostile environments. We would know exactly what to do. Another Ice Age? Avoid the penguins and don't let anything breathe on you. Planet turned into a ball of molten magma? Stay on the floating rock platforms and keep an eye out for dinosaurs. Dinosaurs have a tendency to unextinct themselves when there's lava about.
But there is a worst case scenario. If the polar ice caps melt and turn the world into a giant Ocarina of Time-style Water Temple, then there is a much higher possibility that we would be totally boned.
Conclusion: The Environmental-type apocalypse would be GOOD for gamers. Just as long as it wasn't a water-type environmental apocalypse. Then it would be BAD.
The Falling Space Rock Apocalypse
As anyone that's mined every planet in Mass Effect will tell you, the galaxy is a big place. It's stuffed full of space, bits of junk floating about and not much else. If a rock falls off the edge of Jupiter, it has over 300 million miles to fall before it reaches Earth. By the time it hits, it's going to be going quite fast. That means deep impact. Which means devastation. And that means lots of death. Imagine Majora's Mask but without the time-travelling safety net.
So if a honking great galactic boulder dropped from the heavens like a fat lass off an Olympic diving board, we'd all be smashed into even more insignificant pieces with the extinction hammer. However, by using the kind of gaming skills hard-wired into the brains of gamers during the fashionable 1970s, gamers would be able to avert an asteroid apocalypse with relative ease and be hailed as heroes in civilization's hour of need.
By employing the basic principles of electromagnetic propulsion, a team of scientists and builders could construct an enormous kind of floating bat in the Earth's exosphere. This technologically amazing floating bat would be manually operated from the planet's surface using a potentiometer-based paddle controller. It would be located somewhere important. Like the Kennedy Space Centre or a secret bunker underneath Buckingham Palace.
As the asteroid approached, the floating bat would simply be strategically positioned according to the ballistic trajectory. This would prevent the potentially apocalypse-causing piece of astronomical rubble from hitting Earth by deflecting it straight back into the black sky known as space. Problem solved. (Presuming there wasn't some extra-terrestrial with their own floating bat construction to ping the intergalactic masonry straight back.)
Conclusion: The Falling Space Rock-type apocalypse would be a mix of GOOD and BAD for gamers.
Next: Even more apocalypse carnage!
