'Destroy All Humans!' declared war on humanity 10 years ago, and we're still waiting for another good sequel

Screenshot from the video game Destroy All Humans! A little grey alien is flying through a burning city street using a jet pack. He is holding a large ray gun. People are running and panicking in the streets below the alien. There is a UFO in the background.

We love a good alien invasion game. From Duke Nukem to Half-Life, we've pushed back against extraterrestrial attackers in many ways and different settings for decades now. Typically, such interstellar conflicts involve lots of shooting and playing as the humans, of course. Then, in 2005, Destroy All Humans! turned the subgenre upside down and let us become one of the alien invaders.

Some of the best alien invasion movies of all time belong to the 1950s, a period full of fascination with UFOs and anxieties related to the Cold War. For Pandemic Studios (of Star Wars Battlefront fame), the no-brainer would've been to make yet another action-adventure game where you played as an American hero trying to fight back against evil Greys and other alien enemies. Instead, the studio committed to an open-world action game in which you "killed everyone." Believe it or not, the project was conceived by Internet celebrity Matt Harding before his YouTube videos popped off.