That’s not how I remember it. The last level (not counting the hidden levels) has you in a room facing a giant demon head. You have to ride an elevator and fire your rocket launcher at just the right time so it goes in a hole in the head, which kills the giant demon head and you win. If you use the noclip cheat code to see what’s at the end of the hole you shoot the rocket down, you find John Romero’s head on a stake.
That’s Eidos for you. If they make a good game, it’s purely by mistake, and will be corrected in the sequel.
Indeedy, just look at the mangled corpse of Lara Croft and all her aborted fetuses.
Halo Reach
I inevitably kill off every Sim that I’ve ever made.
By the way, it was the original Doom that ended with the player dropped into a lethal ambush, not Doom II.
Wing Commander IV had multiple endings, but if you got to the end, it came down to a choice of whether or not the main character (played in the video segments by Mark Hamill) should interrupt a speech by the rogue admiral (Malcolm McDonnell).
If you interrupt, Hamill lives. If you don’t, Hamill hangs.
Season 1 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead.
[spoiler]
The protagonist, Lee, is bitten at the end of episode 5. After rescuing 9 year old Clementine from her kidnapper and making their way through the herd of walkers roaming Savannah, Lee collapses, unable to go any further. In the last scene of episode 6, you then, as Lee, have to decide whether to have Clem shoot him, or leave him and presumably have him later reanimate.
You know a game presents you with some tough choices when this is one of the less gruesome and easier ones to make.[/spoiler]
IIRC, most of the Silent Hill games have death of the protagonist as an alternate ending.
Fallout 3 as originally released ended with the death of the protagonist, though later DLC changed that.
hmm, john marston in red dead redemption dies at the end. you play as his grown up son once the game is finished.
solid/old snake is heavily implied to die at the end of metal gear solid 4
starkiller in starwars the force unleashed games. he dies at the end in both games.
you can choose if he dies either killed as a jedi or severely mutilated as a sith.
he comes back as a clone in the second game, he lives if you choose the light side and dies if you choose the dark side
In Dragon Age: Origins, assuming you don’t take Morrigan up on her offer, either you or the other Grey Warden is only going to live on in stories and memories.
I believe you can talk your partner into dying instead of you, though.
But inexplicably, not any of your radiation-immune friends. That part is also fixed in the aforementioned DLC.
BTW, Walking Dead is very relevant to this thread. It’s from 2007(!). For some reason, I always remembered Argent Towers’ weird elaborate post.
Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 3 are two obvious examples.
Since this thread is back, I’ll add Mass Effect 2 and 3 as possible options -
Mass Effect 2:
[spoiler]You die at the start. You get better.
But if you do a shitty job of easing tensions amongst your crew, reinforcing the Normandy Mk2, and assigning tasks for the final grand mission, it’s possible to kill your entire ground crew except yourself and have basically the only remaining (named) crew member be Joker, who is too weak to haul you up into the Normandy as the platform crumbles under you. You die for good. This, however, is the worst possible ending and is not importable into ME3.[/spoiler]
Mass Effect 3:
You have 4 major endings-
In the ‘fuck you, I’m not playing your little game’ ending, all of the sentient races get Reaped but Liara’s little ‘this is what you have to do’ boxes help the next cycle beat them.
In the Control ending, you basically become the Reapers’ immortal controller/god/sentience and are no longer alive in the standard sense.
In the Symbiosis ending, you die but manage to merge synthetic and organic lifeforms to prevent further Reaper-type evolution in the future.
In the Destroy ending, you destroy the Reapers and die - unless your military strength was very high, in which case the last scene is of you in rubble - and then gasping for breath.
oh yes, i forgot, you can decide if you want jodie to die and come back as a ghost or live in beyond 2 souls,
Depending on which faction you side with, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines can end with your death, or a fate worse than death (in which you’re chained inside a coffin and thrown into the deepest part of the ocean where you’ll be trapped alive for all eternity.)
While not the protagonist, Martin Septim sacrifices himself at the end of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. There’s also a side quest in which you must let someone kill you, after which the Daedra Molag Bal brings you back to life.
I tend to die an awful lot at the end of FTL 
Neverwinter Nights 2* was one too, originally. It closed on a spiteful “rocks fall, everybody dies” (Obsidian writers were not happy with being forced to make yet another generic Forgotten Realms fantasy story, which shows throughout).
It was retconned in *Mask of the Betrayer *though.
The original *Fallout *is ambiguous : you save the day and you get exiled for your troubles. On the one hand, if you’re reached the end of the game you’re proooobably OK as a wasteland survivor, have ridiculous armour and an anti-aircraft-like gun to shred whatever’s in your way. On the other hand, the wasteland isn’t exactly a friendly place and the hero has no reason to keep on living any more. The last image we get of the Vault Dweller is him trudging alone, with slumped shoulders. I always figured he was fixing to die, back then.
Of course, the sequel made it canon that he didn’t.
Well, yeah. Cthulhu does eat 1d3 investigators per round, he’s no joke 
When it first came out, the running joke was having 2,000 year old phalanx units defending your city against tanks and bombers, and often winning.
In quite a few of the 80’s RPG’s like Phantasie and Might and Magic, characters aged and would die of old age. It usually got so annoying that your entire party was elves or another race that could live thousands of years. In Phantasie 1, you had to have a minotaur character to finish the game, and usually he was so old by the time you got to that part he probably had only one horn and was using a walker as his main weapon.
In Bioshock Infinite, the game ends with the protagonist drowned by several alternate versions of his daughter years before the game begins. I think.