Video game characters have been blessed with some incredible skills and powers over the years. Some are able to soak up physical damage like sponges soak up water, while others can be shot countless times without spilling a single drop of blood. Despite these otherwordly abilities though, many video game characters share the same deadly weakness: water.
There are plenty of turn-of-the-century games in which even touching a drop of water will stop a character dead in their tracks. Insta-drown mechanics were often the result of developers using water to hide the edges of an open world or having difficulties programming believable swimming mechanics. As a result, these video game characters die instantly when they touch water, much to the annoyance of players.
Claude (Grand Theft Auto)
Together with Yu Suzuki's Shenmue series, Grand Theft Auto 3 helped to lay a lot of the groundwork for the open-world genre, though not all of the ideas and solutions that it brought to the table were necessarily good. The developers used water to keep players from going where they didn't want them to by having the game's protagonist Claude drown instantly the moment he found himself in the drink.
While this did help to hide the edges of Liberty City and served as a great way to gate progression to GTA 3's second and third islands, it became something of an open-world trope due to the game's overwhelming success. The insta-drown mechanic would resurface in the next GTA game as a result, with swimming not being added to the franchise until the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
John Marston (Red Dead Redemption)
Although swimming came to the Grand Theft Auto series in 2004, the mechanic did not make its way into Rockstar's second most popular series for quite some time. In the 2010 release of Red Dead Redemption John Marston and his son Jack would drown the moment they touched water, despite Rockstar having done away with the insta-drown mechanics in GTA: San Andreas.
The release of Red Dead Redemption 2 therefore raised a few interesting questions; most notably, why could the younger version of John Marston swim and not the older one? Of course, the answer to that question is a lot more complicated than him simply forgetting, with the real explanation likely being a combination of the developers being both more able and more willing to program swimming into the 2018 sequel.
Altair (Assassin's Creed)
Rockstar wasn't the only developer who saw the usefulness of insta-drown in open-world games. To their credit though, Ubisoft at least addressed the fact that players were unable to swim in the first few Assassin's Creed titles, with the narrative explaining that a glitch in the programming of the Animus caused Desmond and the assassins to desynchronize whenever the latter came into contact with water.
To be clear, this is still a pretty cheap way of creating an artificial border, but the fact that it's at least explained to a certain degree should probably count for something. It wasn't just the playable characters who couldn't swim either, with NPCs also drowning whenever they fell into the water. Eventually, the Animus 2.0 fixed this issue, allowing all subsequent Assassin's Creed protagonists to swim.
Sonic (Sonic the Hedgehog)
It's important to note that insta-drown was around long before open-world gaming, with many 2D platformers using pits of water to kill off their players. The Sonic the Hedgehog series is perhaps the most notable example of this, however, as although Sonic would die instantly when falling into water in any standard level, the earlier 2D games featured underwater levels in which Sonic was able to swim.
To be clear, it was still possible for Sonic to drown in these levels, though only if he ran out of breath. Players could get around this by breathing in air bubbles that floated up from the ground beneath them, with the game's music being used to indicate when Sonic's oxygen was running low. The Sonic Adventure games did something similar, with Sonic able to survive in certain bodies of water but not others.
Spyro (Spyro the Dragon)
Despite the leap to 3D bringing with it a whole new dimension for developers to play around with, it didn't stop them from recycling a lot of the same old ideas. As a result, many of the earlier 3D platformer protagonists also die instantly when they fall into water, including the titular character from Insomniac Games' hugely popular Spyro the Dragon series.
Given the links between the species and fire and the fact that a flaming tail is one of Spyro's defining features, it perhaps makes sense why the little purple dragon is unable to survive in water in the first Spyro game. That he's able to swim in all of the subsequent installments is a little baffling though, as too is the fact that he can seemingly hold his breath for an unlimited amount of time.