The Greatest Video Game Villains

Deck four of the Von Braun is where the mask comes off: Polito, the scientist whose objectives you have been following all game, is dead, and the voice was never hers. Every instruction in System Shock 2 up to that point is hers too. No storefront sells an artificial intelligence, so Wikipedia's article is the only identifier she has. Irrational and Looking Glass built it in 1999, and Electronic Arts published it.

Rapture is a level built out of one man's argument, and every corridor is that argument failing. He runs the whole of BioShock through radio transmissions and audio diaries; across the entire series you meet him in person exactly once, when he hands Jack a golf putter and gives an order. Ken Levine wrote him, Armin Shimerman voiced him, 2K sells the game. The only page about Ryan rather than about a product is on Wikipedia.

Every chamber in Portal is hers. Valve sells her voice as a Dota 2 announcer pack and her face on a T-shirt, but only Wikipedia has a page that is her. She operates the whole Aperture Science Enrichment Center by camera and intercom, then makes you euthanise a Weighted Companion Cube in an incinerator. Valve shipped it inside The Orange Box in October 2007, and reviewers both praised and dinged it for being short: one small campaign, wholly owned.

Most of Final Fantasy VII is a pursuit. The party chases him across a 3D world map, blocked by mountains and water until the vehicles arrive, and the Nibelheim flashback rewrites the game's own past around him. Square released it in Japan on 31 January 1997. Nintendo does sell him, as a Smash Bros. Ultimate fighter dated 22 December 2020, but that is somebody else's product; Wikipedia keeps the only page devoted to Sephiroth himself.

Halfway through Final Fantasy VI he shoves the statues of the Warring Triad out of alignment, reshapes the planet and brings on the entire second act, which is played inside the wreckage. Square Enix reissues the game and has never sold the clown, so Wikipedia holds the only entry with his name on it. Villains rarely get to redraw the map they are fought on, and Yoshitaka Amano designed him for Square's 1994 release.

There are not really levels in Resident Evil 3, just a thing that decides where you are allowed to be. He stalks Jill across areas for the length of the game, so Raccoon City becomes a route rather than a map; he says STARS, then carries a rocket launcher. Capcom rebuilt him in 2020, and one Wikipedia article is the only place both versions are filed as one character. Shinji Mikami and Kazuhiro Aoyama conceived him in 1999.

Nobody else here talks this much. He is on the radio all campaign, taunting you between missions, and the mission structure of Borderlands 2 is his war. Gearbox and 2K shipped the game in North America on 18 September 2012 and have never shipped Jack, which leaves Wikipedia as his only page. The design is lopsided on purpose, down to the mask of a face he wears over his own, and Anthony Burch wrote him for Dameon Clarke to voice.

Konami's version has a real name, Mathias Cronqvist, and a castle that works as his body: the gears in it turn only while he is alive. Kill him and the level stops, which is the cleanest statement of this whole scale. Hitoshi Akamatsu built Castlevania around him in 1986, borrowing a public-domain novel and making somebody else. Stoker's count belongs to nobody, this one belongs exclusively to Konami, and Wikipedia carries the page for it.

Four decades of Mario levels have ended at his door. Nintendo has put his name on a whole game and Jack Black in his mouth, and neither is a page about the character; only Wikipedia has that. In Bowser's Fury, out on 12 February 2021, he wakes at intervals, transforms parts of the island and drives you to the Giga Bell; the free-roaming area is built to be interrupted by him. Miyamoto created him in 1985.

The town in Silent Hill 2 is James Sunderland's head, and this is the part of it that carries out sentences. He turns up first in the apartment complex as an indestructible thing, and near the end there are two of him; James works out that Pyramid Head exists because he needed punishing. The Great Knife is yours to carry afterwards. Team Silent shipped it through Konami in 2001, and only Wikipedia has a page that is his.

Every Zelda dungeon is a step toward one address, and Breath of the Wild puts that address on screen from the first hour: Calamity Ganon as a serpentine cloud circling Hyrule Castle, in sight from most of the map. Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka set him up in 1986; the Gerudo form arrived with Ocarina of Time in 1998. Wikipedia files beast and Gerudo in one article, and that entry is the only record he has of his own.

A fall like his would normally be a cutscene. Warcraft III makes you play it: he is the human campaign's playable hero right up to the Culling of Stratholme, where he says that the entire city must be purged and relieves Uther of command. The four campaigns run in sequence, so there is no skipping him. He exists exclusively inside Blizzard products and has never been one, so Wikipedia holds his only page. Blizzard released it on 3 July 2002.

The map in Super Metroid is one long corridor pointed at her, and the game withholds her for hours. The destination, not the journey. Nintendo has never given her a title of her own, which leaves Wikipedia as the only record of the character. Then the fight turns over: a baby Metroid that imprinted on Samus drains her energy, hands it across and dies doing it. Gunpei Yokoi created her for the 1986 original and Yoshio Sakamoto designed her.

Captain of your squad in 1996, and the reason it dies. Shinji Mikami and Isao Ohishi built him as a betrayal you do not see coming, and Capcom escalated him until Resident Evil 5 has him seeding the Uroboros virus worldwide before Chris and Sheva kill him in a volcano. D. C. Douglas voiced most of it. What he holds is a series rather than a game, which the scale counts against him, and only Wikipedia catalogs him across it.

One boss, one room, and it reaches out of the machine. He reads your memory card to name games you have played, tells you to set the pad on the floor so he can move it, and the counter is the second controller port. Yoji Shinkawa drew him; Hideo Kojima built him for Metal Gear Solid in 1998. A single encounter is a small share of a game. Konami priced the games, never the boss, so only Wikipedia catalogs him.

Michael Mando improvised his audition, and Ubisoft rebuilt the character to look like him. Wikipedia calls him Far Cry 3's secondary antagonist and he dies at the midpoint; his definition of insanity monologue took Best Gaming Moment at the 2013 Golden Joystick Awards. A critic credits him with giving the series an iron-forged identity; a series is not a game. Ubisoft sold his name once, on 2021's Vaas: Insanity add-on, and only Wikipedia has a page about the man.