Whether they are intent on world domination, murder or kidnapping a dishy princesses, many of the villains of video gaming have an unduly bad reputation. With the rapid progression of technology and the scope covered by the medium, video games are far more sophisticated than the days when the bad guys were a group of strangely colourful ghosts trying to stop Pacman from stealing their pac-dots. In the many years that gaming has been gathering credibility as an art form, we have seen numerous villains who have successfully stolen the show from their whiter-than-white nemeses. What separates a top-notch game developer from an average one nowadays is not how a game looks but rather how original, intricate and compelling the narrative is. In the contemporary gaming industry nearly every developer is capable of creating a nice looking game but not everyone can devise that memorable narrative which makes a video game great. A hallmark of a sophisticated narrative is moral ambiguity. As gamers, we dont want to be patronised and told exactly what judgements to make about the entire cast of a games characters. It is often the sign of a great game if you walk away thinking was the villain really that bad?. Sometimes a games baddie will win us over by showing flashes of humanity intermittently dotted through their evildoings, while on other occasions we might secretly root for a villain because the protagonist we control is so unappealing. Whatever the case may be, it is nice to be able to come to this alternative judgement regarding a villain gaming was full of black-and-white morality in its early days and the industry has come a long way since then. Here are the 10 gaming villains who we secretly wanted to overcome our lesser main-character and exact their evil wishes on the world:
Hailing from South East London, Sam Heard is an aspiring writer and recent graduate from the University of Warwick. Sam's favourite things include energy drinks, late nights spent watching the UFC with his girlfriend and annihilating his friends at FIFA.
