10 Most Memorable Video Game Bosses Of All Time
The kind of evil that sticks with you.
By and large, villains tend to be more interesting than their heroic opposition. The good guys, when you get right down to it, all have the same basic goal: Stop the bad guy from doing whatever bad guy thing they're up to. There's not a lot of room for individuality.
The bad guys, though, are driving the story. And so developers can make them as outlandish and idiosyncratic as they want.
So long as the villain is unique and climactic - and makes the bare minimum of sense - then we gamers will get invested. Because even a memorably bad video game villain is better than one you'll forget half an hour after you finish the final level.
We have no room for generic baddies with boring AI. We want someone special, who either terrifies us, gives us the giggles or just generally excites, one way or the other. And these guys achieved that in spades...
10. Dr. Wily (Mega Man)
Is there a more classic example of an evil villain in pop culture than the mad scientist? What makes this evil archetype so compelling is that, regardless of how much chaos and destruction they're ultimately responsible for, their main objective is to create something.
They have an unending thirst for knowledge and a desire to invent. These aren't universally evil ideas, but ones that always seem to find their way into someone's plan of world domination.
The unfortunate thing about Dr. Wily is that he started out trying to do good for mankind, until he felt like the world was ignoring those contributions. So he did what any good, nefarious genius would do in that scenario: Turn all of his robots evil and use them to dominate the world.
But hey, at least the guy knows how to do the whole mad scientist thing with some flair. He controls his army of unique and increasingly skilled robots from a skull-shaped castle, gets around using flying cars that he built from scratch, and styles his hair to look like the wings of a majestic bird with a massive bald spot.
Dr. Wily's legacy is pretty fantastic, even if it is about 99 percent evil.