20 Video Game Villains You Couldn’t Wait To Kill

20. Dane Vogel - Saints Row 2 (2008)

Released the same year as GTA IV, Saints Row 2 gave players the opportunity to explore a sandbox world in which realistic physics and graphics weren’t nearly as important as OTT weaponry, high speed crashes and blowing the ever-loving heck out of everything. And you’d be lying if you said you didn’t take time off from the mean streets of Liberty City to visit Stilwater and swing a giant dildo.

The second and best instalment in the Saints series returns us to reform the 3rd Street Saints gang and take back the territories controlled by the comically two-dimensional Brotherhood, Sons of Samedi and Ronin. And while there are plenty of larger-than-life figures to latch onto within the ranks of the gangs, the one man we all set our sights on is Dane Vogel, CEO of Ultor, which has been gutting and gentrifying Stilwater for some time.

Vogel is the puppeteer pulling the gangs’ strings throughout, driving down property prices, buying up land and enforcing his agenda with a large private security force. He is the ultimate corporate, opportunistic, capitalist grub and is a good representation of something all too real in a game that prides itself on unbelievability. So it’s a sweet, cathartic release when we finally have him begging and pleading, and get to shoot him through the mouth and put him out the window of his own tower.