10 Best Star Wars Villains Who Debuted In Video Games
The best Star Wars video game villains, from Darth Revan to Jedi: Fallen Order's Second Sister...
There's a strong argument to be made for Star Wars having the greatest rogues gallery in all of fiction.
Darth Vader is a cultural touchstone, Palpatine is an ever-cackling, Machiavellian delight, and Darth Maul became instantly iconic off the back of a dramatic entrance and a lightsaber fight in The Phantom Menace. It's not just the movies that gave us great bad guys either. Admiral Thrawn, the cerulean-skinned strategist from the Expanded Universe, was so popular that Lucasfilm was compelled to bring him into the new canon.
And, of course, the video games have done their part to prop up Star Wars' status as the world's greatest hive of scum and villainy.
From physical powerhouses to masterful manipulators, this list will take a look at the greatest, most memorable antagonists from the past 30-plus years of Star Wars video games. And to begin our descent into the dark side, let's take a look at the metal-mouthed Sith Lord who graced the cover of arguably the greatest Star Wars game ever made...
10. Darth Malak - Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic
If nothing else, Darth Malak proves the importance of a strong visual hook when it comes to good villain design.
There's a cutscene in 2003's Knights of the Old Republic - the game where Malak makes his villainous debut - where we see what the follically-challenged Sith Lord looked like before he had his cybernetic collar attached, and the difference is striking.
Without the metal mouthplate, Malak looks like one of the generic goons you spend the game much of the game slicing through. With his jaw replaced by a cybernetic mouthpiece however, the Sith Lord looks far more intimidating - and the reveal of what his face looks like without the plating is still an effective slice of body horror 20 years later, original Xbox graphics be damned.
And while Malak may be overshadowed by Knights of the Old Republic's other Darth (who - spoiler alert - will be making an appearance later in this list), he's an effective antagonist in his own right. His very first act is to destroy an innocent planet by carpet bombing it from orbit, and his last words ("and in the end, as the darkness takes me...I am nothing") are a perfectly pathos-ridden crescendo to his relationship with the main character.