8. Gordon Freeman
All too often these days the hero of a gaming series will be a meat headed soldier with a bag of potatoes for a body and a gruff undefinable voice. Youll have seen these guys in such action fodder as Gears of War and Ive got no idea who could possibly feel anything that relates to an emotional bond to these walking lumps of meat. In the Half Life series you play as Gordon Freeman a mute speccy scientist with a David Brent goatee, whose biggest achievement in life has been to take on interdimensional beings with a crowbar. Gordon has a PhD in Theoretical Physics and his childhood heroes were Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Its clear that Gordon Freeman is perhaps gamings geekiest hero and Half Life is the only first person shooter series in which you take control of someone akin to a lowly science teacher with a secret love for carnage and thats awesome.