8. Andrew Ryan (Bioshock)
Andrew Ryan's story is a pretty sad one - he created this magnificent city where he wanted people to live harmoniously without the outside world interfering at all. He invested billions of dollars into creating it and laboured day and night to ensure that any problems that arose were squashed. What does he get in the end? Beaten to death with a golf club by his own son after begging him to do it. Now I'm all for killing off the bad guy, but was Andrew Ryan really a bad guy in the end? Andrew wasn't exactly happy with the way things were run around the world after experiencing the Russian Revolution in 1917 and living in America during the '30s. He decided to build Rapture so that people could live in peace and harmony without any interactions from so called parasites that brought humanity to its knees. He built his city under water using his own resources and filled it with thousands of people, and for over 10 years Rapture was a success. If we leave the story there, Andrew seems like a great guy, though it only went downhill from there. By preventing contact with the outside world and letting people like Frank Fontaine exist, he ensured Rapture's decline: is that his fault, though? When you create a city built under water and away from the normal world, it's kind of a given that if you live there then there won't be any contact with the outside world. The whole point of Rapture was to develop a city that wasn't affected by the problems that ruined great nations like Russia and the USA. When Andrew invited people down to Rapture, it wasn't so that they could have a second home for the summer, it was so that they could escape normal society all together. Andrew Ryan may have ended up exactly like the people he was trying to escape, but was it really his fault? He wasn't fuelled by greed or a desire for power, he merely wanted to keep Rapture as the utopia it was and was forced to act the way he did by people like Frank Fontaine. To be killed by his own son with a gold club was somewhat of a low blow.