10 Video Game Heroes Who Made Everything Worse

9. Gordon Freeman - Half Life

Resident Evil village chris redfield
Valve

The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference, says the G-Man at the opening of Half-Life 2. And in the case of Gordon Freeman, he could not have been more right.

Through all the fights with the Combine, as well as the many alien hordes that came through that original portal in the first game, let's never forget that, technically speaking, this is all Freeman's fault.

A freak accident, a long game by the G Man, or perhaps simply cosmic punishment for man's hubris, caused Black Mesa's experiment at the start of Half-Life to go horribly awry. The Resonance Cascade, as it was dubbed, released a horde of alien monsters onto Earth. This was then followed by the invasion of The Combine, who decimated and conquered Earth in a matter of hours.

Whether that has anything to do with the original experiment, I'll leave for you to discover one way or another by actually playing this unfinished masterpiece of a series. But in terms of that humble original title, it's hard to deny that Freeman spends the entire game cleaning up his own mess.

Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?