10 Video Game Villains Created Out Of Spite
8. The Guardian - Ultima VII: The Black Gate
Significant portions of Ultima VII: The Black Gate's story were inspired by developer Origin Systems' years-long dispute with Electronic Arts.
Origin believed that EA's 1987 game Deathlord was a ripoff of the Ultima series, causing Origin to sever their affiliate ties with the company, while featuring numerous thinly-veiled ribs directed at EA throughout the Ultima series.
This included introducing a pirate character named "Pirt Snikwah" - EA founder Trip Hawkins' name spelled backwards - before Origin went in all guns blazing while developing Ultima VII.
The 1992 game's primary antagonist is The Guardian, a so-called "Destroyer of Worlds," a fitting moniker given that Origin's own company motto was "We Create Worlds." The game also directly referred to the Guardian as "vain, greedy, egocentric, and malevolent."
Furthermore, the three Generators that give the Guardian his power each resemble part of the classic EA logo - a cube, sphere, and tetrahedron respectively, and two initially friendly characters who are later revealed to be double agents are named Elizabeth and Abraham - as in, EA, get it?
Despite so blatantly voicing their displeasure about EA's powerful standing in the industry, a financially flailing Origin was acquired by EA a few months after Ultima VII's release, and later disbanded the studio altogether in 2004.
But EA's greatest act of erasure was perhaps the decision to take the Origin trademark and use it for their popular desktop app for almost an entire decade, before recently replacing it with EA Play.
As much as Origin threw some epic shade at EA here, in the end it was predictably the massive corporation that won the war.