This one was a toss-up between Valve's maniacal testing robot, GLaDOS, and their friendly if not slightly insane AI, Wheatley (played incredibly by Stephen Merchant), but when it boils down to it there can only be one titan of the Portal series, and that's Ellen McLain. GLaDOS has a well-deserved spot on the podium of gaming's most iconic villains, with her instantly identifiable robotic voice providing both laughs and scares, in perhaps the most quotable gaming series of all time. The dialogue really is something to behold, but its delivery would be inappropriately muted coming from anyone but McLain, whose robotic cackling is a spectacle to behold once the game boots up. https://youtu.be/aXYuL4yo0tM?t=238 She's got an iconic voice for an equally iconic series, so its only natural that her performance was especially brilliant.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
