7 Video Game Heroes Who Made Better Villains

Ok so it's a hard sell to convince anyone that a man who willingly imprisoned his own daughter in order to use her power to awaken an ancient entity so that he could purge an entire planet before turning his sights to the rest of the universe is a good guy, but hell if I'm not up for a challenge because the story of Handsome Jack really does plot the journey of a man with misguided intentions leading to one of the greatest video game villains in history.

Thanks to Borderlands The Pre-Sequel which is set between Borderlands 1 and 2 (hence the amusingly strange naming) we get to see what lead Handsome Jack down his path of utter insanity. Here we're told that his wife was killed by accident during an encounter with a bandit who was looking to steal Jack's daughter Angel, wanting to do so because Angel was a Siren who could control technology. The accident saw the bandit killed when Angel took over a turret, but also indirectly killed her mother as well.

Jack's grief at losing his wife caused him to despise bandits, and upon looking at the planet of Pandora and how they were running wild, killing and robbing every decent folk left on the planet, decided to try and in his own words "civilize" things. Now if he'd stopped here or actively tried to use diplomacy or other means to better the planet, we might be talking about Jack as a hero of the ages, however, his method for dealing with the bandits was a little more....death ray-centric.

Using Angel's power to try and create a superweapon called the Eye Of Helios, Jack came very close to unleashing his anger at the planet, yet in a moment that would add Vault Hunters to his list of "gotta be killed" he was scarred for life and had his mind fractured forever, thus removing what misguided heroics he had and replacing him with the stone-cold !*$% we know, hated and actually kinda loved.