9 Badass Female Game Heroes That Changed Everything

4. Samus Aran (Metroid)

One of the most important moments in gender portrayals within gaming history belongs to Samus, although it was always something of a double-edged sword in the way it was handled. Featuring five different endings in the original game, you had to finish the entire thing in under different amounts of hours to unlock the true identity of Samus, as up until that final shot, every single player thought they were playing as a burly space marine. The positive side of things is that on the game's third ending, only her space helmet is removed to reveal a big head of hair, which being you were not playing as Jon Bon Jovi meant all along you'd actually been playing as... a girl! Score one for female gamers, right? Wrong. Well, half wrong.

Another two of the games endings end up showing Samus in more revealing clothing, with the most hilarious in retrospect being a little pixellated bikini version that appears if you can finish the game in under an hour. Apparently in development the switch to Samus being a female was something of an afterthought, but even so this remains one of the biggest bait n' switches in gaming, for (mostly) the best reasons.