With the belligerent Kratos appearing on the PSP in God Of War: Ghost Of Sparta, we salute the greatest antiheroes in videogames…
They’re nasty, duplicitous and casually violent, and they cross moral boundaries so we don’t have to. Here’s a selection of our favourite videogame antiheroes…
Kratos – the God Of War series
Let’s deal with an obvious one first. Kratos, perhaps more than any other character in videogames, is the epitome of an antihero. Across a series of games on the PS2, PS3 and PSP, Kratos has vented his fury on a legion of gods and monsters.
Other than his love of violence and the occasional sexual encounter, we know relatively little of Kratos and his day-to-day habits. We’d like to see a God Of War sequel where he has a day off, and sits around at home screaming at Jeremy Kyle on the television. Or maybe standing in a queue at Asda quietly clenching and unclenching one fist, while holding a basket of groceries in the other. He’d still be virtually naked and covered in white and red war paint, obviously.
Eric – Skool Daze, Back To Skool
From the obvious to the obscure now, with a classic 1985 game for the ZX Spectrum. One of the earliest examples of the sandbox adventure genre (though the sandbox was quite shallow by today’s standards), Skool Daze and its sequel Back To Skool allowed you to do more-or-less whatever you wanted within its school setting.
As young tearaway Eric, the point of the game was to steal your report card from the school safe, but you could just as easily wander around causing mischief. You could stand up in the middle of assembly, write rude words on the blackboard, fire your catapults at teachers, or walk around hitting your classmates.
Eric may have been only a few pixels high, but he and the other cartoonishly-drawn characters of programmer David Reidy’s games were instantly identifiable, from Mr Withit, the trendy Geography teacher to Angelface, the school bully whose occasional outbreak of mumps could end Eric’s day at school at any moment. A classic game, and a classic character that could be seen as a progenitor to Jimmy Hopkins in Rockstar's similarly themed Canis Canem Edit (or Bully in the US).
Nico Bellic – Grand Theft Auto IV
For a mainstream videogame, Nico Bellic is a surprisingly well-drawn, three-dimensional character. An ex-soldier from an unspecified country in eastern Europe, Bellic suffered a rough childhood at the hands of an alcoholic father, and witnessed terrible atrocities in the Yugoslav wars.
It’s this richness of background detail that makes even Nico’s most unpleasant activities in Grand Theft Auto IV (which, to be fair, he's forced to carry out by the player) vaguely palatable, and he remains one of the series’ most sympathetic violent criminals.
Wario – Wario Land series, WarioWare series
A wicked foil to Super Mario’s sunny, can-do plumber, Wario was created as a new antagonist for Super Mario Land 2 by Hiroji Kiyotake, But despite his villain status, there’s something oddly charming about Wario’s sneering misanthropy and downright ugliness.
Perhaps this is why he’s been treated to so many spin-off games of his own – more, in fact, than Mario’s brother Luigi, who only has forgotten edutainment title Mario Is Missing and Luigi’s Mansion to his name – including the brilliant Wario Land and WarioWare series. He's a digital approximation of grumpy, jaded videogamers everywhere.
Max Payne – the Max Payne series
He may have been gloomy, introspective and terse, but then hard-boiled detective Max Payne had every right to be. Tortured by nightmares of his murdered wife an daughter, Payne seeks revenge against their killers while struggling with his own inner demons.
His actions as a vigilante, which involves killing apparently thousands of criminals in repeated John Woo-style encounters, are punctuated by Payne’s rambling, sometimes poetic inner dialogue, and he surely represents one of the most lonely, fatalistic antiheroes anywhere in the medium.
Agent 47 – the Hitman series
There are few vocations more antisocial than the professional killer, and the Hitman series’ Agent 47 was designed in a lab to be the most efficient murder-on-demand operator in existence.
Stealthy, silent and introverted, there’s nevertheless something oddly magnetic about Agent 47. Maybe it’s due to the occasional flashes of humanity we see from him throughout the series – the laboratory rabbit he adopted as a child, his habit of confessing his sins to Father Vittorio – that makes up for the fact that he could quite conceivably snap your neck like a breadstick.
Duke Nukem – the Duke Nukem series
To get a true impression of just what kind of an antihero Duke Nukem is, try to imagine taking him down your local pub. Within five minutes, he’d have made politically incorrect comments to the bar staff, written his name on the wall in bullets, sung a deafening rendition of Born To Be Wild while showering you with booze, and shown everyone the tattoo on his backside.
In short, Duke Nukem is a complete idiot, an unholy mixture of the worst character traits of straight-to-video movie heroes. But then, that’s perhaps what makes the games in which he stars so much fun – you wouldn’t want to have to sit next to him in a pub, but he’s an entertaining character to play in a shooter. He brashly says the unsayable, and does the unthinkable, while at the same time saving the planet from aliens. He's versatile, if nothing else.
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