Now that the rumors of a new Grand Theft Auto game have been confirmed, we’ve been thinking a lot about how hard it is to find heroes. Back in the day, the protagonists of video games were morally upright plumbers or voracious yellow circles. As the medium evolved, we got to see player characters with dark sides. But sometimes developers go too far in trying to make their heroes funny, tense, or morally complex, and the end result is a protagonist that is absolute torture to master. Here’s our Hall of Shame of the most unlikely characters to ever feel our joysticks.
Anthony Williams
Social satire is a very tricky video game genre to play in, and studios screw it up more often than not. One of the most egregious examples is American McGee’s 2006 Bad Day LA, where you play as homeless Angeleno Anthony Williams. Anthony, a former cop, has had a hard time dealing with countless disasters, but none are as terrible as the game’s script. Anthony spews horrible one-liners throughout the experience, and the voice acting is equally clumsy. Anthony’s awfulness is somewhat mediated by the fact that everyone else in the game is almost as stereotypical and evil, but it’s not enough to save him from this list.
Trevor Phillips
The Grand Theft Auto series enjoys moral ambiguity, but even diehard fans struggled to empathize with Trevor in GTA V. The scuzzy drug smuggler and gun smuggler is callous and obscene even by franchise standards, debuting viciously stomping biker gang VP Johnny Klebitz to death. Whenever you have to play as Trevor in GTA V, it feels bad, like you have to shower afterward. He constantly flies off the handle and kills people, betrays his friends and generally leaves behind a trail of chaos. And while you might argue that’s kind of the point of the game, it doesn’t seem as much fun when this guy does it.
Lester the improbable
We know the concept of an “untrustworthy narrator” in fiction, but an “untrustworthy avatar” in a 16-bit platformer? It’s no mystery why the titular hero of Lester the Unlikely makes our list. His 1994 Super NES game, developed by Visual Concepts, placed the wimpy nerd on a deserted island in search of a way to escape, but the frustration the player felt is compounded by Lester’s refusal to act as a player character. behave. He walks at a snail’s pace, flees in terror when he sees an enemy for the first time, and sometimes doesn’t even follow the controller’s input. Eventually he finds his courage and becomes bearable, but most people will never get that far.
George Armstrong Custer
One of the most infamous Atari 2600 games of all time is Custer’s Revenge, a low-budget smut published by American Multiple Industries. In it, you slowly march the titular soldier across a dusty plain to have intercourse with a Native American woman tied to a pole, while dodging arrows raining down from above. While there have been several games that use non-consensual sex as a narrative tool, this was by far the crudest, especially when you mouth the blatant racism. And the real Custer wasn’t a prince either!
Lo Wang
The late 1990s were a fertile time for over-the-top edginess, and no first-person shooter protagonist (except Duke Nukem) epitomized the cringe like Shadow Warrior’s Lo Wang. Developed by Duke’s parents at 3D Realms, Shadow Warrior was technically advanced, introducing features such as climbable ladders and vehicles for the player to enter and control. But ninja protagonist Lo Wang, as reflected in his voice acting, was very off-putting. With every line of racist stereotype or sexist joke, it quickly becomes unbearable to play the game with the audio on. That’s a shame, because minus the main character, it’s pretty solid.
Alex
Indie games can push the boundaries in ways a big budget can’t, but the developer of 2019’s Yiik: A Post-Modern RPG may have gone a bit far with it. The game is the story of Alex Eggleston, who returns to his hometown in New Jersey after college and finds himself embroiled in a metaphysical tale of vanished humans and wandering souls. The thing about Alex is that he’s basically every stereotype of a smug, smug post-college hipster wrapped up in one playable character, and spending time with him and his endless monologues is a chore. It didn’t help that, in response to the game’s mediocre reviews, developer Andrew Allanson blamed players for not getting what he was trying to do.
Bubsy
The success of Sonic the Hedgehog in the 1990s opened the door to a plethora of mascot platformers. Most were just mediocre, but one sank much deeper than the rest. Accolade’s 1993 SNES title Bubsy: Clawed Encounters of the Furred Kind introduced an animal protagonist so unappealing that he became something of an avatar for the entire genre. An anthropomorphic bobcat, Bubsy combined unfunny one-liners with floating physics into one furry package you’ll want to send back to sender. By Bubsy 3D in 1996, the entire game industry had turned against him and he disappeared for 21 years, only to be picked up by a new studio in 2017 for a new game that was… pretty awful too.
Recommended by our editors
Kane & Lynch
These are two guys, but one can’t live without the other. IO Interactive’s shooter franchise (if you can call two games a franchise) stars Adam “Kane” Marcus and James Lynch, two ruthless reprobate who meet on their way to death row. It only goes downhill from there as they get busted by a crime syndicate and tasked with recovering stolen money. Along the way, they commit more than their fair share of atrocities, in part due to Lynch’s violent psychosis that causes him to hallucinate and slaughter hostages indiscriminately. The sequel, Dog Days, was described by the art director as an “anti-game” because of the uneasy feeling it made you feel.
Rufus
Adventure games often require you to control characters who make stupid decisions to keep the plot moving, but the protagonist of the Deponia series is so idiotic it’s painful. Rufus is a self-obsessed, ignorant, desperately horny misogynist who spends the series looking for a woman named ‘Goal’. Scene after scene bellows, he cringes and messes everything up, regardless of the good choices the player makes. And he talks so much – often in lines that seem poorly translated – that it’s exhausting. One of the most notoriously annoying protagonists in gaming history.
Richard Marcinko
The main character of the 2009 first-person shooter Rogue Warrior is based on a real person, but that makes it even worse. Richard Marcinko – as voiced by Mickey Rourke in the game – is arguably the edgy boi alive, as he infiltrates North Korea to take out a missile defense system. Marcinko constantly unleashes profanity-filled diatribes throughout his mission, obviously to give the boring game some sort of character. It won’t work and you’ll have to reach for the mute button in seconds. It’s probably best that you can complete Rogue Warrior in just over two hours, because more time spent with this guy would be worse than any prison camp.
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