You Think Your Life Sucks? 10 Game Characters Whove Had It Real Bad

Game Characters Who've Had It Hard

Heroes are made, not born, as they say. In video games this is just as true, but there aren’t all that many characters with tragic backstories behind them to fuel their quests besides, maybe, losing their damseled princess (I’m looking at you, Mario).

True hardship involves an little complexity, or at least a bit of backstory, so here’s a list of 10 characters that have turned from tragic characters to heroes (or anti-heroes) in no particular order.

#10 Isaac Clarke

The protagonist of horror series Dead Space, Isaac is just a spaceship engineer in a rather bleak universe full of broken stuff and eventually zombies with huge claws that only die when you delimb them. It’s not his job, nor would he have anything to do with any alien (spoilers: man-made) weird artifacts that make you go crazy.

He’s only there to see if his girlfriend is alright. It’s a tragedy, so you know how this one ends, folks.

#9 Max Payne

It didn’t take long for Max Payne to go from loving husband and father to homicidal maniac. All it took was a swift Mentalist-like blow to the family. Max may have flare and style when he’s throwing his body around like a ragdoll for the pure purpose of killing people around corners and slowing time down, but all of that is fueled by pure desire for revenge, and after that has been fed, probably ennui.

Come the third game, Payne has become nothing more than a vessel for violence fueled by pain (no pun intended… ok, maybe a little) and principles. Also booze.

#8 Adam Jensen

The unwilling hero of Deus Ex Revolutions, Adam “I never asked for this” Jensen isn’t all that tragic to begin with, but if you’d start your story the way that Robocop begun his, you wouldn’t be that happy either. After having his body broken by a big augmented guy, Jensen is forced to get augmentations of his own. These aren’t easy to get used to though - you’re supposed to constantly take drugs to get the body to accept them, and they aren’t exactly comfy, plus I doubt you have an easy solution when you have a bad itch.

Eventually Adam accepts his augmentations or doesn’t, depending on your choices, but there ya go.

#7 Alex Mercer

An uncharacteristic addition to this list, Alex being a bit of an anti-hero, he gets to be on this list because of how he was unwittingly infected with the experimental virus. Ok, that may be a lie. He finds out over the course of the game that he accidentally infected himself after getting himself gunned down by the army he was working for, but there ya go. Mercer’s story isn’t the tragic one in this case as much as the backstory of the world is, what with the Blacklight virus meant to target specific races and whatnot.

Still, I’d probably turn into a genocidal shapeshifting maniac if I were him too.

#6 Lee Everett

Mr. Everett wasn’t much else but a history teacher before the zombie apocalypse. Unfortunately he finds his wife sleeping with a state senator. In a fit of rage, he kills him, getting him convicted of murder. There’s the wife out of the window. In addition, he eventually gets to his family business and finds his (spoilers) family dead or reanimated into zombies. Many of his friends die. It’s all a tragic roller coaster for Lee.

At least he’s got Clementine to give him something to fight for.

#5 Tiny Tina

Another uncharacteristic addition to the list, Tiny Tina of Borderlands 2 fame first comes across as a crazy little girl. Eventually it’s rather clear that there’s a lot more to her than meets the eye, first being real mental problems brought about by the brutal loss of her parents, and later of her friends. The game explores these coloured grey areas of her life in a funny tactful way, but the subtext is still there, all the more present in the expansion Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep. 

It works in a way that makes her quirky and fun, but also complex. Kudos to Anthony Burch and his sister Ashly for bringing this character into reality.

#4 Jim Raynor

Jim may not be as tragic as his zergy girlfriend’s story, but considering the fact that he was a freedom fighter who lost said girlfriend not once but twice to the zergy part, there’s a little bit of that in there. In addition, Raynor’s entire homeworld is eaten up by the Zerg before being exploded by the Protoss. A lot of his friends die and I can’t think of his quest seeming like anything but futile.

We’ll have to see what eventually becomes of him, but hey, his girlfriend is now zerg, so there’s that.

#3 Captain Price

It’s rare to look at military badasses with pity, but Captain Price should be the one deserving of respect for taking his vengeance by truly any means necessary. He’s not young, he’s been through a lot, he’s visited the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. lands and came out alive, carrying his leftenant out of the danger they were in (damn hard mission that was), been shot and left for dead, lived in a gulag for several years, seen most of his former comrades die - if Price was any other man, he’d have been nothing but a shell at this point. 

But Captain Price has an epic beard. Also a cigar. It keeps him going.

#2 Illidan

You may not be prepared to truly try to understand Illidan, but there’s a reason for which he got to become the bad-ass that he is. See, he was one of two brothers, and they were both quite awesome, but his brother got the girl he loved. He took it alright, considering, but he liked power, and as we know from some childhood stories, power corrupts. Even more so in the world of Warcraft. So he became the reason the Sundering happened. And then was imprisoned for 10 000 years after trying to fix it. His brother’s girlfriend breaks him out and he helps, but then makes another blunder that he tries to fix by absorbing demonic power. 

He’s the prototypical example of the saying that “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” but in his case, it was the Burning Hells that got him in the end (aside of the raid that downed him on top of the Black Temple).

#1 Sam Fisher

Last, but certainly not least, Sam Fisher of Splinter Cell fame is another military badass with a history of getting his toes snubbed. His parents died as a child. His marriage didn’t last long and his ex-wife died of cancer. His daughter was supposedly killed by a “drunk driver”. Fisher was driven to the brink because of this, and he had nothing left after that. He’s also had his share of traumatic experiences in his life. He was forced to hide under dead bodies in order to avoid being killed in the middle of an operation. Two of his comrades were killed in Iraq and he had to be rescued from where he was being tortured by his remaining squadmate.

His voice is going to be a mainstay though. And whatever else may happen, his daughter is still there to base him.