Five Videogame Villains Who Charmed Us With Their Nefarious Ways

When asked, in a variety of venues all over the internet, to name the top videogame villains of all time, the consensus usually drifts in the same way. There are tons of these lists floating about in the ranty game-ether, and they always go the same way. There's generally a parade of Sarah Kerrigan, Psycho Mantis, and Mother Brain, sometimes with Bowser thrown into the mix, sometimes Diablo, but always culminating with the same guy: Sephiroth from FFVII is the most ultimate, horrible villain of all time. 

No, actually. He's not. I mean, Sephiroth is a total scary badass, don't get me wrong. In all fairness, a genetically modified dude with cat eyes and a god complex who wants to control the planet is fairly daunting, when one tries to ponder it as a reality. Clearly, if this individual existed in the real world, and this scenario came to pass, it would mean a lot of destruction, uncertainty, and death for innocent young flower sellers. 

It's just that Sephiroth is kind of obvious. And it's easy to have a villain that is so alien, so obviously different in nature from the role the player takes on as protagonist. Even if there are circumstantial, superficial similarities between Sephiroth and Cloud, it's still pretty much in the bag that our hero is going to do right or die trying. 

To me, a truly good villain is one that makes us question things. Perhaps, through snippets of illicitly told origin stories and flashbacks, we come to sympathize with the struggles of this person. Human curiosity is such that when we encounter actions on the part of others that do not make sense, we often try to understand the character's motivation. This is called empathy, and it's a fairly typical response. But a truly masterful villain has to be able to simultaneously attract and repel us, and to me, this takes a bit more than a luxurious silver man-mane and megalomania. Much the same way people put obvious B.S. on their OKCupid profiles about the things they most value in a potential partner, I decided to list the qualities that I think contribute to a really great villain. Of course, the mastery of a good villain is always in the nuance, so the doing of this exercise maybe detracts from my point a bit, but the elements that I came up with were ambiguity, sadism, insidiousness, manipulation, and betrayal. Fun! 

And so, I present to you the five villains that I find to be the most intense, most frightening, and the ones that unsettle me the most. I have no doubt that some of my choices will incite confusion (and possibly comment flaming, if you're so inclined. Whatever.), but I will do my best to state the case for each one. And so, without further ado, here are my top five videogame villains of all time. 

 

Pyramid Head- Silent Hill series 

I figured I would start with a fairly straightforward choice in Pyramid Head, aka Red Pyramid Thing, aka Triangle Head. Pyramid Head generally makes it on to most people's villain lists, though he's usually not in the top five. Reasons cited usually involve some combination of the following: His head is obscured by a scary, pointy thing. He carries a huge, rusty sword, except for the occasions when he is carrying a huge, rusty spear. This spear is probably some kind of demented phallic symbol, representative of one of Pyramid Head's apparent pastimes, raping the lesser monsters who populate the execrable alternate universe of Silent Hill. Delightful. 

All those reasons are pretty awful. Indeed, there are a variety of hypothetical scenarios I can come up with, many of which involve being stuck in a makeshift Confederate hospital during the American Civil War, each of which would be more pleasant than dealing with Pyramid Head's accessories and hobbies. However, these are only partially representative of why Mr. Head is on this list for me. Beyond the blatant monster-violation and penchant for headgear that appears to combine the worst stylistic elements of executioners and the KKK, there is something more subtly disquieting about Pyramid Head. He does not speak, but moans at times, indicating that perhaps he is in some kind of pain. He also appears to have the body of a man, and both of these details are suggestive of the idea that maybe Pyramid Head was once a man, as well. Following this line of thought, one is forced to wonder who he was before, how he got there, and what happened to him to make him this way (yes, I know one of the endings of Silent Hill: Homecoming kind of addresses this, but unless you've played that specific game and gotten that specific ending, it's still freaky and mysterious. And if you have, it's not mysterious anymore, but it's still freaky as hell). 

Many have suggested that, at least with the initial appearances of Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2, he is representative of some aspect of protagonist James Sunderland's psyche. Namely the part that feels guilty for that whole pillow smothering mess with his wife, because it's kind of difficult to tell whether it was a "You're terminally ill and I'm releasing you from your pain" mercy killing, or "Hurry up and die, you're acting like a psycho and I've not been laid in over three years" sort of killing, which is, you know, murder. These things are, of course, never really that clear cut. It was probably a bit of column A and a bit of column B, but if Pyramid Head is some entity manifested of James' guilt over Mary's death, then it kind of makes the rest of the game make sense. It explains the presence of Maria, who is pretty much sexy, not-ill version of Mary, the creepy faceless nurse-sluts, the fact that the letter disappears over the course of the game. Yup, it's all in James' head.  

Except, if it's all in his head, then why are there a bunch of sequels featuring the same horrifying monsters? Do ALL of the sequels featuring Pyramid Head happen in someone's head, nested in James' head, Inception-style? Because that seems far-fetched even to me, and I'm the one who's writing this nonsense to begin with.  

Clearly there is at least some objective existence of Pyramid Head and his grotesque pals. And in fact, there are even a couple of scenes in various episodes of the franchise that show more than one Pyramid Head, suggesting that he is not a unique specimen. But if that's the case, what is he? Was he a person? Is he a demon? Does his entire race dress like that? When one gets too deep into the analysis of it, one only ends up with a logic loop. It's best to just let it go, knowing Pyramid Head is a Möbius strip, and the world of Silent Hill is non-orientable. The various people who have worked on the game have been very careful not to endorse any particular alternate ending as canon. I, for one, hope this never changes. The need to explain everything and the overdrive into which it puts our brains when we try is precisely what makes the ambiguity of Pyramid Head so frightening. 

Page 1    Page 2    Page 3    Page 4    Page 5