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15 Video Game Heroes Who Were Actually Terrible People

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Protagonist in name only.

Nazarii Verbitskiy

Gaming - October 17th 2026, 03:00 GMT+2

Corvo Attano — 15. Corvo Attano (2012)
A royal bodyguard framed for murder turns into whatever the player wants him to be. Dishonored lets Corvo Attano clear his name through stealth or through rivers of blood, and most people chose blood. Guards die in gruesome supernatural ways for the crime of doing their job. The game calls it chaos for a reason. | © Bethesda Softworks

Captain Martin Walker — 14. Captain Martin Walker (2012)
Three soldiers walk into Dubai looking for survivors and leave behind a pile of bodies. Captain Martin Walker convinces himself every terrible call in Spec Ops: The Line was necessary, including the white phosphorus strike on a crowd he never properly identified. The game keeps insisting he's the hero while showing you exactly why he isn't. Few protagonists have ever been this openly indicted by their own story. | © 2K Games

Kain — 13. Kain (1996)
Betrayal turns Kain into a vampire, and vampirism turns him into something worse. Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen frames his revenge quest as justice, but every step forward costs someone else their life, their soul, or both. He gets the chance to save his world and chooses his own ascension instead. Centuries of sequels later, he still picks himself first. | © Crystal Dynamics

Ellie Williams The Last of Us cropped processed by imagy — 12. Ellie Williams (2020)
Five years after the first game, Ellie Williams hunts down a woman and does not stop at just her. The Last of Us Part II follows that revenge mission through torture, dead dogs, and a slow unraveling of everyone around her. She loses her girlfriend, her fingers, and most of her humanity chasing a closure she never actually gets. The credits roll and nothing she did fixed anything. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Booker De Witt — 11. Booker DeWitt (2013)
Debt gets Booker DeWitt into Columbia, and debt is the reason none of what follows is clean. BioShock Infinite reveals he sold his own daughter to pay off gambling losses, which kicks off the entire plot he spends the game trying to undo. He burns through soldiers and civilians alike looking for forgiveness he arguably doesn't deserve. Redemption stories work better when the guy earns it first. | © 2K Games

Michael De Santa — 10. Michael De Santa (2013)
Nobody in Grand Theft Auto V is clean, but Michael De Santa sells himself as the one with a conscience. He faked his own death, lied to his family for years, and sold out old partners the second it kept him breathing. Franklin and Trevor both get burned by him before the story wraps up. A guy who calls himself retired after a lifetime of robbery and murder isn't reforming, he's just hiding better. | © Rockstar Games

Arthur Morgan — 9. Arthur Morgan (2018)
Arthur Morgan spends most of Red Dead Redemption 2 collecting debts for Dutch van der Linde with a gun in hand. People who can't pay get beaten, robbed, or worse, and Arthur does it without much argument for most of the game. The late push toward decency doesn't erase a résumé full of burned homesteads and bodies. Dying slow doesn't buy back what came before it. | © Rockstar Games

Handsome Jack — 8. Handsome Jack — Pre-Sequel version (2014)
Picture a man who thinks mass murder counts as quality control. That's Handsome Jack in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, years before he becomes the franchise's favorite villain. He wipes out colonists, experiments on innocent people, and genuinely believes every corpse makes Elpis a better place. The game hands players his origin story like it's tragic, but the guy was already rotten before the mask came off. | © 2K Games

Wander — 7. Wander (2005)
Sixteen corpses in, and the guardians Wander hunts never did anything to him. Shadow of the Colossus frames every kill as romantic sacrifice, a man destroying ancient life to revive someone he loves. Each colossus falls slower and sadder than the last, and Wander keeps swinging anyway. Love is a weak excuse when the body count hits double digits. | © Sony Computer Entertainment

Niko Bellic — 6. Niko Bellic (2008)
Revenge gets expensive fast in Grand Theft Auto IV, and Niko Bellic never stops paying with other people's lives. He came to Liberty City claiming he wanted peace, then spent the whole game hunting down the men who wronged him in the war. Bodies pile up in cabs, warehouses, and quiet apartments that have nothing to do with his war crimes back home. Closure never actually arrives, just more funerals. | © Rockstar Games

James Sunderland — 5. James Sunderland (2001)
A pale, soft spoken widower is the last person you'd expect to be a killer, which is exactly the point of Silent Hill 2. James Sunderland comes to town looking for his dead wife and gets a slow reveal instead, one that strips away his own excuses. The monsters chasing him are shaped by his guilt, built from an act he spends the whole game refusing to say out loud. Mary didn't die of her illness. He ended it himself, then buried the memory somewhere the fog couldn't reach. | © Konami

Alex Mercer — 4. Alex Mercer (2009)
Manhattan turns into a quarantine zone within days, and Alex Mercer is the reason why. Prototype hands players a shapeshifting killer who caused the outbreak himself, then frames his rampage through the city as payback. He consumes people to absorb their memories, tearing through soldiers and civilians with the same indifference. Activision marketed him as an antihero, but there's no hero math that makes patient zero sympathetic. | © Activision

Joel Miller — 3. Joel Miller (2013)
The ending of The Last of Us still splits rooms, and it should. Joel Miller storms a hospital full of surgeons trying to synthesize a cure from Ellie, then kills most of them to stop the procedure. He lies to her afterward, flat out, taking away any say she had in her own sacrifice. Naughty Dog built an entire sequel out of the fallout from that one choice, because somebody was always going to come looking for payback. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment

Trevor Philips — 2. Trevor Philips (2013)
Somebody in Los Santos has to be the worst option available, and Grand Theft Auto V hands that title to Trevor Philips without hesitation. He tortures a man for information he could've gotten in thirty seconds, just because he enjoys watching the process. Random pedestrians get beaten over nothing, friends get betrayed over less, and the game never dresses any of it up as justified. Rockstar built the other two leads with some kind of moral floor. Trevor doesn't have one. | © Rockstar Games

Kratos — 1. Kratos (2005)
Start with the body count and work backward. Kratos opens God of War already responsible for the deaths of his own wife and daughter, tricked into it by Ares, and spends the rest of the series taking that rage out on everyone above him. He kills Zeus, guts Poseidon, and levels entire temples of worshippers who never touched him. Sony built a franchise on his vengeance before softening him decades later as a father. The original games never once let him off the hook. | © Sony Interactive Entertainment

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Heroic framing can hide a lot, and some of gaming’s most celebrated leads are, on closer inspection, selfish, reckless, or outright monstrous. Here are 15 video game heroes who were actually terrible people.

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Heroic framing can hide a lot, and some of gaming’s most celebrated leads are, on closer inspection, selfish, reckless, or outright monstrous. Here are 15 video game heroes who were actually terrible people.