The Most Evil Things We Have Done In Video Games

Video games are the ultimate fantasy, letting you become someone you could never be in the real world. This means a super-powerful hero or an athlete some of the time, but it can also mean a genocidal maniac who is exempt from the law. Video games have let us do some truly evil things over the years, and some of them are unforgivable. These are the evil things we’ve all done in video games.

Super Mario 64 – Throw Penguin Off Mountain

Don’t even lie. Don’t act like you’re better than the rest of us. At some point, everyone who has played Super Mario 64 has found the lost baby penguin and, instead of taking the penguin back to its mother like you’re supposed to, has chucked it off the side of the snowy mountain to its doom. Why did we do this? To hear the sound a penguin makes when it explodes? To prove to the Mushroom Kingdom that we were in control? Or was it just to feel that rush that can only be experienced by taking another life? Perhaps it was all of these things.

Super Mario World – Letting Yoshi Fall To His Death

It’s easy to forget that “Yoshi” isn’t really a sole character, but rather a group of adorable dinosaur creatures. To Mario, however, they’re disposable. If you need proof, consider what we all did in Super Mario World: leapt off Yoshi’s back in order to make a difficult jump, sacrificing him in the process. There were other Yoshis who would help us, unaware of what we had done to their fallen brothers–like a deer innocently staring down the barrel of a hunting rifle moments before its demise. Mario certainly didn’t mind, maintaining his same cheery demeanor as he closed in on Bowser. But in the process, Mario–and we–became the villain.

Skyrim – Murder Everyone

The appeal of an open-world RPG is that you can effectively do anything–making the character in the game as close to yourself as you wish. We’re not sure what it says about humanity that so many of us have used that freedom for evil. Sure, you can pickpocket and steal in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but you can also be a homicidal monster who destroys everyone in their path. If you’re evil, you’ll feel little remorse for killing a whole bunch of random people, regardless of who they are or what they did, using a new weapon or spell. Of course, doing so can make the game more difficult, depending on who you antagonize, but being evil isn’t always easy!

Halo – Shoot The Funny Marines

The marines you team up with in the Halo games, especially the first few games, were very helpful with clearing out Covenant squads and manning the guns on top of various vehicles. It’s tragic, of course, that we still have to shoot them in the face. But shoot them we must, as Master Chief works best when he’s alone. Really, though, the Halo marines are mostly fun to slaughter because they say funny things in response. Comedian David Cross even voiced one, offering little quips each time he was shot. And unlike some of the evil acts in video games, this one comes with consequences, as the marines will eventually turn on the Chief and send him on the Great Journey ahead of time.

GTA V – Run Over Innocent People

Several different Grand Theft Auto games could be on this list, of course, but none give you a larger world in which to spread evil than Grand Theft Auto V. The most successful entertainment product of all time is also a breeding ground for pure evil. Get in any vehicle and just start driving on the sidewalk to murder dozens, if not hundreds, of random people. They had families. They had hopes and dreams. And now, they have their blood spilling all over the streets of Los Santos. Like in Halo, there is a consequence for indiscriminate killing, as the police will hunt you down with everything from cruisers to helicopters, but it’s really not that difficult to escape and go on another killing spree.

Watch Dogs 2 – Not Petting The Dogs

We have a little confession to make on this particular entry: We don’t actually qualify for it. We aren’t truly evil enough to avoid petting the dogs in Watch Dogs 2. In fact, we would pet every single dog we could find, arguably extending the game’s total runtime by three or four times what it should have been. But there are some truly heinous, sadistic people out there who choose to ignore the dogs, despite their heads being so perfectly cuddly and soft. They ignore them, despite their faces being the cutest thing you’ve ever seen. We can live with accidentally shooting someone while completing a mission, but we’d lose sleep over not petting a dog.

Tamagotchi – Letting It Starve

There is a fine line between negligence and evil, and the Tamagotchi helped us all step over it at one point or another. As part of the virtual pet trend of the ’90s and early 2000s, this little handheld device found its way into many pockets. Taking care of a pet seems like a fun activity to do at first, but then you realize that it’s almost impossible to keep the thing alive and still maintain any sort of life outside of it. So, after promising to be nice to the creature for a whole two hours, we all eventually took a nap. And in that time, this little pathetic digital baby managed to starve to death. It was going to happen sooner or later.

Crusader Kings 3 – Ordering The Assassination Of A Child

Look… the kid was in our way

Crusader Kings 3 is essentially the most elaborate choose-your-own-adventure story you could imagine, letting you rule a nation and grow it into a vast empire while micromanaging everything from taxation and defenses to your own family’s marriages. But alongside the above-board stuff, you can also be an outright monster. Take, for example, your power to order assassinations of foreign leaders–even if they’re literal infants. Doing so creates a “secret” that can later be exposed and put your political career in jeopardy, but there’s also a good chance you can simply have a baby murdered and get away with it.

The Sims – Removing The Ladder From The Pool While Someone Is Swimming

The Sims gives you almost total control over the lives of your virtual characters, and this includes the ability to kill them in creative ways. One of the classic techniques we’ve pretty much all done is the “disappearing ladder.” After one of your sims goes into the pool for a relaxing swim, you enter the editor and remove the pool’s ladder. This makes them unable to ever leave, resulting in them eventually dying–perhaps after pooping their pants. Sure, it’s a dastardly thing to do, but it’s also extremely satisfying if you really hated how that person was treating everyone else in the house.

Zelda – Attacking The Chickens

Play Zelda for even an hour or two and you’ll know you are not supposed to attack the chickens. Unlike most of the other evil deeds on our list, this one actually comes with dire consequences. Sure, you can slash your sword out at the chickens roaming in the Zelda games’ peaceful towns, but do it too much and you’ll face the wrath of a massive poultry swarm. It’s unclear exactly why Nintendo decided this was the evil deed that could not go unpunished, but that punishment is universal. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can actually trick enemies into hitting the chickens, using your unwitting new allies as a personal murder squad.

Super Smash Bros – Edgehogging

An evil practice that is nonetheless widely used by professional players, edgehogging in Super Smash Bros. (especially in Melee) isn’t in the spirit of Nintendo’s world-colliding fighter. After knocking an enemy off the edge of a stage, players discovered they could grab onto the ledge and prevent an opponent from doing the same when they attempted to recover. This was eventually removed from the series, forcing players to actually jump and attack enemies trying to recover. Still, with Melee remaining a popular choice for competitive players, it’s something they pretty much all have to deal with.

GoldenEye 64 – Playing As Oddjob

Back in the ’90s, no one really cared that much if there was a massively unbalanced character in a multiplayer game. After all, it wasn’t like you had to worry about someone exploiting it in an online match. However, the fact remains that playing as Oddjob in GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was downright despicable. Because the character was so short and the N64 controller didn’t allow for quick aim adjustment, whoever played as Oddjob could easily kill their enemies. If you won as Oddjob, you’d ruin everyone’s day and couldn’t even really claim the glory for yourself. It’s not just us saying that, either, but the game’s own designers.

Giving Your Guest The Cheap Controller

Image credit: Jason Fanelli

Is it evil, or is it simply an established rule? Most video game systems released after the early ’90s only came with one controller by default, and especially for younger players, the idea of paying $50 or $60 for another one seemed daunting. There were–and are–plenty of third-party alternatives available for far less money, however, and many of these cheap controllers became the go-to for a guest. Back before the Mad Catz brand was revived as a high-quality accessory line, it was synonymous with “bad wired controllers,” and these are what those guests would be given before a round of Madden or Halo. They never stood a chance, with those squeaky plastic triggers and buttons acting like nails on a chalkboard as they lost to a player with a genuine first-party controller.

Screen-Looking

Where are you looking? At my screen?!

A capital gaming offense (and by that we mean it deserves a light punch to the arm), screen-looking has been a cardinal sin for as long as split-screen games have existed. Whether it be a sports game, a shooter, or even a racing game, looking at your opponent’s screen gives you an unfair advantage that can lead to cheap kills and abrupt quitting. Some have even taken drastic measures to eliminate it, such as putting up curtains in LAN party rooms or taping cardboard dividers on the TV itself. Online gaming has certainly helped reduce screen-looking’s impact, but it’s something none of us have truly forgotten.

RollerCoaster Tycoon – Capturing Your Guests And Charging For The Bathroom

RollerCoaster Tycoon 2

RollerCoaster Tycoon allows you to do lots of evil things, such as drowning guests you don’t like or purposely designing a deathtrap ride so an entire middle school’s student body explodes in a fiery wreck. But even those aren’t the worst things you can do in the game. No, we’re talking about building a fence with no doors around a group of guests, placing a bathroom in the middle of it, and charging them several dollars every time they want to use it. What choice do they have? If a gorilla happens to get loose while they’re waiting in line to poop, it just makes it more exciting. Yes, this is an amusement park, but the amusement is not for the guests.

Ganking Beginners In MMOs

World of Warcraft

If you’ve ever wanted to make someone quit playing a game they just started, you’re a jerk, and you’ve probably done this. MMO games are typically split into distinct zones, with the “starter” areas containing low-level quests so players can get used to the game mechanics and story. If you’re a monster, you’ll take a high-level character into these areas and trick the newcomers into fighting you. In a game like World of Warcraft, players from one faction who sneak into the enemy faction’s city need to get attacked before they’re able to attack other players, but it’s not that hard to make this happen. What follows is often a complete slaughter of an entire city, and what have you gained from it?