A few months back, an infograph on video game villains was making the rounds, depicting the nationality and setting of various combat video games. The infograph makes an interesting point: the identity of bad guys in video games is very much a reflection of real-world geopolitical developments. But the graph does not go quite far enough. It is obviously comprised of only a few hand selected games, and as it goes back only to 2001, it does not show the more general, historical trends in video game development regarding bad guy nationality.

For video games set on modern day earth, the question of who should play the villain is a very delicate issue for game developers. It is also a new one: prior to 2001, it was virtually unheard of for a video game to feature a real world nation as a villain, and it is only in the past four or five years that games featuring real nations and organizations fighting each other in hypothetical conflicts have become commonplace. Having real countries be video game bad guys has, however, been part of long arc in video game development, wherein video games have persistently pushed the boundaries regarding what is considered an “acceptable” story line. At the very beginning of video game development, realism of any sort was strongly frowned upon; even having bad guys that bled red blood was considered too shocking and graphic. Over time, however, games have incorporated more and more elements of realism into their game play, beginning with the least controversial elements and then working its way up to games based on hypothetical armed conflicts between existing nations.

For the most part, every First Person Shooter video game (FPS) is going to need a large horde of individuals to serve as the game’s targets. FPS games are, with a few notable exceptions, premised on playing a protagonist that runs around killing hundreds or thousands of assorted bad guys. However, unlike movies or books, video games are a more immersive experience, and the player doesn’t just observe the action; they must make a deliberate choice to aim a weapon and start killing the bad guys. This means makers of video games need to make their bad guy be someone the player actually wants to kill — and if you are going to set your video game in a realistic earth setting, here’s where your trouble starts. In the age of global marketing, who can you choose to have as your bad guy that all of your players, worldwide, will be comfortable with killing?

That is the other reason why, until very recently, bad guys in video games were never real-life modern day organizations. The good guys could be and often were real organizations — U.S. soldiers, NATO troops, etc. — but the organizations chosen to be bad guys were as generic and inoffensive as possible. Having FPS games set on Earth as we know it is thus a relatively new concept, only dating back to the halcyon early days of the 21st Century. Of course, as far that goes, video games are themselves a pretty new medium, and they don’t date back too far beyond that. However, featuring real political divisions in video games has only become a strong trend in the past few years, and is expanding at a heavy rate. Prior to 2000, the bad guys were almost exclusively aliens, monsters, and authoritarian corporate overloads, in the style of Doom and Quake. You just didn’t fight ‘real’ people — that was not a line games were ready to cross.

So how did it start? Breaking down video game villains by year, four distinct eras of video game villains appear: (1) Attack of the Mutants and Corporations, (2) Historical Reenactments, Generoterrorists, and Russians, (3) Modern Reenactments and Al-Qaeda Clones, and (4) Speculative Warfare.

1. First Wave: Attack of the Mutants and Corporations (circa 1990-1998)

In the early days, FPS bad guys came in one of two types: evil corporations that have taken over the world and evil mutants from outer space that have taken over the world. There was still some variety, of course — you also had bad guys that are evil corporations that use mutants to take over the world (e.g., Corporation (1990); CyberMage (1994)) and corporations that opened up wormholes allowing mutants from outer space to take over the world (Half-Life (1998)).

But by and large, the games avoided using real-life countries or real-life settings. You either had Duke Nukem 3D (1996) and its mutated, dystopic Los Angeles that has no relation to the Los Angeles of the real world, or Gunmetal (1998) and its world of corporations where states no longer exist. (And let’s not forget the amazing Chex Quest (1996), the first FPS I ever played. Being specifically designed for children, it solved the Bad Guy Dilemma by making the villains balls of slime from space that, instead of killing, you humanely relocated to another dimension.)

There is an exception to the rule that early games did not allow realism into their settings — the game that is frequently considered to be the first FPS of them all. In Wolfenstein 3D (1992), you play an American soldier trying to escape from a Nazi castle. Although the bad guys were a real political organization, as far as having an FPS based on real-life events goes, making the bad guys Nazis is pretty safe call. There is a general global consensus that Nazis really are bad guys, and portraying them as such is not politically offensive to any significant consumer market. Even so, the game was too radical for its time: it was banned in Germany due to portrayal of Nazi imagery, and in the U.S. much of the ‘realism’ was edited out:

All swastikas and Nazi references were removed. Adolf Hitler, a boss character in the game, had his moustache removed and was renamed “Staatmeister.” Blood was replaced with sweat to make the game seem less violent (for SNES copies distributed in Germany, the enemy blood was turned green). Attack dogs were also replaced by giant mutant rats.

So Wolfenstein proved that, in the early 1990s, the world was not ready for real people to be cast in the role of FPS villain. Five or six years after Wolfenstein first came out, however, video games would begin to slowly try out using realistic villains once again, often in combination with the aforementioned mutants in order to reduce the realism’s sting.

2. Second Wave: Historical Reenactments, Generoterrorists, and Russians (circa 1998-2003)

Towards the end of the 1990s, realism in video games slowly started to replace the corporate mutant overlords of yore. Its development took a cautious approach, however, and the bad guys were still safely removed from being identified with existing organizations. In order to make the bad guys real and yet inoffensive, they were either (1) historical reenactments, where the bad guys are real-life organizations that used to be bad guys, (2) generoterrorist organizations, or particularly terrorist groups that are culturally non-specific, or (3) Russians.

Historical reenactments: These games are typically based on real WWII campaigns and the Cold War era, but also commonly include games based on WWI or the Vietnam War. See, e.g., Medal of Honor (1999), Call of Duty (2003). In almost all of these games, the player is an American or Allied soldier, and the horde of bad guys is made up of a former U.S. military enemy. Like Wolfenstein 3D, the first major historical reenactment game, Metal of Honor,  cloaked itself from the worst  criticism by picking the World’s Most Noncontroversial Bad-Guys — Nazis. This is a common trend; combat video games other than FPSes have, over the years, often also followed the same pattern, and have likewise broken into video game realism by making their first military targets either Nazis or other Axis powers.

In the early years of the historical reenactment FPSes, games often involved scifi elements and the omnipresent mutants in order to make them more palatable, but by 2001, they were heavily focused on realism. Historical reenactments in general were a safe way for FPS games to explore more realistic themes, as they are based on disputes that are decades in the past and are generally no longer a source of political tension. Making a game based in history also helps inoculate developers from criticism because the games are based on objectively factual disputes between countries; there is thus little room for creativity in the plot, and so less room for developers to be accused of bias in their choice of villain.

Generoterrorists: In contrast to the historical reenactments, the generoterrorist games are generally set in modern times and rely on fictional bad guys that, while not directly associated with any real political faction, often evoke real-world political events.

It was the Tom Clancy series of video games that began the generoterrorist trend, starting with Rainbow Six (1998). As with basing a game upon an historical war, basing a game upon a book, like Tom Clancy’s novels, makes it possible for the developers to expand beyond previous boundaries with a legitimate excuse — that it was the book that chose to make a terrorist group be the bad guys, not the game developers. Rainbow Six was also a particularly fortunate way for video games to start incorporating realistic terrorist groups in their game play. In Rainbow Six, no countries are specifically called out by name, and the bad guy is not a national political entity but rather those damned eco-terrorists. As with the Nazis, no one really cares about hurting eco-terrorists’ feelings, thus making them an imminently safe target for pixelated destruction.

In contrast, the good guys are based upon real international political entities, or at least a warm and fuzzy UN-friendly version of real entities. The protagonists are part of Rainbow, a “multinational counter-terrorism unit, composed of elite soldiers from NATO countries.” This makes Rainbow Six — a game about multilateral action by Western forces to combat eco-terrorists determined to kill the world via an Ebola armageddon —  about as non-offensive as it gets, when it comes to a game about shooting people. But as noncontroversial as its plot was, it was a starting point, marking the first time an FPS has chosen a close approximation of the modern world for a setting.

Ever since Rainbow Six, generoterrorists have helped expand the boundaries of what is allowable in video games. Terrorists, by definition, are the bad guys. (If they were not bad guys, then obviously they would be called “rebels” or “insurgents,” not terrorists.) This is one reason why generoterrorists are such popular video game villains — calling them bad guys is definitionally non-controversial. Additionally, terrorism is not necessarily associated with any single political or geographic tradition, and it comes in an endless number of varieties: eco-terrorists, anarchist-terrorists, Islamic terrorists, pro-life terrorists, narco-terrorists, anti-UN terrorists, for-profit terrorists, secessionist terrorists, cyber-terrorists, or even just terrorists-who-are-terrorists-because-they-love-being-evil. For pretty much any FPS, it is easy enough to invent a terrorist group that possesses the appropriate motives and military capacity to fit the game’s story line.

The generoterrorist thus provides a dose of realism while avoiding any messy philosophical questions regarding the righteousness of the good guys’ cause. For the squeamish gamer, it is easier to go on a killing spree in the first-person perspective when the targets are a generoterrorist organization, because, assuming you’re not a bad shot, anyone you are killing is someone who deserved killing.

Games With Generoterrorist Villains:

Russians: Although the second wave of realistic video games strongly resisted using villains that were identifiable as any real-world organization, there is an exception to this rule: when in doubt, make Russia the bad guy. In reality, this is kind of a sub-category of both the historical reenactment games and the generoterrorist games, as Russians were the bad guys in Cold War reenactments, and “Russian arms dealers” are practically a generoterrorist group in their own right.

Why were Russians the first real world political entity to be featured regularly as an FPS villain? Best I can figure, Russia just isn’t as offended by the prospect of being portrayed negatively in American popular media. The Russian villain, twirling his mustache and smoking a cigarette, has been a longstanding cinematic icon. Thanks to the Cold War, having Russians be the bad guys became a standard feature in popular entertainment for so long. Casting a Russian organization in the role of villain is a way of casting a real group as a bad guy, but knowing that everyone is going to realize it is nothing personal. It is not a jab at Russia — it’s a Hollywood trope. So, like the generoterrorist, having a Russian bad guy is an easy way to play up the “realism” of a game without alienating any consumers.

Example Games with Russian Villains:

Continued in An Inquiry Into the History of First-Person Shooter Video Game Villains, Pt. 2.

-Susan