Love to Hate You: The 10 Most Unlikeable Game Protagonists

With rumors of a new Grand Theft Auto game confirmed, we’ve been thinking a lot about how heroes are hard to find. In the old days, video game protagonists were morally upright plumbers or ravenous yellow circles. As the medium has evolved, we’ve been presented with player characters who have darker sides. But sometimes, developers go too far in trying to make their heroes funny, or edgy, or morally complex, and the end result is a game protagonist that’s absolute torture to control. Here’s our Hall of Shame of the most unlikeable characters to ever feel our joysticks.

Anthony Williams

Social satire is a very tricky genre for video games to play in, and studios mess it up more often than not. One of the most egregious examples is American McGee’s 2006 Bad Day L.A, where you play as homeless Angeleno Anthony Williams. A former agent, Anthony has fallen on hard times and has to deal with numerous disasters, but none are as terrible as the game’s script. Anthony spurts horrible one-liners throughout the experience, and the voice acting is equally inept. Anthony’s awfulness is mediated slightly by the fact that everybody else in the game is almost as stereotypical and bad, but it’s not enough to save him from this list.

Trevor Phillips

The Grand Theft Auto series revels in moral ambiguity, but even diehard fans had a hard time empathizing with Trevor in GTA V. The scuzzy drug smuggler and gunrunner is callous and obscene even by franchise standards, making his debut by viciously stomping biker gang VP Johnny Klebitz to death. Whenever you have to play as Trevor in GTA V it feels bad, like you need to take a shower afterward. He’s constantly flying off the handle and murdering people, betraying his friends, and just generally leaving a trail of chaos behind him. And while you might argue that’s kind of the point of the game, it doesn’t seem as fun when it’s this guy doing it.

Lester the Unlikely

We’re familiar with the concept of an “unreliable narrator” in fiction, but an “unreliable avatar” in a 16-bit platforming game? There’s no mystery as to why the titular hero of Lester the Unlikely makes our list. His 1994 Super NES game developed by Visual Concepts placed the gawky nerd on a deserted island looking for a way to escape, but the frustration the player felt is compounded by Lester’s refusal to behave like a player character. He walks at a snail’s pace, flees in terror whenever he sees an enemy for the first time, and sometimes won’t even follow controller inputs. Eventually, he finds his courage and becomes tolerable but most people will never make it that far.

George Armstrong Custer

One of the most notorious Atari 2600 games of all time is Custer’s Revenge, a low-budget smut oddity published by American Multiple Industries. In it, you slowly march the titular soldier across a dusty plain to have intercourse with a Native American woman tied to a post, all the while dodging arrows raining from above. While there have been several games that use nonconsensual sex as a narrative tool, this was far and away the grossest, especially when you fold in the blatant racism. And the real Custer was no prince either!

Lo Wang

The late 1990s were a fertile time for over-the-top edginess, and no first-person shooter protagonist (besides Duke Nukem) embodied the cringe quite like Shadow Warrior’s Lo Wang. Developed by Duke’s parents at 3D Realms, Shadow Warrior was technically progressive, introducing features like climbable ladders and vehicles the player could enter and drive. But ninja protagonist Lo Wang, as expressed through his voice acting, was deeply obnoxious. With every line either a racial stereotype or a sexist joke, it quickly becomes unendurable to play the game with the audio on. Which is a shame, because minus the lead character it’s pretty solid.

Alex

Indie games can push the envelope in ways big-budget ones can’t, but the developer of 2019’s Yiik: A Post-Modern RPG might have gone a little far with it. The game is the story of Alex Eggleston, who returns to his New Jersey hometown after college and becomes embroiled in a metaphysical tale of vanished people and wandering souls. The thing about Alex is that he’s basically every stereotype of an entitled, smug post-college hipster wrapped in one playable character, and spending time with him and his endless monologues is a chore. It didn’t help that in response to the game’s middling reviews, developer Andrew Allanson blamed the players for not getting what he was trying to do.

Bubsy

The success of Sonic the Hedgehog in the 1990s opened the door to a deluge of mascot platformers. Most of them were simply mediocre, but one sank far deeper than the rest. Accolade’s 1993 SNES title Bubsy: Clawed Encounters of the Furred Kind introduced an animal protagonist that was so deeply unappealing that he became a sort of avatar for the entire genre. Bubsy, an anthropomorphic bobcat, combined unfunny one-liners with floaty physics in one furry package that you’ll want to return to sender. By 1996’s Bubsy 3D the entire gaming industry had turned against him and he vanished for 21 years, only to be picked up by a new studio in 2017 for a new game that was…also pretty terrible.

Kane & Lynch

This is two dudes but you can’t have one without the other. IO Interactive’s shooter franchise (if you can call two games a franchise) stars Adam “Kane” Marcus and James Lynch, two irredeemable reprobates who meet on the way to death row. Things only go downhill from there, as they’re busted out by a crime syndicate and tasked with recovering stolen money. Along the way, they commit more than their share of atrocities, in part due to Lynch’s violent psychosis that causes him to hallucinate and indiscriminately slaughter hostages. The sequel, Dog Days, was described by its art director as an “anti-game” because of how uncomfortable it was supposed to make you feel.

Rufus

Adventure games often have you controlling characters who make stupid decisions to keep the plot moving, but the protagonist of the Deponia series is so idiotic that it’s painful. Rufus is a self-obsessed, clueless, desperately horny misogynist who spends the series in pursuit of a woman named “Goal.” In scene after scene, he mooches, cringes, and screws everything up no matter what good choices the player makes. And he talks so much—often in lines that seem to have been badly translated—that it’s exhausting. One of the most notoriously obnoxious protagonists in gaming history.

Richard Marcinko

The protagonist of 2009 first-person shooter Rogue Warrior is based on a real person, but that makes things worse. Richard Marcinko—as voiced by Mickey Rourke in the game—might be the edgiest boi alive, as he infiltrates North Korea to take out a missile defense system. Marcinko is constantly unleashing profanity-filled tirades during his mission, obviously to give the bland game some sort of character. It doesn’t work and will have you reaching for the mute button in seconds. It’s probably for the best that you can complete the entirety of Rogue Warrior in a little over two hours, because any more time spent with this guy would be torture worse than any prison camp.