The generic hero – – Gamereactor

There are plenty of colorful, iconic figureheads in the gaming world, whose personality, attitude, charm and originality have enchanted many gamers over the years. Sonic is one of them, Lara Croft is another, as are Marcus Fenix, Nico Bellic, Solid Snake, Duke Nukem, Kratos, Ellie, Guybrush Threepwood, Nathan Drake, Cloud and many more. But then there are all those hollow generic heroes, often designed to allow me as the player to fill him/her with my own personality. And there are many that are my very personal favorites, and I thought I would list them below.

Master Chef

For those who haven’t read the books, absorbed all the canon released over the past 20 years, there are very few game heroes more anonymous than Bungie’s olive-green super soldier. Master Chief has a generic name, generic armor, generic voice, and for the first three games we are not even told why he fights or what he thinks of the wars he largely commands. All we are told is that he follows orders and that he plans to wipe out the Covenant because they are the enemy, and against my better judgment, I have always loved him, and his extreme anonymity. The Chief is so tough and so ruthless that it becomes almost parodic during certain sequences, and it fits Halo as a game series so unashamedly well. Instead, it’s Cortana’s personality that takes center stage, as well as all the values I put into it as a gamer – giving color and character to the cosmic war that put Xbox on the gaming map.

Gordon Freeman

Sometimes it really is the law of necessity that, along with talent, luck and timing, forms a whole that not only outshines the competition, but redefines the entire form of entertainment. Half-Life and its protagonist Gordon Freeman did exactly that in the first half of 1998, and the fact that Gordon had an anonymous appearance, an anonymous personality, and didn’t speak for the entire 18-hour action-adventure was not because Gabe Newell & Co really wanted a generic hero with no personality, but because they didn’t know how to create a character that the player wouldn’t be irritated by. Initially, there was an idea to be inspired by Duke Nukem, with a bearded cleaner on Black Mesa with a colorful personality showing us around the underground research facility that has been invaded by aliens, with a sense of humor and a tough exterior. All of this was thrown in the trash, however, and the incorporeal, mute Freeman was born. The fact that Gordon did not speak, that he said nothing and thus did not color our experience for us, was a stroke of genius, because all the dialogue and the environment-based story presented to us (always from the player’s perspective, never via zoomed-out cinematic sequences) went straight to the cerebral cortex in a way thatHalf-Life no action game had achieved before.

Doom Slayer

The main hero in the Doom -games has been running around in his bright green armor and iconic space helmet since the early 1990s, beating hell demons to sticky mush and without even having a real name. id Software cared so little about story, concept, theme and premise that they didn’t even bother to give their ultra-anonymous hero a name, and so it has continued. In recent years, Slayer has taken off the helmet a few times and in the newly released The Dark Ages, Hugo Martin & Co have brought a bigger story, but there’s always something cool about being nameless, personality-less and homeless in Doom, all with a single goal: kill all the demons!

Super Mario

Mario? Anonymous? You’re probably a little confused. After all, he is both corpulent, dressed in bright red, has a big fancy cap, the most substantial mustache in the gaming world and yells “Let’s-a-goooo!” in every game, all the time. Mario can be classified as anything but anonymous, right? I, however, see him a little differently. Before Illumination put together the utterly charming The Super Mario Bros. Movie in which Mario suddenly had his own business, a company car, rival plumbers with bad attitudes, a tough family and downright coming-of-age problems that would manifest themselves when he tried to fall asleep…. Before that, he had nothing but a brother he never talked to and a dinosaur friend he never petted. He had a monotonously thin voice and said the same sentence in every game, he had no real personality, we didn’t know where he came from, what his real motivation was, or whether he even liked saving the same old princess from the same turtle villain every year, over and over again. Mario had no attitude and no character for decades, which is why he absolutely belongs on this list.

Samus Aran

I will forever remember the surprise or perhaps even “shock” when, at the end of Metroid (NES), it turned out that the cool bounty hunter with the arm cannon I had just sent around with and bludgeoned the evil Mother Brain to death turned out to be a girl. I just sat there, open-mouthed, as the final scene played, and I’ve been a hugely passionate Metroid fan ever since. I love Metroid. I consider Super Metroid the absolute pinnacle of the game series, and I love Samus as a character. But anonymous in terms of personality, character and attitude, this she has always been, often more than any other hero Nintendo has created. But behind the mask, in her iconic outfit, there has always been (as with Master Chief and Gordon Freeman ) room for me as a player to plug myself in, dream myself into the role of the galaxy’s foremost bounty hunter legend, stepping into the game’s world and soaking up the atmosphere. I don’t think that was ever the intention of Gunpei Yokoi, I think the technical and narrative constraints of the time just didn’t allow for much more, and I’m grateful for that 40 years later.

Which generic heroes are your favorites?