Introduction
Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone
Revenge doesn't get much nastier or more petty than this. In a moment that comes almost out of nowhere during the excellent Hearts of Stone DLC (and let me go ahead and say if you've played Witcher 3 but haven't played the DLCs, it's been like a decade - what are you doing?), the enigmatic Gaunter O'Dimm reveals himself to Geralt in a tavern and makes it clear he may be the most powerful thing in the entire Witcher universe. He does it by stopping time.
When Geralt enters the place, a guy stops him and wants to share a drink. That interrupts Gaunter, which must have made him pretty mad because he ends the conversation by walking over to the interrupting dude and sticking an entire wooden spoon in his eye, then unfreezing time. Part of it is showing Geralt how dangerous and powerful he is by doing something physically impossible. But also, Gaunter acts as petty as killing a guy grotesquely just because he interrupted him.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2
The late 2000s and early 2010s loved plots about guys who wanted revenge: "Skyfall," "Star Trek Into Darkness," "Captain America: Civil War"—everybody wanted revenge for something. So, of course, Call of Duty followed suit and made "Black Ops 2" a super revenge story.
Most of the time, bad guys come up with convoluted plots to get revenge but never follow through meaningfully or fail. You have to give Raul Menendez credit, though—this guy actually did it. The game has a choose-your-own-adventure campaign, so depending on your actions, his revenge will succeed completely, or you can stop it at the last minute.
But there's no stopping the big moment in the middle of the game where he enacts his revenge against the original Black Ops 1 cast. Menendez’s life is like a trauma conga line—tragedy after tragedy. They really justify why he would want revenge. An American businessman burns his sister, the CIA assassinates his dad, and his house is raided, resulting in his sister being finished off with a grenade. Woods, the guy who did it, becomes his main target.
Menendez's revenge involves a fake prisoner exchange where you think you're shooting Manuel Noriega, but it's actually Mason, the protagonist from Black Ops 1. Woods gets captured and has his kneecaps blown off. Hudson is murdered in front of Mason's kid, David. It is dark and absurdly convoluted but vicious and memorable.
Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season 1
You’d think a straightforward survival series like The Walking Dead wouldn’t have some big twist at the end, but there’s a pretty shocking revelation they save for the final act. For one thing, main character Lee gets bit by a zombie—that's kind of a big deal but not what I’m talking about. What’s really surprising is you find out that Clementine, the little girl Lee’s been protecting, doesn't just have an imaginary friend. The person she's been talking to on the radio is real.
Completely real. Well, in terms of in the game world. Obviously, this is a fictional story, so not real real but real in terms… I don't know why I’m explaining this. In all seriousness, this is a pretty creepy revelation though, and it only gets darker from here. Because when you actually confront the guy, it’s revealed he’s actually the owner of the gas station you found in act two. The interesting thing here is that you never actually see the family; all you see is an abandoned car with a lot of food. Your group’s starving, so they take all of it, and the story just keeps going from there.
But now, at the end of the game, you learn the owners of that car were just out, and you stole all their stuff, which led to the wife and child getting killed by zombies. Only the husband remains, and he’s been secretly following and watching Lee from a distance. Now, he wants to take Clementine away as a form of revenge. He also believes he’s the only one that can protect her, but let’s be real here—this is for revenge. The guy’s clearly got a screw loose at this point. The hungrier we got, the more she blamed me until she finally took our daughter Elizabeth and left. They didn’t get far. I found them a day later in the road.
I mean, he’s carrying around his wife’s head in a bag. I don’t think he’s thinking clearly. He’s got Clem locked away and plans on killing Lee. The whole scenario is pretty sadistic; he’s mostly just trying to torture Lee by reminding him of all the mistakes he’s made. The one thing this guy didn’t count on is that Lee is already a dead man walking, and Clem is a lot more resilient than he thinks. It’s a climactic moment that’s both a surprise and feels earned in a way a lot of late-game revenge reveals don’t feel earned.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Okay, enough mushy stuff. Time for something a little dumb. If you have any experience with San Andreas, you know what I'm talking about already—the mission "Deconstruction," where CJ buries a man alive for catcalling his sister.
So, who said this to you? Construction workers up that hill? Hold up, I got this. I need to go teach him a little respect, huh? That’s right, he didn't like a threatener. He's not some major bad guy or anything—just some random guy Carl decides to kill in the worst way imaginable.
The whole mission sticks out because normally CJ's pretty sensible. But in one mission in the middle of the game, he's just suddenly a total psycho. All that happens is Kendall comes in mad because some construction worker disrespected her. CJ's first thought is to jump in a bulldozer, push the foreman's portapotty into a big hole, and fill it with cement. That sounds like something Trevor from GTA 5 would do, not CJ. And I think that's why it sticks out in people's memories.
I think Rockstar just thought it would be funny to have a mission where you wreck a construction site. That's probably the most thought they put into it. Sometimes the GTA stories are pretty good and well thought out, and sometimes they're kind of, you know, an excuse to do something. And that's what this is. If you look up "disproportionate retribution" in the dictionary, this mission is it. I guarantee they came up with the mission first and then came up with a reason for it second.
Mortal Kombat 11
While the base game ends on a super happy ending where all the heroes win, the Aftermath DLC ends on a darker note. Sure, it's fun to see Shang Tsung chewing the scenery, being the most obviously evil guy who's 100% going to betray the good guys. They just keep going along with it anyway because they're dumb, but when the betrayal actually happens, it kind of messes things up.
The darkest bit happens after they re-revive Shao Kahn, who arrives at the ship with all the good guys and just starts wrecking house, getting revenge on everybody. He defeats Kung Lao and throws him into the Sea of Blood, which you can never die in, so it's basically an eternity of suffering. "Tell me, did your masters teach you to swim?" Then he beats up Liu Kang for defeating him in Mortal Kombat 9 and takes down Kitana for killing him in the main story. They really rub salt in the wound by having Kitana and Liu reach out to hold each other, only for Kahn to smash Liu's hand and then, in one of the grossest things in the story mode, smashes both of his legs with a hammer.
I’m talking compound fractures here—huge chunks of bones sticking out. It's a nasty revenge that's kind of hard to watch. Unless you're one of those Liu Kang haters, then you probably love it.
Metal Gear Solid
For a series as convoluted in plot as the Metal Gear Solid games are, you'd think there would be more revenge, but there actually isn't. Or if there is, the revenge is either against abstract concepts or made intentionally unsatisfying, like with Metal Gear Solid 5.
Mostly, the series focuses on revenges inflicted on the protagonists rather than the ones they inflict. For this entry, I want to talk about FoxDie, the virus injected into Snake by the U.S. government in secret, designed to specifically target the members of Foxhound who were the ringleaders of the Shadow Moses incident.
This special virus uses nanomachines so it only activates on certain individuals—it's a silent assassin essentially made to bury all the dirty little secrets where they stand. Snake, it's mostly a government project, but there is a revenge twist. The doctor who administered it, Naomi Hunter, actually secretly hated Snake and wanted him dead. There's a whole lot of drama bomb dropping during the latter portions of the game—enough to make your head spin—but this moment sticks out because of Jennifer Hale's emotional performance.
By the way, yeah, Jennifer Hale is Naomi in Metal Gear Solid. The big twist is that Naomi made it so the FoxDie virus would eventually kill Snake as well. She was actually Gray Fox's sister, whom Snake killed back in Metal Gear 2.
It's a pretty messed up thing to do to a guy. Snake knows he's going to die from the virus someday, just doesn't know when—could be in 30 years, could be in 30 minutes. That's bad enough, but in Metal Gear Solid 4, it's revealed that the FoxDie in Snake's blood is evolving into something that could potentially kill the entire human race. It doesn't actually happen, but still, pretty hardcore revenge.
Lost Judgment
Another complicated one, so try to follow along here. I'm going to try, and the keyword here is try, to simplify things. There's a lot going on in Lost Judgment. The primary theme, though, is bullying—how it can ruin people's lives and how this often dangerous behavior is ignored or dismissed by society.
The central villain of the game is Jin Kuwana, a vigilante who specifically targets bullies. What he did wasn't necessarily revenge-related, but how he did it... oh, it is. See, his origin is that he used to be a teacher. There was bullying going on in his classroom, which he mostly ignored, thinking it was just kids being kids. But then, a student that was being tormented jumped off the school roof, and that changed everything for him.
He was actually trying to put together evidence before the student's death, but he was too late. He saw his job and saw the students who caused the death mostly get off scot-free. So, he devised an appropriately convoluted scheme, as befitting this game's Yakuza spin-off status. He waited till all those bullies grew up, had stable jobs and happy lives, then used the evidence he collected of the intense bullying they engaged in to force them to do his bidding. Adults had a lot more to lose than kids.
He used the bullies to kidnap other bullies, who he would then serve up on a silver platter to aggrieved parents who could murder them. "You see your killing spree on these former bullies like you're doing the country a service. In your eyes, this is... actually no, you'd call it justice, wouldn't you?" Jin would cover this whole thing up, but he's just doing it because he hates bullies. The people he's got working for him are all former bullies, basically press-ganged into service to perform even worse crimes. It's a complicated but impressively messed-up kind of revenge. You have to respect the hustle.
Good was okay. "I didn't think... I didn't know he'd kill himself. I really didn't know. I swear I'll try to make it up to him somehow. I'll spend the rest of my life making up for it." "Stop! What the hell?!"
Mad Max
Enough esoteric revenges that require paragraphs to explain. Here’s a simple, straightforward revenge for a simple game. In the opening of the game, the bad guy Scabrous Scrotus steals all of Max's stuff, so Max stabs him in the head with a chain. Max escapes; Scrotus somehow survives and swears revenge. That's the story.
The funny thing about the game is that Max doesn't really care about this guy. He just wants to get an engine so he can ride off into the desert and finally forget the nightmares haunting him. He eventually starts to warm up to people, including a woman named Hope and her daughter Glory. Max even imagines himself getting married to her, so yeah, it's not going to end well.
Sure enough, come the end of the game, you return to the base only to find it's been ransacked. Hope is dead, and the little girl Glory has been tortured. She dies in Max's arms. The bad guy killed them hunting for Max.
It's your standard kind of revenge, but for a game, this is pretty dark. They didn't just kill the few actually sympathetic characters in the game—they horribly tortured them. On top of that, everything Max was trying to do the entire game was rendered pointless. He doesn't get the engine, and the people he meets are all dead. I mean, at least you kill this bad guy, but the taste of victory is like ashes in your mouth—a pretty bitter ending, even for Mad Max. Honestly, pretty bleak.
Final Fantasy VI
One that gives you a pretty good impression of the kind of bad guy you're dealing with in this classic SNES RPG is Kefka. You know, the clown? That guy's a real menace, and you know it from his first appearance. At first, he seems like a bumbling idiot sent to hunt protagonist Terra, who's hiding in Figaro Castle. Edgar manages to get him to back down after mocking him, only for everyone's favorite clown to wait till nightfall to set the whole castle on fire.
One hell of an escalation. There's supposed to be a peace treaty between the two nations, but he just ignores it and attacks the castle—all just because the king didn't show proper respect. By the end of the sequence, Kefka still comes off like a total chump. They manage to save the castle, and the heroes get away without any real issues. But seriously, serious overreaction here. They send a guy on a diplomatic mission to just look around, and he ends up trying to burn the whole place down.
And that's like the first and probably least of Kefka's many atrocities. The big difference is that he's actually trying to get revenge here. For everything else, there's basically no explanation other than he is a massive jerk. Assuming you know that's all it is, he doesn't have one; otherwise, he wouldn't act this compensating.
The Last of Us Part II
What else was going to be number one? Seriously, this is the most recognizable, controversial, and memorable act of revenge in recent gaming history. I'm talking about Joel. Spoilers for a game—the game's a few years old at this point—but he's dead. They kill him at the start of the game. It’s revenge for a lot of things: for killing all the Fireflies at the end of the first game, for potentially dooming mankind by killing what could have been the last possible doctor capable of coming up with a way to stop the infection, and more personally, for killing Abby’s dad, who was that doctor.
Joel's death, which is at the start of the game, is pretty brutal. They shoot him in the legs and then beat him to death with a golf club. Extremely messed up and hard to watch. I don't want to linger on it too much because it's kind of a downer, but I had to mention it. It’s pretty iconic in terms of revenge.
Bonus: Saints Row 2
I have a bonus here for you. Saints Row 2 has this entire Brotherhood mission chain that's basically a prank war that went way, way too far. An endless series of revenges that get more and more depraved each time. It’s absurd but a little disturbing if you actually consider the implications of it for real. Don’t dwell on it for too long because it’s Saints Row.
I'm not going to cover everything because we'd be here all day, but some of the highlights include secretly putting radioactive waste into the Brotherhood boss's tattoo ink so half his face gets burnt off. Then there's a part where you kidnap the boss's girlfriend, throw her in the back of a truck, and leave it in the middle of a monster truck rally, leading the boss to inadvertently kill his own girlfriend. It's a lot, and somehow you're supposed to be the good guy in this situation. I mean, wow.
Conclusion
That's all for today. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.And as always, we thank you very much for reading this blog. I'm Zaid Ikram. We'll see you next time right here on Gamix.
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