final fantasy 7
Squaresoft’s environmental fable features a small group of eco-rebels against the mighty Shinra Electric Power Company, part energy provider, part terrifying interplanetary dictatorship. The designers were prescient in envisioning a multifaceted company equally adept at weapons, genetic engineering, and politics, and with its own 24-hour news channel to help with propaganda.
resident Evil
Formed and run by the Ashford family (surely the games’ answer to the Sackler dynasty), Umbrella is the pharmaceutical mega-corporation responsible for creating the zombifying T-virus and then spreading it across the globe. A monstrous metaphor for corporate greed and irresponsibility.
Portal
With a checkered background in grotesque human experimentation and shower curtain sales, Aperture Science is the creator of the megalomaniac artificial intelligence GLaDOS, who traps the player character Chell in her labyrinthine lab. The founder, Cave Johnson, is the epitome of the tech entrepreneur: brilliant, ruthless and completely crazy.
bioshock
Ken Levine’s acclaimed action thriller centers on fatherly industrialist Andrew Ryan, a combination of Howard Hughes, Walt Disney and Ayn Rand, who builds a corporate utopia under the ocean. The take home message is that we absolutely shouldn’t trust companies that want us to harvest powerful genetic sera from children.
Labor union
One of the great cyberpunk video games of the 1990s, Bullfrog’s real-time strategy has the player join a leading corporation as a “marketing director” (you literally brainwash people). Your job is to destroy competing companies and recruit useful jerks to achieve global domination. Once a glimpse of a dark and distant future, it now looks like some kind of cozy reality TV show.
god ex
Released in 2000, Warren Spector’s sprawling sci-fi role-playing game (RPG) now feels all too close to home with its depiction of a deadly pandemic manipulated by countless corporations for power and profit. Cleverly, all of the companies in the game are shadowy versions of real-life entities: ruthless security firm Tarvos could be Blackwater, entertainment conglomerate Picus is reminiscent of Fox, and Tai Yong Medical is an unholy combination of Pfizer and Boston Dynamics. Terrifyingly familiar stuff.
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Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee
It’s not hard to spot the background to this classic platformer, in which a race of brutal colonizers called the Glukkons enslave the indigenous species of Oddworld, destroy their culture, and then drain their natural resources through massive industrialization. The main focus is RuptureFarms, a meat processing mega-company with a horrible secret. On the surface it’s a comedy, but the game’s dying landscapes and gloomy, smoke-filled factories paint a consumer nightmare.
assassin’s Creed
Abstergo Industries, the shadowy conglomerate at the heart of Ubisoft’s time-jump murder adventure, is clearly inspired by real-life corporate leviathans like Reliance Industries and Danaher, who have tendrils in a variety of industries, it’s just that this is a front for an ancient religious military order that engages in a centuries-old battle against a rival murderous clan.
borderlands
In a universe teeming with evil military and industrial corporations bent on colonizing planets and stealing their resources, Hyperion reigns supreme. His CEO, Handsome Jack, is part industrialist, part tyrant, using looted resources from his company to build a murderous dictatorship on the world of Pandora. By employing endless streams of propaganda in the media, he builds an image of himself as a hero and savior of the people, thereby gaining popular support. Why does it sound familiar?
Fall
This post-apocalyptic RPG series features the most familiar sci-fi trope: the company that starts out with seemingly good intentions but then can’t help but develop into monstrous, inhuman cruelty. Vault-Tec, like Hyperion, makes excellent use of propaganda to appease people; he even has a smiling mascot, Vault Boy, to earn his trust. But there’s more to his nuclear bunker complex than meets the eye. Studio Bethesda’s light-hearted use of 1950s-style advertisements, posters, and slogans contrasts brilliantly with the ravaged wastelands the player explores.
