The Generic Hero

There are plenty of colourful, iconic figureheads in the gaming world, whose personality, attitude, charm, and originality have enchanted many gamers over the years. Sonic is one of these, 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 these hollowly generic heroes, often designed to allow me as a player to fill him/her with my own personality. And there are many of these that are my very personal favourites, and I thought I would list them below.

Master Chief

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

Gordon Freeman

Sometimes, it really is the law of necessity that, together 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 main character Gordon Freeman did just 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 get annoyed with. Initially, there was an idea of taking inspiration from Duke Nukem, having a bearded cleaner on Black Mesa with a colourful personality guide us around the underground research facility invaded by aliens, with a sense of humour and a tough exterior. All this was thrown in the bin, however, and the disembodied, mute Freeman was born. The fact that Gordon didn't speak, that he didn't say anything, and thus didn't colour 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 that no action game had managed before Half-Life.

Doom Slayer

The main hero in the Doom games has been running around since the early 90s in his bright green armour and iconic space helmet, beating hell demons into gooey 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 couple of times and in the newly released The Dark Ages, Hugo Martin & Co have delivered a bigger story, but there's always something cool about being nameless, personality-less, and homeless in Doom, all with a singular goal: Kill all demons!

Super Mario

Mario? Anonymous? You're probably a little confused. After all, he's both corpulent, dressed in bright red, has a big nice cap, the gaming world's most hefty moustache and yells "Let's-a-goooo!" in every game, all the time. Surely Mario could be classed as anything but anonymous? I see him a little differently, though. Before Illumination put together the utterly charming The Super Mario Bros. Movie where Mario suddenly had his own business, a company car, rival plumbers with bad attitudes, a tough family, and outright coming-of-age issues that would manifest themselves as he was trying to fall asleep... Before this, he had nothing except a brother he never spoke 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 if he even liked saving the same old princess from the same turtle villain every year, time-after-time. 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 maybe even "shock" when at the end of Metroid (NES) it turned out that the cool bounty hunter guy with the arm cannon that I had just steered around and bludgeoned the evil Mother Brain to death with, turned out to be a girl. I just sat there, mouth agape, as the final sequence played, and since then I have been a hugely passionate Metroid fan ever since. I love Metroid. I consider Super Metroid to be 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 always has been, often more so than any other hero Nintendo has created. However, behind the mask, inside her iconic get-up, there has (just like with Master Chief and Gordon Freeman) always been room for me as a player to tuck myself in, dream myself into the role of the galaxy's premier bounty hunter legend, and thus step into the game's world and soak up the atmosphere. I don't think that was ever Gunpei Yokoi's intention, I think that the technical and narrative limitations of the time just didn't allow for much more, and I'm grateful for that 40 years later.

Which generic heroes are your favourites?