Developers love to present players with characters that feature bonkers origin stories in their games, but sometimes the in-development tales that led to the creation of these characters are even wilder.
Here’s a list of famous video game characters whose true origin stories I’m willing to bet that you’d never guess — I sure know I wouldn’t.
Solid Snake is two different people — just like the real Big Boss
In the Metal Gear Solid series, Solid Snake would feature an original look for the first game, but then become heavily inspired by Snake Plissken from John Carpenter’s Escape From New York. You might know that one considering how Snake actually goes undercover as “Pliskin” in Metal Gear Solid 2, but did you know that the character began life because of a different character?
In the Metal Gear series, Solid Snake’s design was heavily inspired by Kyle Reese from Terminator, down to his pose for promotional materials.
I find it very interesting that even though both Reese and Plissken are iconic characters, Solid Snake has arguably grown to overshadow both of his fathers in terms of popularity.
Ermac was born out of fake news
Ermac, the red ninja from the Mortal Kombat series, wasn’t meant to be a thing.
It all began when one fan sent Electronic Gaming Monthly a Polaroid of a red ninja in the game. EGM believed in this video game equivalent of a bigfoot sighting and published it without further inquiry. The incident created rumors so strong that the good developers decided to just make it real.
But where did the photo come from? Welp, the fan just doctored a photo of Scorpion to make his armor red.
Also, Ermac is short for “Error Macro”, a term used in one of the game’s diagnostics menus. Sorry if you thought it had some sexy and mysterious meaning.
Rain from the Mortal Kombat series is both an internal joke and a Prince reference
If Ermac resulted from fans pressuring the MK devs into making a character, then Rain was the devs’ revenge. Most of the ninja characters in the MK series have really fun inception stories, but Rain might just take the cake.
Ed Boon inserted Rain in a small filler sequence in MK3 just to mess with the minds of fans. “How can we unlock this cool new guy?” Many must have asked. The thing is, the purple ninja didn’t even have any moves of his own, because he wasn’t even a real character. He was yet another rehash of the classic MK ninja skin.
Rain only showed up as a real character a bit later with the release of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. Ed Boon says that his name and color came about as a tribute to Prince’s hit, “Purple Rain.” Here’s hoping he’s being honest about that.
Kirby’s look was just a placeholder
Kirby is one of the most immediately recognizable video game characters, but Nintendo didn’t originally want him to look like that.
What we know as Kirby was merely a graphical placeholder for an actual design that never came to be. Either that, or he just swallowed whatever Nintendo artists put near him.
Imagine rocking as much at design as the person who randomly came up with a throwaway design that became more recognizable than 95% of video game characters out there.
Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life series was originally a space biker
Despite making a few mistakes along the way, the protagonist of the Half-Life series remains one of the more book-smart main characters in gaming history. Still, Valve originally wanted him to at least look like the exact opposite of that.
He was originally born as “Ivan the Space Biker”, a much more burly version of the main character we ended up getting.
The Spy from Team Fortress 2 was born out of a glitch
Team Fortress 2’s spy is likely the most meme-able character in the game, and that’s saying a lot since this is one of the most meme-able games in existence. Still, he’s there because of a happy accident.
He exists because a bug plagued the game’s beta stages and caused enemies to show up as if they were teammates. This would’ve led a weaker dev team to lose its collective mind, but Valve saw the universe sending them a sign.
Nathan Drake is based on a real-life daredevil
If you think Nathan Drake from the Uncharted series is the son of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones, then I have some worrying news for you.
Naughty Dog actually based him on Jackass superstar Johnny Knoxville. It’s one of those things that you’d never in a million years consider a possibility, but good luck erasing the knowledge from your mind now that you’ve seen the image above.
Lady Dimitrescu is based on a real serial killer
Lady Dimitrescu likely became even more popular than the game she’s from, and that’s cool, but also kind of worrisome when you know the full picture. You see, Lady Dimitrescu is partly based on Morticia Addams, who is cool, but also on a noblewoman called Elizabeth Báthory, who was anything but.
The thing about Báthory is that she was one of — if not the most — prolific serial killers in history. Báthory was active in the second half of the 1500s, and her thing was killing young girls to drink their blood, as she thought that would keep her youthful. She was wrong and died before reaching even 55. Times were tough back then, but I think it’s fair to say that killing up to 650 people for their youth and not even reaching the age of 60 is pretty embarrassing.
Published: Nov 9, 2023 05:43 pm