Corrupt Corporate Executive / Video Games

Corrupt Corporate Executives in video games.

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• Ace Combat:
  • The executives of General Resource in Ace Combat 3: Electrosphere had tried to erase all traces of the Night Raven when Rena Hiorse, the test pilot who was only nine years old had unwittingly revealed its existence in an interview.
  • In Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, the president of North Osea Gründer Industries is revealed to have supplying Yuktobonia with aircraft, and is in fact a member of a group of Belkans called the Grey Men, who had instigated the war between Osea and Yuktobonia in revenge for the fall of their country.
• Act of War's Consortium is a bunch of corrupt business executives who use terrorism as an excuse to jack up oil prices, and also happen to finance several terrorist organisations.
• Advanced V.G.: Miranda's video game counterpart secretly created Section-9, where she used her own daughter, Reimi, as a testbed for her Designer Babies. K-1, K-2, and later, the Material Twins were the result, all of whom were biogenetically engineered killing machines, each of which she killed for failing to defeat Yuka Takeuchi... which caused Yuka to blame herself for their deaths and briefly lose her fighting spirit.
• Henry Leland, Chief of Development of Alpha Protocol's Halbech, inc. His character design and voice job appears to have been custom-tailored to make him look and sound as much as a corporate sleazebag as humanly possible, to say nothing of his smoking habits.
• In Anno 2070, the Tycoons are a whole faction of Corrupt Corporate Executives. Thor Strindberg is the worst of the lot, though. The next game in the series, Anno 2205, shows that they paid dearly in the long run, as Global Trust has gone bankrupt in the interim.
• Taiga Gigayama in Armed Police Batrider. He starts by "magnaminously" creating the artificial island of Zenovia as a refuge for people trying to escape Manhattan's skyrocketing crime rate. Only for Zenovia to become even worse, as GiganTech proceeds to take political power over the island, and use its luckless captives to test out black market weapons like Boredom and supply energy for super-weapons like Discharge.
• Army of Two combines this trope with Private Military Contractors in the form of the heroes' own military corporation, SSC, whose leadership is plotting to privatize the United States military so they can take over the country.
• Ayano of Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia is introduced as one of these, as the head of the villainous Tenba Corporation. It turns out she's not, and everything bad about the company is actually Bourd's fault. Once he's out of the way, she makes sure it's reformed.
• Assassin's Creed: Several Templar targets through out the series were influential merchants working towards the goal to establish a One World Order as part of their ancient conspiracy. In fact, the modern-day Templars leaders are executives that run Abstergo Industries towards the same objective. Since the French Revolution, they came to the conclusion that they could control people through the power of coin instead of the divine right of kings.
• Averted in Asura's Wrath with Deus's Reincarnation, who takes time out of his work schedule to help an old man (who is the emperor he ironically killed in his past life who reincarnated as well) cross a busy street. Olga is his Sexy Secretary.
• The villain of Baldur's Gate is the Iron Throne trading company, which just wants to make a shitload of money, but it's later revealed that the adopted son of the local leader is just using them for his much grander scheme. It is worth noting that the Iron Throne is invoked as being a largely Lawful Evil organization in-universe (as this is a Dungeons & Dragons game set in the Forgotten Realms).
• Banjo-Kazooie: Gruntilda the Witch owns Grunty Industries (a pollution-spewing underwear factory in the middle of a wasteland), WitchyWorld (a rundown Theme Park with unsafe rides^note the level is a reference to Action Park, which was notorious in the 1980s for its poor safety record and underaged employees who were drunk while on the job. Not helping matters were rowdy patrons and an indifferent management. Eventually, it was closed down due to several personal injury suits in 1996. When Action Park was revitalized under new management in 1998, they took safety very seriously), Clanker's Cavern (a garbage dump with a cyborgized whale that acts as a trash compactor), and the HMS Rusty Bucket (a large cargo ship in an extremely polluted industrial harbor that has dropped its anchor on an innocent dolphin). All of them operate under No OSHA Compliance, implying that Grunty's a scrooge when it comes to safety features. They also have deranged employees who will attack anyone on sight.
• In Batman: The Telltale Series, it's revealed that Bruce's father Thomas Wayne had ties with the mafia and the corrupt mayor, and amassed wealth by drugging and gaslighting other rich people (including the Penguin's mother) and committing them to Arkham Asylum in order to steal their land and money.
• BioShock:
  • The original BioShock does quite a bit to Deconstruct the idea of the Objectivist writings of Ayn Rand by showing the player an anarcho-capitalist dystopian hidden city pretty much filled with these guys. Frank Fontaine and Augustus Sinclair stand out.
  • BioShock Infinite gives us another example with Jeremiah Fink, a cruel and unforgiving Robber Baron who basically controls all of Columbia's industry and maintains it with what amounts to little more as a slave labour force.
• Borderlands:
  • Handsome Jack, the main villain of Borderlands 2, is CEO of the Hyperion corporation and to put it lightly, an egotistical maniac who declares practically everyone on Pandora a bandit (even those who aren't actually bandits) and a despot who is pointlessly cruel to everyone for kicks and giggles.
  • Borderlands 3 continues the tradition of psychotic CEOs with Katagawa Jr, heir to the Maliwan corporation who has allied with the Children of the Vault as part of his war with the Atlas corporation led by Rhys (one of the rare exceptions in this setting) borne out of what is implied to be a twisted crush. He became the company heir by killing off all other siblings next in line to inherit the company and is portrayed as a shallow and murderous yuppie.
• The Big Bad of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is Atlas Corporation CEO Jonathan Irons, who manipulated the world's governments to turn over key security operations to him via not informing anyone that an imminent strike from a known terrorist organization was planned even though he had knowledge of it beforehand.
• In the Civ-clone Call To Power series, one of the government models you discover in the Modern Age is the Corporate Republic, where corporations assume the role of government agencies. So once again, if you're evil and head the main business in charge of the government...
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2: Two members of the Acolytes — the half-human children of Satan plotting to unleash Hell on Earth — are the heads of two megacorporations.
  • Raisa Volkova controls the Bioquimek Corporation, which unleashes a plague that turns humans into demons and destroys Castlevania City overnight.
  • Nergal Meslamstea is the CEO of the largest weapons manufacturer in the world. His corporation controls the academies of Spec Ops, which he has twisted with his supernatural powers to turn the recruits into Sociopathic Soldiers.
  • Also, Necromancer Zobek from the prequel started his own mega-corporation, and plans to save the world so he can take it over himself.
• Crey Industries in City of Heroes, which has its own black ops teams and engages in kidnappings, employee brainwashing, and shakedowns regularly (then bribes the judges or claims "rogue employee" when caught in the act). Alarmingly, a lot of the technology that keeps the city running smoothly was built and sold by them, making them seem more respectable to the public than they really are.
  • Kirk Cage runs a ruthless mining group called the Cage Consortium in the City of Villains that works its miners to death- causing said miners to rebel, with strength gained from sheer force of will.
• Clarence's Big Chance: Parodied.
  Executive: Crawl around, little ants! One day, daddy's gonna stand all over your faces and make him bum-loads of sweet dough! You know it!
• Critical Depth has both Dana Nagel, CEO of Mondred Corp, who plans to use the mysterious Pods to exploit for profit, and Sebastion Titan, head of Titan Industries, whose plans border on downright world domination.
• The WEC is the big bad in the Crusader series of games. If you are a bad guy and not a robot or a soldier, you are a Corrupt Corporate Executive. No exceptions. The office politics would make Machiavelli have a nervous breakdown.
• Following in the footsteps of its tabletop counterpart, Cyberpunk 2077 has this as the default approach of just about every corporate executive in the game. To the corporations, the pursuit of profit justifies murder, torture, brainwashing, terrorism, kidnapping, and any sick, twisted fantasy that happens to serve the bottom line. Of course, given that the consequences for failure are grim for aspiring corporate executives, it's not difficult to understand why those who reach the top learn to value results over morality.
• Subverted by the titular corporation in Deep Rock Galactic. Their recruitment pitch says they'd rather send a crack 4-man squad rather than sending a veritable army, they make it clear that most of the times, their hardware is more precious than their employees, and getting a promotion means paying the company for the privilege. However, they never lie or obfuscate all these, and the Dwarves they employ don't have any issue with it, and Mission Control will support the team on the ground as best as he could. All in all, it may be that the company and Dwarves in general just have a different mindset than humans.
• Elijah Kamski from Detroit: Become Human is an Ambiguously Evil, Idle Rich Tech Bro who invented the Ridiculously Human Robots driving the game's plot and is disinterested in both the future of humanity and the future of android rights, living as a recluse in his Big Fancy House watching the Crapsaccharine World he created from afar. It's implied that he's secretly responsible for the android uprising, given that he personally designed Markus, is aware of Jericho's location, and even gives Connor the means to overcome his attempted reprogramming by Cyberlife if he goes deviant — purely for the sake of scientific curiosity.
• Deus Ex Universe:
  • Bob Page is Deus Ex's Corrupt Corporate Executive Villain with Good Publicity, taking refuge in the unlikelihood of anyone digging deeper.
  • David Sarif from Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a downplayed version, coupled with a healthy dose of Utopia Justifies the Means: While he does and orders some very shady things (such as purposely sticking a bunch of unnecessary military augs into Adam to make him his own private killer cyborg, his covert investigation of Adam's past, and refusing to let police rescue hostages in one of his factories so his private killer cyborg can keep corporate secrets away from the public eye), he's shown to be a benevolent idealist at heart and genuinely believes that what he's doing is for the benefit of all humanity. Zhao Yun Ru is a straight example, though.
• Arius of Devil May Cry 2 , who seeks and wields demonic power for world domination while publicly the head of the international Uroboros corporation.
• The Bankster skillpath in Dungeons of Dredmor is all about weaponizing the various shady dealings associated with this trope.
  Skillpath description: "There's nothing an adventurer can't face with a bunch of derivatives, a diversified stock portfolio, and absolutely no morals whatsoever."
• Mr. Big, the CEO of BigCorp, frequently serves as the Big Bad to many titles of the Diner Dash series, as he tries to drive numerous restaurants out of business (including Flo's diner) in order to increase his own sales, and it's up to our plucky waitress to keep these smaller establishments afloat. At least he seems to treat his employees well, as two of Flo's best-tipping customer (Barb the business woman and Colin the cellphone addict), work for Mr. Big.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: President Zazz of Zetacorp uses his corporate influence to rule Zeta with an iron fist. He admits to having such a Lack of Empathy that he sees everyone around him as either resources to exploit or potential obstacles to be gotten rid of. He also buys off the Church of the Vessel to make sure certain areas get less protection from demons, causing poverty and homelessness to increase, essentially forcing people to work for him if they want to survive. Finally, he plans on reviving the original humanity to create a human supremacist society and drive all non-humans out of their homes.
• In EarthBound (1994), Geldegarde Monotoli ran the show in Fourside, and it was hinted he made a deal with Giygas to gain so much power, and before that was a nameless employee in a large company. Many citizens complained the abuse of his power ruined their lives. Once the player defeats the Mani Mani Statue and cuts off Monotoli's connection to Giygas he apologizes for his actions, explaining that his behavior was due to the statute's influence. In the postgame you can find he happily went back to his old job as an elevator operator.
• The Elder Scrolls gives several examples:
  • Morrowind
    • Great House Hlaalu is a haven for these types, along with being a Proud Merchant House. Chronic Backstabbing is rampant and the House's favored skills all lend themselves well to lying, cheating, and stealing one's way to success. Additionally, several of their highest ranking councilors are in the pocket of the brutal Mafia-esque Cammona Tong. When dealing with them, either as part of the House Hlaalu questline or the part of the main quest where you need to be named Hlaalu Hortator, you will need to bribe, blackmail, or, in one or two cases depending on how you play it, outright kill in order to get the support you need.
    • Carnius Magius of the East Empire Company in Bloodmoon. He's embezzling from the Raven Rock ebony mining colony and tries to get it to fail to cover his tracks. Whether you side with him or against him, he'll eventually turn on you.
  • Thonar Silver-Blood and Maven Black-Briar in Skyrim. The former owns Cidhna Mine, the largest silver mining operation in Markarth, and has an agreement with the city guard where any criminals arrested in Markarth can be forced to work in the mine as slave labor. He also hires mercenaries to seize control of rival mines in the area so their owners are forced to sell to him. The latter controls Riften's mead industry, and regularly hires the Thieves' Guild to sabotage her competitors and put them out of business as well as the Dark Brotherhood to deal with anyone she doesn't like. Also, for extra frustration points, if you choose to resolve the Civil War you have to make one of them a Karma Houdini. If you take the Stormcloaks' side, Thonar's older brother Thongvor Silver-Blood will become the new Jarl of Markarth, while if you take the Empire's side, Maven Black-Briar will become the new Jarl of Riften. However, Thonar can be killed once you discover that he's been using the leader of the Forsworn to perform assassinations disguised as terrorism, but Maven will always be essential no matter what.
• Reaver in Fable III, the CEO of Reaver Industries. While his business ethics are already atrocious (destroying the environment and actively using child labor), Reaver himself in his first cutscene of the game shows how he stomps out union protesters — personally, using a pistol.
• The Fabulous Fear Machine: Jen, the player character of the first campaign, manipulates her way to become the CEO of her company and suppresses a report of the addictiveness of a drug, on top of using the Fear Machine and its agents to spread fear and crush her rivals.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • Alice McLafferty, head of the Crimson Caravan Company. She recruits the player to steal the Gun Runners' manufacturing specifications and is secretly working with the Van Graff crime family to slaughter competitors' caravans, sabotaging their main competitors the Gun Runners in return.
    • It's implied that Festus, Sunset Sarsaparilla Company's robot mascot, was programmed by, or on the orders of, someone very much like this. The company was legally required to include in his interface a "silly ol' advisory" about the health risks of drinking their product too much, but his hearing always suddenly gets suspiciously spotty anytime you start asking him questions about it. Assuming the player doesn't just give up in frustration first, the conveniently tin-eared Festus has to be queried for the advisory three times in a row before he finally spills the beans. Yeesh.
    • Robert House plays around with this. While he wasn't as blatantly cartoonishly evil as other Pre-War corpos he was certainly ruthless in business dealings in how he bought out the businesses of Vegas as his way of payback against his brother for cheating him out of the family business. As the self-declared CEO and autocrat of New Vegas, he's mostly fair in how he lets his underlings deal with things themselves but can be rather brutal in regards to punishing anyone whom he deems a threat to his power, ranging from justified (The Brotherhood of Steel) to very questionable (the Kings if they cooperate with the NCR).
  • As revealed in Fallout 4, John-Caleb Bradberton ran the Nuka-Cola Corporation this way. Rather than waste money on superior advertising campaigns and Research & Development to uphold their dominance over the market, they simply forced other soft drink companies into bankruptcy, stole their recipes, and rebranded those recipes as new types of Nuka-Cola. They were more than willing to use terrorist actions, including sabotaging advertising campaigns, mugging employees, stealing supplies, damaging machinery and even launch full-scale attacks on soda plants! The Far Harbor DLC contains a "Cola Wars" storyline you can follow by exploring the Vim Soda Pop factory, which reveals how Vim was under attack by Nuka-Cola saboteurs before the bombs dropped, and the Nuka-World DLC contains terminals confirming that almost every alternate flavor of Nuka-Cola is actually a rebranded, stolen recipe from some other company that Nuka-Cola put out of business. Not to mention the Amusement Park of Doom he built that occasionally killed people due to him cutting corners for the sake of focusing on making weapons for the US government in exchange for them making him immortal.
• The Shinra Electric Power Company in Final Fantasy VII (with the exception of Reeve). Shinra's main industry in the game seems more "World Domination" than "Electric Power". Or "Weapons Manufacturer" before even that. This gets amped in the remake, as Shinra has intentionally allowed the Avalanche cells to wreak havoc, so they could blame Avalanche's non-existent Wutai patrons and declare another war. They also intend to abandon Midgar and its population entirely, since their pollution and unethical experiments have turned their "City of Tomorrow" into a monster-infested hellhole.
• Genevive Aristide and her company, Armacham Technology Corporation, from First Encounter Assault Recon, are so corrupt that they have no qualms with murdering their own employees in sight of federal agents and then killing those same agents with uniformed security guards. Nor do they hesitate to arrange for a nuclear explosion in the middle of a large, populated city - and this is just the cover-up for even worse things they've done. Most of them were perpetrated by Harlan Wade. At some point, you begin to wonder if Alma really is the Big Bad, or Wade/Aristide/Armacham itself is. They're wholly responsible for Alma's creation and escape to wreak her Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Five Nights at Freddy's: Fazbear Entertainment makes so many bizarre decisions that you'll end up wondering if they're actually evil or just woefully idiotic (the game never outright says which). Here are their "wonderful" decisions:
  • They never fix the animatronics when they start attacking the night watch, and even though their AI is so easy to fix and make them mostly harmless that a simple guard can do it, they prefer to keep hiring new guards as they die (as opposed to hiring a repairman), and even fire any guards who do fiddle with the animatronics' AI.
  • If any guards die, they'll hide the body, clean property and premises thoroughly (to the point of replacing carpets!), and only when the job's done do they inform relatives of the disappearance... by filing a missing person report.
  • The second game shows that they won't put up warnings about breaking the robots apart (in this case, robotic parts contain sharp materials). Instead, they turn one of the animatronics into a "disassemble-and-reassemble-at-will" attraction for the children just because they were tired of putting it back together after they kept tearing it apart. You can see where this is going.
  • The third game reveals they used dangerous animatronic/suit hybrids that, if mishandled, would release the animatronic endoskeleton parts while a performer was still wearing the suit, injuring them severely. Said suits were so unsafe that even breathing on a springlock would moisten it enough to break loose, and their advice on how to deal with springlock failures amounted to, "Could you please bleed to death in this room? You're disturbing the customers." That being said, once a failure does occur they actually have the sense to immediately retire the suits to their hidden Safe Rooms... though they admit they don't care whether an employee wears one despite the dangers.
  • Said Safe Room is noted to be invisible to animatronics, and is present at every location. Great place for a security guard's office, right? Except that rather than destroy the unsafe springlock suits and repurpose the room to protect guards from the homicidal animatronics, the management instead decided to lock the suits in said room, build a false wall over the entrance, and tell employees not to mention it to anyone (especially insurance representatives). They did this to every location's Safe Room.
  • Then Sister Location drops a bombshell with the reveal that the Serial Killer (named William Afton) was a C.E.O. of a robotics company himself before co-founding Fazbear Entertainment, and built the Funtime animatronics to kidnap/murder children.
• Adrian Ripburger in Full Throttle is another example of a villainous vice-exec with a benign superior. Since he murders said superior and takes his place relatively early in the game, however, the distinction is probably moot.
• Don Genie from the F-Zero franchise is the head of the universal traders. On numerous occasions he has been arrested for illeglly trading weapons, and each time will pay a small fortune to stay out of jail.
• The Korx in Galactic Civilizations are the literal embodiment of this stereotype — the government and the whole planet are run by one company. So when you play as their leader, technically you are a CEO. Ironically the system works well: everything they have is capital and hence valuable (although they are max evil). Unfortunately their neighbors are externalities...
• Grand Theft Auto: In a Crapsaccharine World full of morally-bankrupt people, this trope almost always show up. A few of them stand out:
  • Grand Theft Auto 2 has the entire Zaibatsu Corporation, which are Faux Affably Evil MegaCorp that tries to pull everyone including enemy gangs for profits. Claude Speed managed to wipe all three Zaibatsu bosses in Anywhere City, but their shady businesses remain.
  • Grand Theft Auto III introduced Donald Love, a real estate mogul who owns much of Liberty City and is currently involved in an illegal exchange of a mysterious parcel. He works closely with the Colombian Cartel but isn't above wiping them out if they try to blackmail him (or if their deaths will assist in slum clearance...). In a slight inversion of this, he is the highest-paying and most reliable gang "boss" the game offers, and the only one who doesn't betray you by the end. In the prequel Liberty City Stories, he is reimagined as a comic relief nitwit, though with a much higher body count: This time he is an ally of the Leone crime family, running as their Mayoral candidate after having the previous incumbent shot. Despite a colorful election season — involving blown-up election vans, torched ballot machines, and Uzi-packing student organizers — he still loses the race and goes bankrupt. Donald later turns up in a flophouse with a scraggly beard; upon discovering Avery Carrington's development plans for Fort Staunton, he directs you to plant explosives under Fort Staunton, demolishing the entire district and allowing him to spearhead the development project seen in GTAIII.
  • Avery Carrington from Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. He's not an antagonist though, being this a criminal simulator with allies and rivals rather than good and evil.
  • Carrington also mentored Love, who played this role in Grand Theft Auto III. They even have similar dialogue between the two games.
  • Grand Theft Auto V:
    • Devin Weston is a complete douchebag executive who bulldozes houses, tried to shut down GTA's version of Hollywood, and holds 11% of a Private Military Contractor corporation which he uses to do his dirty and then underpays them just because he can. Deconstructed when, even with his vast wealth and resources, he has antagonized enough of his 'friends' for them to forget about him after he's kidnapped by the protagonists, and in one ending, utterly ruin him themselves.
    • Lester Crest isn't fond of such people, as he has Franklin assassinate several of them to manipulate the stock market to his favor. Among the Asshole Victims are a pharmaceutical company CEO who bribed the FDA to release an unsafe drug that can cause heart attacks, four jurors who were paid off by tobacco company execs to throw out a class action lawsuit, a tech company's head of product development who sold users' personal data to cyberterrorists, a miserly vulture capitalist who plans to lay off thousands of auto workers so he can buy more automotive stock cheaper, and an ex-Mafia real estate developer who strong-armed his way onto half of the building contracts in Los Santos.
    • Before the aforementioned assassinations, Lester has Michael infiltrate the Lifeinvader offices to plant a bomb within a prototype smartphone to assassinate its CEO Jay Norris, who in his (unwitting) Final Speech admits that he stolen trade secrets from rival companies, exploited child labor, and profited off millions of users' personal data.
• Perennial villain of the Daiku no Gensan/Hammerin' Harry series, Hyosuke Kuromoku. Not coincidentally, his company uses modern-style construction workers, while hero Genzo/Harry is a traditional Japanese carpenter, and heroine Kanna is the heir to the company that employs him.
• Haunting Starring Polterguy: Vito Sardini is the CEO of the Sardini Company that sells defective skateboards to innocent teenagers. He has a nasty facial expression, smokes a fat cigar, values his money over everything and has according to the on-screen text an MBA in "sleazy economics".
• Adrian DeWinter and the executives of Artemis Global Security in Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X.. After getting a defense contract with Brazil to fight the Las Trinidas terror group/military, and fighting a battle to defend Rio, Artemis stocks drop dangerously when the United States military intervenes and enforces peace (a PMC not able to act is worthless, after all). In response, CEO DeWinter accepts a deal from Las Trinidas to fight for them against the US and Brazil, in explicit violation of the law governing PMCs, because it pays better, and he's personally insulted. This results in Artemis launching an all-out assault on the United States, trying to assassinate the president, disabling the country's missile defense system, and trying to nuke the country. Fortunately, it also results in their ace pilots quitting and joining the US at a key moment, and then ultimately foiling all of DeWinter's plans, before finally assassinating him.
• Goldman from House of the Dead initially appears to be one of these, but then he turns out to be much more.
• Journey to the Savage Planet has Martin Tweed, the CEO of Kindred Aerospace, who is so corrupt that his indoctrinated AI have to be periodically reformatted to prevent them from revealing how big of an asshole he really is. And if that weren't enough, his company deliberately polluted Earth to force humanity offworld and has sent thousands of amateur tourists on glorified suicide missions.
• President Max Profitt Haltmann in Kirby: Planet Robobot. True to his name, he goes to extreme lengths for the sake of his company's prosperity by exploiting planets (The latest target being Popstar, which naturally ends up being a big mistake) for their resources using his gigantic Access Ark spaceship. He used to be a decent guy until he lost his daughter, which sent him off the deep end.
• The Last Federation, the entire species of Acutians. When dealing with them, instead of dealing with warlords, queens or some sort of government, player directly deals with the three most wealthy CEOs.
• The city-state of Zaun in League of Legends is full of these, effectively run by the various industrial "chem-barons" that engage in shady exchanges of power amidst the underworld, but probably the worst is Renata Glasc. A charismatic, but unfettered social climber born with just her name and her late parents' alchemical formulas, she grew an empire based on the quality of her products, ruthlessness in extracting loyalty from her customers and cohorts, and cutthroat takeovers of local competition, sometimes with genuine hostile force. The way she handles her business has allowed her to maintain a positive reputation among the general population, but talk to the woman herself, and she'll gladly revel in the sadistic power moves she's made... probably before indoctrinating you into her Cult of Personality.
• In Love & Pies, Sebastian Corps, CEO of Global Megacorp, is described by the Windmill Café patrons as a ruthless businessman. He doesn't care how he runs the company as long as he makes a profit, and he tries to manipulate the employees who resigned into returning to work for him. When he offers Amelia "lessons" on how to run Windmill Café, he tries indoctrinating the rules he has for Clean Bean Café such as requiring payment for outside help such as Sven, changing the café's marketing strategy without Amelia's input, and convincing her to fire Joe to streamline profits. He also offers her to sign the documents to make Windmill Café part of the Global Megacorp brand.
• Mass Effect:
  • The planet Noveria exists as a place for Corrupt Corporate Executives to operate and perform research outside the bounds of Citadel law.
  • ExoGeni Corp is in charge of the colony on Feros where it conducts experiments on the colonists, allowing the telepathic Thorian creature to exercise its control over them so its researchers can observe the effects. After Shepard's intervention, ExoGeni attempts to wipe out the entire colony. Later in the game, ExoGeni employees' experiments with Thorian creepers lead to disaster after the Feros mission when the creatures go berserk and kill most of them. The last surviving researcher attempts to bribe Shepard to prevent her arrest.
  • The ultimate evil executive in the Mass Effect universe: Nassana Dantius who is implied to have her employees murdered if they leave before the expiration of their contract, and tries to have them all killed out of paranoia in Mass Effect 2. Not only does no-one mourn her once she's assassinated, her company's stock goes up.
  "Tell your assassin to aim for the head... 'cause she doesn't have a heart."
  • Miranda Lawson's Archnemesis Dad is one of the wealthiest businessmen in the entire galaxy, but his role in the actual story is more that of a Mad Scientist.
  • Then there's Donovan Hock, a wealthy businessman (arms dealer) and patron of the arts on Bekenstein. And constantly surrounded by trigger-happy minions in expensive fashion. Taking him down is the goal in Kasumi's loyalty mission.
• In Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, the CEO of Amaterasu Corporation, Makoto Kagutsuchi, depicts himself as a welcoming, friendly person who is willing to help others, presenting an affable demeanor. Or so it seems. In comparison to the other executives in the company, he's far more corrupt than they could ever be, but unlike them, he has good intentions but is extremely misguided. Though Makoto's Affably Evil self isn't fake, in reality, he's the story's Big Bad and a highly unscrupulous extremist, moonlighting as a serial kidnapper and enforcing cannibalism on Kanai Ward's homunculus residents so they can be sustained, all while keeping them in the dark about the fact they're not human, and as part of his plot to provide for them through unethical means, he assembles Master Detectives in Kanai Ward so they can oppose his rival, Yomi, and Makoto can personally overthrow him from his position as director of the Amaterasu Corporation Peacekeepers in his even deeper plot to Kill and Replace his detective rival, Number One, leader of the WDO, as the CEO is a clone of Number One, and as part of that plot, he intends to further abuse his authority by leading any further outsiders away from Kanai Ward so its secret can be kept. Adding to this, it's notable that all of this revolves around Kanai Ward rather than the Amaterasu Corporation, showing that he is very eager to ignore his duties as the CEO for the sake of the city itself. Yuma reforms him to actually pay attention to managing the company through more ethical methods, and in turn, this also improves Kanai Ward's current condition due to Makoto no longer abusing his power just to take hold of a city of homunculi.
• Max Payne's Big Bad is Nicole Horne, head of the Aesir Corporation, a member of the Inner Circle, the twisted mind behind the nightmare drug Valkyr, and the one behind the murder of the title character's wife and baby girl.
• Rich Dotcom in Mega Man Star Force 2. His diabolical plan to take over a hotel is to fake accidents and yeti sightings, thereby driving away customers until the owner has no choice but to sell! Naturally, the actual villains are using him like a chump for reasons that aren't really explained all that clearly.
• Played much more seriously with Serpent in Mega Man ZX. He presents himself as the benevolent head of Slither Inc., who protects the populace from Maverick attacks as well as producing Mechaniloids for day-to-day life and providing energy for the country. In reality, he he staged those Maverick attacks with the Mavericks he was secretly producing, unearthed Model W, and kidnapped innocent people to turn them into Cyber Elves that will be fed to Model W in order to power it up and awaken it. The populace and many in Slither Inc. itself don't even realize the truth until the end of the game where he bombs the residential district with his Mavericks and ships in order to prepare one final harvest for Model W, all to satisfy his desire to Take Over the World and achieve godhood.
• Downplayed by Kenneth Baker, CEO of ArmsTech in Metal Gear Solid and the driving force behind the Metal Gear project. He's a sardonic, wizened war profiteer who embodies War for Fun and Profit, but isn't any more corrupt than any of the other arms dealers bribing Congress. He's really just trying to save his company, which was in danger of going bankrupt due to the Strategic Defense Initiative, and does everything in his power to resist FOXHOUND and help Snake. However, his actions resulted in him becoming an Unwitting Instigator of Doom.
• Mr. Shifty has Chairman Stone, whose interests include stealing from and killing a lot of people, and doesn't include the well-being of his employees.
• Oddworld:
  • The Glukkons are similar to Star Control II's Druuge — a species of out-of-control capitalists. Their lives revolve around harvesting the animals on their planet, processing them, and selling them as snack food. By the time of the first game, Abe's Oddyssee, they've driven one race into extinction (the Meeches) and the others are rare. Thus, they turn on their slave race, the Mudokons, and attempt to turn them into their next product. In the second game, Abe's Exoddus, they've taken to making a soft drink from Mudokon bones and tears.
  • Stranger's Wrath gives us Sekto, the owner of Sekto Springs, a water bottle selling company that made a dam around the Mongo River region, damaging the wasteland and making life difficult for the native Grubbs.
• OFF: Enoch, the Guardian of Zone 3 is a Fat Bastard who has some extremely questionable ways of running his sugar factory. To be more specific? The sugar the Elsens are addicted to are made from burning the corpses of their fellow Elsens.
• In Oiligarchy, you get to play as one of these, running an oil company that engages in every Captain Planet-worthy crime imaginable.
• In The Outer Worlds, almost every corporate executive and employee in the game is an example, although Played With as many of them aren't actively evil, just excessively cost-cutting and incompetent (though enough of the Board's higher ranking members are both that they deserve to be overthrown on their intentional acts of villainy alone). However many of the game's best endings can be achieved by joining the Board and cleaning up their messes to reform them into a genuinely competent company.
• Persona:
  • Persona 3 has Tanaka, the Devil Social Link, who spends his time with the player talking about doing shady business (but not before making the protagonist pay him as an "investment"), though his interactions with the Main Character will encourage him to consider philanthropic work, if only for the purpose of having the people he may potentially help owe him. He returns in Persona 4 as the host of his own home shopping program, but we see in Persona 5 that he's switched to selling Black Market goods online.
  • One of Persona 5's main antagonists is Kunikazu Okumura, the president of fast food company Okumura Foods. He ruthlessly exploits his employees to the point that his Mental World depicts them as mindless robots. Additionally, he plans to marry his daughter off to an abusive scumbag simply to advance himself politically.
• Pillars of Dust: In Gregg's third chapter, the Crystal Caverns has a corporate headquarters where the wyvern, Jezos, lurks. Jezos is running a heating oil business while being the cause of the Bur region's eternal winter, forcing people to buy their products. One soul orb reveals that Jezos is in cahoots with Almorigga, who wants the wyvern to punish Bur for their loyalty to the royal family.
• This is the primary flaw of the Vailian Trading Company in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. The leader of the VTC's operations in Deadfire, Director Castol, is not an example himself, having a genuinely positive vision of what the VTC can contribute, but feels forced to commit actions in line with this trope (like getting involved with the slave trade) to get enough immediate profit to keep the shareholders off his back while he pursues his vision, and many of his subordinates have far less moral hesitation, from unequal treaties entered into with misleading arguments to striving to usurp Castol's position for personal profit and to redirect the VTC's operations for pure profit, like his immediate subordinate, Governor Alvari.
• Pokémon:
  • Pokémon Platinum: Cyrus, the leader of Team Galactic. He runs a huge corporation, and that is a facade for the true plan to make him a deity. Could also be considered a severe case of A God Am I.
  • The CEO of Altru Corp. in Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia is also the head of Team Dim Sun. The two are nigh-completely parallel — just replace "oil power" with "Pokémon power".
  • In Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness, Mr. Verich is an obscenely rich man bribing the sailors of Gateon Port, and is likely the man who made a load of money through the mines under Pyrite Town. Given he's the man in charge of Cipher, doesn't it make more sense that he'd finance the construction of Realgam Tower, which served as Evice/Es Cade's base of operations in Colosseum?
  • Lysandre in Pokémon X and Y was a Mad Scientist and head of a massive tech company that bears his namesake. He was an elitist Misanthrope Supreme who planned to kill everyone not part of his Team Flare, which had a $50,000 entry fee.
  • Lusamine in Pokémon Sun and Moon is the owner of the Aether Foundation, but is one of the nastiest villains in the Pokemon franchise, who freezes her own Pokemon and mentally and physically abuses Lillie and Gladion, her daughter and son respectively. Though in Pokémon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon, this is subverted as she's an Anti-Villain.
  • Zigzagged with Chairman Rose in Pokémon Sword and Shield. Yes, he may be the Big Bad of the games and endangered thousands in his quest, but a) he was a Well-Intentioned Extremist trying to find a solution to an upcoming energy crisis, b) his villainy has nothing to do with his position in the company, greed, or power and c) his company never had any sort of corruption or amoral business practices. Notably, he's probably the most Graceful Loser of all the villains in the series, and willingly stepped down from his position and cooperated with authorities after his plan blew up in his face and the Player Character saves the day.
• Portal 2: Aperture Science CEO Cave Johnson apparently fits this to a T, especially in his later years when he had to resort to putting his own employees through tests, though he stands out mostly for being a Cloudcuckoolander and Crazy Cool.
• Quantum Protocol:
  • Victor Bosucha is willing to take bribes from Omega to help the latter in maintaining a Dungeon Network and allow a backdoor in Aegis Industries' android security software. When Omega lambasts him about his terrible security cameras, Victor uses this as an opportunity to demand more money from Omega.
  • Downplayed and eventually subverted with Maya Neskara, the president of Neskara Systems. She is complicit in Omega's backdoors and Dungeon Networks, but only does so because of political pressure rather than greed. She allows Quantum to hack the dungeon anyways and covers for them, showing that when push comes to shove, she'll side with Quantum over Omega.
• Ratchet & Clank:
  • Chairman Drek has a far-reaching, planet-looting scheme for making endless profits, the thwarting of which is Clank's sole motivation throughout the first game.
  • Then there's Gleeman Vox from Ratchet: Deadlocked, who hosts a Merchandise-Driven intergalactic TV event called DreadZone, where captured heroes are forced to fight to the death.
• Reality-On-The-Norm: Yathzee, the owner of the company "Yathzeebrand", which is known, among other things, for brainwashing its employees and demanding them to nearly worship the CEO.
• The Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil. Notably, when the government finally had evidence of Umbrella's misdeeds in the Time Skip before Resident Evil 4, they destroyed the company by freezing their business practices, crashing their stock price and driving them into bankruptcy — it doesn't matter how powerful a corporation you are, if you can't do business, you die. There's also the shadowy Other Corporation Albert Wesker works for, the Raccoon City Police Department, most of the S.T.A.R.S management — really, almost any organization in the setting.
• Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins: Pingar is the greedy CEO of Pingar's Emporium. On the rogue route, he pressures the protagonist and Paris into selling treasure to him while making empty promises of saving their friend, Chuna. He later manipulates the duo into attempting to assassinate Duke Kamur and sics another assassin on them when they refuse to hand Chuna over to him. He then kidnaps Chuna and several other crystallized children to sell them to Teor, knowing the latter is going to perform dangerous experiments on them and keep them in their crystallized state.
• The RuneScape quest "King of the Dwarves" has the dwarves think the Consortium is this. The ultimate reason for that is the death of two miners in a cave-in, as the Consortium's forces, the Black Guard, was too busy saving the machines damaged in the same terrorism-based explosion to help them. The trope isn't played straight — the decision was necessary to avoid further disasters caused by the city's power supply being destroyed. This doesn't help with preventing all the civil unrest.
• Saints Row 2 and Red Faction have the Ultor corporation. Doing anything to earn a buck off Stillwater's middle and wealthy classes, they will not hesitate to exploit workers, start gang wars and bring in heavily armed men to protect investments.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • One of the antagonists in Scooby-Doo: Mystery Mayhem is the head of ShermanTech known as Travis Sherman, who is revealed to be using the Tome of Doom to assist in illicit land acquisition by scaring away employees with the monsters summoned from the book's pages to force the owners to sell. He also mentions wanting to use Dr. Selena Drake's alpha wave modulator to brainwash everyone into only buying his company's products.
  • Scooby-Doo, Who's Watching Who? has Sylvester Sweetsugar (real name Edgar Norbert Diffendork), current head of the Sugarland candy corporation and one of the suspects in the Sugarland case. Aside from his friendly nature being an act to hide the nasty creep he really is, he's said to treat his employees poorly and cut costs by making his company's candy out of cheaper ingredients.
• Master Zilla of Zilla Enterprises from Shadow Warrior. His forays into evil sorcery and his plans to take over Japan with his summoned monsters was what prompted Lo Wang to quit the corporation. When Zilla tried to have Lo Wang killed, Lo Wang took the fight to him.
• The Morganites of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri operate as a collective of businesses under their leader who is, by default, titled CEO. While not intrinsically evil like the Korx, the faction can be played as amorally as you, the CEO, desire. Technically, Morgan got aboard the Unity illegally, having his people install a secret cryo-pod on the ship; he justifies it by saying that, as a major contributor into the construction of the Unity, he, technically, owns part of it.
• Simon Welk of Smashmuck Champions, owner and CEO of Welk Industries. Aside from creating and/or recruiting the more morally questionable Champions, he once unleashed a super-weapon his company had created onto unsuspecting Hub City so it'd spare his headquarters, Welk Tower.
• Chief Blank from Space Channel 5 is a loon who'll do anything to get high ratings, including brainwash the masses.
• In The Spectrum Retreat, the management of the Spectrum company is focused on profits, and profits only, not caring that a whole lot of people might be trapped in their Lotus-Eater Machine.
• In Spider-Man: Miles Morales the Big Bad is Iron Man villain Simon Krieger, CEO of Roxxon Energy who's trying to sell toxic and unstable reactors to the state of New York and murders anyone who gets in his way.
• In Spore, a player can evolve their species into one of these by sticking in the middle path (getting either three or all blue cards) as the Trader archetype, which the game defines "... are in it for the profit; their allegiance is to the almighty sporebuck". This idea really can be played out, in which a trader empire will generally have lowered prices for all general purchases and colony tools, as well as to have the cash infusion super power (which doesn't have a penalty with local empires), which simply allows the progress bar for a system's trade to fill up instantly, allowing you to buyout the planet if you have the cash. Factor it in with the ability to farm spice and the fact that only zealot and warrior type empires (as well as the the Grox) are your only sworn enemies, you can take over a large chunk of the galaxy just through simple exploration and trade and never even have to fight until you're strong enough to do so. And they say money doesn't talk...
• Splatoon 2 has Mr. Grizz, CEO of the Ambiguously Evil Grizzco that sends teenagers to fend off hordes of berserk mutant fish. His Benevolent Boss persona is a front meant to entice Inklings and Octolings to continue working for him despite the shady and unsafe conditions of Grizzco Industries, and to encourage better productivity. It's more explicit in the Japanese version, where a friendly boss in a shady business is considered to be a red flag for employees. He returns as the Big Bad of Splatoon 3, with the revelation that he's a Well-Intentioned Extremist who was one of the last surviving mammals and seeks to forcibly bring about our return.
• The Druuge from Star Control II are a whole Planet of Hats of Corrupt Corporate Executives. Marriages are entirely based on contracts, and any offspring who reach maturity are forced to pay a percentage of their income to their parents. Every member of the race works for the Crimson Corporation, which owns everything on all Druuge-occupied planets, including air. Thus, anyone who is laid off from the Crimson Corporation is accused of poaching company property, and either executed or sent to be used as crew/emergency fuel on a Mauler-class spaceship. All the while, the Druuge are trying to stab each other (and other races) in the back and claw their way to the top of the corporate pyramid.
• Star Wars Legends: Czerka has two planets' worth of slavery, genocide, environmental damage, and other shady practices to their name. In Knights of the Old Republic, a light-side Player Character can scam them mercilessly and get away with it. In the sequel, they're at it again, trying to screw over Telos, getting cozy with the Exchange (mobsters), and the local rep overrunning the place with mercenaries and paid thugs to subvert the Telosian Security Force. This bites them hard in the ass come Star Wars: The Old Republic where Iron Lady Republic Chancellor Saresh has had enough of their flagrant disrespect for the law and orders their assets seized for crimes against the Republic. Players are part of the cleanup crew on the Republic side, but the Empire wants to swoop in and grab whatever they can before the Republic makes off with the company assets.
• Mitsuko Isurugi from Super Robot Wars: Original Generation 2 is able to plan with all sides except for the Einst, simply because all sides know that she will only look out for herself, and wants the war to continue so she can profit off of it. The only reason she doesn't work for the Einst is because they're Eldritch Abominations and she can't make money off of them.
• Syndicate, the game series that lets you play a Corrupt Corporate Executive. There's not a lot of corruption in the original game (beyond using violence to take over territories from other companies), but the backstory makes it clear that most people are functionally slaves to the corporation in control of a particular region, thanks to implants in their heads receiving Mind Control signals.
• System Shock has Edward Diego who was performing illegal biological experiments on Citadel Station. When Tri-Optimum workers were getting suspicious they sent men to arrest him and he blew them up with the station's defenses. He later becomes a servant to SHODAN and the hacker has to fight him. Before that however, he gave the hacker an ultimatum to change SHODAN's programming in order to get a military grade implant and be set free. Similarly, in System Shock 2, the Von Braun would not be such a death trap and the Many would have remained ineffectually stuck on some chunk of space-debris were it not for a few Tri-Optimum executives.
• Tachyon: The Fringe has the Galactic Spanning Corporation (AKA GalSpan), the most powerful MegaCorp in both Sol and the Fringe. The Fringe branch is run by Regional Director Gustav Atkins. The main story arc involves GalSpan moving into the Bora area of space in order to claim its resource-rich asteroids. Atkins uses a legal loophole to obtain legal rights to those regions (apparently, the ancestors of the Bora never bothered to file for permission to settle in a far-away area of space). Not only does Atkins use his Army of Lawyers to force Bora colonists to leave, he then hires mercenaries to attack those who refuse or are a bit too slow in leaving (yes, including firing on unarmed shuttles). Sabotage is also not out of the question. Whichever CCE runs the Sol branch is also responsible for blowing up a hospital in order to hide the accidental release of a deadly virus. If you take the side of the Bora and win the campaign, Atkins is fired by his bosses.
• Heihachi and Kazuya Mishima from the Tekken series probably count. Jinpachi was a benevolent CEO, but Heihachi quickly corrupted it, and Kazuya was even worse (e.g., smuggling endangered animals, which brought Jun Kazama into the picture).
• Tarion and Archos in Telepath Tactics. Both of them are callous, exploitative, money-grubbing sociopaths who enslave huge swaths of people and subject them to horrific working conditions in their mines. Here is their reaction to a worker who tried to use their own Loophole Abuse against them and escape:
  Tarion: See to it that Igor's men find him and everyone who follows him; I want every last one of them dead.
  Archos: Yes, sir. Will Igor be taking the customary fee?
  Tarion: 10% of whatever he finds on them, and not a single aurom more. I'll be counting everything he sends back personally.
• Terror of Hemasaurus: Richie Hoarderson is a stereotypical right-wing CEO of PollutaCorp who knows that climate change is real, but is making far too much money off fossil fuels to care and plans to abandon the Earth to go live on the Moon anyways.
• In Thing-Thing, Systems Corp., as run by the unnamed CEO, is an extremely amoral company specializing in the manufacturing of super soldiers and other bio-weapons. To make things worse, they seem to be in charge of the setting.
• The Cogs, the various Mecha-Mooks from Toontown Online, are either this or a Yes-Man. So stuck-up that actually laughing damages them.
• Wario's role in the WarioWare series is as one of these, but as an Anti-Hero rather than a villain. He's a lazy, greedy bastard with terrible hygiene problems, but the Rule of Funny and Rule of Fun get him a free pass via his microgames, and he usually receives some form of Amusing Injury at the end of the game as karma.
• In We Happy Restaurant, the player is the boss of a restaurant where the food mutates customers and staff alike and nobody cares for their wellbeing. The company only cares about money, and you have to make it for them.
• Woolfe - The Red Hood Diaries: B. B. Woolfe is the CEO of Woolfe Industries who keeps the city gripped in a constant state of fear.
• Trade Prince Gallywix of World of Warcraft in spades. When the volcano above Bilgewater Port began to erupt, he extorted a fortune from his own cartel for the right to board his ship. Once onboard, he locked them all in chains as his slaves. His later betrayal on the Lost Isles was not a surprise, but the fact that Thrall let him live and continue to lead the Cartel was.
  • In fact, the Goblin player character is for the most part portrayed as a Corrupt Corporate Executive in the starting quests. Whether his/her experiences escaping from Kezan and the Lost Isles have changed him/her is left up in the air...
  • It can be argued that any Goblin in World of Warcraft with any authority whatsoever is a Corrupt Corporate Executive or a merchant trying to be one someday, or at least those who aren't already a Mad Scientist or a Pointy-Haired Boss, with rare exceptions.

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