For The Evulz / Video Games

Antagonists who do terrible things just because they can in Video Games.

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• The first mission of Ace Combat X: Skies of Deception has Enemy Chatter showing that some Leasath chair forcers are raining bombs on a defenceless city just because they can spare the ordnance.
• The Blood Roses from All Points Bulletin are bored rich kids who commit crimes for fun. Their leader, Jeung, started with killing a hobo just because he felt like it.
• In Aquaman: Battle for Atlantis this is discussed when Vulko wonders about Black Manta's motivations; Aquaman says given their history he doesn't need a reason to attack him.
• Assassin's Creed:
  • Assassin's Creed: Majd Addin is the only Templar captain in the game who doesn't even try to justify his actions and does not serve the greater good. When asked why he executed innocent people (to the point of performing the executions himself), he replies that he simply enjoyed the thrill of playing god with the lives of others.
  • Assassin's Creed II: Rodrigo Borgia freely admits to Ezio that, while he did execute Ezio's father to stop him from exposing a Borgia-sponsored conspiracy, he also had Ezio's brothers executed simply because he felt like it. It's actually because of this that even the Templars themselves consider him to be nothing but a corrupt tyrant, describing his leadership over them as the "Dark Age of the Order."
• At one point of Batman: Arkham Asylum, you hear various mooks discussing what Joker required them to do in order to join his gang. One group of them says that Joker instructed them to kill their sisters. One of the mooks says he didn't have a sister, so he just killed some random woman. Joker approved.
• Deconstructed in Batman: Dark Tomorrow; the Joker takes over Arkham Asylum and kidnaps Commissioner Gordon. Batman figures out that somebody hired him to do these things because the Joker isn't playing this trope straight.
• Solomon in Battlefield 3 was heavily implied to be this.
• Zig-zagged in Black & White: while some Evil paths for completing quests get you the same reward or an equivalent one, like learning a Lightning miracle instead of a Heal, others will give an Evil player character no reward but the Evulz. Similarly, some Evil gameplay strategies are solid Pragmatic Villainy, while others are wasteful Stupid Evil in the long run, albeit pretty funny in the moment.
• Yuuki Terumi from BlazBlue is directly responsible for a lot of the bad things that have happened to Ragna, Jin, Noel, Kokonoe, Arakune, and many others, and had no reason for doing any of it other than the fact that he enjoys being a massive dick.
  • It goes deeper than that, though. Terumi has stated that if he is not hated, he would cease to exist. Therefore, he had to be as Troll-ish as possible and make as many people hate him. It's a double-subversion, however, because Terumi himself enjoys inflicting sufferings here and there.
  • He actually put it best himself when Hakumen demanded to know his intentions:
    Hazama/Terumi: C'mon, you know me better than that, 'old buddy!' Surely you don't mean to imply that I need a reason to destroy and manipulate and KILL!? OK, all right, fine! How about this reason? Seems as good as any. I do all the wonderful things I do because I want to see the miserable look on the faces of people like YOU when you're wallowing in despair, dismay, grief, frustration, misery... all sorts of other unpleasant nouns... I guess you could say I'm bored. At least misery is interesting.
• Nene in Blue Dragon has an actual ultimate plan: he tricks your party into powering up their magic so he can steal it and save himself from a wasting disease, but in order to pull this off, he simply cackles and invokes this Trope at every one of their meetings. At a certain point, it starts to seem like he just sits around brainstorming new ways to make the heroes mad.
• Borderlands:
  • Handsome Jack, the Big Bad of Borderlands 2, claims various Well-Intentioned Extremist excuses for his actions, but it's clear from the joy he gets cruelly slaughtering and subjugating "bandits" (everyone on Pandora who isn't a Hyperion employee, though they get treated little better) that he really just enjoys doing horrible things. His girlfriend, the Sheriff, is more upfront about this.
  • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! catalogues just how he got to his sequel days, and yes, it boils down to shooting people is fun and exciting. The Sheriff is one of the player characters, and becomes increasingly turned on as Jack gets worse.
  Nisha: (when Wilhelm calls his drones) An unmanned drone? Can't even watch them die that way...
• Bulnoil in Brigandine, due to being a Card-Carrying Villain. He wants to summon Ouroboros to engulf Forsena in chaos... for no reasons other reasons aside of he's a huge dickhead.
• Gary from Bully personifies this trope, what with his justification for putting Jimmy into power as the King of the School, then sabotaging him completely and getting him expelled, then plunging the school into complete chaos being because he could. Mr. Hattrick is the equivalent among Bullworth's faculty, as he comes from an old-money family and has no financial need to keep his job there; he stays on just because he enjoys throwing his weight around and tormenting students and other teachers.
• It isn't made very clear why Tuber kidnapped the fruits in The Caverns of Hammerfest.
• Most villainous contacts in City of Villains use you as a tool in their Evil Plan, for some petty thefts or revenge plots, or trying to further their own (and, in some cases, your) agendas. Westin Phipps, on the other hand, poses as a charity worker and sends you to do things like kidnap an inspirational schoolteacher, destroy textbooks, and poison food supplies. Why? For no reason other than to crush the hopes of the downtrodden poor. People are split over whether or not he's evil enough to make even villains uncomfortable.
• Doctor Neo Cortex in Crash Bandicoot.
  Coco Bandicoot: Cortex, why do you keep doing stuff like this?
  Doctor Neo Cortex: Well, actually it's pretty fun. You should try it. Y'know, riding around in huge, rumbling machines and whatnot? Very stimulating.
  • Perhaps in the new games, but in the original three Neo Cortex was always all about World Domination.
• Crystal's Pony Tale: The witch doesn't seem to have any motivation for capturing Crystal's friends other than being a jerkass.
• Crossing into Stupid Evil, the Ancestor of Darkest Dungeon really had no reason to conjure the dark arts, murder and drive people to insanity, or summon Eldritch Abominations on a whim other than curiosity and boredom.
• Donkey Kong: Though the first game had K. Rool steal the Banana hoard due to it being Impossibly Delicious Food and the second game had him kidnap DK for revenge and as a bargaining chip for the Bananna hoard, several later games have him messing with Donkey Kong for no reason other than because he's the villain. For example, in DK: King of Swing, K. Rool steals the medals from a contest the Kongs were going to have for no reason, aside from antagonizing the Kong family.
• Dead Rising:
  • Dead Rising: In stark contrast to every other villain in the game, the Convicts, Jo Slade and Brock Mason all have no established motives for what they do, other then because they enjoy it or just plain hate for humanity.
  • Dead Rising 2: Tyrone King is motivated by Greed, but with the sheer amount of sadism and pointless cruelty he takes and causes towards Chuck and his allies, shows that he isn't just doing it for money, but he is also doing it because he finds it enjoyable. Seymour Redding also counts as this, seeing the outbreak as an opportunity to kill people by hanging them for pleasure and nothing else, laughing after hanging someone and attempting to kill Chuck just for "trespassing" when he really wants to kill him just for fun.
  • Dead Rising 3: The Kings of Chaos as a whole are this, killing and causing destruction all over Los Perdidos simply because they can. Their introduction scene even has two of them attempting to gangrape Rhonda Kreske simply because they want to. Albert Contiello qualifies as this, as while he is motivated by Greed and using the outbreak as a money making opportunity, he also takes needlessly cruel procedures when it comes to harvesting the organs of his victims and also laughs maniacally whenever Nick Ramos briefly passes out from forced drug use.
• The players themselves in Dwarf Fortress. You ever hear of Video Game Cruelty Potential? Well, drop all preconceptions you have about it. Immediately. Dwarf Fortress brings it up to eleven and beyond. A common dwarven pastime is building Pointless Doomsday Devices. And, when the players are having a bad day, setting them off. Being evil has never been so much Fun.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: During the Final Boss fight, Zazz will summon zombies of Barbados, Morgalia, Clyde, Robun, and whoever sacrificed themselves in Chapter 2. He specifically picked the first two to hurt Akira and Chase, and the last one to hurt everyone.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • This is a very common trait among the more outright malevolent Daedric Princes, including Boethiah, Mehrunes Dagon, and Molag Bal. Getting mortals to betray, destroy, dominate, etc. one another are essentially their reasons for existing. None of them attempt to hide this fact. Though not as outright malevolent, Clavicus Vile likes making deals with mortals that they will later regret, and enjoys granting their wishes in a Literal Genie fashion. Vile also collects souls simply for the sake of having them.
  • Oblivion:
    • The player can join the Dark Brotherhood, a combination Murder, Inc. and Religion of Evil, but murdering someone who doesn't deserve to die. The first time you 'sleep rather soundly' after doing so and consequently meet Lucien Lachance and ask him about the Dark Brotherhood, he remarks:
    Lucien Lachance: We kill for profit, for enjoyment and for the glory of our Dread Father Sithis.
    • Some of the victims are slain for revenge, for selfish gain of whoever pays, to (assumedly) remove someone seen as a threat or to send a powerful message to the Brotherhood's enemies. Even the murder of Baenlin on your second mission, the harmless old man who doesn't seem to have done ANYTHING to deserve dying in the 'accident' you staged, is explained. His nephew Caenlin moves into the house soon after the hit is complete. If you talk to him and/or read the black horse courier article about Baenlin's death, you'll likely assume Caenlin used the hit to claim his inheritance. However, there are a few instances where there is no hint in that direction. For example, in one mission you are sent to a fancy manor where five guests have been lured to by a false promise of hidden gold. No matter how much you socialize with the guests and how much information you get them to tell you about themselves (and each other), at no point do you get any slightest clue about why someone would pay the Dark Brotherhood for their deaths. Quite frightening, if you think about it.
    • The stark contrast from Morrowind's I Did What I Had to Do Morag Tong, which can be very disappointing for people coming to Oblivion from that game. The Dark Brotherhood are in Morrowind too, albeit as NPC antagonists, specifically set up as the counterpart to Morag Tong. The disparity is deliberate.
• Another community example: EVE Online. So, you've just finished building the biggest ship in the game, the Titan, after months of back-breaking work. Its destruction is not a matter of if, but a matter of when: this very trope is all most people need in this game to happily destroy months of work and real-world money.
• More than half of the Acts of Infamy in Evil Genius are done solely to make sure that you're the evilest genius trying to Take Over the World.
• Reaver in Fable II.
  "There's something rather edifying about hurting people."
  • By the time Fable III rolls around, he's compounded his villainy by becoming a wealthy and powerful industrialist who provides one-man justification for proletarian rebellion. Shooting workers? Hosting ludicrously hedonistic depraved parties? Blood sport? Opening a brothel in place of an orphanage? That's not even Tuesday for Reaver, it's just what he does. This being Reaver, you cannot make him pay for his crimes and he inevitably becomes your Evil Chancellor.
• Far Cry:
  • Vaas In Far Cry 3 is plainly Evil, he tortures people for fun and even forced cannibalism on his hostage.
  • Pagan Min in Far Cry 4 admits that he actively enjoys making the lives of the Kyrati people a living hell. Even when he has full justification after their rebel leader and Ajay's father killed his infant daughter, he acknowledges that it was little more than an excuse to do what he always wanted.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Dr. Lugae, the Mad Scientist servant of Archfiend Rubicante in Final Fantasy IV. Lugae turns Edge's parents, the king and queen of Elban, into hideous monster versions of themselves. Edge and the rest of the heroes are forced to fight them, until the king and queen snap out of it, and kill themselves while Edge pleads with them to stop. And Lugae did that for the pure hell of it, which enrages even Rubicante, who has been built up as a Noble Demon. Rubicante even personally apologizes to Edge for the act. Not that Edge much cares.
  • Kefka from Final Fantasy VI is the result of crossing this trope with Straw Nihilist. Thanks to the Magitek experiments he's undergone, his mind has rotted to the point that destruction and death are the only things that bring meaning to his life, so he destroys and kills everything and everyone he can because it's the only thing that puts a smile on his face. And boy does it ever. Towards the end, it's possible that the only reason he stops playing this trope straight is because he's so ridiculously powerful that it just isn't fun anymore. Without the Evulz to drive him, he no longer has any use for either the world or even his own existence.
  • Rosso from Final Fantasy VII: Dirge of Cerberus. Her motivation boils down to "why not?". The rest of the Tsviets say similar things, to the tune of "We were made as killing machines, so why not do what we do best?"
• The Evil Matriarch Hilda from Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War. Most of her acts seems to derive from her lust of power. But torturing her sister in law Tailtiu to death and then her daughter too? That's simply done For The Evulz. Also, when her husband was very much disdainful towards child hunting so they can be sacrificed to an evil god, she goes ahead and supports it wholeheartedly. For what? For The Evulz.
• In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, according to Dimitri on the Blue Lions route, Miklan's gang of bandits attacked and destroyed several villages, leaving them in no shape to survive the winter, apparently "purely for pleasure." Dimitri says he might have understood, but not condoned, stealing and pillaging to survive, but this is inexcusable.
• William Afton from the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise killed around eleven children for no known reason. The most likely option is that he simply wanted to.
• For The Horde toys with this a bit, as the goblins and trolls have a sort of Moral Myopia about this sort of thing. When one of them dies the vocals show they care much for each other, as a large tribal family, and they swear vengeance or cry out unintelligible names, but the reason they're warring with everyone in the first place is because they just want to sack things.
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn brings us Blados, a Card-Carrying Villain who just plain loves his job. Whether it's kidnapping a child, blowing up and collapsing a cavern so the heroes can never go back to that area, taunting characters for being "too weak for a good fight", forcing the heroes to activate a forbidden Alchemy Machine and plunge most of the continent into a Total Eclipse of the Plot, or turning a giant laser superweapon against his own country, it looks like he's only doing it for laughs.
• The Nightmare Court in Guild Wars 2 manages to have an actual plan that requires its followers to kill and torment For The Evulz: By creating terrible memories for themselves and their victims, they try to make sure that their pseudo-Hive Mind, the Pale Tree, gets darker too, and will cause newly born Sylvari to be less accepting of the teachings from Ventari's tablet, which the Nightmare Court considers Stupid Good as opposed to their own Knight Templar approach.
• Deconstructed in Injustice: Gods Among Us and Injustice 2. The Joker's rationale for causing Superman's Start of Darkness by tricking him into killing his own wife Lois Lane and nuking Metropolis, and the ugly reason why he chose Metropolis rather than Gotham? As he says when Batman is interrogating him after the fact, he wanted to play on "easy mode" for once as if he was "beating up a dog with a dead kitten". However, this prompts revulsion even in the other villains, who have more abstract goals such as world conquest. That his jokes are full of references to nihilism and wanton chaos reveal how insane he truly is.
• Kid Icarus: Uprising: It's Played With for Hades, who does has a plan (Kill All Humans to harvest their souls to build his army and get an eternity's worth of good snacks), but openly admits that committing acts of evil is his idea of a good time. That really is the extent of his entire "plan" in the game. Cause a war on Earth and the Heavens, sit back, and enjoy the show while using their souls to replenish his armies and snack down. While commentating, of course.
• Rugal Bernstein from The King of Fighters. Some of his plans have a reasonable motivation, but he usually just does evil because he's amused at how low he can sink. Why do you think he killed all those people he then made into decorative bronze statues? Because he could.
• The Big Bad of Kirby and the Forgotten Land stands out as one of the cruelest villains in the whole franchise. Unlike previous antagonists who were corrupted by dark artifacts that amplified their hatred, a grieving parent trying to reunite with his daughter, or a once-benevolent priest who lost his mind to madness, Fecto Forgo has no such moral foibles. It is simply an evil alien creature who wants nothing more than to conquer and consume everything around him, willing to manipulate others with Mind Control to achieve its goals. And it's not incapable of feeling compassion; in fact, Elfilin is the living embodiment of his kindness given physical form. But when Fecto re-absorbs Elfilin and assumes its true form, all it wants to do is continue its tyrannical campaign, cementing Fecto Elfilis as truly irredeemable.
• Meria, of Knights in the Nightmare, loves to run around blowing shit up. She will actually take it all the way to Asgard if you let her.
• Last Cloudia: According to a description on the Crystal Castle Ark, Loug Zeus was believed to have brought a crystal to Granzelia to prompt a war of greed for its amusement.
• The eponymous mask from The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. This is emphasized by the fact that the person it chooses to possess is a (skull) kid, and during one of its three boss fights, it dances around giggling like a child, rarely attacking you. It doesn't seem to have a clear reason for all of the horrible things it does, part of what makes it scary as fuck. Note that Majora hands Link the Oni Mask and treats the Final Boss fight as a simple game.
  • Doubly so in the questionably canon manga adaptation, where the Mask is revealed to have hexed Kafei into a child for the hell of it when he refused to play with the possessed Skull Kid, and once discarding the Skull Kid, comments that Link "looks like a fun fellow" and tosses off a few inexplicably creepy lines about how he wants to play with Link now, eventually settling on "tag". Majora further has a Villainous Breakdown as he and Oni Link fight, calling Oni Link a "meanie" when he hits him the first time and giggling madly before repeating his actions from the video game of running around tittering with excitement. In the final form, he bawls out Link for ruining his "game", screaming that humans had always "played" willingly with him before. We're given a pretty good view that Majora threw the entire world into chaos and tried to destroy it purely because it was fun.
  • Not Majora himself, but they establish a Freudian Excuse for the Skull Kid, who was being influenced by him at one point in the game. A long time ago, the Skull Kid and the Giants were friends (his ONLY friends), but the giants left to sleep in the four compass directions leaving the Skull Kid all alone and feeling he had been abandoned. This caused him to become bitter and antagonistic toward people, which got turned up to eleven when Majora possessed him.
  • Plus the evil plan brings his friends back to visit/stop him from destroying the world!
• The Legend of Spyro: Malefor kidnaps a baby dragon only to have some company after exposing her to darkness, no doubt putting her through terrible misery and suffering in the process. Then he launches an army of crazed apes (whom he eventually condemns to a Fate Worse than Death simply because they do not seem loyal) to kill anybody who tries to stop him, so that he can destroy the entire world with a deadly blast. His motive is apparently Because Destiny Says So, but seriously — what would his actions accomplish? When the heroes show up to stop him, he gets a kick out of using Mind Control to turn one against the other, and is visibly miffed when she breaks free, ruining his game. Then as the planet starts to disintegrate during the final battle, he gets an even bigger kick out of taunting them for being too late: "Welcome to the end of the world!"
• The Dark Star in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story is this. He's already a Made of Evil Eldritch Abomination, and as a result, has no motivations other than destruction. His 'plan' is to destroy the Mushroom Kingdom or world, and he doesn't even consider that he happens to be 'living' there at the time. Then again, he's Made of Evil itself, so it's unlikely he'd understand the concept of having motivations or reasons.
• Mass Effect:
  • In the first game, it seems the Reapers plan to purge the galaxy of all intelligent life, including mankind, because... that's simply what they've been doing for ages.
  "Your extinction is inevitable. We are the end of everything. [...] The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance and at the apex of their glory, they are extinguished."
  • And in Mass Effect 2, their secondary motivation has been revealed to be reproduction. By way of melting the most appropriate races into primordial porridge. This porridge is then used as the primary ingredient for a gargantuan cyberorganic gestalt of the entire species in question, that then becomes the core of a new Reaper. While the biological imperative of this motivation is typical, the sheer absurd horribleness of it is probably Lulz related.
  • Mass Effect 3 finally did reveal their motives (which are spoilerific and long-winded in explanation), and it turns out they were operating on Blue-and-Orange Morality / Well-Intentioned Extremist rather than this trope. Their precursors, on the other hand, were arrogant, narcissistic eldritch abominations who utterly dominated the galaxy, but utterly enslaved the insignificant masses to fuel their equally massive egos. The cosmic backstory happens because they tried to one-up their slaves, an act that was wholly unnecessary and ended in tears for everyone involved. ^note In fact, they accidentally started the entire cosmic horror story plot of the series because their automatic food dispensers were frequently inventing robots and getting themselves exterminated in robot wars, so they tried to solve the robot-war problem, and prove they were better at making robot slaves than their organic slaves, by making their own super-robot and ordering it to solve the robot-war problem with almost no organic oversight. Then they acted surprised when their super-robot, neglected and forced to solve a nearly-impossible problem, turned on them. Their biological descendants are also arrogant NEE Ts who only look wise because they've had thousands of years to practice, brainwashing the local scientists to use as disposable ragdolls, and Shepard has to chastise a 50,000 ton cephalapod-demigod to shape up and get in the fight.
• Yomi Hellsmile from Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is the director of the Amaterasu Corporation Peacekeepers who wants to control Kanai Ward and eliminate any competition to his position no matter the cost, something he demonstrates immediately during Yuma's journey to Kanai Ward, as his plot to eliminate Master Detectives entering into Kanai Ward serves as the first case in the game. He's also the one with higher power over Amaterasu because he thinks he's the only capable member in it. However, why he wants to do it is never explained; he seemingly just wants to be a maniacal Dirty Cop because it makes him feel good.
• Metal Wolf Chaos gives us RICHARD Hawk, who laughs constantly while testing out a superweapon on New York City and filling Chicago with poison gas for no reason other than the fact that he just hates freedom.
• Murray, the Demonic Talking Skull from the Monkey Island series fits this trope quite nicely.
  "What! Murray, I did you a favor!"
  "Yes, thus making my betrayal all the more evil! Muhahaha!"
• Mother: Pokey/Porky Minch seems to fit this trope perfectly in EarthBound (1994) and Mother 3. Though the series most famous villain is undoubtedly the cosmic horror Giygas, he's actually edged out by a worse evil: a frustrated, self-absorbed child willing to set the world on fire because he never gets his way. He once states that being the hero doesn't sound like fun to him. In EarthBound, he seems more like a harmless example who usually appears to taunt or hinder Ness. Mother 3, however... his actions shift more towards pure evil territory, transforming a peaceful island's plants and animals into violent chimeras, then gathering all the inhabitants on the island to his flying "utopia" so that they can all watch as he awakens a dragon to destroy all of existence. All this because he's bored and wants a quick laugh.
• Nintendo Wars:
  • Lash, the resident Mad Scientist and Perky Goth of Black Hole's forces in the Advance Wars series, openly admits her only interest in being on their side is to be evil and play games. Unlike Hawke, who becomes increasingly worried about Black Hole's motivations and their goal, Lash couldn't care less because it's "still as evil as ever."
  • A similar example is Dr. Caulder from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, whose motivations are a vaguely scientific perverse interest in "studying" how people act when they are broken down, made to suffer, faced with no-win scenarios, and suffering under the effects of a horrific virus. His first appearance, the sixth mission aptly named "Fear Experiment", has his forces targeting the same automated crop factory the 12th battalion is after, with the team coming to a disturbing conclusion after the fact:
    Dr. Morris: To tell the truth, there's something else that truly disturbs me... It appears the enemy's goal was to destroy the factory all along. If we had gotten the factory up and running, we could have solved our food-shortage problem. We could have lived here peacefully. What did they gain by destroying our factory? It's as if...
    Lin: It's as if they wanted us all to die.
• By the time Travis Touchdown reaches her, Bad Girl in No More Heroes is so utterly burned out by her career as an assassin that she slaughters countless gimp clones just for the fun of it. She openly admits that she has no reason to kill anyone, she does it to keep herself entertained. Travis, who is only slightly less of a Villain Protagonist than Kratos, finds himself disgusted.
• Munenori from Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams is a crazy piece of work. His motivation in this is cemented when he learns that his eye from his mother was not forced upon him to make him strong but given by his mother willingly to save his life. He begins to break down....and then starts cackling and explaining that it's irrelevant to why he does anything.
• Minions (especially brown ones) from Overlord might also count toward this trope - they simply enjoy killing and crashing everything (this is evident from their constant remarks, like "Kill, kill!" or "Burn, burn!").
• The boss of Chapter 4 in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door turns the citizens of Twilight Town into pigs just for kicks and giggles.
• The killer in Persona 4 decides to cure a serious case of Small Town Boredom with murder and (attempted) rape. In his own words:
  "Reasons? None, really. I could do it, that's all. And it was fun... I guess that's my reason?"
• Pillars of Dust: Almorigga cursed the surviving villagers of Ghyrr by transforming them into dogs, all for his own amusement.
• In the second Pokémon Mystery Dungeon game, it's never explained why Darkrai wanted to cover the world in darkness aside from destroying both space and time in order for his evil plan to work.
• Why does GLaDoS from Portal subject the player to so many dangerous tests even after she's Turned Against Her Masters? Because she really likes testing. Also For Science! The second game eventually goes further into this by explaining that successful testing provides a shock to the AI overseer's pleasure centers.
• [PROTOTYPE]:
  • You (as Alex Mercer) can run around murdering absolutely anyone you care to using a multitude of techniques and abilities. True, they drop some health for you, but then why not absorb them instead of, say, throwing the smoldering remains of a helicopter at some random grouping?
  • Blackwatch is implied to be heavy believers of this trope. One of the consumed memories are about Blackwatch troopers shooting civilians just for the hell of it, laughing the whole time.
• Iris Sepperin of RosenkreuzStilette states that she made the organization of RKS fight against the Holy Empire just for her own amusement. She also amuses herself with other people's suffering, such as Zorne's when she killed her father whom she was desperately trying to get to accept her as his real daughter, and Grolla's when she had arranged for her long-dead grandfather to be brought back by her father as The Grim Reaper.
  Iris: I was born with absolute power and unparalleled brains. Now, when someone knows everything there is to know about something, they get bored with it. That's the reason why I chose to stage this little revolution: to make this world just a little less boring.
• By the time of Saints Row 2, The Boss made it clear that liberating Stilwater for peace wasn't a priority anymore. The final lines of Saints Row 2 confirm this. "This is our city [now], we do whatever the fuck we want." Downplayed somewhat in later games as fame and money is sexier to them than rampant murder.
• Ende the Practitioner from Seraphic Blue: Downplayed in the fact that he is following orders, but that doesn't mean he can't have fun while committing atrocious acts. However, his constant need to amuse himself works against him when he fuses his subordinates with Disastia's core in the hopes that they lose their minds. Instead, they control that power and usurp Ende's status as the Big Bad.
  • From the same game, Siegbert Ansbach also plays with this trope when raising his daughter. He claims that raising her to become emotionally numb is necessary for her to save the world, but he also brags that raising a child is a "game", which casts doubt on how much his actions are based in "pragmatism" rather than amusement. Especially when he decided to stop doing something about her evil alternate personality because he thinks it's more fun if they duke it out, which essentially puts the world at risk.
• Most of the villains in Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus have some sort of Freudian Excuse or another behind their criminal careers. Sir Raleigh, however, is simply a bored aristocrat who commits crimes and sinks ships to entertain himself.
• Lampshaded by Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) for Mephiles, who really doesn't seem to have any reason for attempting to destroy the entire universe, other than raging sadism.
• If you you're really looking for nasty evil leadership, seems like the whole place of SimCity (and the game's many sequels) is an ultimate Crapsack World that corrupt mayors can run cities in. Crime can be rampant on the streets, or a mayor can summon a tornado to hit that peaceful neighborhood, or he can even drive around and spill toxic waste in shopping districts. The people living in those cities aren't too bright for staying there either. Try reducing all firefighter budget to zero and set a few fires. As the industries explode and set the entire map on fire, you will find that even with a third of the map burning and another third already turned to ashes, 30% of people polled will still find traffic or taxes to be the biggest problem in town...
• Soul Nomad & the World Eaters:
  • Carnage and mass destruction are integral parts of fun for Gig. He is very open about this, by the way.
  • Likewise, Thuris seems to cook up virulent, nigh-incurable plagues mainly for shits and giggles. The protagonist of the Demon Path trumps them both by a long shot. His/her final words after destroying reality itself in a Suicidal Cosmic Temper Tantrum? "It doesn't matter. It was fun."
• Street Fighter has Juri Han, Seth's sadistic, hedonistic Dragon. She joined S.I.N. after receiving the Feng Shui Engine, but she also freely admitted that it was her idea of a good time. Sadly, her idea of "fun" involves people getting beaten within an inch of their lives. It also tends to overlap with other tropes as she literally gets off on the pain she inflicts.
• Yuber and Luca Blight from the Suikoden series. Childerich from Suikoden V for that matter too.
• Super Robot Wars:
  • Both Psycho for Hire Archibald Grims and Lubikka Hakinnen. Grims forced Elzam von Branstein to make the Sadistic Choice between killing his wife or having his whole colony gassed, as well as bombing an excavation site all for the lulz. His predecessor Lubikka is also said to have done a lot of atrocities for the lulz, and takes extra lulz if he is torturing Tytti Noorbuck mentally.
  • Archibald actually does have a grudge against the Branstein family, but when not torturing them, he just really likes killing people. His hobbies include joining rebellions that he couldn't give a damn about, "accidentally" firing on civilians in an occupied country, and drinking red tea because it looks like blood.
  • This is what The Edel Bernal's motivation boils down to essentially in Super Robot Wars Z.
• Word of God states that this is Wario's reason why he's working with the Subspace Army in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Wario does have motivation in greed, but the efforts he goes through to get it, right down to shaking money out of enemies way too gleefully just proves he enjoys the methods as much as the gains.
• SHODAN from System Shock. She's an apegy of villainy and bloodlust. First, Edward Diego tricks the hacker into removing her ethical restraints, and how does she thank him? By turning everyone except you into her mutant slaves, while letting Diego still have at least somewhat of a mind. Worst of all, she plans to use Citadel Station's mining laser to destroy the cities of Earth, and then use her mutant virus on anyone who survives her wrath.
  • After you defeat her in the first game, there's also her appearance in System Shock 2. SHODAN merely used Dr. Marie Delecroix as a pawn for disposing of The Many after Dr. Janice Polito commits suicide. But she abandoned her when she needed her most. She also made a deal with you: if you destroy The Many, she will let you live. She never lets you come to the aid of another human being in need of your help. You destroy the Many, and she leaves you for dead. Only to fight you... and die. But not really, because you then see her TAKE OVER REBECCA SIDDONS! Why? 'Cuz she's "a perfect immortal machine!"
• Saleh, one of the Quirky Miniboss Squad in Tales of Rebirth is an extreme case that he is very much repulsed with anything good and strives to do evil and it just delights him to see people suffer.
• Verse from Tyranny would qualify as a Token Evil Teammate in most video games. In Tyranny, you are a Villain Protagonist with a number of Affably Evil allies (and a few Token Good Teammates)... and Verse is still a stand-out. When she heard the horde of marauding monsters that is the Scarlet Chorus was rampaging in the area, pillaging wantonly and taking people prisoners and forcing them to fight and be conscripted or horribly executed, Verse grabbed a good knife and willingly headed out to them. The fastest way to earn her approval is to hilariously kill others — including Scarlet Chorus members, who deserve it if they're dumb enough to take a Fatebinder on, as she sees it.
• Alhazad from Wild ARMs conducts horrible experiments on any human unfortunate to cross his path (including orphaned children) because this is his idea of fun. He even admits he's not that concerned about the fate of Filgaia when it comes down to it, because having fun is his primary motivation.
• World of Warcraft has this humorous example from the Black Comedy that is the Forsaken:
  Undercity Champion: I punched a penguin on my way in here.
  Argent Confessor Paletress: Oh, my. Do you feel remorseful, at least?
  Undercity Champion: Nah, not really. I just wanted to see the look on your face. (laughs)
  • A lot of player behavior in general faults into this and not just towards the other faction.
  • A more serious example is what drove Sargeras to madness. After defeating the Nathrezim he could not come to peace with himself over the cruelties they had inflicted on others simply for the sake of doing so.

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