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Evil, Inc.

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"The NEVIC corporation, who are evil because they're a corporation in a sci-fi game. They might as well have been called There's Shit We're Not Telling You Ltd. Formerly traded as Hope You Haven't Watched Any Alien Films Lately PLC."

Welcome to Evil, Inc. We offer many services, including manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, genetically modifying orphan children to create super villains, and producing herbal soups made of weed. Chances are you've heard of us, considering we're a publicly traded company with thousands of branches across the globe (as well as a few secret labs cleverly disguised as corner bakeries). Oh, and don't try to stop us, because whether you know it or not, you probably work for us. Have a nice day!

Evil Inc. is the standard enemy organization in a lot of works — a corporation that sets out to gain money and/or power through some form of villainy. Expect laws to be flagrantly broken, ethics to be ignored, and dissenters to be disposed of, all in the name of profit or advancing their Evil Plan. Often a Lex Luthor back-up plan: Create a front that, in case anything goes wrong, gives you both the perfect alibi and the resources to start over. They generally come in one of three varieties:

  1. Unassuming (such as "Milwaukee Bakery, The" actually being the front for an international terrorist group)
  2. Suspicious, but still keeping its villainous activities hidden (PMCs, arms manufacturers, Predatory Big Pharma, etc.)
  3. Cartoonishly evil (look up "Big Evil Corp.")

Regardless of which type it is, evil corporations have one or two ultimate goals: make as much money as possible regardless of who suffers, and Take Over the World.

Often this is considered Camp (especially if it's a Type 3), a Dead Horse Trope, or both in movies (excluding environmental ones). In video games, it's still running strong, despite being pretty predictable. And in (mainstream) comic books, LexCorp, and OsCorp have been running without interruption for decades, and are therefore still the medium's prime examples. Often the "reveal" that a company is Evil, Inc. can be seen coming from a mile away, but the test for whether or not the hero is working there is to ask whether his mission is some level of top secret, or whether he’s ever seen the CEO's face. If the answer to the first question is yes and the second one no, congratulations! You're one of the bad guys!

Evil Inc. is likely to be ruled by a Corrupt Corporate Executive.

When Evil Inc. would make more money without being used as an evil front, it's an example of Cut Lex Luthor a Check. When Evil Inc. is a legion of superheroes gone awry, it's a subversion of Heroes "R" Us. When it's actually succeeded, more or less, in taking over the world, it's turned into MegaCorp. When it's a smaller part of a secretive agenda, it may be involved in The Conspiracy; conversely, if it has a secretive agenda itself, it is a Corporate Conspiracy. When the Evil Inc. masquerades themselves behind their nice-sounding names and publicity, then they are Peace & Love Incorporated. Toxic, Inc. is a subtrope, where the company is depicted as not just evil but with a specific focus on pollution. Compare Incompetence, Inc., which can overlap.

Also the name of a webcomic by Brad Guigar.

Corporations with various traits of this sort of business have existed, and do exist, in real life, from the usual suspects in Big Tech and Big Pharma to more colorless monopolies who simply exploit their market dominance to unethically stall innovation, influence legislation, destroy competition and gouge the customers. However, fewnote  of them will ever self-consciously advertise themselves as evil, preferring instead another trope. By definition, Evil, Inc. as used here is an exaggerated and caricatured example of corporate villainy. Therefore, No Real Life Examples, Please!


Examples

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    Advertising 
  • The Mint Mobile ad "Dream Job" has the Devil getting a job at the hilariously customer-unfriendly "Big Wireless", proudly proclaiming "These guys torture people on a whole other level! I'm learning so much!"
    Exec: He's been a real addition to the team. Prices are up, hold times have doubled, and some fees are so hidden, we can't even find 'em.

    Anime and Manga 

    Comic Books 
  • Astro City:
    • TransGene abducted many victims for experiments, with only a sole, superpowered survivor; he escaped but is now a fugitive from justice, and the corporation is now hunting for him with more experimental subjects, in order to dissect him and learn why the process worked on him.
    • The Black Lab performs underground science for anyone willing to pay.
  • Vought-American, from The Boys, responsible for both a WW2 fighter plane that almost cost the US its advance in the Pacific and an assault rifle so crappy the Vietcong didn't even steal it from the soldier's corpses, who only survived thanks to their extensive bribing network. Now they're the only ones producing superheroes, kept in check by the rest of the military industry and the Boys.
  • The DCU has a few examples.
    • The best known example is Lexcorp, the corporation that Superman's Arch-Enemy Lex Luthor uses to forward his evil schemes. Almost every time after one of his plans fails, he'll say something to the extent of "Arrest ME? But I'm just the head of a perfectly legitimate megacorp! Why arrest me?"
    • The second volume of Mystery in Space introduced the Eternal Light Corporation. They're mostly put out of business by Captain Comet, but are shown to still have a small core of hardliner supporters.
    • Wonder Woman's Volume 2 villain Victoria Cale runs a pharmaceutical company, that breaks supervillains out of jail to experiment on them without their consent and uses their amelioration of mind control techniques on civilians.
    • Robin (1993): Tim Drake and Cassandra Cain take down the head of a pharmaceutical company that has been testing its new Super Serum by having compatriots sell it as a street drug and then hiring mercenaries to hunting down and kill the survivors to cover up their misdeeds.
  • The Marvel Universe has several examples — most of whom are Iron Man villains.
    • The oldest example is Roxxon Oil, which was swallowed up by another evil corporation, Kronos. Roxxon later returned as an independent company and major antagonist in The Mighty Thor and Immortal Hulk under the control of Dario Agger, before its new CEO goes against the Champions. Roxxon is Toxic, Inc. to the extreme, using projects to specifically make environmental issues worse so they can profit, and even ally with Malekith's Dark Council to conquer the Ten Realms.
    • Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM) used several shell corporations as fronts for their dealings, before the whole thing was bought out by Roberto "Sunspot" DaCosta and rebranded as "Avengers Idea Mechanics" in New Avengers (2015).
    • Osborn Industries from Spider-Man was retconned into one, once Norman Osborn himself was retconned to be Evil All Along.
    • Marvel UK's 1990s books are largely centred around Mys-Tech, a globe-spanning evil corporation led by immortal sorcerers. They employ Warheads and act as the Big Bad for the rest of the Marvel UK protagonists.
    • X-Men has Trask Industries, which exists solely to manufacture Killer Robot Sentinels. Shaw Industries picks up the Sentinel slack after Trask and his company go the way of the dodo.
    • Nextwave has the Beyond Corporation, both the secret sponsor of Nextwave and the force behind their greatest enemies, H.A.T.E.. Mighty Avengers (2013) later reveals that Beyond Corporation is actually made up of cosmic entities like the Beyonders who took a bunch of heroes and fucked with their personalities For the Evulz, and most of the old Nextwave team has been dealing with some serious psychological repercussions from it. Then after those cosmic bastards got kicked out, Beyond stuck around, and is still doing seriously questionable experiments.

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Following the Mass Awakening, pharmaceutical companies and corporations such as Bio-Major are apparently scrambling over each-other and willing to hire mercenaries to obtain Titan DNA samples (including the Ghidorah DNA samples obtained by Alan Jonah) for lucrative purposes.
  • Anywhere But Here: It is never stated what exactly the Diamandis Company makes, but all we really know is that it is environmentally unsafe and involves exploiting its workers to the point of various protests and acts of eco-terrorism is done against them. Since Blue and Yellow are a Hanging Judge and Corrupt Corporate Executive, respectively, going up against them in any way is risking life in prison or the electric chair.
  • More Than Human has an evil corporation called John Smith (JS) Inc. The Rowdyruff Boys work for them in the Special Cases unit, which deals in weaponry, espionage, assassinations and other evil.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Weyland-Yutani and/or its surrogates from the Alien franchise are in the continuous habit of forcing ill-prepared humans into encounters with the insanely dangerous Xenomorphs, all in the hopes of somehow using the aliens for profit.
  • Virtucon from Austin Powers is a example of a fully functional Evil Inc. that was screwed over when Dr. Evil came back and insisted that they start working on doing nefarious deeds again.
  • The film version of Big Trouble morphs the book's Penultimate Corp into Penultra and erases its Type 1 angle. Mostly Type 3, but flirting with Type 2. Penultra is mostly a construction company, but as corrupt as the day is long, willfully incompetent to the point of cartoonishness, but so well connected that they still keep raking in contracts. They have no trouble blaming any problems on subcontractors and disposing of said blame magnets in "boating accidents" on a regular basis. Oh, and there's an M1919 machine gun on the boardroom table.
  • Carry On Spying has STENCH (the Society for the Total Extinction of Non-Conforming Humans), who steal a drug.
  • PANTAC from Dottor Jekyll e Gentile Signora is a company which deliberately destroys economy of underdeveloped countries to gain cheap labour, and which produces poisonous food in prospect of selling cures for the maladies it induces.
  • Jurassic Park: The Jurassic World trilogy and Camp Cretaceous animated series gives us both the secret conspiracy within In-Gen and BioSyn, who are out to find some way to profit by weaponizing cloned prehistoric life forms come hell or high water (very high water). BioSyn (and Dr. Lewis Dodgson) win the pot in Jurassic World Dominion by going full Umbrella/Weyland-Yutani and risking an extinction-level event with cloned prehistoric locusts just so his company can obtain full monopoly of the world's food market.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Apex Cybernetics are the second type. They're a hi-tech corporation invested in the fields of robotics, neurology and A.I. with facilities on both U.S. and Chinese soil, and they're using their own facilities as a front to build a Titan-killing Mecha with which they can kill Godzilla and any other Titan they deem a threat, and fashion themselves as the architects of humanity's future. What makes it even worse is they actually have the astonishing levels of stupidity to use King Ghidorah's telepathic remains as the brain for their superweapon. When Apex's own actions instigate Godzilla's rampage, true to corporate form, Walter Simmons — who's masterminding their Evil Plan — takes advantage of it to make the public think Godzilla has made a Face–Heel Turn and that Apex will be humanity's savior instead of the ones responsible for provoking Godzilla's rampage.
  • The Shield Corporation from Highlander II: The Quickening. The company's founder is the hero himself, who intended it as a bulwark against the depleted ozone layer. Alas, it is presently under the guidance of crooks who bilk consumers and governments for the service, and are covering up data showing the ozone layer has restored itself.
  • Logan: Hiding behind a benevolent public image, Transigen is directly involved in illegal human experimentation on mutant children. They're also responsible for preventing further mutant births via genetically modified crops which suppress the X-gene.
  • Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil Film Series. Never one to miss a chance to accidentally unleash a Zombie Apocalypse, Umbrella can always be counted to pick the most dickish of dick moves over anything else. Then the final movie reveals that they intentionally unleashed the T-virus, so that they could rule the post-apocalyptic world after the rest of humanity is decimated.
  • Omni Consumer Products (OCP) from the RoboCop franchise is an omnipresent company that runs Detroit as a corporatocracy, monopolizing every consumer service and privatizing civil institutions like the police force. They also use highly unethical tactics to maintain control, such as employing violent criminals and producing defective military products (like ED-209).
  • Sorry to Bother You has Worryfree, which has its workers sign lifetime contracts where they live at the factories, and that's before you find out about the equisapiens.

    Literature 
  • Penultimate Corp in Big Trouble cuts across all three types. Penultimate Corporation is mostly a construction company, but as corrupt as the day is long, willfully incompetent to the point of cartoonishness, but so well connected that they still keep raking in contracts. They have no trouble blaming any problems on subcontractors and disposing of said blame magnets in "boating accidents" on a regular basis. On top of this, Penultimate's main shadow goal is to overthrow Castro.
  • In Company by Max Barry, Zephyr Holdings doesn't just have a Bad Boss, its entire business is creating them. The whole company is just one big laboratory for finding the cruelest, most demeaning ways that a corporation can treat its own employees without losing productivity... and then teaching those techniques to managers at other companies.
  • Manpower Incorporated from the Honor Harrington series. Their main product is genetic slaves. Unlike many examples, their own nature is plainly visible for the galaxy to see. Manpower is actually both a source of revenue and a distraction for the Mesan Alignment, which plans to Take Over The Galaxy.
  • The Last Adventure of Constance Verity: There is an actual company — Lairs, Incorporated — that specializes in building secret Supervillain Lairs.
  • Tresisda from the MARZENA series is a computer software company based in Germany and Russia. Their very name is an anagram for DISASTER and their goal is global market domination by any means.
  • Played for Laughs in A Murder of Manatees: The Further Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent, where a multiversal conglomerate is staging a takeover of several major evil corporations in order concentrate all evil in one place. The list includes Weyland-Yutani, Cyberdyne Systems, LexCorp, Umbrella, Kentucky Fried Velociraptor, and United Airlines.
  • The Otherworld: Back in the 16th century, the Sorcerers decided that they wanted to be the main supernatural power and duped the church into forming the Inquisition. Now, the Sorcerer cabals operate as massive, family-owned multinational corporations with more than their fair share of shady dealings...
  • Leech Enterprises in Kim Newman's fiction, including the novel The Quorum. Its Corrupt Corporate Executive Derek Leech is actually the Devil, or something very close, and seems to have as his ultimate aim simply making the world a worse place, possibly to its destruction. (But on his terms; there have been two Enemy Mine situations when something else wanted to destroy the world.)
  • BeauTek from The Ultra Violets, masquerading as a biocosmetics company while manufacturing mind-controlling perfume and their own army of mutants in the Mall of No Returns.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Angel: The law firm Wolfram & Hart is a front for the Wolf, Ram, and Hart, a cabal of powerful demons commonly called the "Senior Partners". The firm's goals are to represent the evil and unnatural in mortal courts, further the aims of the Senior Partners to bring about the final Apocalypse, to keep man's inhumanity to man running smoothly, and grow their yearly profit margin. Their clients include other Evil Incs. such as Weyland-Yutani, Yoyodyne, Newscorp and the patent holder of cancer.
  • In Bad Robots, TezCorp is a MegaCorp which specializes in robotics and electronics, created by a malevolent robot to punish humans for mistreating their electronic appliances.
  • Veridian Dynamics of Better Off Ted certainly flirted with being one. Its management practices certainly held true with the average Evil Inc., and some of their divisions were engaged in work that wasn't just morally dodgy, but outright evil insanity. Happily, its general incompetence kept it from actualizing.
  • Blood Over Water has Sleet Mountain, with its CEO Clyde Spendelworth. In the novel remake, he's revealed to be running an illegal sex slave trade, using his role as CEO of Sleet Mountain as a front. In the original miniseries, he was merely a con man who was ripping off the government and polluting a pond. The novel keeps the pollution and cleanup fraud theme but expands to make Clyde unlikeable regardless of which end of the political spectrum you're on.
  • In The Boys (2019), Vought International is slightly less evil than its comic counterpart, but still pretty bad. It was founded by a Nazi Evilutionary Biologist who wanted to use the Super Serum he developed to elevate white people into a Master Race of literal supermen, but in the modern day they've settled for Pragmatic Villainy in the form of a massive media empire that uses bribery and blackmail to cover up the crimes of the Fake Ultimate Heroes they employ. Things escalate in season 2 when they assassinate multiple United States Congressmen to cover up their crimes, and in season 3 when the Big Bad Homelander performs a hostile takeover of the company with the intent of having a President Evil Puppet King under his control.
  • Capadocia takes place in a Mexican for-profit prison for women by the same name. ECSO owns Capadocia and uses the jail as a front for trafficking with designer drugs.
  • The Colbert Report has Prescott Group, a shady MegaCorp Stephen Colbert shills for. The pharmaceuticals division, inevitably featured during the "Cheating Death" segment, makes products always have a litany of hilariously horrifying side effects.
  • Doctor Who: In "Oxygen", Chasm Forge is a corporation that has no problem in "deactivating" employees when their reduced productivity makes them more of a strain on the limited resource of oxygen than their lives are worth.
  • Dogengers: The series that features some of Japan's finest local heroes, also introduces their most dreaded villainous group: the Secret Society of Darkness Incorporated, or (Aku no Himitsu Kessha INC.), headed by the equally dreadful Yabai Mask, and comprising some other of Japan's local villains like Shuraomaru, Nectaris (from Earth Warrior Zeros), and Akuma Bee (from Localizer Brave), although that last one deserted in 2018, stabbing his employer in the back.
  • In Get Smart, the Nebulous Evil Organisation K.A.O.S. is a Delaware corporation for tax purposes.
  • In Mr. Robot, the company E Corp is ridiculously powerful and is directly and indirectly responsible for a lot of bad things, including killing the main character's father via radiation. In fact, Elliot hates them so much that he actually mentally refers to the company as Evil Corp, and since the story is told through his eyes, whenever anybody mentions it, we hear "Evil Corp" as well.
  • Power Rangers Cosmic Fury: Lord Zedd allies himself with Squid Ink Inc., the universe's largest and most evil weapons manufacturing company. In the penultimate episode, Squid Ink CEO Bajilia Naire becomes the Dragon Ascendant and reveals her plan is to kill Zedd, let his soul release a World-Wrecking Wave that will rid the universe of goodness and heroism, and then profit off of the endless wars in a world where everyone is evil.
  • In Season 4 of True Detective there's the Silver Sky mining operation. Besides their pollution levels causing severe harm to the primarily Alaskan Indigenous villages, they were funding the "independent" research to produce false contamination levels to meet standards. And "Part 5" reveals they are bribing Det. Hank Prior to obstruct police investigations.
  • Utopia features Corvadt and Pergus Holdings, massive multinationals spanning dozens of different industries. They are close to perfecting a Sterility Plague that takes effect when a flu vaccine combines with genetically modified corn.
  • Vincenzo: Babel Group, the evil conglomerate that does stuff like deliberately market opioids to the sick for the express intent of getting them addicted, and then kill all the scientists involved with the clinical trial by blowing them up.

    Newspaper Comics 
  • Dilbert's workplace veers into this as the strip goes on, primarily in the abusive ways in which the employees are treated. Heck, two of the higher-ups actually have "evil" in their job titles!

    Podcasts 

    Tabletop Games 

    Video Games 
  • The Big Bad of Alpha Protocol is Halbech Corporation, a defense contractor whose Evil Plan is to trigger a new Cold War between the US and China for the sake of War for Fun and Profit. However, their efforts are more likely to trigger World War III, forcing Player Character Agent Thorton to race against the clock to Prevent the War.
  • The Templar Order of Assassin's Creed runs a multinational conglomerate known as Abstergo Industries in the present day. Abstergo's primary focus is harvesting the memories of various individuals to create products that demonize the Assassins and paint the Templars as heroes not to mention their usage of paramilitary strike teams to take out the opposition. If that weren't enough for you to know that they are an Evil Inc company, they use the colors of black, grey and white. Oh and their founders just so happen to be Henry Ford, Ransom "Ranny" Olds and Harvey Firestone.
  • In Borderlands, the various gun manufacturers run the gamut from just being criminally negligent (Dahl abandoning their workforce on Pandora led to them becoming insane bandits) to outright Cartoonish Supervillainy in the case of Hyperion under Handsome Jack's rule. Tales from the Borderlands shows that Hyperion corporate culture puts heavy emphasis on worshiping Jack and emulating his psychopathy with Klingon Promotion a completely viable way to climb up the corporate ladder.
  • Close Your Eyes's V.I.E.W seems to be playing this role and, from what's implied (especially by the protest signs and clues left by the Witch), the participants (or many of them) in the Cognitive Transfer program were not entirely willing.
  • The FutureTech company in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 almost certainly qualifies. Over the course of the Allied campaign in the main game, and especially during the short side campaigns and Commander's Challenge mode of the expansion pack, it becomes bitingly apparent that the corporation has no real stake in which of the three sides emerges victorious - only that the state of the world-wide conflict provides an excellent opportunity to field test their technology. This includes, among other things, helicopters and armored troopers capable of flash-freezing men and machines alike; massive aerial gunships mounting a scaled-down version of a superweapon; a sentient robot tank that decimates entire armies with neutron particle cannons. Even the voice-overs for units specifically stated to be the product of FutureTech are decidedly more sociopathic, bloodthirsty, or outright indifferent to the carnage they can inflict, in comparison to the otherwise defensive and patriotic sentiments of the Allies' baseline troops.
  • Criminal Case: The Conspiracy has DreamLife. Initially introduced as a tech firm company focused on developing virtual reality games, they get slowly unmasked over the course of the story as a morally bankrupt company whose true goal is to develop a Fantastic Drug capable of turning humans into mindless sheeple for them to be controlled by a select powerful elite, and its influence via the works of Rozetta Pierre and Ad Astra lasts for the whole game even after its shutdown halfway through the season.
  • In the Crysis series, C.E.L.L. starts as a corrupt and bloodthirsty military contractor. Between the second and third games, they falsely take credit for Alcatraz's victory and obtain an alien energy source, so their political influence and economic power grows to the point that they can drive multitudes into debt slavery.
  • Cyberpunk 2077:
  • One of the twists of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is that the current Mutual Killing Games were set up by Team Danganronpa, a media company dedicated to replicating the fictional-in-this-universe Danganronpa games into an actual Sadistic Game Show for a viewing audience, and are willing to brainwash and pit students against each other in a Deadly Game just to entertain a bored public. But it's ok; the kids signed a waiver.
  • Dead Rising 2 introduces Phenotrans, the pharmaceutical company responsible for manufacturing the expensive anti-zombification drug Zombrex. As it turns out, producing Zombrex requires the acquisition of a steady supply of Queens, parasitic insects responsible for (and spawned by) the creation of zombies. Phenotrans' solution to this was to intentionally cause zombie outbreaks in Las Vegas and Fortune City, killing and infecting millions of people while giving Phenotrans the supplies they needed.
  • In the DERE.EXE series, AppSir Inc (which shares their name with the out-of-universe developer) appears to just be a game development company but is actually a front group for the Rotschstein Institute, which uses their games as experiments in forced digitization of human minds and other such things. Even after the demise of the Institute, Darius continues the company's experiments to bring back someone he loves and seek revenge on those he felt wronged him.
  • Descent features the Post-Terran Mining Corporation, or P.T.M.C., which specializes in mining on other planets, moons, and asteroids and developing autonomous robots to do so. Lo and behold, the robots are going haywire, and lo and behold, the player character has to destroy these robots and the mines where they dwell, and lo and behold, this entire thing was a setup to test and refine the intentional homocidal programming of these robots in a bid by P.T.M.C. for world domination.
  • Where to even start with the Deus Ex Universe? Just about every corporation in the series is up to something shady, whether that be actively profiting off of others' misery or being in cahoots with The Illuminati.
    • Technology and bio-research giant VersaLife (along with its parent company, Page Industries) from Deus Ex is the worst, responsible for countless incidents of unethical experimentation, corporate espionage, and the production and release of the Gray Death nanovirus — and that's without even mentioning their CEO's plans to take over the United States, and his attempt to merge with an omniscient AI to turn himself into a god.
    • Deus Ex: Human Revolution mostly centers around two corporations. Sarif Industries, the protagonist's employer, is a generally benign, if not exactly benevolent, company that treats its employees well and just wants to make an honest buck bringing augmentation technology to the world. Tai Yong Medical, on the other hand, plays this trope for all its worth. Its CEO cares for nothing but profit, outright demanding that employees use untested and even defective materials in its augmentation products in order to meet profit and schedule goals, engaging in hostile takeovers and corporate espionage to eliminate competition, producing "upgrades" that allow her to shut off augmented people or drive them insane, and even planning to merge with the Hyron Project.
  • The BigCorp from Diner Dash Adventures is portrayed as a Card-Carrying Villain who explicitly sets out to cause mayhem in Diner Town For the Evulz, and openly brags about committing "evil" deeds. This is a Flanderization of their previous portrayal, in which Mr. Big is a Corrupt Corporate Executive who is willing to engage in sabotage to get rid of competitors, but is also willing to concede defeat if his rivals manage to survive despite the sabotage. By contrast, the BigCorp in Adventures seem to cause wanton destruction all over the city for the heck of it, even when it's not profitable for anyone.
  • Kremkroc Industries, Inc. and Frantic Factory in Donkey Kong Country and Donkey Kong 64, respectively.
  • The UAC in Doom (2016) have gone straight into this trope, in contrast to their positive portrayal in the previous games, thanks to the upper echelons becoming a demon cult. Their antics include sacrificing their employees to summon demons and trying to create fusions of demons and machines, like the Cyberdemon. Other things include encouraging employees to voluntarily give up their souls, get pentagram brands to "show their faith in the UAC", and institute a seven-day work week (because God rested on the seventh day, but just think of how much more work He could have gotten done if He hadn't!) as they try to exploit Hell for its resources. The whole thing is Played for Laughs at points, with cheerful announcements that offer slogans like "Weaponizing demons for a brighter tomorrow!" Towards the end of the game, they degenerate into Black Speech. They go even harder in Doom Eternal due to one of the Hell Priests having taken over as the head, with the Slayer constantly coming across an announcer praising demonkind and telling humanity to sacrifice themselves.
  • Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Zetacorp outright brags about owning all means of production and they have so much influence that they not only have corporate mercenaries, they also used their wealth to take control of the Church of the Vessel and use them to persecute the poor. Although they are technically fighting dangerous demons, President Zazz's endgame is to revive humanity and have them establish a human supremacist society while subjugating the world's non-human countries.
  • The Fallout series has Vault-Tec, who are the creators of the Vaults and the ones behind all the various horrible social experiments that often result in disaster and unnecessary human suffering. The Vault-Tec Workshop DLC of Fallout 4 gives a good look into the mentality of Vault-Tec employees: they are typically amoral psychopaths dedicated to nonsensical experiments that result in nothing worthwhile, and any employee with an interest in actually improving the quality of life of Vault Dwellers is hated and shunned by the others.
  • This is lampshaded in the Dead Living Zombies DLC of Far Cry 5 where a filmmaker notes that corporations make for excellent generic villains since no one likes them and you don't have to worry about offending any specific group
  • The Shinra Power Co. from Final Fantasy VII. This is the company that drains the life of the planet (literally) to make a profit and they have a private army that they enjoy sending out to quell anyone who opposes them. They are largely responsible for many bad eventualities in the story, including destroying people's homes because they fought back, kidnapping people and tampering with their bodies, cover-ups, propaganda and using the genetic material of an unearthed malevolent alien to create Super Soldiers for their private army. One of those soldiers, Sephiroth, would become the true Big Bad of the first game.
  • From Fur Fighters, this billboard:
    Viggo Industries: You will buy our products.
  • Mantel Industries from Haze is a Private Military Contractor/MegaCorp responsible for the massacre and displacement of South American indigenous groups. Its activities are so heinous that it has to forcibly keep its soldiers in line with "Nectar", a drug which makes their horrific actions seem like good, patriotic fun.
  • UltraTech is the evil MegaCorp that hosts the Killer Instinct tournament. It's not clear why they host it, but the comics implies they make a killing through spectators.
  • Czerka Corporation in Knights of the Old Republic is only marginally less evil than the Sith, and siding with Czerka on some dispute is a rite of passage in any Dark Side playthrough. Its business opportunities have included botching up the Telosian restoration with short-sighted profit-grubbing, dealing with the Exchange (only to have your Dark Exile kill the leader when that relationship becomes... inconvenient) and trading in Wookiee slaves. Thankfully, according to Star Wars Legends, their shit finally caught up with them and they were eventually gutted by The Republic and ended up changing their name and restructuring themselves to try and distance themselves from their former reputation. They became a legitimate company after that, although during the Galactic Civil War they signed an exclusivity contract with Darth Sidious' Galactic Empire. However, they held no real loyalty to The Emperor and actively sought out weapon production contracts with the New Republic after his fall.
  • Lobotomy Corporation: Really, any of the Wings of the World in the Project Moon Shared Universenote  count, but you play as one as the titular Lobotomy Corporation (also known as L. Corp). The corporation's product is energy for the Mega City the setting takes place in, and they get said energy by harvesting it from horrible eldritch creatures called Abnormalities like a twisted for-profit version of the SCP Foundation. Employees have to essentially live within the branches and are never allowed to live, their lives are completely up for grabs in the case of an outbreak and insanity is common — and that's not even talking how the grand majority of Abnormalities are artificial and created by L. Corp itself, or the atrocities the Sephirah had to suffer thanks to Ayin. The gameplay encourages you to play very callously — it is technically possible to have run where you treat all your Agents well and prevent all of them for dying, but the Nintendo Hard nature of the game acts as a natural barrier to that, and the game offers you various ways to Kick the Dog — such as an Abnormality that slowly and painfully kills an Agent sent to work in it in exchange for 'free' energy.
  • The Amaterasu Corporation in Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is pretty much defined by how shady it is, with it hiding secrets from the citizens of Kanai Ward and the whole company being an unfiltered source of evil. However, when infiltrating the research lab itself in Chapter 4, we find out that the employees themselves are not to blame. It's actually the fault of Yomi Hellsmile of the Peacekeepers and Makoto Kagutsuchi, its CEO, than anyone else, alongside head researcher Dr. Huesca, as it's their collective amorality that influences its bad reputation. You only find out about this later in the game, however.
  • Aesir Pharmaceuticals in the original Max Payne. The company's founder, Nicole Horne, originally worked for a secret government project. When the super solider serum they were working on was discontinued, Horne stole and repackaged it as a designer street drug (which led directly to Max's family being killed when a memo about the project ended up on Michelle's desk and Horne found out). Max notes that Horne's laptop probably has info about other sundry world-domination plots (and more mundane things like internet porn), but Max confesses he isn't interested in learning the depth of her evil (he already wants to kill her for what she's done to him, his family and the city, and has "seen too much of it already") and shoots the monitor. Interestingly enough, Aesir Pharmaceuticals is implied to be very profitable on the books, in addition to their illegal activities, as their stock prices are extremely high and rising, and they own a very large tower in prime New York real estate territory, neither of which would be possible with the dirty money gained from drug trafficking.
  • In Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, the Deadly Game the cast find themselves in was derived from a similar one created by Cradle Pharmaceuticals, who kidnapped 18 children from one of their hospitals for an elaborate human experiment into Psychic Powers and mind-control. Their Mad Scientist CEO was gleefully willing to potentially murder children to get results, and they even abducted a police detective who was getting too close to the truth.
  • The Magog Cartel of the Oddworld series are a conglomerate of multiple horrifyingly corrupt companies. Openly using slave labor, supervisors having the authority to administer on-the-spot executions on employees for little to no reason, and planning to genocide their entire working force to sell as delicious snack food are only some of many of their atrocities.
  • The various corporations in The Outer Worlds operate without any oversight due to the fact that they're far away enough from Earth that they are for all intents and purposes the rulers of the colony, which coupled with their utter incompetence spells dangerous things. Aside from overworking their employees, they're also not above such actions as causing robots to go haywire and killing everyone as a form of insurance fraud as well as other shenanigans. The only aversion is Monarch Stellar Industries, a more egalitarian company that unlike the others valued the rights and individual liberties of its employees, which has led to it becoming a major thorn in the side of the Board.
  • DataDyne from Perfect Dark try to help an evil alien race retrieve a very powerful weapon and try to kidnap the US president so they can use the government's submarine to reach said weapon. Prior to this, no one suspects them of any wrongdoing except the protagonist's organization.
  • In the Pokémon games, some of the evil teams are this:
    • Pokémon Diamond and Pearl: Team Galactic is publicly a natural energy-harvesting company that owns several buildings in Sinnoh, but is using that energy to carry out a plot to Restart the World and recreate it In Their Own Image, with all spirit removed as Cyrus believes it to be the source of all conflict.
    • Pokémon Ranger: Shadows of Almia: The Altru Corporation turns out to be the bosses of Team Dim Sun who plan on using a mind control device to enslave Pokémon for labor and warfare, thus ushering in an era of prosperity for Almia.
    • Pokémon X and Y: Lysandre Labs, a tech company founded by Lysandre with a focus on resource conservation, is the company that Team Flare serves and is stealing money and Pokémon, with the ultimate goal of averting an Overpopulation Crisis by killing everyone who isn't them.
    • Pokémon Sun and Moon: The Aether Foundation is a charity variant, as they masquerade as a benevolent group who takes in Pokémon and protects them from Team Skull, but are the ones funding Team Skull in the first place and are using those Pokémon as guinea pigs for experiments or freezing them to add to Lusamine's collection. Lusamine's ultimate goal is to open a wormhole to Ultra Space and have the Ultra Beasts wreak havoc across Alola. However, once Gladion replaces Lusamine as head, he decides to reform the organization and turn them into an aversion.
    • Pokémon Sword and Shield: Downplayed with Macro Cosmos. They aren't outright evil, but are willing to help Chairman Rose's crazy plan to avert an energy crisis by awakening the dangerous Eternatus, not caring about the potential damage to Galar.
  • Aperture Science from Portal is a humorous example. Founded by eccentric billionaire Cave Johnson (who becomes more eccentric after contracting lead poisoning during a botched murder attempt on his industry rivals), the company bases its ideas on his crazy delusions. Unsurprisingly, the company is hemorrhaging money. They originally used pro athletes and astronauts to perform simulations; however, as the tests became more lethal and Johnson's fortunes began to dwindle, they resorted to using vagrants and ultimately their own workers.
  • In the Purgatory (RPG Maker) games, the nobility-owned D&M Biological Weapon Manufacturing Corporation, aka the Lobelia Corporation, is in the business of kidnapping criminals and experimenting on them to turn them into "demons", living weapons. To create a "perfect demon", they are trying to get their subjects to kill 20,000 people, which they believe will turn the subject into a perfect demon.
  • Resident Evil:
    • The series' iconic villain is the Umbrella Pharmaceutical Company, a corporation founded by a group of creepy English Evilutionary Biologists who wanted to create a race of superhumans and Take Over the World. While Umbrella is a massive conglomerate that has multiple subsidiaries dealing in legitimate businesses, almost all of these serve as some sort of front for the company's illegal activities in creating biological weapons. In the original game, the company stumbles on a zombie virus while performing genetic experiments. In Resident Evil 2 the virus leaks into the water supply after a botched mercenary operation, unleashing an epidemic on their Company Town, Raccoon City. Rather than try to, you know, help save the town from the epidemic so that it won't spread any further and their reputation won't be completely ruined, the company sees a golden opportunity to test their newest line of biologically engineered Super Soldiers in a combat environment and use them to conduct a Fiery Cover-Up while at it. Things ultimately go so bad that the US government ends up nuking the city, and Umbrella's stocks plummet, as nobody wanted to work with a company that has such a massive stigma attached to it. The United States government drives the company into bankruptcy by freezing its assets and filing a massive number of lawsuits against it, and as Leon eloquently says in the opening intro of Resident Evil 4:
      Leon: Soon, its stock prices crashed, and for all intents and purposes, Umbrella was finished.
    • Resident Evil 5 sees another biopharmaceutical company, TRICELL, continue from where Umbrella left off. Having already grown from its mass exploitation of the African continent, TRICELL steals research from the now-defunct Umbrella Corporation to conduct its own research into bioweapons. This culminates in the intentional infection of Kijuju's residents with the Plagas parasite, turning them into mind-controlled, zombielike soldiers.
  • OmniCorp from Scrap Metal Heroes is a Type 2 example, being a robot manufacturer who is behind the mysterious robot malfunctions for unknown reasons. Later, it's revealed that OmniCorp is actually a subversion they're just a scapegoat for the real villains.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog: Sonic's nemesis Dr. Eggman is shown to own a few companies as fronts for his evil schemes, especially in the Sonic Riders sub-series where he's the owner of Robotnik Corp., the provider of the Extreme Gear used in the first installment, and MeteorTech, a security company that produces androids. He's also been known to lease out his older robot designs to security companies.
  • Roxxon Energy appears in Spider-Man: Miles Morales and plans to sell their experimental fuel source called Nuform to the state while concealing the fact that it's highly unstable and toxic, while harassing dissenters with their corporate death squads. The Tinkerer tried to stop them with her brother, who invented it, only for him to be murdered by the CEO Simon Krieger as he downplayed the potential danger to the public.

    Webcomics 
  • Cthulhu Slippers has Cthulhu Corp, a biotechnology company owned and operated by Lovcraftian monstrosities. Products are more often than not fatal to their users ("Can o' Shoggoth", "Face Squid", and "Stress Brick"), and employees both human and nonhuman are routinely eaten, mauled, afflicted with Body Horror, driven to insanity, or ritually sacrificed by their coworkers for raises and promotions. It's all played for laughs.
  • Homestuck has the Betty Crocker wing of General Mills, which may or may not be its own company Crockercorp depending on what universe you're in. Betty Crocker is real, and is also known as The Batterwitch. She's an alien empress acting in the service of the Big Bad and trying to overthrow him and take over herself.
  • In Jenny and the Multiverse (see also Jenny Everywhere in "Web Original" below), the Altern Corporation act as the primary antagonists, with its Corrupt Corporate Executive "the Man in Grey" serving as the Big Bad.
  • Sluggy Freelance has Hereti-Corp, a both very straight and parodic example. They're among the most major antagonists in the Myth Arc of the comic and have dabbled in various "taking over the world" schemes, from trying to gain control of the gymnastic assassin Oasis for reasons as mysterious as her origin to wanting to clone the resident alien Aylee as a living superweapon. At one point, they almost went under after being exposed, but they resurfaced as "House of Cheese", selling pizza made entirely of cheese, and under new leadership eventually regained the name Hereti-Corp and are now involved in a potential end-of-the-world scenario.

    Web Original 
  • The Altern Corporation in the Jenny Everywhere mythos, Depending on the Writer, can be a genuinely sinister megacorp, sometimes running the Earth in a dystopian cyberpunk-type setting, or a more lackadaisical organisation when it's founded and run by Laura Drake. However, it's rarely if ever been benign.
  • Charon Industries from Red vs. Blue is a weapons manufacturing company whose CEO Malcolm Hargrove is willing to kill off the population of an entire planet just so his company can have unrestricted access to the alien technology there.
  • Kabushiki Kawaii from RPC Authority is a Japanese corporation that specializes in creating Humanoid Abomination Sex Slaves.
  • Marshall, Carter, and Dark Ltd. from SCP Foundation is an aristocratic, Affably Evil MegaCorp that specializes in selling paranormal artifacts to anyone willing to pay. They have a formal and respectful relationship with just about every power involved with the Masquerade and practically have the entire world in their hands. Their only reason for their continued existence is because they want to play with it. They even use their own employees as test subjects for "quality assurance" the same way the Foundation uses death row inmates.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 

 
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Alternative Title(s): Evil Corp, Evil Corporation

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Black Hat Organization

The Black Hat Organization -- ran by Black Hat and his minions -- are an elite group of supervillains that creat products and other odd-jobs that help other supervillains.

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