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Developed by Elixir Studios in 2004, Evil Genius is a Space-Management Game best described as Dungeon Keeper meets James Bond. You are the eponymous evil genius, and it is your job to construct a villainous lair in an active volcano, recruit henchmen, steal priceless treasures, hold the world for ransom, and fight off pesky super agents. Also, you need to keep your minions well-trained and happy, because the looting and ransoming won't take care of itself.

Notable for a quirky sense of humor mixed with classically over-the-top megalomanical villainy. Everything has a '60s vibe to it, and the forces of justice are just as stereotypical as your own minions.

There's also a great deal of freedom and a wide range of methods you can use to complete your overarching goal. Want to run a fortress island with massive numbers of armed guards, machinegun emplacements, and horrifying freaks of nature, all emphasizing firepower? Perfectly reasonable. Want a deadly secluded island filled with martial arts disciples? Feel free! Want to beguile your enemies with squads of elite deceptive social minions who will leave their heads spinning and questioning their loyalty? That's also perfectly viable. Want to create a resort island as a front for your evil machinations? Go right ahead. Want to set a thousand deadly traps and twisty, mystifying corridors that will leave the forces of justice lost, confused, and very very dead? Nothing's stopping you. You're allowed to either discard the Villain Ball with prejudice or wrap both hands around it and run straight for the end zone.

Upon release, the game was reasonably successful but not enough to save its developer, Elixir Studios, from closing down a year after its launch. The IPs were bought up by Rebellion, who would release two different and now-defunct Facebook titles, Evil Genius WMD and Evil Genius Online. A full sequel, Evil Genius 2: World Domination released on March 30, 2021.


This game provides examples of the following tropes:

  • Abusive Parents: The reason Maximilian is so screwed up.
  • Achilles' Heel: Every Super Agent has one, and discovering them is the key to getting around their immortality.
    • Mariana Mamba is made fat via reverse liposuction, losing her looks and thus rendering her main weapon null.
    • Jet Chan is challenged to a one-on-one karate battle after interrogating his old master. He is drugged ahead of time and loses the match, causing him to isolate himself in the mountains and meditate on his failure.
    • Katerina Frostonova is forced to watch you mutilate the only object she ever showed any affection for, her teddy bear Mr. Snuggles. The resulting BSOD leaves her unable to operate any more.
    • Dirk Masters is dipped in your bio-tanks, modified to react to the many illegal steroids in his body and morphing him into a unique Freak under your command.
    • John Steele cannot be defeated during the game, but if you have him locked in a jail cell when you press the button to launch the rocket and thus win the game, the ending cinematic will show him strapped to the rocket and launched into space with it.
  • Action Bomb:
    • If you die, your genius is rolled into a morgue... where you see that they're Actually a Doombot, whose face lifts to reveal a timer that quickly reaches 0. Boom!
    • Colonel Blackheart's pet monkey, Pendragon, carries TNT for this purpose.
  • Added Alliterative Appeal: When mousing over Shen Yu, he is described as "a mysteriously mystical maniacal man."
  • After-Combat Recovery: Henchmen have a second Idle Animation that recovers all their stats rapidly.
  • The Ahnold: Dirk Masters provides the over-the-top Stallone style gunplay, while Red Ivan provides the physical presence and exaggerated accent of Schwarzenegger (despite being Russian instead of Austrian.)
  • Amazon Chaser: Mariana Mamba's special power is to woo your minions away from your service.
  • Anachronism Stew: While the devs stated this takes place in the 60s, the level of technology and several historical inaccuracies very much puts the game into this. One point of contention, for example, is the existence of British India (under S.A.B.R.E.) about two decades after it had been dismantled in real life. Likewise the game denotes the American Mid-West, Middle East, and Southeast Asia as the best places for cash, even though none of these regions would've been particularly rich at that time (the Middle East was just discovering oil and China had just started industralising, meaning that the cities of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai are nowhere the shining skyscrapers of today; as for the Mid-West, while it isn't poor it's definitely not richer than the East or West Coast either.)
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: You can only have up to 100 minions. Thankfully, this can be changed fairly easily by editing data files.
  • Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Jet Chan. This is often the only reason that your own minions can take him down in close-combat; Jet can and will spend valuable time doing multiple taunts in a row, as opposed to kicking your guards' faces in.
  • Artificial Stupidity: You can't directly control the individual minions, instead only giving general orders and setting up security systems to alert them to intruders. This leads to hilarity. Feel free to shout "Why am I surrounded by these incompetent fools?!" at the ceiling.
    • If a fire breaks out, the closest valet will not simply grab the nearest extinguisher and put it out. Instead, seemingly random valets all over your base will grab the extinguishers nearest them, and run to the fire, no matter how far it may be. Then, when they get there, they will put out one burning object (in a room after an explosion there can be over half a dozen objects on fire) and walk, with the extinguisher, past the other fires and put the extinguisher back.
    • This one may be intentional: Henchmen have the clearance to open level 3 and 4 doors just like the Evil Genius, but their AI believes they don't, so they'll only actually go through one if the player specifically orders them to. This can be useful or annoying, depending on what you put high-security doors on in the first place.
  • Artistic License – History: Each enemy intelligence agency roughly corresponds to a Cold War factionnote , but some of their territories would historically belong to another one. Making the geographical territories part of a single faction does cut down on the total number of regions in the game.
    • Israel is part of S.M.A.S.H. Historically, it should be either part of S.A.B.R.E. or P.A.T.R.I.O.T., depending when the game is set.note 
    • Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, and Finland are part of S.A.B.R.E., but they were neutral and should belong to S.M.A.S.H.
    • India and Pakistan are part of S.A.B.R.E., despite the game being set more than a decade after the end of the British Raj. They were neutral during the Cold War.
    • Mexico is a territory of P.A.T.R.I.O.T. while it was neutral during the Cold War.
    • Iran is part of H.A.M.M.E.R. while pre-Islamic Revolution Iran historically was aligned with the Western Bloc and should be either S.A.B.R.E. or P.A.T.R.I.O.T.
    • Ditto for Thailand and the Philippines belonging to A.N.V.I.L.
    • Yugoslavia is part of H.A.M.M.E.R. instead of S.M.A.S.H. Yugoslavia is one of the founding members of the Non-Aligned Movement.
    • Ditto for Indonesia belonging to A.N.V.I.L.
    • North Korea was aligned with neither USSR nor China, and so should technically be a S.M.A.S.H. member instead of an A.N.V.I.L. one.
    • Vietnam is part of A.N.V.I.L. An accurate representation of Vietnam during the 60' would be split between H.A.M.M.E.R. and P.A.T.R.I.O.T. (Soviet-backed North, US-backed South).
    • Antarctica entirely belongs to S.M.A.S.H. An accurate representation would be split between S.A.B.R.E. (Norway, United Kingdom, France, Australia, New Zealand) and S.M.A.S.H. (Argentina, Chile) controlled slices
  • Autocannibalism: Col. Blackheart lost his left leg to a Bengal Tiger, which he killed with his bare hands. It's rumored that he cooked the tiger along with what was left of his severed leg into a stew and ate it, in order to honor the beast who injured him so thoroughly.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Red Ivan, who can be as much a danger to your base and your minions as to the forces of justice due to his preferred weapon being a bazooka. If you absolutely must use Ivan in game, it's best to keep him confined to a Topside Shack until he's needed. He can be quite useful in the right situations, but he needs to be kept on a tight leash and carefully micromanaged, which might push him into Difficult, but Awesome territory.
  • Ax-Crazy: More than half your henchmen, especially The Butcher, Red Ivan, and The Matron.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: Your goal, of course. If you beat the game, you're treated to a scene of your Evil Genius taking leadership of the Forces of Justice, with its former leaders bowing down to them as banners of the newly-created evil empire are unfurled.
  • Bald of Evil: Both of the male Evil Geniuses.
  • BFG: The Mercenary minions carry immense machineguns. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. agent Dirk Masters carries two.
    • And then Ivan turns it up to eleven and has a RAWKET LAWNCHAIR! Most players refuse to use him since he's a bit trigger happy and will set most of your base on fire. Others swap it out for a machinegun, usually Dirk's.
      • Those that insist on using him unmodded take advantage of the fact that henchmen won't pass through level 3 or 4 doors unless specifically ordered to, and lock him in a topside shack until they need him.
    • Sentry turrets are also very large and very shooty.
  • Bloodless Carnage: All manner of horrible stuff can happen to people in this game. They can be shot at, stabbed and blown up. Despite all of this, however, you'll see nary a drop of blood around.
  • Board to Death: The second objective in the game is to summon the crime lords of the world to a presentation where you present your evil plan, then zap the one that gave you lip with a shrink ray hidden in a model volcano.
  • Bodyguard Babes: You can get up to two (or Bodyguard Hunks if you play as Alexis).
  • Briefcase Full of Money: When a minion needs to transport cash for some reason, it takes this form.
  • Brown Note: Several henchmen can do this. For example, Lord Kane's presence can cause people to cower in fear or flee in panic, while Eli Barracuda plays a boombox with hypnotic suggestion that causes people around him to uncontrollably break out into dance.
  • Bruce Lee Clone: Jet Chan. He's a blatant Bruce Lee rip off named after Jackie Chan and Jet Li.
  • Busby Berkeley Number: in one of the menus, scuba diver models do a "synchronized swimming" variant.
  • Captain Ersatz: The entire cast in one form or another.
  • Card-Carrying Villain: You!
  • Clone by Conversion: The cloning pod works by turning a mook into a copy of you.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Your minions. Construction workers wear yellow, social minions wear red (except for the Spindoctor), military minions wear orange and science minions wear white.
    • The territories controlled by the Forces of Justice are also color coded: P.A.T.R.I.O.T.'s territories are blue, S.A.B.R.E.'s are green, H.A.M.M.E.R.'s are red, S.M.A.S.H.'s are yellow, and A.N.V.I.L.'s are orange.
  • Comedic Sociopathy: By the boatload. The different torture devices are just asking for it. Hell, why are you playing this game if not for that ?
  • Compensating for Something: A radio host makes this observation about all the "big guns" the crime lords attending your meeting carry.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity - The Super Agents cannot be killed through any amount of minions, traps, gunfire, or interrogation. Only specific methods that don't become available until the second half can deal with them. See Achilles' Heel above.
  • Contractual Genre Blindness: Why does your Elaborate Underground Base's entrances have slowly-opening doors? Why do your minions ignore Highly Visible Ninjas unless you've specifically told them to do something about them? Because you're the Evil Genius. If you weren't Contractually Genre Blind, more than half of the gameplay would have to be changed.
  • Cool and Unusual Punishment: Most of the ways you torture prisoners:
    • The Interrogation Chair has you spin around on the chair, crash cymbals on their head and force them to watch a Mook do Michael Jackson's dance moves.
    • The Centrifuge and Mess Hall Mixer put emphasis on the spinning part.
    • The Bookcases are Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom that rapidly slam the unfortunate agent.
    • The Greenhouse and Impact Stress Analyzer subject them to Metronomic Man Mashing.
    • The Laser and Long Range Shooting Stall essentially have the agent facing a firing squad.
    • The Brainiac Machine blinds them with Epileptic Flashing Lights.
    • The Environment Chamber and Brain Washer have the agent (their brain in the case of the latter) tossed around like a ragdoll.
    • T.I.M. the AI Supercomputer alternates between Breaking Speech and Tickle Torture.
  • Cooldown Manipulation: The Matron can bestow a buff upon your other henchmen that lets them regenerate their special abilities quickly.
  • Cutting the Knot: Opportunity: You've located Excalibur. Problem: Your minions aren't worthy to pull it out of the stone. Solution: Steal the stone too.
  • Death Trap: Part of the fun in the game is designing a convoluted, Goldbergesque series of them. Ironically, the most valuable traps are non-lethal. Lethal traps generate too much heat, and non-lethal traps can be made to sweep up enemies in endless loops of money-making combos.
  • Decapitated Army: You lose automatically if your Evil Genius is killed.
  • Denial of Diagonal Attack: Sentry turrets have very narrow firing arcs, and can only be placed on a grid facing one of four directions. This provides diagonal blindspots from which agents can attack any tightly grouped cluster of them. Thus, some staggering in their positions is needed so that they can cover each other.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: Eli Barracuda killed the Mayor of New York because the Mayor accidentally spilled coffee over his suit.
  • Do Not Adjust Your Set: The penultimate objective is to hijack the airwaves with broadcast towers and deliver your ultimatum to the world. You get laughed off, necessitating use the Doomsday Device to show you mean business.
  • Doomsday Device: Three to choose from for the endgame;
    • One releases a gas that turns citizens into Worker henchmen.
    • One causes earthquakes and lava to plague cities.
    • One inverts gravity, which causes everything to float towards the moon.
  • The Dragon: Whichever Henchman the player favours most. Each Evil Genius starts with their own.
    • Industrialist Maximilian has the young Samurai Jubei.
    • Narcissistic Socialite Alexis has New York gangster Eli Barracuda.
    • Chinese Mastermind Shen Yu has the sinister Lord Kane, the man (accidentally) responsible for sinking the Titanic, amongst other things.
  • Dumb Muscle: Freaks do a lot of damage and can take a lot of punishment before going down, but have one of the lowest maximum smarts statistics in the game. The value is so low in fact, that they will constantly be triggering the player's own traps when they pass by the trigger mechanism, even if their smarts are at full value. Some players take full advantage of this by installing a Freak-trigger, which takes advantage of a Freak wandering around a sealed-off section of the base to trigger traps remotely.
  • Elaborate Underground Base: The stronghold of the Evil Genius is an underground lair contained within an island's mountain, with the second island's base being under a volcano. It's entirely up to the player how the base is structured.
  • Enemy Civil War: Late in the game, you capture diplomats from each Force of Justice and replace them with your own. Ultimately, this makes the Forces of Justice fight each other when they see each other... sometimes.
  • Epic Flail: The Matron's morning star. "Time for their medicine!"
  • Equal-Opportunity Evil: Although the minion's sprites are mostly all white (and they all share the same model), their names show a wide variety of origins. The Henchmen are a straighter example, being a collection of evil individuals from all over the world.
  • Even Evil Has Standards:
    • Red Ivan was exiled to a gulag because his masters in the Soviet government were disgusted by his sadistic tendencies.
    • Even the Evil Genius abhors country music, which is why you can blow up Nashville. Your scientists grudgingly admit that you're doing the world a favour, but they really need somewhere to test their new toy on, and it has to be somewhere big... so they might as well kill two birds with one stone.
  • Evil Counterpart: Red Ivan is this to Dirk Masters to the point where it's not even trying to be hidden, both are large action types whose ability is "Spin around killing everything".
  • Evil Genius: Duh.
  • Evil Gloating: Gloating at prisoners increases your Notoriety. The Evil Genius avatar will also automatically go over to gloat at a Super Agent being tortured. However, in true adherence to the spirit of the trope, gloating at any captive gives a chance for them to break out immediately, Super Agents especially. John Steele will always escape if he is gloated at.
  • Evil Minions: No prizes for guessing who they're working for.
  • Evil Sounds Deep: T.I.M. and Lord Kane.
  • Explosive Stupidity: Enemy units who are armed with explosives aren't always so careful when using them. More than a few soldiers and saboteurs have literally had their own bombs blow up in their faces, leading to hilarious moments where they are running around on fire. Jet Chan, Dirk Masters, and John Steele will also start planting explosives upon escaping one of your security cells, even if said cell is in a closed, confined space; serving themselves a steaming bowl of instant karma in the process.
  • Expy: While the game is awash in them, one remarkably subtle instance sticks out. When male civilians get dressed up in their hotel rooms, they emerge with slicked back hair and a very tasteful beard, which combine to make them a dead ringer for John Rhys-Davies as General Pushkin from The Living Daylights.
  • Failed a Spot Check: Minions and foreign agents are both more likely to set off traps when their attention stat is low. Less skilled agents can also miss the bodies, henchmen and other incredibly conspicuous objects. Reducing enemy's attention with distractions and social minions is a big part of both keeping an operation quiet and ensuring traps are deadlier.
    • People who are distracted by a social minion will ignore anything happening around them while that's taking place, up to and including someone else punching the heck out of them.
    • Minions will also use doors without problem if they can get through them... blissfully ignorant of any enemy agents (guns and swords optional) that have been standing in front of said door trying to force it open. Cue a lot of snooping and/or explodey death.
  • Forgotten Phlebotinum: Partway through things on the first island your crew invents a shrink ray. It gets used to steal the Eiffel Tower in an optional mission, and that's the last you ever hear of such an advanced device. Ditto for the earthquake generator you use to flatten Nashville.
  • For the Evulz:
    • Half the Acts of Infamy you can perform in the game are done solely to be a dick to Agencies, such as ruining S.A.B.R.E's tea supply or ruining a S.M.A.S.H. attempt at bringing down ivory smugglers by replacing the stash of ivory with thousands of squeaky toy elephants. There are few legitimate evil acts, such as you publicly executing The Orsons, a family of pop singers.
    • Like destroying Nashville and country music, your evil genius considers that taking a break from evil.
  • Freudian Excuse: For a Card-Carrying Villain, Maximilian has a pretty strong one.
  • Fun with Acronyms: The spy organizations who are trying to stop you do have fun with this. Incidentally, neither the game nor the manual will ever actually tell you what the acronyms actually mean.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: Sadly, quite a few, more in the vein of Bugs That Will Make You Want To Break The Game CD variety:
    • Service minions escorting brainwashed Agents outside of the base have a habit of 'dropping off' the Mind Raped person right in front of the base. Bonus points if the drop-off zone is located inside a Camouflaged Door, meaning the door will stay open constantly.
    • Some people have reported that both two Super Agents' Karmic Deaths have caused crashes. The only fix? Don't look at them. Hope you weren't excited about seeing your enemies defeated...
    • After a late-game mission, the Forces of Justice have been convinced that each other is the problem. The game tells you that they'll fight against each other while on your island, freeing you from both worrying about Good Guy retaliation levels. For every time this actually happens, there's a handful of times when the massively-armed soldiers drop the Idiot Ball and work together to deal with you.
    • The second objective requires you to build a conference table to invite the crime bosses for a meeting. If the table is then destroyed, or even moved elsewhere, this objective will never show up as complete. All you can do is to reload a saved game (thankfully, it's also possible to fix this by editing the savegame.)
  • Game Mod: The possibilities are limited, but it can be done to a certain extent. Ever wanted your own ninja henchman, for example? It can be done. Other mods include replacing every view screen with porn and changing the values of said viewscreens so they increase minions' loyalty stat.
  • The Generalissimo: Cuba is run by someone only known as "El Presidente", and it is required by law for radio broadcasts coming from Cuba to say "Viva El Presidente!" when they first mention him. He's also been using Montezuma to cast hexes upon his enemies. Not to worry, though, since you can recruit Montezuma off him.
  • Good Is Not Nice: In addition to attacking each other during Global Chaos, higher-ranking Soldiers and most Super Agents will attack minions on sight, even Social or Science minions who aren't aggressive. They'll also blow up your hotel, even killing tourists in the process.
  • Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Alexis totes a very long, very evil looking holder for her omnipresent cigarette. Playboy minions have a less comically over-sized but no less sinister holder as part of their gear, and you'll constantly be seeing minions and henchmen smoking around the base while on break. Basically it's the Sixties, and everyone smokes.
    • Minions can exploit this universal smoking habit to torment agents they're interrogating. They'll taunt them with a nicotine fix, taking long and indulgent drags while the agent pleads and strains to get even a single puff.
  • Great White Hunter: Bonus henchman Col. Blackheart.
  • The Guards Must Be Crazy: Your minions will happily let investigators, soldiers, and obvious, heavily armed ninjas walk into your base unless you tag them to be eliminated. Likewise they'll throw a captured agent in a cell with all of his weapons still on him, and if he gets out he'll immediately start planting bombs and mowing down your minions with twin assault rifles.
  • Guide Dang It!:
    • You get virtually no in-game information on how to defeat John Steele. You can't actually defeat him permanently, but if you want him to be defeated during the victory cutscenes, you need to have him locked in a holding cell when you fire your super weapon in order to see his demise.
    • Likewise, the game doesn't tell you why your minions are panicking or why enemy agents are suddenly able to teleport into your base... it's because your base has an area that is completely enclosed, but an annoying thing about this is that the game is equally unclear when a location is enclosed. That dead-end corridor where you put two vases? It's actually inaccessible even though it looks like there's plenty of room to squeeze through. The training room where you put some dojo mats together? Also inaccessible, because minions can't walk across the mat.
    • You need to send your minions out into the world to plot in order to discover the Acts of Infamy that will progress the story. Of course it's unrealistic to expect the game to just tell you where everything is so you can breeze through the plot in an hour, but given there are twenty regions in the game it can take a painfully long time to find that one Act you need. Plus, deciding who to send to plot is a Morton's Fork in and of itself: If you send basic construction workers you don't have to worry too much if one of them dies, but it takes even more time; if you send your science minions you can potentially cut time down, but if one of them dies it's a process to train another minion again.
    • Research involves being presented with an object and selecting up to three pieces of lab equipment out of eight to experiment on to find new stuff. To put it another way, it means choosing between 8C3, or a whopping 336 possibilities of which only one combination is the correct one. For a single item. The game does have some mercy where you can pay to find out which ones aren't the right ones, but given it costs thousands it'll chew through your budget in no time unless you use it sparingly.
    • The game is also very shut-mouth about what new rooms and objects will become available as you progress through the game. For a first-time player it usually results in building a base as tight as possible for efficiency, only to later unlock an object that's too big to place down and no room for expansion. For returning players, it means overestimating how much space they need and building a room far too big.
    • Just finding the rogue CIA Crime Lord for Objective 2 can be a pain. The game tells you that you need to have plenty of notoriety to get in contact with him, but it doesn't tell you which region he's in.
    • Both sub-objectives in Objective 7 feature this trope due to the log neglecting to mention some vital details:
      • First, it tells you to capture and interrogate ambassadors from the five alliances. Unfortunately it does not state that it needs to be an interrogation that drains health, so players might repeatedly try to use an incorrect device and wonder why it's not working.
      • Next, it tells you that you have to steal enough resources to build a rocket. You'd expect the log will update once you've got said resources, but you also need to click on the giant hole in the middle of your base before your minions will actually start construction, and there are no hints that the hole could even be interacted with. Without knowing that though, it's likely you'll be stealing dozens and dozens of crates either thinking you don't have enough or that the game is bugged.
  • Hallway Fight: Off-screen example in which the greatest triumph of Super Agent Jet Chan was defeating an evil genius who built a long, narrow lair which ran the length of the Great Wall of China. Chan reportedly used the lair's layout to his advantage, forcing the genius' mooks to fight him one-on-one rather than let them gang up on him.
  • He Knows Too Much: Any investigator agent who has gathered a heat rating will fall under this, and the player is expected to react accordingly...
  • Hero Antagonist: The Super Agents.
  • Heroic BSoD: You defeat Jet Chan and Katerina Frostanova by causing them to experience these. Jet Chan by having a minion defeat him in a rigged martial arts duel, Frostanova by destroying her beloved teddy bear before her very eyes.
  • Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Almost everyone wears brightly colored uniforms. Your neon yellow workers and the orange military minions are particularly obvious. Enemy spies and agents also come in full dress uniforms, some of them more glaring than others.
    • Special mention goes to P.A.T.R.I.O.T.'s Burglars and S.M.A.S.H.'s Infiltrators, who get more conspicuous and less sneaky as they rise in competency. After all, you'd have to be an Exceptional thief or saboteur to execute your duties successfully while wearing a bright yellow Spy Catsuit for the former or a hot pink miniskirt and go-go boots for the latter.
  • Highly-Visible Ninja: A.N.V.I.L.'s Infiltrator agents are ninjas dressed in various bright colors. Minions will happily ignore them unless they are tagged.
  • High-Voltage Death: You can build traps to electrocute heroes infiltrating your lair in this game.
  • Historical Rap Sheet: Criminal mastermind Lord Kane is alleged to have had a hand in every major crime of the 20th century, from starting the fire that crashed The Hindenburg to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He does insist that the sinking of the Titanic was an honest accident, as one of his minions apparently misheard his orders.
  • Hold the Line: Your final objective is to guard the rocket against increasing waves of soldiers as you prepare for launch. Starting the Enemy Civil War a few missions earlier lessens the pressure.
  • Hollywood Action Hero: Dirk Masters, the American super agent, a Rambo-lookalike who dual-wields machine guns.
  • Hollywood Voodoo: Henchman Montezuma.
  • Human Popsicle: The final upgrade to the minion's bed is a cryogenic suspension unit.
  • Hunting the Most Dangerous Game: Bonus Henchman Colonel Blackheart's motivation for joining your evil empire.
  • Husky Russkie: Red Ivan, burly bazooka-wielding henchman.
  • Hypocritical Humor: The manual's description of the video game cabinet dismisses it a "passing fad".
  • Ice-Cream Koan: Shen Yu replies with these when given commands in a bad Chinese accent, such as "He who walk... arrive".
  • Idle Animation: Done by virtually all characters, though the Henchmen and Evil Geniuses all have unique ones. The Henchmen even have an alternate animation that serves as After-Combat Recovery by restoring all their stats at a rate of something like 40 points a second.
  • I Have Boobs, You Must Obey!: How Mariana Mamba wins over your minions.
  • Instant Expert: A few minutes' instruction is all it takes to upgrade a mindless construction worker into a quantum physicist.
  • Intentional Engrish for Funny: Jubei the Ronin henchman does this. "Using FRAT of Brade." when ordered to capture rather than kill, for instance.
  • Involuntary Dance: Eli Barracuda's boombox causes this.
  • Island Base: Two of 'em! The second even has a volcano for you to launch a rocket from.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • The darkly hilarious Out Clubbing act of infamy involves sending your soldiers out to club baby seals on live TV.
    • Another highlight is neutering the world's most fertile male panda.
  • Kill It with Fire: Several of the traps (and the flamethrower rack for mercenaries). Often a bad idea due to such weapons being indiscriminate.
  • Kill Sat: All the endgame Doomsday Devices are satellite-mounted.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: Most non-lethal traps and social minions all exist to keep enemy agents from remembering and reporting anything they see about your base. Super Agents can be mind-wiped and temporarily gotten rid of through what would normally be lethal torture too.
  • Laughably Evil: Half the acts of infamy in this game, really. Hell, the entire game!
  • Leitmotif: Each of the Super Agents has their own theme music that will play when they arrive on the island.
  • Literal Metaphor: The brainwasher, which sucks out and washes the brain of the person strapped to it with chemicals.
  • Made of Explodium: Everything — from beds to fire extinguisher cases to doors. Worse, when something explodes, it sets nearby items on fire, which will eventually explode themselves unless someone puts it out. Also leads to Man on Fire.
  • Modular Epilogue: The ending changes slightly based on which Evil Genius you are and which delivery method you used for your chosen Doomsday Device, as well as whether you had John Steele in a holding cell when you pressed the Big Red Button.
  • Monumental Theft: You are expected to pull off a few.
  • Mooks: Billions of them, on all sides.
  • Ms. Fanservice: Mariana Mamba both fulfills this role and weaponizes it, seeing as she was explicitly found in the Amazon and spends her career running around in an orange bikini. She is defeated once she loses this status.
  • Multiple Endings: Depending on which Doomsday Device you activate. You can turn the entire population of Earth into construction worker minions with the ID Eliminator, hold everyone hostage in midair with the Gravity Disruptor, or cause mass devastation with the Earthquake Beam.
  • Napoleon Complex: Maximilian is pretty small, but fully intends to conquer the world.
  • Nebulous Evil Organisation: Pretty much a N.E.O. management Simulation Game.
  • No Body Left Behind: Dead bodies turn into body bags that will eventually fade.
    • Zigzagged in that body bags attract the attention of agents, and should one of them fade while "out in the open", the world heat level will rise. That's what the freezers are for.
    • Additionally, the presence of bodybags lying about your base gives your minions second thoughts about being part of your Nebulous Evil Organisation, sapping their loyalty as long as they remain present. Putting them in the freezer keeps those bodies out of the minions' sight and minds.
    • For what it's worth, your minions just fade away upon death.
  • Non-Action Big Bad: The Evil Genius can't attack enemies. The bodyguards you pick up as your Notoriety rises can, but they're not particularly good at it and can't be replaced if they die.
  • Noodle Implements: One of the Acts of Infamy concerns toppling a pointless monarchy with "Some spiked beverages, fluorescent duct tape, a set of inflatable farm animals and a crowd of paparazzi".
  • Not the Intended Use:
    • The "confusing pop-up" trap is meant to bewilder your enemies, sapping their Smarts. However, they also form a temporary impassable wall while they're up, allowing you to restrict the agents' movements so they don't accidentally dodge your other, deadlier traps.
    • The freezer's intended use is to store body bags, so accordingly it disables their loyalty-sapping aura. In fact, it disables all auras, so it can also be used for storing the dismantled totem pole, which also has a cursed negative aura until you reassemble it. Likewise, using a freezer for your trap room is helpful so that your minions don't have to bother moving body bags around, not only saving time but also preventing them from having their loyalty drained or tripping the traps themselves.
    • Because you can only place a handful of items in corridors it's actually not that efficient to use them to connect parts of your base. Instead, use the barracks so you can line your base with lockers, beds, not only allowing you to save tons of room, but as a bonus or allows your minions to sleep without having to run across your lair. Do make sure you actually have small parts of corridor though, otherwise you'll find you won't be able to place fire extinguishers anywhere.
    • Lord Kane's "Smooth Operator" ability is intended to remove the targeted enemy's collected heat. However, it's much better used for its unintended side effect of completely immobilizing them from the moment you give Kane the order until he actually performs it (which can be quite some time if he's very far away), allowing your other minions to beat on them risk-free.
    • Freaks are pretty obviously intended to be some free Dumb Muscle. However, they have numerous downsides in this department... one of which, that their Smarts cap is so low they can never avoid your traps, gives them the much better alternate purpose of being locked in a box with some trap triggers to constantly set them off. Attach those triggers to some well-placed wind traps, and any agents or tourists that wander into the wrong corridor get stuck being blown around for free combo money forever.
    • An in universe example, most of the interrogation devices are actually standard pieces of equipment that your minions can use for other purposes with the interrogation being a secondary effect. Only two items (Interrogation Chair and Bookcases) have no purpose other than interrogation. Notably, all of the research machines you can use in the laboratory can also be used for interrogation.
  • Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Some Acts of Infamy are heists of gigantic proportions, but you will only ever hear a short radio broadcast about them.
  • 100% Completion: Sadly made impossible by certain mutually-exclusive Acts of Infamy, preventing you from filling the Region Completion bar of each area. There is no reward nor indication of completion, though.
    • You may only deploy a single Doomsday Device out of a selection of three different ones. Since it takes quite some time to finish the project (and the game) once the choice is made, if you want to see all three endings your best option is to load a save-game made hours earlier and choose a different device.
  • The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: While any agent will attack you if they get close enough, the Specialist agents are specifically sent to assassinate you. While you can dispose of them like any other agent, the proper way would be to send out a clone to get shot instead.
  • Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: The radio host who talks about your latest atrocities in the USA's west coast pronounces "schedule" with an "sh-" sound (the British way) rather than an "sk-" sound (the American way).
  • Organ Autonomy: The Butcher was once a medical aid-worker until an emergency forced him to transplant a cannibal's cursed pancreas into himself.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Once you research the appropriate technologies, you can create Freaks by dumping body bags into the Bio-Tanks.
  • Paper-Thin Disguise: The Forces of Justice can't tell an inflatable Science Machine from the real one.
  • Pastiche: The art style is a blend of the campier elements of 1960s Spy Fiction with a cartoonish twist.
  • Polar Madness: Addressed; the S.M.A.S.H.-held territory of Antarctica is inhabited only by scientists living in isolated research bases; as a result, the regional news reports heard when you complete a mission are broadcast by a disc jockey running a radio station solely keep the base personnel across the continent from going completely insane. Although, considering just how eerily calm he is in the face of increasingly worrying reports, he may not be completely sane himself.
  • Priceless Paperweight: The only thing the treasures you steal actually do is replenish the loyalty of your minions as they walk by. This means you'll probably be using the world's largest diamond and your set of priceless Ming vases as decorations in the middle of the break room or cafeteria.
  • Public Domain Artifact: Excalibur and The Ark of the Covenant are two possibilities when doing a Type A Gotta Catch Them All for special items, except you only "need" four out of six, rather than all of them. Players may opt to steal all six anyway, because let's face it, you might as well complete the set and rub it in the faces of the Forces of Justice, eh?
  • Punny Name: The Butcher's real name is Dr. Ethan Asia.
    • Additionally, one of the crime bosses needed for Head of the Underworld is called Lei Ying Lo.
  • Quirky Miniboss Squad: Your henchmen/women can be one of these, if you choose the right people.
  • Redshirt Army: Your heroic opponents, and they come in different varieties, depending on the agency, function, and level of annoyance with the Evil Genius. They can come as regular inspectors, to ninja-like saboteurs, to outright invading with the military. Incidentally, there is a literal redshirt army in a brief Enemy Civil War you engage in; a rival sics red jumpsuit-clad minions to try and take you out.
  • Reforged into a Minion:
    • Dumping a fallen enemy into the Bio-Tanks result in a mindless zombie mutant. This is also how you defeat Dirk Masters permanently after you find out the secret to his Testosterone Poisoning.
    • The I.D. Eliminator, a Doomsday Device that erases a person's character and replaces it with that of a Mook.
  • Renegade Russian: Red Ivan, a former Soviet soldier gone rogue after being betrayed by his handlers. His mind is a mess thanks to simultaneously hating both the capitalists he was trained to fight and his former Soviet comrades for abandoning him.
  • Reverse Psychology: Some enemy agents can be deterred from going somewhere, simply by putting a door with the lowest security setting (i.e. "Anyone can enter") in front of it. They clearly are thinking "Well, if anyone can enter, there can't be anything that important on the other side". Obviously, this can be used against them to keep them out of more vital areas. The reverse is also true, as any door with the higher security settings (3 to 4) draws almost every agent nearby to spend all their time trying to get through this obviously important door... even if there's nothing behind said door.
  • Reward from Nowhere: Traps give you money for combos with no attempt to explain where the money is coming from.
  • Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: As mentioned above you get rewarded with cash through using elaborate traps to dispose of enemy agents. The more elaborate it is the bigger the payout.
  • Rule of Cool: You can steal the Eiffel Tower. With helicopters. And a shrink ray.
  • Rule of Funny: Everything everywhere in this game. Why do beds blow up? Why are the ninjas brightly colored? Why do you dispose of Mariana Mamba by making her incredibly obese? Why do you go out in the world mostly to troll the enemy agencies, instead of actually disabling them? Because it's hilarious, and you, as a classic Evil Overlord, are a case of Contractual Genre Blindness.
  • Safely Secluded Science Center: The crux of the game is the creation of an underground lair hidden on a remote desert island of indeterminate location, upon which you can safely research and develop all the technologies you'll need to make a name for yourself as an international supervillain. It's not quite remote enough to keep pesky spies at bay, and you'll have to upgrade to a jungle island about halfway through the game but eventually you will be able to create the doomsday device with which you can take over the world.
  • Schmuck Bait: Some of the traps are quite obvious. Bonus points for using stolen loot as bait for them.
    • Setting a door to security level four draws in agents like bees to honey - even when the door is guarded by two giant henchmen. And has absolutely nothing of value behind it. Any agent who falls for this is automatically tagged for capture — this is the only time your minions will take that level of initiative.
    • One trap is literally a Big Red Button in the middle of a bullseye with arrows pointing at it, saying "DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON" in lights. Sadly, it is a self-contained trap, and cannot be used as the trigger for other traps.
  • Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Any minion whose loyalty drops too low will hightail it out of your base. Some of them will even steal gold from your safe before fleeing.
  • Self-Surgery: The Butcher's backstory involves him giving himself a pancreas transplant. An evil pancreas.
  • Shoot Everything That Moves: Red Alert status makes your minions arm up and/or immediately aggress (with intent to kill, unless tagged otherwise) any non-minion forces in their vicinity, and appropriately engage any tagged minions nearby. Under heavy attack? Go to Red Alert, Shoot Everything That Moves! This Is Not a Drill!
  • Shout-Out:
    • Naturally, given the source material. Many of the Acts of Infamy are a Shout-Out to Bond movies and other spy films.
    • There is also a blink-and-miss-it one: the first island choppers have a Novistrana symbol on the tail. Novistrana was in Elixir Studio's earlier game, Republic: The Revolution. Screenshots from that same game appear on the Widescreen TV's that can be placed in the Break Room.
    • Lord Kane's given name, according to some of the more obscure game files? Kaiser Söze.
    • One of Jubei's voice lines when issued a move order is "Gojira!" Which is the Japanese name of Godzilla.
    • Dirk Masters does the Terminator's thumbs up from Terminator 2: Judgment Day as he sinks into the Bio-Tanks before turning into a Freak.
  • The '60s: Mixed liberally with elements of The '70s and The '80s, such as a Rambo expy for the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Super Agent. The presence of the Cuban Missile Crisis dates the game at 1962, however.
  • Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: Freaks are Type II, as their attributes do not degrade over time, but once lost they cannot be restored.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Under the player's management.
  • Spiritual Successor: To Dungeon Keeper.
  • Spoiled Brat: Alexis' background. But she's not your standard spoiled brat, oh no. When she inherited her father's media empire and immense fortune, she could live a nice life in eternal luxury without raising a finger again. Instead, she worked her inheritance such that their combined value quadrupled, and she became an internationally famous and well-loved actress/celebrity/socialite while at it. But even these were not enough, Alexis wanted more. She wanted the world.
  • Standard Power-Up Pose: Minions do this upon finishing their training and ascending to the next rank.
  • Stealth Pun: The Michael Jackson dance routine minions do while performing an interrogation? It's from the video for Smooth Criminal.
  • Story-Driven Invulnerability: Super Agents cannot be permanently killed by ordinary means, only through a special mission unique to each one. Applies more loosely to the Evil Genius' own Henchmen; they can be killed through "ordinary" combat, but only Super Agents have enough oomph to deplete one of their 3 lives and eventually kill them for good.
  • Strapped to a Rocket: John Steele’s demise if he is kept in a cell when you press the big red launch button.
  • Supervillain Lair: Home, sweet home.
  • Too Dumb to Live: On both sides. Social and Scientist Minions will duel armed soldiers in gentlemen's fisticuffs, to infiltrators deciding to use satchel charges on harmless table tennis courts. Captured agents also get to keep whatever weapons they have on them, like say the Super Agent Dirk Masters who was just mowing through the base with his big M60s. Agents deciding to attack a nuclear reactor. You can tell how well that turns out for them.
  • Too Smart for Strangers: Apparently averted in America, since the radio announcement when you successfully kidnap someone in the Mid-West includes advice that people take "basic self preservation" steps like "not taking candy from strangers."
  • Tuxedo and Martini: John Steele, the British super agent.
  • Video Game Cruelty Potential: The traps are just asking for it. The game even rewards you for impressive combos.
    • Sticking fat people into the mixer.
    • Tossing female agents into the greenhouse.
    • The Bookcase's sole purpose is hilarious cartoony smashing.
    • You can even imprison, torture, and execute your own minions at a whim. Not to mention that the Super Agents can't die unless you use their own weakness on them, meaning you can torture your most hated enemy endlessly.
      • Come on, who hasn't put Jet Chan through a few rounds with the laser as revenge for all the times he's blown up part of your base?
    • One of the most extremely cruel examples is the way you can finish off Frostonova. You cut up her teddy bear right in front of her, breaking the surprisingly fragile woman permanently. You Bastard!.
    • When defeating Jet Chan by drugging him and having one of your crew besting him in the dojo, if you don't have them available, you can have him be defeated by one of the basic construction worker minions rather than a proper martial artist. The ultimate humiliation.
  • Villain Cred: "Notoriety", which represents how widely your misdeeds are known to the world. Increasing it is necessary to progress in the main storyline, and is the main reason to perform side missions. You also get increases to your minion cap for high Notoriety, but on the downside, once you become ''really' notorious, Super Agents start showing up, and the Forces of Justice ramp up their assaults much quicker.
  • Villain in a White Suit: Henchman Eli Barricuda is never seen without his stylish immaculate white suit. Never, ever, spill something on it.
  • Villain Protagonist: The Player Character is the eponymous Evil Genius, a Card-Carrying Villain with designs to Take Over the World.
  • Villainous Friendship: Whenever your Henchmen aren't doing anything, they can usually be found in pairs, taking smoke breaks together and chatting in out of the way corners. If one of them is unpaired, one of the regular minions will talk with them instead. Henchmen and minions will also wave to one another as they pass in the halls.
  • We Have Reserves: Your minions are very disposable. And you will go through them. A lot.
    • So disposable, in fact, that the basic construction worker minions are free, only costing money if you increase the recruitment rate (up to one every second). Not to mention the game actually rewards you for summarily executing or torturing your minions in front of others.
  • Who Shot JFK?: The "Assassinate Mr. President" mission involves sniping him from a "grassy knoll". Partially subverted in that you don’t actually kill him, according to the briefing, as that would cause a suicidally huge amount of heat- you just hit him with a drug-filled dart and he trips out, showing that you could have shot him, but didn't (which may be a reference to theories about a man with an umbrella who people claim fired a dart that paralyzed JFK.)
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?:
    • Enforced by the Super Agents, who are actually immortal. Sure, you can tell your minions to shoot the Super Agent but they will just fall unconscious for a while before causing more trouble. The only way to get rid of them permanently is to research their Achilles' Heel, exploit it, and make them retire in shame.
    • The most extreme example is the James Bond lookalike, John Steele. He can only be killed completely off if he is kept imprisoned until the very end of the game whereupon you strap him to the rocket boosting your Kill Sat into space!
    • You can, however, just shoot the regular agents and soldiers you capture, though why you'd do that when you went to all the trouble to capture them first is a good question. Usually it boils down to simple convenience.
    • The main reason to not just shoot them is because being around bodybags causes the loyalty of minions to drop, so its usually more efficient to have them executed in jail and then take them 10 feet away to the freezer, so that you don't make them carry it all through your base lowering everyone's loyalty.
  • Worker Unit: Construction workers.
  • Worthy Opponent: This pops up with whatever Super Agent a player respects the most.
  • Yellow Peril: Shen Yu.
  • You Call That a Wound?: Henchmen reduced to zero health by combat against regular agents will only knock them out for a period, after which they will get back up again and recover their stats. Henchmen taken out during missions will disappear for a while, then finally make their way back to your island from the wilderness. The only exception to their Contractual Boss Immunity is if they are killed by one of the Super Agents, in which case they have three lives. After losing their last life to a Super Agent, they are Killed Off for Real.
  • You Have Failed Me: The line is uttered by Maximilian just before...
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: You can make your evil genius execute any minion at any time, and you don't need any excuse to do so. Each evil genius has their own method of execution. It also somehow restores all nearby minions' Health, Endurance, Loyalty, Smarts, and Attention to near tip-top levels, which makes executing hapless idiots a viable strategy for restoring minions' stats without them ever having to stop working. Ever.
    • More specifically, this is done as a Dog-Kicking Establishing Character Moment by the Evil Genius at the end of the tutorial mission to the lady who has been guiding you to this point, after she says that she has committed all her other lessons to video tapes. Her desperate protests that she can still be useful are ignored as the Evil Genius gleefully chuckles an Evil Laugh after the Henchman executes her.
  • Zeerust: Despite all the bizarre technology, the game's timeframe appears to be somewhere in the 60s or 70s (Lasers and Pong cabinets are both described as brand new technology). Word of God put it in the 60s, but if they saw something they liked from another decade they threw it in.
  • Zerg Rush: If you've got the money, it's possible to defeat even squads of enemy veterans by simply having waves of construction workers mob them with their fists.

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