EDITOR'S NOTE: Apparently we forgot how to count. This is, in fact, a list of five and not six -- as is now reflected by the corrected headline and header image. Whoops!
It's a tough job market out there -- especially if you're trying to get work as a video game enemy. Are you a zombie, terrorist, or a communist from the future? If not, you're probably having a hard time finding work. Plenty of dependable hard-working mummies, living hamburgers, and evil snails have been cruelly cast aside by the video game industry, but we here at GameSpy aren't blind to their plight. These are video game enemies society has passed by...
During the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Universal Studios produced a series of classic horror movies featuring monsters that would go on to become staples of the discount Halloween costume aisle for the next half-century. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon -- Universal either created or shaped the way we imagine all these creatures today.
While the popularity of these monsters waned after the 1950s, their careers were reinvigorated in the '80s when they began to find plentiful work in video games. If you found yourself in a stage with a dark black/purple/brown color palette during the 8- and 16-bit eras, it was pretty much guaranteed you'd be dodging an onslaught of mummies, wolfmen, and black-lagoon-based creatures. Around this time, Dracula reportedly converted a couple of his castles into garages for his collection of tricked-out hearses, and Frankenstein was said to be in Michael Jackson's inner circle.
Lately, though, the Castlevania series has been the only place where the Universal monsters have been able to find consistent work, and when the recent Castlevania: Lords of Shadow updated the look of the series' vampires and werewolves (and eliminated mummies and Frankenstein altogether), even the Konami cash dried up.
Who Took Their Jobs: Zombies
It's easy to see why the video game industry has gone the zombie route; they're plentiful, don't talk back, and splatter real pretty when they're hit with a shotgun blast. In the past, the fact that most of them demand to be paid in brains was an issue, but the development of a tofu brain substitute that tastes just like the real thing has solved that problem.
If game makers of the '80s and early '90s had a message they wanted to impart to the kids playing, it was this: Everything, no matter how cute or harmless-looking, can murder you. Turtles? Yup. Snails? Sure. Beavers? Oh, hell yes.
Back in the day, an animal didn't have to be even remotely threatening to be a video game enemy; in fact, it seemed like the non-threatening animals were employed more often than the genuinely deadly. Of course, the philosophy is the complete opposite now -- game designers take something that's already pretty intimidating (like a zombie or a demon), pump it full of steroids, cover it in extra spikes, and give it a rocket launcher.
Who Took Their Jobs: Blob Monsters
Some enemies in games (particularly in platformers) look so unassuming, you feel like you should ask them if they're lost and where their parents are rather than kill them... but these days, they're rarely based on real animals. Most of the time, they're just squishy, bouncy, ball-like creatures -- cute, but not close enough to any real-life organism that you might feel bad about squashing 500 of over the course of a game.