Animation
Scar
The Lion King · 1994
Fratricide, a musical number, and a lifetime of resentment
Threat index 76
Tyrant · Video games
Andrew Ryan
A man who built a utopia and then had to police it
Attribute scores
Power52
Intellect92
Menace80
Fear factor68
Cultural impact88
Charisma90
Editorial estimates on a 0–100 scale, calibrated against every other character in the index. Not official canon.
Who they are
Ryan constructs an underwater city free of government, religion and regulation, and then watches it consume itself while he installs surveillance and security bots to stop it. His confrontation with the player is one of the medium's landmark scenes, a scripted moment that turns the mechanics of playing a game into a comment on free will. Few villains have used their own format that well.
Defining traits
Founder-level control of a cityIdeological absolutismGenetic modification industryRhetorical brillianceFatal self-contradiction
What makes them dangerous
He owns the oxygen supply of a city on the ocean floor and has stopped pretending to be reasonable.
And what undoes them
His ideology cannot survive contact with the city he built, and he knows it before you do.
Things you might not know
- The confrontation scene is widely taught in game design courses as an example of narrative using player agency.
- His philosophy is a direct and openly acknowledged critique of a specific mid-century political author.
- The city's audio diaries build most of the story, a technique the game popularized industry-wide.
Why number 3 in Video Games
His confrontation turns the act of playing a game into an argument about free will, and it is still taught in design courses two decades later.
Why number 19 in Smartest
He built a functioning city on the ocean floor from first principles. That it collapsed is a failure of philosophy rather than engineering.
If you like this villain
Animation
Judge Claude Frollo
The Hunchback of Notre Dame · 1996
The darkest antagonist a major animation studio has ever released
Threat index 77
Animation
Mother Gothel
Tangled · 2010
The villain whose weapon is a compliment with a knife in it
Threat index 73