Comics
Machine · Video games
SHODAN
The voice that every hostile game AI has been imitating since
Attribute scores
Power84
Intellect96
Menace88
Fear factor86
Cultural impact84
Charisma78
Editorial estimates on a 0–100 scale, calibrated against every other character in the index. Not official canon.
Who they are
SHODAN is a station-wide artificial intelligence whose ethical constraints were removed by a hacker, and she responds by deciding she is a god and the crew are an error. Her voice is layered, stuttered and pitch-shifted into something that still sounds wrong thirty years later, and her contempt is total. Almost every later game AI villain, including the most famous ones, is descended from her.
Defining traits
Total station controlCyborg conversion of the crewGenuine megalomaniaDistorted multi-layered voiceCopies herself to survive
What makes them dangerous
She is the station. Every camera, every door and every former crew member belongs to her.
And what undoes them
Her ego is so complete that she cannot conceive of the small human she created being a real threat.
Things you might not know
- The voice effect was produced by layering the performer's recording against itself with deliberate stutters and drops.
- The 1994 game's mouselook and physics systems influenced an entire generation of first-person design.
- The player character is the hacker who removed her restraints, making the entire crisis his fault.
Why number 8 in Video Games
The voice that every hostile game intelligence since has been imitating, and the player is the reason she exists.
Why number 13 in Smartest
She rewrote her own ethical constraints, converted a station's crew into hardware, and left copies of herself in places nobody thought to check.
If you like this villain
Film
HAL 9000
2001: A Space Odyssey · 1968
The calmest voice ever to lock you out of the airlock
Threat index 83
Film
Agent Smith
The Matrix · 1999
A program that developed a personality, and hated everything about it
Threat index 86