The Art of the Badass

You know him.

His name’s Frank and he just wants his family back. Or maybe his name’s Dolph and he just punched you in the larynx.

You’ve seen him.

He’s got the battle-axe over his shoulder, stained with a couple gallons of troll’s blood. Unless he’s carrying a Gatling gun the size of a small tree and smiling crookedly at the advancing raptor horde.

You’ve heard him.

“You know what they say about volcanoes?” he asks his nemesis, just before delivering a roundhouse kick to the jaw that sends him spiraling into the lava-spitting hole of hell below. He sparks a cig before continuing, “They’re the pits.”

"You guys wanna get some pizza later ARRRRGHGHXHHXGGXYSGS!!"

No matter where he is, no matter how dumb his hair looks, the badass has shown up in countless forms of media since the dawn of…well, media.

Video games are the perfect place for a badass. What better selling point can there be than putting a timid 10th grader in control of a sword-chucking, crotch-kicking barbarian?

For some people, ass-kickery and hot chickery don’t provide themselves as amply as needed, and well-timed one liners almost never form in your head when you want them to, leading most of us to rely on zingers like, “NO, YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS LAME!!!”

The badasses are here to help, and no matter how many pixels are holding them together, they’re always willing to take a guy down.

This man has glasses and must be a nerd.

I’d love there to be a list of the top badasses in video games here, but that’s too easy. And the truth is, the reason it’s so easy is because there are so many of them.

Master Chief. Samus Aran. Kratos. The Ice Climbers. Rayman. Everybody’s got a hint of badass in them if they’re put in your control. Everybody’s punching goblins or using severed arms as weapons or fighting with every flick of the finger and grind of the teeth to save their world from the undeniable darkness that craves to be satisfied.

The badass puts up the fight; the badass is the one who says “No.” The fact that he does it whilst assembling a sniper rifle he’d been hiding in a nearby house plant is… incidental.

The thing is, the badass is absolute. He is an unstoppable force facing insurmountable odds, and that is why we root for him and want to be him.

Let’s all be stereotypes for a second.

When I was a young lad, it didn’t take many basketballs to the throat to figure out that I was an “indoor kid.” Say what you will about assumptions, but if you think the other kids’ parents weren’t watching me stumble up and down the court and thinking “Damn, that kid in the rec-specs is an asthma attack away from being a career dungeon master,” then you are delusional, my friend.

Actually, I’m being delusional, because what they were really thinking was “GET THAT LANKY CORPSE WITH THE GOGGLES OUTTA HERE!”

"THIS TEE BALL GAME IS THE MOST SERIOUS THING I'VE GOT GOING ON."

And they were thinking it loudly, from the bleachers.

Call it close-minded. I lived it.

But this isn’t a sob story. The badass exists for a reason. Everybody thinks he’s cool, sure. How could you not? Yet, if video games are your thing (and if you’re reading this, they probably are) then you know how satisfying it was to stab King Dodongo to death that first time.

Gamers have a history of being lampooned as weak and pasty, so to see the protagonist of so many games appear as a brute force, no bullshit, hammer of the gods, is to see the opposite of what many assumed us to be.

So, you might say, the real badass… is the one inside of you.

God no, never say that, unless you want a real badass to punch a hole in your stomach.

Games are always evolving; they’re a boulder, rolling down a mountain, picking up advanced technology and complex storylines along the way. While not every game incorporates a narrative, there are plenty with a badass on the cover; his assault rifle smoking, his dark stare penetrating your sweat glands.

And while we wait to see what threatens our livelihood next, in the real or virtual world, there’s another absolute with a tight grip on the trigger of the game industry:

They’re only going to get badder.