T

The Transcendent One - as seen in Planescape: Torment
Transcendent One: “Does he really matter to you?”

Annah: “He matters more to me than life!”

Transcendent One: “Then die.”

An endgame villain who announces himself by instantly slaying everyone in your party, ol’ Tranny is a cold and fearsome entity. But then, the hero, the Nameless One, is seeking punishment to ease his own guilt. Planescape is brutal in delivering it.

Tyrannosaurus Rex - as seen in Tomb Raider
While most of the world remembers Tomb Raider for Lara Croft’s boobies and hilariously eroticized grunts of exertion, gamers remember it for another reason entirely. The first TR was a curiously quiet game, Lara navigating crumbling edifices with only occasional intervention from angry beasts. And then, totally unexpectedly, a really, really big dinosaur. It frightened the life out of us the first time we saw it, inspiring exactly the same terrified backwards-running firing wildly into the air we’d probably do if it happened in real life. It’s testament to the game’s sense of flow that filling the T-Rex’s head with a load of bullets actually worked, rather than some asinine puzzle being cruelly inserted into a high-adrenaline situation.

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Ugh Zan III - as seen in Serious Sam
Serious Sam had its beefcake tongue inserted firmly in its halfwit cheek. Just in case there was any lingering doubt, a 300-foot-tall demon with four arms trashing half a city rather gives the game away.

V

Terese & Jeanette Voerman  - as seen in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
Neither your enemy nor your ally, totally unique and dangerously broken in the head, Jeanette was the improbably-breasted vamp used to promote the game. She had a nice line in both flirting with and threatening you, often in the same sentence. Then her buttoned-down, ice-cold sister Terese turns up, and before too long you have to pick sides. It’s not so much that discovering they’re the same person is a shock (a personality crisis brought on by parental sexual abuse), but rather the tragedy of it all - how can you convince someone to end a feud with a person who doesn’t exist?