W

Walton Simons - as seen in Deus Ex
Bob Page is DX’s big baddy, but it’s the mysterious figure of his sometime comrade who steals the evil crown. He’s a great villain for two reasons: a voice so calm it’s sinister, and the fact that he’s a dark mirror of the game’s hero. They even share the same nano-augmentations.

X

Xenomorphs - as seen in Alien vs Predator 1 & 2
In the games, the xenos have maintained a menace long since lost in the diminishing returns of the movie series. So many videogames owe a debt to this textbook implementation of fast, scuttling things with claws in the dark, but only AvP - especially the incredible, terrifying first one - could offer the real deal. While so many other Alien games hurled dozens of the things at you, AvP had the sense to make even a single one a lethal threat, and subverted headshot philosophy by having the beast’s most vulnerable part spray acid blood when shot.

Y

Yuri - as seen in C&C: Red Alert 2 and C&C: Red Alert 2 - Yuri’s Revenge
A Russian psychic from C&C’s most ludicrous installment, and noteworthy mostly for just how amazingly inept a villain he was. Nearly all his crazy conquering plans went disastrously wrong, and among his many humiliations he can count being reduced to a brain in a jar, having his forces defeated by a Clint Eastwood pastiche and being eaten by a T-Rex. Think Dick Dastardly rather than the cunning Kane.

Z

Zerg - as seen in Starcraft
Characters so embedded into PC gaming consciousness that they even have their own verb. Starcraft’s nasty insectoid aliens wrote the book on winning RTS bouts by defeating the other guy with exhausting rushes of weak units in massed numbers. They’re here as villains because, really, anything that propagates by killing or assimilating whole species at a time isn’t offering peace and love. And let’s not even get started on the fact that they give their units cuddly names like “Devouring One.”

Zombies - as seen in quite literally everything ever
It’s debatable whether zombies have become as popular a game baddie as they are because a) they’re scary b) they’re funny c) censorship fools don’t get quite so upset about kids shooting dead people or d) all of the above. Either way, their slow pace, slack jaws and eerie moans in everything from Half-Life to The Movies and Planescape to Stalker makes them a perennially appealing monster that can entertain and scare all at the same time. We raise a cup of braiiiiiins in their honor.