From: Pac-Man

Unlucky because: If you’re not paying attention, Clyde is just another one of Pac-Man’s colorful ghost adversaries, albeit one who’s frequently cast as their leader for some reason. In the original Pac-Man, however, the orange ghost wasn’t exactly leader material. And by that, we mean he probably should have been wearing a drool guard.

Above: Oh, for… he hasn’t even found his way out of the nest yet! 

Some people might argue that his slightly sluggish pace and reluctance to be useful are actually signs of good luck, seeing as it means Clyde will likely be far away from Pac-Man when the tables inevitably turn. These people have obviously never played the game very much. The flip side of their argument is that Clyde runs away just a little slower than all the other ghosts, thereby making it easy for his compatriots to pass him, leaving Clyde to the mercy of Pac-Man’s jaws while they squeeze out a few more crucial milliseconds of life. It also means that Clyde only rarely gets to kill Pac-Man himself, which, assuming ghosts keep score, has probably granted him permanent “noob” status among his friends.

Above: Even the attract mode has a healthy disdain for ‘Pokey’ Clyde 

From: Metal Gear Solid series

Unlucky because: On the surface, Hal “Otacon” Emmerich has had a pretty awesome time of it. After designing towering murder-bot Metal Gear REX, he’s spent his life hanging out with Solid Snake, watching safely from the sidelines as his superspy best friend does all the real work. Sure, he has to take care of a sweetly precocious little girl and design new, less destructive robots, but in the main he’s living every geek’s dream: watching other people doing cool stuff, all the time.

After what Otacon’s been through, though, it’s probably small comfort. Never mind that he made his debut by pissing himself while cowering in a locker; in each of the three games he’s appeared in, he’s fallen deeply in love with someone (who, surprisingly, isn’t Snake), and that someone has always died. Always. Worse, they’ve died either directly or indirectly because of Snake’s actions, and they usually pass on in an extended tear-jerking death scene.

Above: Otacon counts all the people he knows who still haven’t died horribly 

Tear-jerking for Otacon, mainly, who spends almost as much time sobbing and blaming himself throughout the series as Snake does growling and smoking. Really, though, Otacon’s personal tragedies are a side effect of the terrible judgment he exercises when forging relationships. His first love was a terrorist sniper, his second was his own stepsister (with whom he shared a fantastically creepy and incestuous adolescence) and his third was a clearly unstable scientist with a long history of betraying Snake. Premature death or no, all three of those infatuations are doomed to end in tears, and the sooner Otacon realizes that, the sooner we can stop listening to this:

Above: SPOILER ALERT - WATCH AT YOUR OWN RISK

After all he’s been through, Otacon would probably spend all his time weeping if it weren’t for the extended diatribes on nuclear proliferation and military politics that he loves to launch into.

Above: ‘Oh, did a hat drop? I’d better tell you about the crippling inefficacy of multinational disarmament treaties in the face of rampant military privatization!’ 

From: Max Payne series

Unlucky because: It’s hard to think of a protagonist who gets shit on more relentlessly than Max Payne. His wife and baby daughter are dead, murdered at home by junkies. He’s been framed for the murder of a DEA colleague by another DEA colleague. He can’t sleep, he’s probably addicted to painkillers and the only people who don’t want to kill him are a shadowy politician and a traitorous hitwoman who’s likely going to be dead soon. And his face looks like this:

Making matters worse, all that is just the setup for the first game. Over the course of his two adventures, Max is repeatedly shot, blown up, kidnapped, betrayed and left for dead. The closest he comes to sleep is when an overdose of the drug Valkyr puts him into a delirious coma, and when he’s awake, he’s haunted by weird premonitions, hallucinations and one of the most comically overwrought internal monologues ever to appear in a game.

Above: Not even being able to do this can make up for Max’s pain 

As if it weren’t enough for Max to just barely scrape through two near-death misadventures and lose everyone he cares about, someone had to go and throw salt in his eyes by turning his story into an incomprehensible mess of a film starring Mark Wahlberg and a bunch of CG monsters.

Above: NO