Villains monologue at us so much in videogames it’s become passe. Oh, you’re so evil you took over the radio station and replaced the friendly voice that’s been guiding me since the tutorial just so you can tell me about your evil plan? Yawn. Use that radio to sing a song at me, maybe then I’ll pay attention.
Sing during a boss fight and I’ll pay even more attention. I’m not sure where this trend started, but the videogame boss who is so extra they can’t help but perform an entire song-and-dance routine while kicking your ass has become a delightful trend—though not all the entries on this list are boss-fight songs. If it happened too often it would stop being surprising and lose all its power.
Which is also why games that are entirely musical don’t count for the purpose of this list. You won’t find Stray Gods, Billie Bust Up, Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, No Straight Roads, People of Note, or Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion here. Only unexpected songs count, which is why you shouldn’t read this list if you don’t want their existence spoiled for you.
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I’ve also left off any that aren’t on PC, of course, so Courtney Gears from Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal and the musical turd from Conker’s Bad Fur Day (no really, there’s a giant singing poop in that game) won’t be included here either.
The singing orc
Middle-earth: Shadow of War
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The randomized pool of orcs in Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War spits out the occasional unique oddity: the one who collects ears; the twins who show up as a pair; that one orc who is obsessed with spiders and covered in webs. Fun as those oddball uruks are, there’s nothing quite like the crash-zoom into a new nemesis who whips out a lute with spikes sticking out of it and bellows “tra-la-la!” at you.
The Singer has lyrics for every occasion. He’ll operatically serenade your defeat with “Rest in peace, man of Gondor / ’tis a pity you were such a bore,” then salute your return with “Your flesh was torn and somehow it mends / It seems our song will never end!” He’s delighted by each new twist in your story because it means he gets to add a new verse to his ballad. I can’t imagine killing him instead of recruiting him to my cause then ensuring he makes it to the top of the pops under my tutelage. I’ll make him a star yet.
Scylla
Hades 2
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Hades 2 is not a game about killing Chronos, or all the timey-wimey stuff that comes with murdering the titan of time. No, it’s a game about Scylla, Jetty, and Roxy, an up-and-coming rock band whose performances keep being interrupted by a witch. They’re just trying to entertain their legion of fans among the shades of Hades, yet over and over she rushes the stage and ruins the show.
Scylla’s siren songs are standouts in an incredible soundtrack, which is why it’s a great choice to have Melinoe, the protagonist of Hades 2, not be into them at all. The way Odysseus gushes about how, much as he hates the sirens, he can’t get their tunes out of his head while Melinoe just goes “meh” is a riot, even though I personally agree with Odysseus. But of course I do. I’m a mortal too, and these are songs designed to make mortals wreck themselves on the rocks. (Or on Roxy, hey ho.)
When you arrive in Oceanus you can hear the distant echoes of Scylla and the Sirens rehearsing for that night’s performance. It’s a real impetus to keep going—especially if they’re warming up for a song you haven’t heard before.
Raphael
Baldur’s Gate 3
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When you confront the devil Raphael in the House of Hope, his agent Korilla starts singing the moment initiative is rolled. Which is neat. Then the pipe organ kicks in, and you get distracted from deciding what level to cast counterspell at by how hardcore it sounds. And then Raphael starts singing his own theme song.
It’s diegetic too. Cast the silence spell on either Raphael or Korilla and their voices drop out of the soundtrack, which is yet another lovely little bit of reactivity in a game full of them. Raphael’s song is a perfect encapsulation of who he is too. He’s a dramatic showoff, big theater-kid energy, and when this final fight starts you realize what that means. He’s the worst kind of villain: a Disney villain.
The Joker
Arkham City, Arkham Knight
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During Arkham City the Joker gets hold of a direct line to Batman and starts leaving clingy messages on his voicemail. It’s a funny running gag that really pays off when the credits roll and a final missed message plays: Mark Hamill crooning Only You (and You Alone) down a crackly phoneline.
The trick’s repeated in Arkham Origins, only it’s Troy Baker singing country tune Cold, Cold Heart, and again in Arkham Knight where the Joker sings over the credits and during the game. Even Professor Pyg gets musical in Arkham Knight, singing along to opera during his boss fight, but it’s hard to compete with Mark Hamill doing doo-wop.
Teh Earworm
Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
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In the Claptastic Voyage DLC for Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, you get digitized and sent inside the mind of Claptrap, the universally beloved Borderlands mascot NPC nobody has ever said a bad word about. While you’re there searching for a secret code hidden in the bot’s brain, he offers up a sidequest to get rid of an earworm that’s been nagging at him.
One of those classic “the Germans have a word for everything” deals, the word originally spelled ohrwuhrm is Teutonic for stuck-song syndrome—when a tune is so catchy you can’t get it out of your head. In the Claptastic Voyage it manifests as Teh Earworm, a gigantic worm monster with speakers strapped to it that blares a song called Mainframe at you. And while defeating it might get it out of Claptrap’s head, now it’s in yours. It took me until Borderlands 4 to get that song out of my head, and then they went and played a French version that’s just as hooky.
GLaDOS
Portal, Portal 2
Portal’s end credits song, Still Alive, became a meme so quickly and annoyingly it’s tough to remember how great it is. But then you listen to it again and the intervening years melt away and you remember that actually, Portal was a trium— well, it was really really good.
The song’s more passive-aggressive personification of GLaDOS, confronting the deadliness of her experiments and her own defeat, was so perfect it became her default portrayal across Portal 2 and in its own end-credits song Want You Gone. (And in Lego Dimensions, where she has yet another song.) It’s arguably not even canon, but Still Alive still managed to redefine who GLaDOS is, which is quite a feat for a three-minute joke that plays over the credits.
Guitar Warrior
Total Distortion
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The CD-ROM era gave videogames CD-quality audio, a whole new toolkit to play with. One of the weirder results was 1995’s Total Distortion, in which you travel to the Distortion Dimension to record footage of alien landscapes to make cool backdrops for music videos. In between that, you play minigames to represent your attempts to have a nightmare-free sleep, eat a lot of sandwiches, and battle the guitar warriors.
These servants of the Distortion Dimension’s supreme dictator, the Metal Lord, aren’t stoked about you exploiting their home for footage to put behind someone playing air guitar. “Video taping is stealing!” they declare, before forcing you into another minigame—this time one where you twang away at chords to fight the sonic energy of their guitar. Fail, and you get to enjoy the best thing about Total Distortion, a song that’s one of the best game overs in history.
Conroy Bumpus
Sam & Max: Hit the Road
Sam & Max: Hit the Road is an affectionate parody of Americana, with its oversized roadside attractions and tourist traps. Its villain, Conroy Bumpus, is a big-game hunting cowboy who wants to bag a bigfoot, but while Sam and Max’s road-trip across America feels authentic if exaggerated for comic effect, Conroy wasn’t even born in the USA.
The guy whose hit records include ‘Heaven’s Just Like Texas, Except That There’s No Taxes’ is a dang tourist with a Liverpool accent, a wannabe Elvis like Shakin’ Stevens. This fraud adds insult to injury when he performs ‘King of the Creatures’ at a floor show, a song full of lies like “I trapped my first tiger before I could speak” and “killed me a bear when I was three.” I didn’t like him before I heard him sing a country song about animal abuse, now I really hate the guy.
Satan
Saints Row: Gat Out of Hell
![Saints Row: Gat Out Of Hell - Musical [US] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/PqToiIwh7Fc/maxresdefault.jpg "Videogame villains who sing at you are the best插图6")
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There are two wolves inside us all. The series that gave us the dubstep gun was also the series that gave us Satan as a domineering father who has trapped his daughter, princess of New Hades, in a gilded cage from which she can only be rescued by the power of love. And also the power of song.
Yes, this is the second game in the list where a devil sings like he’s in a Disney movie, only this time it’s actually The Devil, and he’s voiced by Travis Willingham from Critical Role. (His daughter is voiced by Kate Reinders, who played Glinda in Wicked on Broadway.)
Ursula
Kingdom Hearts 2
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The Little Mermaid is one of several Disney movies ground up and fed into the mill of Kingdom Hearts, which means that Sora, Goofy, and Donald have to spend time underwater. Sora gets transformed into a merboy for these sequences, while Goofy becomes a turtle and for some reason Donald is half-octopus, like Ursula. He’s already an aquatic animal, so they probably could have got away with not making us look at this ducktopus monstrosity and wonder if he has two beaks now.
Anyway, in an admirable show of restraint The Little Mermaid’s Ursula waited until Kingdom Hearts 2 to bust out a song, and the end result wouldn’t be anything special if it weren’t for the way the sea witch insists on referring to her eel sidekicks as “poopsies”, leading to Sora’s bizarre line: “Sorry, mommy, your poopsies are toast.”
Ignatius Mortimer Meen
I.M. Meen
I.M. Meen lured in young players with its back-of-the-box promises of first-person videogame dungeon-shooting then trapped them in edutainment hell, forced to correct grammar in fanfic an evil librarian writes about himself. Which is actually an appropriate match for the game’s story, in which that evil librarian uses a magical book to lure in young readers and trap them in a labyrinth full of monsters.
This is communicated in an opening song delivered by Ignatius Mortimer Meen and animated in the familiar house style of Animation Magic, who were also responsible for the infamous cutscenes in the CD-i games Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Where those games weren’t supposed to look as sinister and off-kilter as they actually did, I.M. Meen is. They nailed it.
King Dice
Cuphead
![Cuphead (PC) - Mr. King Dice Theme Song (Die House)[1080p60fps] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/TtFVwlB5Thc/maxresdefault.jpg "Videogame villains who sing at you are the best插图8")
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Try to get to the finale of Cuphead before you’ve collected all the soul contracts and you’ll be bounced by King Dice, the manager of the Devil’s Casino, who informs you in song form that you should go back over your to-do list.
Looking like a rubberhose-limbed cubic-headed Cab Calloway, King Dice sings Die House, a song that is not German for “the house” but is instead a creepy jazzy call-and-response to remind you that Satan’s second banana is a big deal and will absolutely wreck you when you have to face him as the climax of a miniboss parade when you finally do finish your to-do list. You know what’s on the top of my to-do list, King Dice? Your mom.
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