Everybody has to make a living, but not all jobs were created equally. For those of us with jobs that leave us stressed and tired at the end of the day, video games can often offer a chance to blow off steam or get immersed in another world and forget about our own problems for a little while. Unfortunately, not all game heroes have it easy. While all the following games are true classics, we should all be glad the organizations and employers listed below are just fiction.

The World – X-COM:UFO Defense

Also called X-COM: Enemy Unknown in Europe, players of this game were in trouble regardless of the region in which they lived. In X-COM, the player is tasked with running the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, whose mission is to stop alien attacks on earthly soil. Never mind that you’re given a starting budget of only $10 million dollars to protect the entire earth, because that sum will seem astronomical when The World gets together to review your performance at the end of the month and renegotiate your pay. If a nation feels like you aren’t doing enough for them, they’ll decrease their contribution, because obviously less money equal more effective anti-alien operations. Did I mention that the super soldiers pulled together to combat this alien threat are wearing jumpsuits? Jumpsuits! The World actually makes you research armor before you can use it, as if there’s no one on the entire planet who can just show you how it works. And if, after hours and endless hours of watching your soldiers freak out and murder each other in alien mind-controlled insanity, you actually manage to defend earth long enough to travel to the alien home world and destroy it, you get to witness the aliens’ dying act: sending out a signal that awakens their alien brothers hidden in Earth’s oceans! Do I detect a sequel rumbling in those watery depths?

The Rebel Alliance – X-Wing

Being in the Rebel Alliance sucked, and anyone who says otherwise has never flown a Y-Wing. Players didn’t have to fly the Y-Wing that often (The game is called X-Wing, after all), but when they did it was a mission they would never forget. This was mostly true because with the Y-Wing’s top speed made rolling bricks uphill look fast, and missions lasted forever. And sure there was the zippy A-Wing, but get caught in a serious firefight and you were dead, plain and simple. While the titular fighter was pretty badass, fighting the Empire was not. The game was designed around always being outnumbered and winning against impossible odds, aka losing because the game was impossible. If the Rebel Alliance was real they would have to be recruiting pilots by the minute to keep up with the “turnover.” And let’s not forget the spectacular Death Star battle. I had to cheat to even see the mission, of course, and when I did I lasted about seven seconds, which was about six seconds longer than my wingman.

United Aerospace Corporation – Doom Series

If there’s one thing the Alien series taught us, it’s never trust a multi-planetary conglomerate operating in the legal gray area of space. The unnamed space marine of the Doom series was uninformed, however, and look how much trouble it got him in. The United Aerospace Corporation, while researching some kind of jump-gate technology for traveling between the moons of Mars, manage to open a portal to hell. In some cruel twist of fate, the unnamed marine left to guard the hanger wasn’t the first soldier to be slaughtered, and instead becomes the player. Forced to fight their way through three chapters of sunny Mars locals, players who actually manage to re-kill all their undead space marine buddies and make it back to earth are greeted with the horrifying image of a burning city and, yes, you all remember it, a bunny’s head on a stake. But worst of all, nowhere in the entire game is there a terminal for the space marine to enter all that overtime he’s accrued.

The G-Man – Half-Life Series

While the story behind the G-Man is never explained, one thing is for sure: he’s a crappy boss. While he makes silent appearances throughout the original Half-Life, it isn’t until the player wins the game that he appears and “offers” Gordon employment. Of course, the other option is being left defenseless and surrounded by aliens. After accepting his new job, Dr. Freeman isn’t so free any more, as the G-man puts him in stasis for something like twenty years (until Half-Life 2 begins). But all that pales in comparison to his failure as a manager. For starters, he’s horrible at keeping his employees in the loop, expecting Gordon to just wake up twenty years later and be ready to go in this new world. While he checks in on Gordon from time to time throughout both games, he never provides any feedback or constructive criticism. Then again, I guess we shouldn’t lay all the blame on the G-Man’s shoulders. After all, it’s Dr. Freeman’s fault for never asking a single question.

The King – Kings Quest: Quest For the Crown

It’s good to be the king. It’s not good to be the king’s understudy. In the original King’s Quest, Sir Graham is chosen to recollect all of Daventry’s stolen treasures: a mirror that tells the future, a bottomless treasure chest, and a shield that “protects the wearer from danger” (isn’t that what all shields do?). He has to do this because the king runs some seriously weak security and lost them all and now the kingdom has fallen intro ruin. But Graham is willing to go on the dangerous quest because King Edward the Benevolent (can you believe it?) promises him the crown if he succeeds. You might be thinking that’s a pretty fair tradeoff, except for the fact that Graham is mentally handicapped. At least I assume he is mentally handicapped, because Graham can’t do anything that can’t be described in language a four-year-old can understand, things like “GET ROCK.” Even worse, the player had to type these instructions by hand. The worst part was that the game’s puzzles were basically impossible, and I’m pretty sure no one could even beat it without consulting the internet, which didn’t exist yet. Only slightly less worse is the fact that if you cheated all the way to the end Graham wasn’t even smart enough to take the bottomless treasure chest to the nearest elven strip club, but actually stuck around to govern a kingdom that only takes up an eight by six grid of screens and has like one house.

The Empire – TIE Fighter

Let’s face it, neither side was a good one to be on in the War of the Stars. Sure the Empire had cooler uniforms and some really giant spaceships, but they had giant problems too. For one thing, the Empire Core of Engineers must really have been scraping the bottom of the grad school barrel. I guess we can forgive one very poorly placed vent on the first Death Star, but the miserable performance of the TIE fighter is just unforgivable. Pilots must have screwed their helmets on real tight in a (futile) attempt to drown out that horrible screaming noise, but that was nowhere near as annoying as the fact that even the tiniest laser graze send the TIE spinning into bits. While TIE Fighter was praised as a game, I always imagined my fictional fighter pilot curling up under his bunk at night, praying I wouldn’t be calling on him to get into one of those death traps again.

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