Key Takeaways
- Video games often incorporate real-life experiences like working, cleaning, and dealing with landlords.
- Characters like Tom Nook, Lord Divish, and Molag Bal exemplify various landlord archetypes in games.
- Landlords in games such as Allistair Tenpenny, Mayor Onion, and those in Silent Hill can be downright terrible.
Despite their status as one of the world’s top go-to methods for escapism, video games often draw from real-life experiences. Sometimes, you’ll perform menial labor to acquire in-game currency. Perhaps you’ll find yourself sitting on a pier and fishing in an otherwise straightforward fantasy world. Whatever the case may be, there are all sorts of examples of reality bleeding into gaming.
Cleaning, crafting, hunting, fishing, and working are all incredibly common and surprisingly fun ways to add a few grounded experiences to games. Alternatively, developers can annoy players by adding something everyone dreads: a landlord. These often unscrupulous entities often lay the basis for a game’s conflict or progression system, although — as in reality — failing to pay them has dire consequences. However, even the fairest or most vigilant landlords can have some vile personality traits.
7 Tom Nook
Admittedly, Animal Crossing’s Tom Nook is as pleasant as a video game landlord can get. And he’s more of a mortgage broker than a landlord. Still, he never repossesses your house and has no deadline to repay your dues. Moreover, he actively rewards you for paying off each housing loan. Nonetheless, he always serves as the thorn in every townie’s side.
While the modern incarnations of Tom Nook are rather friendly, older versions of the raccoon landowner are less flattering.
In the original Animal Crossing games, he happily complied with villagers’ pranks by repainting your roof against your wishes. His supposed ‘charity’ in Animal Crossing: Wild World is heavily implied to be fake.
A deeper look at Animal Crossing’s lore may also give you some second thoughts about the innocuous raccoon (or, per original Japanese versions, tanuki). Nook is the de facto economic owner of everything. He runs the town’s general store and handles its bank. In Animal Crossing: Wild World, he even runs his own shady ‘charity’ for the supposed town of Boondox. So, even if he’s not a lousy landlord, Mr. Nook certainly has some skeletons in his closet.
6 Lord Divish
Warhorse Studio’s immersive historical simulator is both the first and last place you’d expect to see a landlord. Technically, there are no modern landlords in Kingdom Come: Deliverance; instead, there are historically accurate feudal landowners. However, paying a landlord fits the game’s rabid adherence to realism.
In some ways, each innkeeper is a landlord. However, medieval Bohemia’s worst landlord can be found in the game’s From the Ashes DLC. If you thought paying for a house was bad, try paying Lord Divish for an entire town. You become the bailiff of Pribyslavitz. However, the land isn’t free. Should Henry fail to make Pribyslavitz profitable, Divish reclaims the land. And, yes, this also means you can’t finish the DLC quest.
5 Molag Bal
There are many properties to buy in The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim, but one of the worst (or best, depending on who you ask) houses is in Markarth. Technically, there’s no owner. It’s free for the taking, so there’s no rent. However, as Tyranus suggests, there’s something sinister about this stony abode.
Aside from the cobwebs and ruined furniture, the abandoned house has a demonic current tenant. The Daedric Prince of Damnation is a very active resident, and he demands a literal blood sacrifice. That’s an unpleasant enough rental payment, but the Dragonborn must also consider the Prince’s initial greeting. After all, Molag Bal doesn’t take them on a nice house tour. Instead, he forces you to kill Tyranus before trapping you in a spiked cage.
4 Allistair Tenpenny
It’s bad enough to collect rent in an apocalypse, but Fallout 3’s Allistair Tenpenny may be one of the most dubious post-apocalyptic landowners. Originally from postwar Britain, Tenpenny made his fortune by renovating an abandoned high-rise. The egotistically-named Tenpenny Tower is an expensive home for the Capital Wasteland’s elites.
However, it’s not the elitism that tarnishes Tenpenny’s name. No, his behavior earns him the title of ‘Wasteland’s Worst Landlord.’ Even though the apartments are immaculate, Tenpenny refuses to admit even the richest ghouls. Moreover, Tenpenny encourages you to destroy an entire settlement to improve the view from his penthouse. He has no concern for the lives lost, nor does he express anything other than joy upon the quest’s completion.
3 Mayor Onion
For a game about cute vegetables in a nuclear wasteland, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion has a surprisingly realistic villain. Though technically a mayor, the aptly named Mayor Onion also serves as Turnip Boy’s landlord. Now, admittedly, Turnip Boy has committed massive tax fraud to the tune of $140,000. Still, revoking the deed to his greenhouse seems like an extreme step.
Of course, Turnip Boy is tasked with collecting items for Mayor Onion to reclaim the deed to his house. During his adventures, he comes across plenty of dirt on the multi-layered mayor. Aside from evicting citizens willy-nilly, Mayor Onion has been scheming to become an overlord of all vegetables. It’s bad enough to pay taxes and rent to someone, but having them go full cyborg mode to conquer the world is a step too far.
2 The Owner of South Ashfield Heights Apartments
When you move to anywhere associated with Silent Hill, you can rest assured you’ll have the worst time of your life. You’ll live in constant fog and find yourself surrounded by Eldritch horrors beyond your imagination. Oh, and you still pay rent. All these problems add up and turn the owners of an apartment complex in Silent Hill: The Room into a top contender for the world’s worst landlords.
A gaping hole in an admittedly ugly bathroom wall is far from the only problem in the South Ashfield Heights Apartments.
Fleshy horrors beyond human comprehension lurk around every corner, and many of the supernatural alterations woefully ignore countless regulations.
The massive spiral staircase is a safety nightmare without a solid railing. Likewise, the massive pool of blood is a verifiable biohazard.
Above all else, the building’s owner somehow fails to recognize that the protagonist has been locked in his room for five days. That’s not even counting the many horrors that befall the building throughout the game. It’s made explicitly clear that Henry isn’t the only suffering tenant. The hellfire, monsters, and terrifying apparitions bother everyone living in South Ashfield Heights Apartments, yet nobody seems to notice. Or, perhaps, the landlord didn’t care enough to fix the gaping otherworldly hole in Henry’s bathroom wall.
1 Carl
In games that let you become a landlord, there are always ways to be a benevolent landowner. The dystopian bureaucratic sim Beholder refuses you that privilege. You certainly have the option to be a good landlord and person. You’re even given entire questlines to improve your moral standing. However, completing those without losing the game is nigh impossible.
After all, you’re more than a landlord. You’re Carl, a tool of the dystopian surveillance state. You’re rewarded for spying on guests, reporting their mundane crimes, and stealing their few possessions. For these transgressions, you’ll receive wads of otherwise scarce cash to support your family. So, in that sense, you’re an understandably awful landlord — but you’re still awful.
