Money makes the world go round, and that’s just as true in video games as it is in real life. A few video game heroes - and a lot of villains - control more wealth than the average person could possibly imagine. At some point, the numbers become meaningless, but that doesn’t stop these characters from bringing even more money into their bank accounts.
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Who are the richest characters in all of video games? Some answers will be obvious, but others might surprise you - both in terms of who’s got money and just how much they have.
10El Presidente (Tropico) - $1 Billion
The dictator of the fictional island nation ofTropico, El Presidente controls all of his country’s state-run industries. From agriculture to tourism, along with a healthy dose of money laundering for foreign companies, El Prez has his fingers in as many pies as possible. While some of those funds go to improving the lives of Tropicans, a healthy amount of Tropico’s profits find their way into El Presidente’s Swiss bank account.
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Fidel Castro, the real-life dictator on whom El Prez is based, was estimated to have a net worth of aroundnine hundred million dollars.Tropico isn’t (usually) embargoed by a global superpower, so it’s safe to say that El Presedente controls more wealth than Castro. He alsoowns the moonby the end of Tropico 6, though he doesn’t yet have any way of leveraging that particular asset.
9Lara Croft (Tomb Raider) - $1.3 Billion
Lara is the heir to the Croft family fortune. While her exact net worth is never mentioned in any of theTomb Raidergames, estimates put her at around$1.3 billion in total assets.She spends most of her cash on adventures to far-flung places across the globe, risking life and limb to find legendary treasures that aren’t believed to exist.
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Considering how many of Lara’s adventures end in property damage and loss of life, it’s safe to say that she probably has trouble finding investors, let alone insurance, for her projects. This means she has to pay for her equipment, transport, and losses out of pocket. That honestly makes her wealth all the more impressive, since it’s able to stand up to such expenditures.
8Bruce Wayne (Batman) - $100 Billion
Bruce Wayne has always been the iconic rich superhero. He’s not an alien, a psychic, a mutant, or anything else that would give him extraordinary powers. He’s just the heir to incredible wealth, which he puts towards training and gadgets for fighting crime.
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A 2020 DC storyline putBatman’s net worth at around $100 billion, mostly tied up in Wayne Enterprises and its assets. Hence, Bruce Wayne’s fortune (or, more accurately, Thomas Wayne’s fortune which Bruce inherited as a child) comes from the manufacturing and energy sectors.
7Andrew Ryan (BioShock) - $200 Billion
Andrew Ryan leveraged nearly all of his wealth to construct Rapture, an undersea city free of inconveniences like laws, regulations, and morals. The amount of money he must have spent to do so is jaw-dropping, but he clearly made a healthy profit, right up until the whole thing went wrong just before the events ofBioShock.
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Ryan must have been one of therichest people on Earthto even dream of such an enormous undertaking. Construction on Rapture began in 1946, when the richest person in the world was Henry Ford. Ford died the following year, and adjusted for inflation his net worth would have been around $200 billion. Andrew Ryan would need to have been a close runner-up, and the profits he made while running Rapture surely put him ahead of Ford in the following decade.
6Mansa Musa (Civilization) - $450 Billion
Mansa Musa, the leader of the Malinese people in theCivilizationseries, is believed to have been thewealthiest person to have ever lived.He controlled immensely profitable gold and salt mines and established trans-Saharan trade routes to connect Mali to the greater world.
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While we can never know for sure just how much wealth Musa controlled, historians believe he would have been worthabout $450 billion in modern money- slightly more than John D. Rockefeller and nearly twice as much as Jeff Bezos.
5Rufus Shinra (Final Fantasy 7) - $500 Billion
The Shinra Electric Power Company is one of the main antagonists inFinal Fantasy 7. This global conglomerate has achieved the corporate dream and supplanted the state entirely in Midgar. That would be bad enough, but its biggest profit driver, Mako Energy Reactors, are actively killing the planet and destroying human souls.
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Naturally, Shinra’s leadership only cares about the bottom line. Rufus Shinra inherits the company early in the story when his father is killed by Sephiroth, and he’s even more ruthless than his predecessor. Since there is mercifully no real-world equivalent to Shinra’s power and wealth, it stands to reason that Rufus would be wealthier than even richest people of the modern era, sitting onhalf a trillion dollarsat minimum.
4Tom Nook (Animal Crossing) - $645 Billion
Tom Nook seems to own everything in theAnimal Crossinguniverse. Retail, real estate, shipping - it’s all part of the raccoon’s global empire. The fact that every game in the series prominently features the player paying off a massive debt to Tom Nook while he cheerily reminds you of how much you still owe makes him one of gaming’s most hated figures.
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Since bells don’t convert easily to dollars, yen, pounds, or any other real-world currency, it takes some extrapolation to figure out just how much wealth Tom Nook controls. Webroke down the numbersback when New Horizons launched, and Nook’s numbers are gut-wrenching; he’d be worth about$645 billionin our world.
3Ted Faro (Horizon: Zero Dawn) - Over $1 Trillion
This entry contains spoilers for Horizon: Zero Dawn.
While Ted Faro never personally appears on-screen in the Horizon games, instead showing up through pre-recorded holograms from the distant past, he’s one of the story’s most important characters. He’s also one of the single worst people in human history. He made his fortune in the mid-21st century, capitalizing on surging markets for robotics and environmental technology. His company, Faro Automated Solutions, made him theworld’s first trillionaire.
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Faro’s ego and narcissism led to the destruction of the world at the hands of uncontrollable combat robots, and he personally eradicated an archive of human knowledge to prevent future generations from learning about his failures. His plan wasn’t discovered until a thousand years later, during the events ofHorizon: Zero DawnandHorizon: Forbidden West.
2Scrooge McDuck (DuckTales) - $1.9 Multiplujillion
Uncle Scrooge is synonymous with cartoonish, outlandish wealth, whether he’s appearing in classic Disney comics and TV shows, the belovedDuckTalesvideo game, orDreamlight Valley. He’s the world’s richest duck and is always seeking more money, even though he has more than even he knows what to do with. Scrooge is so rich he routinely goes swimming in a pile of gold coins that dwarfs the US Federal Reserve.
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An early comic by Carl Barks depicts Scrooge’s accountant listing his net worth as"one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred and twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents.“These are, of course, entirely made-up numbers, but clearly well in excess of any fortune that could ever realistically be amassed on Earth. Of course, there’s a lot more to the universe than our little blue planet, which brings us to the richest character in gaming…
1Frieza (Dragon Ball) - Impossible To Calculate
Frieza is the main villain of the long-runningDragon Ballfranchise. A galactic threat and powerful enough to challenge and defeat the universe’s most powerful martial artists, Frieza is more known for his cold-hearted nature and limitless might than for his wealth. However, he’s got more assets than possibly any other character in any form of media.
The breadth of Frieza’s domain isn’t generally shown in any of the Dragon Ball manga, anime, or games, but he rules overmore than half of the galaxywhen he first encounters Goku and friends on Namek in Dragon Ball Z.Frieza can buy, conquer, or take anything that he could possibly want, and it would seem that the only reason he does so himself is out of equal parts pride and boredom. He even mentions during his first battle with Goku that the only reason he came to Namek in the first place was in search of immortality, the one thing he doesn’t already possess.
