The Sidekick Hall of Shame (and Fame): Gaming's Most Gloriously Unhinged Companion Characters
Let's be honest. Half the time you're playing a video game, the protagonist is about as interesting as unseasoned boiled chicken. Stoic. Brooding. Obsessed with revenge or destiny or some ancient prophecy that sounds like it was written on a Denny's napkin at 3 a.m. But then — then — some developer's sleep-deprived intern accidentally codes a sidekick into the game, and suddenly you can't stop thinking about them for the next fifteen years.
We here at Mad Beavers have chewed through the gaming archives so you don't have to. What follows is our deeply unscientific, completely passionate ranking of the companion characters who went so far off-script they basically rewrote the whole play.
Claptrap (Borderlands Series) — The Chaos Agent Who Never Asked for This
If you've ever wanted a robot companion who oscillates between existential despair and manic, borderline unhinged cheerfulness every forty-five seconds, Claptrap is your guy. Your weird, wheeled, high-pitched guy.
Claptrap doesn't just steal scenes — he commits grand larceny on the entire narrative and then throws a rave in the getaway car. He's been blown up, abandoned, humiliated, and used as furniture, and somehow every indignity makes him more lovable. His fourth-wall nudges aren't subtle. At one point in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, he essentially acknowledges that the whole thing is a video game and just kind of... keeps moving. Because of course he does.
What makes Claptrap genuinely special is that Gearbox clearly had no idea how much players would latch onto him. He was designed as a tutorial mascot. He became the soul of an entire franchise. That's the kind of accident that makes game development both terrifying and beautiful.
Unhinged Credential: Once threw a party and invited literally no one. Stood alone. Kept the music going anyway.
Wheatley (Portal 2) — A Moron in a Management Rail
Wheatley starts Portal 2 as the bumbling, well-meaning British AI who's just trying his best. He's endearing in that specific way where you want to protect him from himself. And then — spoiler alert that you've had since 2011 to absorb — power corrupts him absolutely, and he becomes one of the most memorable villains in gaming history.
The genius here is that Wheatley's villainy is still stupid. He's drunk on power and still making rookie mistakes. He taunts you with the enthusiasm of a guy who just got promoted to assistant manager and is taking it way too seriously. Stephen Merchant's voice performance turns what could have been a forgettable twist into a genuinely emotional gut punch by the end.
Wheatley proves that a sidekick-turned-antagonist can be funnier and more devastating than any traditionally menacing bad guy. He's incompetent, he's petty, and somehow you still kind of miss him when it's over.
Unhinged Credential: Celebrated his own intelligence by immediately making several catastrophic decisions in rapid succession.
Daxter (Jak and Daxter) — The Ottsel Who Carried a PS2 Era
Daxter is a small furry creature with a big mouth and absolutely zero chill, and for a generation of PlayStation 2 kids, he was the funniest thing in any room he entered. While Jak was busy being broody and complicated — especially in Jak II, where the series took a hard left into dystopian darkness — Daxter was over there cracking wise, hitting on every female character, and somehow keeping the whole vibe from collapsing into full grimdark misery.
The man (ottsel?) got his own spinoff game on the PSP. A spinoff. Because players didn't just like Daxter — they needed more of him. That's the power of a sidekick who operates on pure chaotic energy and somehow never gets annoying.
Unhinged Credential: Spent a significant portion of his screen time trying to impress women while literally being a small weasel-otter hybrid.
HK-47 (Knights of the Old Republic) — The Droid Who Loved Violence Ironically (But Not Really)
HK-47 is a protocol droid built for assassination who refers to every human being he encounters as a "meatbag." He is deeply, philosophically committed to violence in a way that somehow reads as both terrifying and the funniest thing in any Star Wars property ever committed to digital form.
What makes HK-47 transcend the gimmick is the writing. He has genuine opinions. He has aesthetic preferences about how violence should be conducted. He judges you when you make pacifist choices and respects you (slightly) more when you choose chaos. In a game full of weighty moral decisions, HK-47 is the one character who simply does not care about your moral decisions unless they involve him getting to shoot something.
BioWare's writers clearly gave themselves permission to go completely feral with this character, and the result is a companion that people are still quoting twenty-plus years later.
Unhinged Credential: Has a favorite type of assassination and will discuss it at length if you ask. And also if you don't.
Tails (Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and Beyond) — Technically Helpful, Spiritually Chaotic
Okay, hear us out. Tails in the classic 2D Sonic games was theoretically your partner. In practice, he was a golden retriever puppy who kept running into spikes, falling off platforms, and dying in ways that somehow didn't count against your score but absolutely counted against your sanity.
Tails became iconic not because he was competent — he famously was not — but because his presence turned every level into a buddy comedy where only one of the buddies knew what was happening. In later entries, Tails graduated to full-on unhinged technological genius energy, building mechs and saving the world while still somehow conveying the vibes of a kid who just discovered caffeine.
His evolution across decades of Sonic games is basically a masterclass in how a character can be beloved in spite of (or because of) their complete inability to function normally.
Unhinged Credential: Has died by walking directly into a wall thousands of times across millions of playthroughs. Does not learn.
Why We Love the Chaos
Here's the thing about all of these characters: none of them were supposed to be the thing. They were supporting roles, comic relief, tutorial guides, mechanical conveniences. But somewhere in the development process, a writer went a little too hard, a voice actor found the exact right frequency of weird, or a programmer gave an AI too much personality — and lightning struck.
The best sidekicks in gaming aren't the ones who complement the hero. They're the ones who make you question why the hero is even there. They're the ones you'd actually want to hang out with after the credits roll.
And honestly? That's the highest compliment we can give anything around here at Mad Beavers. Being so unapologetically yourself that everyone else in the room just becomes background noise.
Now if you'll excuse us, we have to go replay KOTOR just to hear HK-47 say "meatbag" one more time. For journalism.
