The Most Popular Video Game Characters, According to the Internet

Like movies and TV shows, video games have a vast cultural impact. But unlike those other forms of media, games offer an entirely different, immersive experience that lets players become characters in new worlds—and a new study by gaming website GTA Boom revealed which of those characters have captured the internet’s hearts.

GTA Boom analyzed thousands of Reddit comments from the top gaming subreddits to determine the internet’s favorite characters. To do this, researchers from the site pulled a list of more than 2000 characters from the Fandom Character Profile Wikia. They then collected the top 1000 posts from multiple gaming subreddits using the Reddit API. A total of 421,193 comments from these posts were collected and scraped for all mentions of the 2000 characters from the Fandom Character Profile Wikia list; rankings were then created based on the number of mentions of each figure received.

The top 10 list of favorites is pretty diverse. Of course, Mario takes the No. 1 spot, with 1002 mentions. Nintendo’s iconic Italian plumber has dominated the video game industry since his debut in 1985. Mario is the best-selling video game character in the world, with Super Mario boasting over 650 million copies sold.  

Batman comes in second, with 779 people picking the brooding DC hero. He has appeared in several video titles, including the Batman: Arkham series. It’s also worth mentioning that Absolute Batman #1 became one of the most popular comic books of the year. 

Rounding out the top three most popular video game characters is Kratos from God of War. Users mentioned the Spartan warrior 529 times on Reddit. Kratos’s story started in 2005 and has expanded to 10 titles since, with the main games averaging 9.7 out of 10 stars.   

You can see the rest of the internet’s top 10 favorite video game characters below:

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