The Top 10 Body Hacks in Video Games

​Body-hacking is one of the most popular tropes in gaming, and pops up across genres from cartoony kids games to horror thrillers. After all, when you are vicariously experiencing a world through a virtual avatar, it's natural to want to pimp out your ride a little.

To that end, game developers have come up with all kinds of weird and wonderful ways to augment the bodies of their characters. We have painstakingly rounded up our favorite ten examples of video game body hacks below, bookended by 8-bit classics. Enjoy, and be sure to rant about what we left off.

10. The Mushroom

The Mushroom is the mother of all video game body hacks, first making its appearance a full 30 years ago in Super Mario Bros. In a pixelated riff on Alice in Wonderland, the Mushroom causes instant gigantism, paired with a handy defense boost.

This magical fungi has evolved and diversified along with the games, and different subspecies have sprouted up all over the Mushroom Kingdom. There are now Propellor Mushrooms, Boo Mushrooms, Bee Mushrooms, and my personal favorite, the opponent-obliterating Mega-Mushroom. Indeed, the Mushroom has even manifested itself in the cranial structure of the disconcertingly subservient Toad species, for presumably unsavory reasons.

Super Mario Bros one playthrough. Credit: PlayingWithMahWii/YouTube.

9. Evolutionary Stones

The creators of the Pokémon franchise are clearly supporters of the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution, which proposes that species can evolve very rapidly over short periods of time. All a Pokémon has to do in order to experience one of these adaptive bursts is find the right evolutionary stone. Needless to say, this method is a lot easier than waiting for natural selection to work out the kinks, and requires a lot less death to boot.

A grand unified theory of evolutionary stones. Credit: ProtoMario/YouTube.

8. Shapeshifting

Alex J. Mercer, the protagonist of the first Prototype game, is essentially just one giant body hack wrapped up in a human. For reasons unknown to him, Alex wakes up in the middle of a virulent pandemic with the ability to shapeshift into other people, and most importantly, to transform his body parts into blades, clubs, tendrils, claws—pretty much everything you'd need in an apocalyptic urban nightmare.

Prototype trailer. Credit: Machinima/YouTube.

7. Shadow Projection

Why hack the body when you can ditch it entirely? In Prince of Persia 2: The Shadow and the Flame, the Prince eventually learns to send his shadow out on missions for him, which results in him earning the worship of some weird bird-headed warrior monks along with some kind of crazy electric flame power. This body-enhancement sequence goes down at the end of the below video, and it is worth watching for the apex musical stylings alone.

Prince of Persia 2 playthrough. Credit: ponnupazoozu/YouTube.

6. Vampirism

Contracting a fantastical disease isn't the most enticing method of body hacking, but in The Elder Scrolls, it can be a shortcut to snagging some sweet new powers, like resistance to disease, poison, and frost. But before you go fang-banging your way into an augmented body, it's worth knowing that there are some downsides associated with vampirism too. You know, small things, like extreme sensitivity to sunlight and looking like a crazy demon monster. The Nine Divines giveth, and the Nine Divines taketh away.

Skyrim vampire rundown. Credit: SkyrimAdventure4Crom/YouTube.

5. Icarus Wings

Everyone knows the upshot of the Icarus myth: don't get cocky or your wings will melt. But the God of War games provide an interesting coda to this famous story, in which Kratos finds an aged Icarus and rips the wings right off his back. The acquisition of Icarus's wings in the game allows Kratos to glide over to whatever horrifying monster he feels like stomping next, while validating the millennia-old compulsion to kick Icarus's ass.

Icarus wing sequence in God of War 2. Credit: TheBalloMan/YouTube.

4. Murder of Crows

It's one thing to use wings to fly like a bird, Icarus-style. It's another to have birds fly out of you. This is improbably what happens early on in Bioshock Infinite, when Booker downs a Vigor that somehow makes his body capable of ejecting alarming numbers of flesh-eating crows. In a franchise packed with many visceral body hacks, Murder of Crows stands out as one of the most grotesquely satisfying—and that is really saying something.

Murder of Crows in action. Credit: Kenechukwu Adigwe/YouTube.

3. He's On Fire

The world of NBA Jam is a magical place. When a player nails three baskets in a row, he is, quite literally, on fire. Nobody knows the scientific mechanisms behind this relationship between baskets and incineratory powers, but regardless of its origins, this body hack has definitely earned its high place on this list.

The glory of being on fire. Credit: oimeunomeefm/YouTube.

2. Nanotech Augmentation

Body hacks in most games are doled out as rewards to strengthen your character, but in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, they are essential for the character's very survival. Indeed, the use of nanotechnological body augmentation is pretty much the major theme of the Deux Ex franchise as a whole, complete with slick robotic arms, weird eyeball add-ons, and invisibility cloaks.

Deux Ex: Human Revolution. Credit: IGN/YouTube.

1. Giant Monster Mutants

It is difficult to believe that a game as simple as Rampage could deliver such a satisfying buzz, but against the odds, this 1986 arcade game still reigns resplendent almost 30 years after it was first released.

You can play as the game of three human characters—Lizzie, George, and Ralph—who have been genetically experimented on by a company literally called Scumlabs. Lizzie is transformed into a giant lizard, George becomes a King-Kong-style ape, and Ralph mutates into a massive wolfman.

The trio then descend upon random towns like Peoria and Kalamazoo to destroy buildings, eat people, resist the attacks of the military, and generally just smash stuff up. Rampage, after all, is the name of the game.

Rampage gameplay. Credit: AcidGlow/YouTube.

But the best part is that when your character runs out of juice, he or she will revert back to a puny naked human, and attempt to bashfully sidestep out of the frame as if they weren't just a giant monster wreaking havoc on an entire city. It's a surprisingly poignant endgame, especially if the transformed human is gobbled up by a still-rampaging compatriot on the way out. Oh, how fast the mighty can fall.

So, for both its transhumanist leanings and its id-based gameplay, Rampage snaps first place on our list of video game body hacks. Vampiric spells and magic mushrooms are great and all, but nothing beats a good old fashioned mutated monster beast intent on destroying the world brick by brick.

Goodbye, Meatbags is a series on Motherboard about the waning relevance of the human physical form. Follow along here.