Can't say I think much of this list overall, but Lara Croft has been polled as the most 'iconic video game character ever' by BAFTA:
https://www.bafta.org/media-centre/pres ... ll-resultsThis appears to have set a load of people off online (water is wet etc*), which is rather funny because Lara Croft and PlayStation in general was beginning to get on some gamer's tits by 1998 as well. I don't know how the poll was conducted ("...the poll was engaged with by over 4,000 players from all over the world") but the results to me say the age demographic must mostly skew 30-50, started gaming in the 90s, and lean very heavily towards the UK trajectory of the video games market. For whatever reason Mario never fully resonated in the UK until pretty recently (I'm sure the 1993 Super Mario movie didn't help in making the character phenomenally uncool with every single 12 year old on the British Isles; ironically it's thanks to another Mario movie that's now made him cooler than ever before), so despite the Mario games being some of the greatest games of all time, was easily usurped by Sonic in the early '90s, and Lara Croft and Crash "strawberry floating" Bandicoot in the late '90s. And by the early 2000s, Mario had completely hit cultural rock bottom.
The fact Hitman sits so highly surprises me in the sense that Sam Fisher is not also there, because between 2002-2005 it was in that mix alongside Halo and MGS. But like Tomb Raider, Hitman does have a movie. Or two.
That Sackboy is there at all must surely reveal those polled lean heavily towards hardcore PlayStation
users gamers as well. I doubt if you showed 500 random people in the street who he was, you'd be lucky to get 2 people to name him. Same could be said of Shadowheart and Astarion from Baldur’s Gate. That's where the word "iconic" really starts to fall apart in this list.
^ the most iconic video game character of all time.
*insert diatribe here about how technically water is not, despite how the saying goes, wet.