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5. Umbrella Corporation, Resident Evil series: Umbrella masquerades as a harmless cosmetics manufacturer while secretly engineering Bio-Organic Weapons and buying off the police department in Raccoon City. Ultimately their little experiement goes awry and they find zombies aren’t as easy to control as one might expect, resulting in the nuking of an American city. No matter how many times their stock crashes, Umbrella always seems to bounce back, making them one of the more dangerous evil corporations.
4. Tyrell Corporation, Blade Runner: These geniuses make it their slogan that they develop humanoid robots “more human than human.” These things are so human that they rebell against being forced into slave labor and come back to Earth as freedom fighters. At least U.S. Robotics learned to crawl before building synthetic humans.
3. Omni Consumer Products (OCP), Robocop series: Watched with the right kind of eyes, Robocop is a textbook of how to build a facist dystopia. OCP manages to infiltrate all of the non-profit sectors of modern life: hospitals, military, and, of course, the police force. What do they do at that point? They make public their plans to privatize Detroit and rename it “Delta City.” Fortunately, they also prove incompetent at designing obediant robots.
2. Weyland-Yutani, Alien series: Not only did they manage to take over all aspects of Earth-based industry, but Weyland Yutani is so ubiquitous that almost everyone refers to it simply as “The Company.” They also created androids which were perfectly obedient, to the point that Ash attempts to kill Ripley in order to bring the first xenomorph back to Earth for research. So much for the first law of robotics.
1. Cyberdyne Systems, Terminator series: It’s one thing to build man-hunting robots, but it’s something else entirely to build sentient man-hunting robots. Cyberdyne tops the list because, unlike all the other entries, they managed to build a corporate monster so powerful that it runs perfectly without “the human element.” Cyberdyne has every reason to want to erase humans. Once you can build mindless drones to do your work for you, even robots don’t need people.