Kingpin: Life of Crime

Kingpin: Life of Crime is a First-Person Shooter released in June 1999. You play as a thug who refused to pay Nikki Blanco. For that, he gets beaten up, dropped off at Skidrow and is told to never show up in Nikki's territory again. Cue the Roaring Rampage of Revenge.

The game takes on a Retro Universe setting, where Art Deco aesthetics are juxtaposed with futuristic technology and ideas, leading Xatrix to bill the game as set in "a past that never happened".


 * Big Bad: Kingpin.
 * City Noir: The urban locations in Kingpin Life of Crime. Features everything between desolate ghettos and classy, but equally vile Radio City with it's Art Nouveau architecture (bearing a suspicious resemblance to some places in Payback). Also notable for a weird mix of modern as well as 20's, 30's and steampunk-scifi styles (Cypress Hill music, Tommy guns, and thugs with cybernetic facial modifications all in the same setting!).
 * Cluster F-Bomb: The game is loaded with it!
 * The Dragon: Nikki Blanco.
 * Dystopia: Skidrow, at least. The rest of the city may or may not qualify for this trope.
 * Fan Nickname: At least one YouTube comment refers to the player character as "Thug". Hey, it's a Meaningful Name!
 * Final Boss: Kingpin and Blunt. However, you can only kill the Kingpin.
 * Immune to Bullets: Blunt. There is no reason for her to be, other than to escape alive and leave a Sequel Hook for the game.
 * Kick the Dog: Thug didn't have to shoot that truck driver with a shotgun, but the driver had the nerve to ask for money Thug had said he would pay!
 * Pipe Pain: The first melee weapon in this game.
 * Revenge: The plot of the game is this.
 * Scary Black Man: The Kingpin.
 * Scrappy Weapon: The grenade launcher from this game. Most grenade launchers in video games either fire grenades that explode on contact with enemies, hold more than three rounds in a magazine, let you carry more than 18 rounds total (especially if the game's bazooka has a clip of five shots and an ammo cap of one hundred rockets), take less than four seconds to explode, exist in games where enemies aren't smart enough to run like hell before the 'nade goes off or some combination of the above. Kingpin's grenade launcher is not any of these things. It's so bad that not even the AI can figure out how to kill you with it.
 * Shout-Out: To Pulp Fiction. The game contains several lines from that movie.
 * And at least one player skin that is a shout-out to The City of Lost Children, whose visual style Kingpin borrows from.
 * Poisonville is a refernce to Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest.
 * Video Game Caring Potential: You can choose to play nice, which will allow you to recruit goons to help you out, go on Fetch Quests and things like that.
 * Video Game Cruelty Potential: You can choose to play mean, which will result in violence, and prices being driven up.
 * Villain Protagonist: To be honest, the player character is this. He was a small-time thug who got beaten up for refusing to pay "protection" money. He starts off trying to get Nikki Blanco, and then escalates to taking on the Kingpin himself.