Mega Corp: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
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{{quote|''"Corporation, noun: An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. "''|'''Ambrose Bierce'''}}
Speculative fiction, especially [[Dystopia
Perhaps there is one company that is a [[Privately-Owned Society]] in its own right. This goes beyond the definition of "monopoly."
Rarely are Mega Corporations portrayed with anything other than unremitting negativism; rather than being a simple business making things that people want to buy, they are almost invariably the villains of the setting, and depicted as exploitative, oppressive and [[Screw the Rules, I Have Money|screwing the rules with their money]] while maintaining a [[Peace and Love Incorporated]] facade. They are home to the [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]], [[Bad Boss]], [[Pointy-Haired Boss]], and [[Obstructive Bureaucrat]], and usually have [[Amoral Attorney
Mega Corporations are shown as being private institutions and therefore doesn't have to play by most rules the government has to, such as freedom of speech, because it's always "nobody is forcing you to work for them or buy from them or use their institutions or buy their products." However, more darker versions will also show these guys pretty much buying off or eliminating their competitors, brainwashing the masses, and coming up with [[Evil Plan
They may also [[Screw the Rules, I Make Them|be shown controlling the government either through having employees in important positions or through lobbying]], or taken to its extreme, may have [[Private Military Contractors]] or other [[Hired Guns]] (or even [[One Nation Under Copyright|an entire country or world]]) at their disposal, and become [[NGO Superpower|Superpowers]] in their own right.
A more benign version may be owned by a [[Rich Idiot With No Day Job]]. However, in [[Post Cyber Punk]] stories, some
Monopolies, Duopolies and Oligopolies (market structures which usually are home to several Mega Corp entities) ''do'' exist in real life, and indeed, very large multinational corporations do exist. And yes, ''some'' of these corporations do engage in unethical practices or political influence. Of course, it is an exaggeration (at least) to claim ''all'' [[There Are No Good Executives|corporations act in this way]].
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** The stuff that happened in [[Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory|Operation Stardust]] wasn't actually their fault. And the profiteering mindset came about after [[Zeta Gundam|the Gryps Conflict]] as they actually threw in their lot with AEUG but were contractually bound to supply the Titans despite all the restrictions that were forced onto them.
** It also helped that the Moon, their main base of operation, was kind of a [[Recycled in Space|Space]] [[Switzerland]], and consistently remained neutral in the most conflicts around the Earth Sphere. Though real-life Switzerland rarely sells weapons larger than a handgun to foreign militaries.
** By the events of ''[[Crossbone Gundam]],'' set
** Anaheim does return back to prominence by the time of ''Victory Gundam.'' Especially when it's revealed that ''they're'' the true benefactors behind the League Militaire, reminiscent of the vital support they provided to the AEUG back in ''[[Zeta Gundam]]''.
* Myth Corp in ''Mythic Quest''
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* ''[[Inspector Gadget]]'' has Scolex Industries, which produces technology such as robots and androids (such as the [[Robo Gadget]] line).
* The Trade Federation in the ''[[Star Wars]]'' prequel trilogy is wealthy and influential enough to maintain its own navy (albeit one composed of converted cargo ships) and blockade entire planets at a whim, as well as have its own seat in the Galactic Senate. Yeah, they were rich enough to explicitly buy political power.
** The presence of fellow
*** It was until (explained in the [[Expanded Universe]]) the Galactic Empire outlawed military droids. Though this didn't stop many criminal and quasi-legal organizations from employing large forces of "security guard droids".
** Also from the [[Expanded Universe]], Kuat Drive Yards is the Empire's primary manufacturer of starships. It should be noted that this company is powerful enough to have a security fleet comprised mostly of Star Battlecruisers and Star Dreadnoughts that dwarf the Empire's iconic [[Carrier Battleship|Star Destroyers]], each of which is in turn, powerful enough to literally scare ''an entire star system'' into submission. Talk about overkill.
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* ''Jennifer Government'' has two giant corporate alliances, US Alliance and Team Advantage, that cover the strongest and second strongest corporations of every trade, respectively. Any independent companies have long since gone bankrupt.
* The ''[[Thursday Next]]'' books have the Goliath Corporation, which produces everything "from cradles to coffins." They're also more or less the main villains of the series.
** Well, at least the executives of Goliath are. The [[Mook
* The [[
** And they all have commando-lawyer strike teams. Seriously.
* The concept is a heavily examined theme in Kim Stanley Robinson's ''[[Red Mars Trilogy]]'', where modern multinational corporations successively evolve into 'transnational corporations' (transnats) and then 'metanational corporations' (metanats, richer and powerful than most nations on earth) over the first two books before they effectively collapse in the face of a global catastrophe and worldwide uprisings near the end of the second book.
* Morning Star Cartel (a [[Meaningful Name]]) in ''A Game of Universe'' is a global corporation that became a interplanetary and then an interstellar corporation, thanks to the founder making A [[Deal with the Devil]].
* ''[[Podkayne of Mars]]'' by [[Robert A. Heinlein]]. The Venus Corporation, which controls the entire planet.
** In [[Robert A. Heinlein]]'s ''[[Friday (novel)|Friday]]'', the Shipstone corporation owns, by the protagonist's own accounting, pretty much everything on
** The main plot of ''[[Magic, Inc.]]'' is about the eponymous corporation taking over all magical dealings first in the city, then the state and the entire US. {{spoiler|The heroes find out that it is a ''literal'' evil corporation when they discover that the founder and CEO is a high ranking demon from hell.}}
* Used and subverted with Event Horizon from the "Mindstar" sci-fi detective series by Peter F. Hamilton. Although mega corporations are more powerful than governments, the young and patriotic CEO Julia Evans keeps most of her industry in Britain to provide work and a strong economy, rather than subcontracting out to cheaper Pacific Rim countries. Of course, this also increases Event Horizon's power and influence within Britain. Hamilton's later novel "Fallen Dragon" reverts to the traditional trope with Earth dominated by five mega-corporations which wield almost unlimited power and increase their profits by using their [[Private Military Contractors|private army and spacefleet]] to [[Space Pirate|asset-strip the offworld colonies they helped establish]].
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* INITEC (Interstellar Nanoatomic Independent Terran Empire Corporation) in the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' [[Virgin New Adventures]] novel ''Original Sin''. Its specialty is robotics, but it also produces weaponry (including the [[Weaksauce Weakness|glitterguns]] that [[Doctor Who/Recap/S12/E05 Revenge of the Cybermen|saw off the Cybermen]]) and spaceships. Oh, and it's run by {{spoiler|a robot [[Virtual Ghost|with the mind of]] [[Doctor Who/Recap/S6/E03 The Invasion|Tobias Vaughn]]}}. Small surprise, considering the real significance of the corporation's name. {{spoiler|Interstellar Nanoatomic is a [[Significant Anagram]] for International Electromatics.}}
* ''[[Crysis (series)|Crysis]]: Legion'' claims that Hargreave-Rasch is so big and powerful that even real-world giants like [[wikipedia:Monsanto|Monsanto]] and [[wikipedia:Halliburton|Halliburton]] are small fry compared to it.
** Uniquely enough (especially for a [[Peter Watts]] novel) is the fact that the entire corporation and its subsidiaries are secretly dedicated to one man's shadowed, {{spoiler|century-long struggle to prepare humanity against an imminent conflict with [[Sufficiently Advanced Alien
* In Andrey Livadny's ''[[The History of the Galaxy]]'', the Galactic Cybersystems Corpotation used to be the primary provider of all cybernetics (from household robots to infantry droids and [[Humongous Mecha]]) for most of the known worlds. However, they reached their limit, and the heads of the corporation were afraid of a crackdown if they attempt to step beyond the legal and ethical norms imposed by [[The Federation]]. They decide to lay low for awhile, letting their competition make these steps and then come back when the laws and ethical norms have changed. It didn't quite work out this way, and Galactic Cybersystems disappeared virtually overnight due to over-consolidation (all R&D and production was done on a single planet known only to a few). The corporation was powerful enough to have its own [[Humongous Mecha]] and a private fleet. Later novels have many smaller corporations that qualify as
* In ''[[The Unidentified]]'' by Rae Mariz, these corporations run schools. After the government ran out of money for schools, corporations bought old malls and turned them into schools, calling them "the Game". The schools are basically places for the teens to be marketed to and for them to test products.
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* ''[[Max Headroom]]'' placed the television networks, and Zik Zak, into this role.
* Massive Dynamic on the show ''[[Fringe]]''. When your slogan is "What do we do? What ''don't'' we do?" that should be a major hint to anyone
** In an unusual subversion, they're not particularly evil or corrupt, just ocasionally secretive. They usually cooperate with the FBI investigations and offer valuable resources for most cases, and their head, Nina Sharp, is a classic case of a [[Red Herring]] (in that she's ''never'' guilty of anything, and is usually just trying to help). There is, however, to consider the ''alarmingly'' high number of evil bioweapons, immoral experiments and [[Mad Scientist
* Vexcor in ''[[Charlie Jade]]'' is the largest and most prominent of the five Mega Corps that run the [[Dystopia
* Veridian Dynamics of ''[[Better Off Ted]]'' is at least almost there.
{{quote|''"And we never part with money unless a more powerful nation forces us to, and there are only three of those left."''}}
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* In ''[http://misspentyouthgame.com/ Misspent Youth]'' by Robert Bohl, you play bomb-throwing teenage anarchists in a Dystopia with an Authority that is out to personally destroy them. Groups who choose to play with a Corporate Authority frequently create evil megacorps.
* Hudson-Cosmos, Stahl, Phi, Trilex Pharmaceuticals and... too many others to name, in [[Cosmopol]]. Most people are not aware that Hudson-Cosmos and Stahl actually outright own ''almost all of the other companies'' and the ''entire cities'' that they are based in.
* Pentex, in the ''[[Old World of Darkness]]''. They're a front for the [[Eldritch Abomination|embodiment of entropy]] and its efforts to poison the entire universe. They have hands in everything from fast food to toys to pharmaceuticals to energy to
** The ''[[New World of Darkness]]'' has the Cheiron Group from ''[[Hunter: The Vigil]]'', a gigantic multinational organization that controls a dozen front businesses. One of those departments [[Theyd Cut You Up|hunts, captures and studies supernatural creatures]], both to find new product possibilities and to utilize their powers (by harvesting bits of them) for the company's own use. Their employees are given a handbook containing near-useless information as their only guide to what they're dealing with, so turnover is insane (giving the player characters a job opening).
* ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'' has several interesting examples. Economic cartels like the [[De Vayne]] incorporation are more powerful that most governments on provincial worlds, they have private armies and small fleets to their name, more than enough to conquer a backwater world. However, all that power to nothing compared to that of the feudal orders of the Imperium.
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* The Alternity game's ''[[Star*Drive]]'' setting. The following Stellar Nations, which controlled large regions of space, all fall under this category: Austrin-Ontis Unlimited, Insight, the Rigunmor Star Consortium, the Starmech Collective, and Voidcorp.
** Although not all to the same degree- Austrin-Ontis have gone so far into [[One Nation Under Copyright]] that they are more nation than copyright these days, whereas Voidcorp is all about Profit.
* In ''[[SLA Industries]]'', the eponymous Mega Corp effectively constitutes a state; its numerous subsidiaries (some big enough to be
* The Crysalis Corporation from ''[[Cthulhu Tech]]'', a game best described as an unholy lovechild of the [[H.P. Lovecraft|Cthulhu Mythos]] and [[Neon Genesis Evangelion]]. The corporation produces everything from household supplies to military hardware. In addition it secretly strives to dominate the world, supplying various cults and terrorist organisations and creating mutated creatures to fight for it. Furthermore, its CEO is actually an avatar of the god Nyarlatothep disguised as a mortal man. Talk about a [[Corrupt Corporate Executive]]!
* [[Tabletop Game]]/The [[Dungeons and Dragons]] setting of ''[[Eberron]]'' has the 13 Dragonmarked Houses, [[Dungeon Punk]] equivalent to Mega Corps, each with their own specializations (Entertainment & Espionage, Banking, Consummer Goods, Private Security, Animal Breeding, Notary, Prospecting, Magical Detections, Overland Travel & Teleportation, Overseas & Air Travel, Hostelling, Healing). Each house descends from a bloodline blessed with a dragonmark, a unique set of birthmarks that grant them powers and skill bonuses relating to a particular theme. Each family used their advantage to corner the market on a particular good or service, as no non-dragonmarked could really match them.
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== Videogames ==
* Where do we start with [[Borderlands]]? Let's see now, the one that's probably coming to your mind now is Atlas. They make powerful firearms, maintain a private army outfitted with said guns and other Atlas Artillery, and control most of Pandora, notably T-Bone Junction.
* The Caldari State from the ''[[EVE Online]]'' universe. The entire faction is composed of a handful mega corporations. All aspects of society are run by the corporation. Citizens are born into a corporation and effectively work there for life. Getting fired is not much different that getting shunned from society.
** All the other space-based corps are also mega corps of varying shadiness from "very" to "not much" and wield significant pull; a group of Gallente megas recently stood up against an attempted government takeover and succeeded.
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** Also in the same 'verse; hardly anybody important in the Half-Life universe apart from Chell ''not'' [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/10-The-Orange-Box worked for Black Mesa at some point?]
** One of the slides from a projector in a meeting room shows that Black Mesa clearly controls the market that they are competing for. It insinuated that Aperture Science has high goals but never actually delivers.
* The World Economic Consortium, bad guys in the ''[[Crusader: No Remorse|Crusader]]'' series, are ''the'' Mega
* EuroCorp of ''[[Syndicate]]'', one of a number of global mega-corporations powerful enough to control whole areas of the globe and maintain covert(ish) cyborg agents with no fear of law enforcement. EuroCorp are a minor player in this field at the start of the first game, but by the end [[Take Over the World|they own the entire world]], and in ''Syndicate Wars'' they've been ruling the world for some time.
* The Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC) from the ''[[Doom]]'' series, whose experiments in teleportation technology were responsible for [[The Legions of Hell|all Hell literally breaking loose.]]
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* The various goblin cartels in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' are [[Dungeon Punk]] versions of the Mega Corp, offering all variety of arms, [[Applied Phlebotinum]], and services equally to all comers.
** The Steamwheedle cartel is the largest of the goblin cartels, and has a huge monopoly on goblin business.
*** Despite being the largest, they're actually a little more...benevolent than most Mega Corps often are; as they're often giving the players jobs and money. The only way they would be out to kill the player character is if they decide to join the Bloodsail Bucaneers or [[PvP]] inside the neutral zones. (Course, most of the people who did this were [[Griefer
** And then there's Venture Co, who are a much less morally ambiguous version of this trope. They're strip mining the mountains, polluting a few of the only oases in the Barrens, and, if you do the rogue quests, are developing a necromantic plague that will ensure its workers are efficient and compliant by turning them into zombies.
** The Cataclysm expansion introduces the neutral-turned-Horde aligned Bilgewater cartel (well, it was [[Its All There in the Manual|mentioned]] in one small blurb in an RPG book before), who are another rival corporation to the Steamwheedle cartel (even in foot<s>ball</s>bomb). They controlled the entirety (as far as what you can visit) of the goblins' home island of Kezan, which was covered in massive factories. After losing two zones to volcanoes, they industrialize and/or strip mine most of Azshara, and many other smaller locations (for the Horde, of course).
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* SynTek is also the name of the villainous Mega Corp in ''SiN'' and ''SiN Episodes: Emergence.''
* ''[[Deus Ex]]'' has Page Industries, a true Mega Corp with major roles in (at least) network communications, space mining, and heavy manufacturing; and its subsidiary Versalife, a massive pharmaceutical company with political power because it's patented the cure to [[The Plague]] {{spoiler|which it also produces}}. These accumulated their power, technology, and R&D expertise as {{spoiler|arms of [[The Illuminati]] before their owner, Bob Page, splintered off to pursue his own ends.}}
** Sarif Industries in ''[[Deus Ex: Human Revolution|Deus Ex Human Revolution]]'' is close but not quite a
*** [[Game Mod|Mods]] for ''DX'' ''[[The Nameless Mod]]'' and ''[[2027]]'' feature WorldCorp and Human Horizon. In ''TNM'' you can either join or fight WorldCorp. Human Horizon in ''2027'' is hunting you down for a better part of the game.
* [[Assassin's Creed]] gives us Abstergo, a pharmaceutical company on the surface which functions as the modern day front for an [[Ancient Conspiracy]]. Lucy Stillman mentions that her inability to be taken seriously after she finished college - and thus her inability to find a job until she was approached by Abstergo - was likely a series of failures specifically designed ''by'' them so she would have nowhere else to go for employment. She further assures Desmond that while this may sound ridiculous, they ''can'' do it. They also trace Desmond via his motorcycle's registry, apparently without going through the police.
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* ''[[Xenosaga]]'', and by extension, ''[[Xenogears]]'' has Vector Industries (simply called "The Company" in the ''[[Xenogears]]'' ''[[Word of God|Perfect Works]]'' book). Vector makes everything from starships to cellphones, has a branch on every inhabited planet in the galaxy, holds conciderable sway over both the local and federal governments of the [[The Federation|Galaxy Federation]], and has been around for (at least) 7000 years. They have a rival corporation called Hymas, but {{spoiler|Vector actually owns them too!}}
* ''[[BioShock (series)]]'' has Ryan Industries, Fontain Futuristics and Sinclair Solutions.
* ''[[Nexus the Jupiter Incident]]'' has a number of
* Facebook's ''Wasteland Empires'' has Omega Corp. They were involved in pretty much everything before the [[Depopulation Bomb]] and released a virus that turned some of the population into slime coated mutants-in fact, they likely caused the destruction of the world in general.
* [[The Elder Scrolls]] 3: Morrowind has House Hlaalu, a high fantasy megacorporation that belongs to the Dunmer royal house. The other Houses are less mercantile and don't resemble corporations, they are respectively a warrior aristocracy (Redoran), a feudal magocracy (Telvanni), a church (Indoril) and plantation slave owners (Dres).
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{{quote|''' What does MegaHugeConglomaCo do, exactly?'''
They merge with, take over, or establish corporate relationships with other huge companies with similarly vague names. }}
* The closest ''[[Freefall]]'' has is Ecosystems Unlimited. They control most of the colonized planet, own most of the robots, and even one of the main characters' ''species'' (and they owned her too until they sold her). This may be due to the planet not being totally [[
* The Maytec Consortium of ''[[SSDD]]'' essentially owns [[Divided States of America|California]], has a standing army, and claimed all of Mars (until the Anarchists went there and found better mineral deposits). They're essentially the third greatest superpower in the solar system, due partially to their selling weapons to both sides of the CORE/Anarchist cold war.
* Creed Corporation in ''[[Friendly Hostility]]'' and it's spin-off/sequel/thing ''[[Other Peoples Business]]''
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* Inco, subsidiary of the Brazilian mining company Vale, can sometimes look like an evil Mega Corporation right out of a Cyberpunk story. Richer than whole countries, it buys and takes lands away from their people to mine metals (mostly nickel), bribing politicians to pay the least possible amount in taxes and fees. Once on their land, the union and employment laws of the country do not even apply anymore, and things have sometimes gone so far that the company was removed from the [[FTSE 4 GOOD]] index for failing to meet their human rights criteria. It also created a lot of problem for the environment, for example their plan to let go of their acidic waste directly in the Unesco classed lagoon in new caledonia (a "coincidence" when the Unesco decided to enter the coral barrer reef on the World Heritage List means that the part where their waste pipeline leads is one of the few not under the protection of the List).
* [[The New Russia|Russian]] company Transmashholding doesn't make ''everything'' but it does own all the locomotive, wagon, and other railway-related manufacturers, so it's only competing with itself. It acts like a cross between a close subsidiary and business partner of Russian Railways, itself technically a large corporation, albeit one owned by the government and whose president is a political appointee.
** [[The New Russia]] is, in fact, chock full of Evil Mega Corps; during the 90's, they were bigger than the government. The most notorious is certainly Gazprom, which produces natural gas used to heat most of Europe; other ones include LukOil (oil), RusAl (aluminium), MTS, BeeLine and MegaPhone (cell phones; MTS is in fact a subsidiary of the much larger but lesser known AFK Sistema, a
* For decades, corporations that owned coal mines in the U.S. Appalachian Mountains could get away with pretty much anything, and this led to a cautionary tale of what exactly this kind of behavior tends to result in. When the miners formed a union, the union leader was gunned down by 17 hired goons, and when a sympathetic sheriff investigated they had ''him'' killed as well and promptly tried to crush the union with yet more copious brutality, which resulted in the union militarizing and [[Bomb-Throwing Anarchists|radicalizing]] to the point where, when the actual law enforcement (who, granted, likely had had bribes from the companies) were called in to deal with "scabs" being sniped at, they were attacked by several thousand armed and angry miners talking about forming a [[Does This Remind You of Anything?|"workers' state" and of exterminating their oppressors and anybody remotely connected to them.]]
This led to the [[wikipedia:Battle of Blair Mountain|Battle of Blair Mountain]], between 13,000 miners and a 2,000-man, hodge-podge army consisting of [[Pinkerton Detective|Baldwin & Felts agents,]] probably corrupt cops, ROTC graduates who had been rapidly shipped to the scene by a rightfully alarmed Federal government, and miscellaneous [[World War I]] veteran volunteers, who eventually managed to defeat the miners. Nearly 1,000 miners were charged with treason and would likely have resulted in the largest mass execution in U.S. judicial history if not for the fact that the rampant corruption of the corporations came to light as being responsible for everything in the first place, leading to a public outcry that prevented it from being carried out. Unfortunately, it took until [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s election for most of those on trial to be pardoned and the beginning of modern labor laws.
* Comcast. They even have localized Monopolies in some areas of the world. As a result of a localized monopoly, they can allow their customer service to slack because what choice do people have during monopolies? There are many places in America where you have to buy Comcast and deal with any data caps or restrictions they provide, or else you do not get internet. At ''all''. This is especially prevalent in their tech support, which is handled by another outsourcing company where the average employee retention span of ''a month''.
** Not to mention, Comcast and other ISPs made it illegal for small towns to run their own
** They have only gotten bigger, too; they are now the majority partner in [[NBC]] [[Universal]].
** A lot of ISP companies in general. The only reason they even ''have'' customers was the aforementioned lobbying and making sure they are the only options available instead of just ''providing better service''.
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