There are plenty of early 2000s games with gay characters in them (often poorly represented, which is a topic for another day) but that reduces sexuality to a black and white representation that simply doesn’t exist. Needless to say, it isn’t a switch that’s either set to “dudes” or “chicks”; it’s a range of desires that shifts and moves from person to person, or even changes within the same person over time.

Today it’s almost a given that in any game with a heavy element of roleplay many of the characters you meet will be bi. This is mostly to ensure the game appeals to as wide an audience as possible, but one could argue it’s also showing how far our society has matured when it comes to sex.

Now that the history lesson is out of the way, let’s take a look at some famous characters in gaming.

15 Assassin’s Creed Syndicate - Jacob Frye

This may still be a debated topic amongst fans, but according to the writer for Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, Jacob is canonically bisexual.

The evidence is there. During the course of the game, Jacob eventually teams up with Maxwell Roth, who over the course of events fall in love with him. Jacob maintains a certain distance throughout, however, at the end of Reclaiming Control of London, Jacob and Maxwell share a kiss as Jacob painfully ends his life.

You may think that kiss was just a sign of Roth’s madness, but the lead writer confirmed it was because he was madly in love with Jacob. He goes on to confirm Jacob’s bi-ness by saying he has to “figure himself out” after the tragic death.

14 Mass Effect 2 - Kelly Chambers

Kelly is the total package - smart, funny, a trained psychologist, and totally swings both ways.

If you’re male Shepard, you can hit that. If you’re female Shepard, you can doubly hit that. All you have to do is put on the charm and she’s all yours. First some playful banter, and then a romantic dinner in the captain’s cabin, and finally a hot night between the sheets. Oh, and she even puts on a little dance number first. 

SPOILER Then later she dissolves into a literal puddle of goo unless you hoof it to the Collector base as soon as possible. Which I didn’t do. Sorry, babe.

13 Borderlands 2 - Axton

Axton likes big guns, hates cats, and will get it on with literally anyone. And believe it or not, his bisexuality was a complete accident.

During the development of Borderlands 2, Axton was supposed to have different voice lines depending on what he did. If he revived a male teammate after being downed, he was supposed to say, “On your feet soldier!,” but instead, he’d say the line for reviving a female compatriot, which was, “Woah – do you, uh, work out?”

The fact that Axton would hit on both male and female players equally made many to speculate he was bi. Eventually, it was confirmed in the DLC Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon’s Keep with the line, “Guns and women. And sometimes dudes.”

12 Saints Row The Third - Caucasian Female Protagonist

If you play Saints Row The Third as a dude, your character is strictly hetero. If you play as the Caucasian female, however, you’re bi.

Why? Well, frankly, it’s because the game is so testosterone-filled that it's almost expected the player is male, and so a woman making a chauvinistic pass at another woman would be considered hot by the audience.

But we can give Saints Row some credit, as it does allow you to play a trans character (and I don’t just mean transvestite). By sliding the character creation options just right you can look however you want, and the game uses the gender-neutral pronoun “they” all the time.

11 Dragon Age: Inquisition - Iron Bull

Bioware famously throws in characters of varying sexuality into their games. One of them just so happens to be a 7-foot giant bull-man.

Ok, he’s not actually a bull, but he is a giant, and he’s very sexual. Pansexual in fact, a subset of bisexual which acknowledges that there is indeed something in between male and female.

Unlike the other characters in the game, you sleep with Iron Bull before you even romance him. After a few veiled hints, he’ll show up in your bedroom and ask if you’d like to “ride the bull.” Saying yes leads to exactly what you think it does, regardless of your gender.

10 GTA 5 - Trevor Philips

Another famous pansexual character is Trevor from Grand Theft Auto 5.

Regardless of your personal tastes, Trevor makes sexual passes at literally everyone in the game, leading everyone to assume he’s bisexual. He could be just a creep, but there are other clues: at one point he implies he’s assaulted Flloyd Hebert (a minor character in the game) as well as his relationship status on the Facebook ripoff LifeInvader stated, 'Any hole's a goal.'

Classy guy.

9 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty - Vamp

I love Vamp. Here’s a dude that shows up, all pale and gothic looking, with a name that is literally the first four letters of the word “vampire,” and you think you already know everything there is to know about him.

Then Snake pops up to burst your bubble. “‘Vamp’ isn't for vampire. It's because he's bisexual,” he says to a Raiden that’s as stunned as you are.

But wait - why does “vamp” mean bisexual? It doesn’t - Kojima, the writer of the series, is actually making a reference to the more European definition of the word, which is a term for a woman that uses her sexuality to get what she wants from men.

He drinks blood and is immortal, but sure, he’s called Vamp ‘cause he sometimes sleeps with dudes. Whatever.

8 Fable 2 - Player Character

Fable was a series of games that was one of the first to give the player the option to do anything they wanted when it came to romance. It meant you could walk up to almost anyone in the game, put on the moves and then wind up with a wife or a husband and a bunch of screaming kids.

Unless you happened to go for someone of the same sex, in which case you didn’t end up with the screaming kids, just the screaming spouse.

You could argue this actually means the player is gay, but you can also go out and seduce someone else of the opposite sex at any point, making the player character bi. So there.

7 The Walking Dead - Javier Garcia

Telltale games specialize in interactive stories that show as much character as possible. Javier Garcia is the protagonist of the current third season of the game, and the best part about him is you wouldn’t know he was bi unless we told you.

For the most part, sexuality doesn’t come up too often in The Walking Dead, what with the zombie apocalypse being the first and last thing on people’s minds. That said, Javier eventually has a brief conversation with another gay character, Jesus, where the two make an extremely brief flirt.

It’s easy to miss, and even easier to ignore, so the writer of the series stepped in on Twitter to confirm that Javi is bi.

6 Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 - Kanji Tatsumi

The Persona series has always been a little weird, but Persona 4 decided to use that weirdness to break down a gender barrier in Japan, and maybe even the world.

When you first meet Kanji, he’s a typically macho high school delinquent who gets his jollies beating up kids after class. But after being kidnapped into the TV World dimension he’s confronted with his shadowself, and it brings into question his entire identity. Eventually, you defeat the boss and escape, but only after discovering that Kanji’s outwardly macho attitude was hiding a part of him he’d rather not show.

What’s amazing about the game is how it portrays the inner struggle that a lot of LGBTQ people go through in an easy-to-understand boss fight. If only coming out really did give you superpowers. Ah well.

5 Fire Emblem Fates - Rhajat

While Persona 4 was a Japanese game from the late 2000s, Fire Emblem Fates is a more recent title that doesn’t struggle with sexuality at all. Instead, it takes the more modern approach in letting you decide what you’d rather be.

There are two options in the game, Rhajat and Niles, who will pair up with whatever gender the player presents them with. Rhajat, in particular, becomes a somewhat obsessive pairing with the player, which has more to do with her personality than anything else.

Nevertheless, if you go the entire game with Rhajat as your lover the game ends on a happy note with their mutual “love and devotion” being told, “in all the countries they visited.” Aww.

4 Skyrim - Everyone

I like to think of Bethesda as a monolithic developer made entirely of bisexual people. Every one of their games allows the player to be or do whoever they want. Skyrim is no exception.

You can be a man, or you can be a woman, and you can decide to lay with any follower you prefer. The only thing you gotta do is go through the motions of courtship. That and ensure your follower doesn’t get eaten by a dragon. That’s a problem in Skyrim that most relationships don’t have to worry about.

3 Fallout 4 - Everyone. Again.

Ok Bethesda, now you may need to put the breaks on the bisexual bus. I’m all for free love, but statistically speaking less than 1% of the population is bi. If you were to go based on Fallout 4, you’d think that number was close to 80%. Literally, every companion that is possible to romance is bisexual, as they’ll happily mount whatever they’re presented with.

Again, I don’t want to curb the representation of bi people in games. I just think we’re giving budding bisexuals a bit of a false impression of the world.

Then again, Fallout is technically an alternate universe, so maybe things are a bit different there.

2 Life Is Strange - Chloe Price

I like Chloe. She’s very open about her sexuality and is probably the most modern portrayal of sexuality in games out there today.

Chloe admits to having a “boy toy phase,” and then just as readily admits that she was saved from a heteronormative life by Rachel, her first true love. After that she seems to lean heavily towards girls in terms of attraction, and yet she still carries condoms in her wallet.

She does a great job of showing that range of attraction that exists in human sexuality while at the same time being unashamed of all of it.

1 Night In The Woods - Mae

Along with Kanji, Mae is a fantastic example of how one can struggle with discovering their own sexuality. But while Kanji dealt with it by putting on a manly persona, Mae is far more laissez-faire when it comes to her preference.

She starts the game with an ex-boyfriend, confirming at least a passing desire for boys, but when asked about her sexuality she replies simply, “I’m not picky.” She also frequently confesses to her compatriots about having crushes on various people of various sexes.

Mae is a cat. She is also bisexual. It just goes to show that range of sexuality exists in all members of the animal kingdom, and not just people.