My buddy Cesar Quintero over at Area 5 once told me a story about how he waited patiently for a wedding to start in Fallout 3 -- just so he could nuke everyone in attendance. He also told me about several other acts of horror that he'd committed in the open-world, do-anything-you-want-including-stuff-you-probably-shouldn't RPG, so that got me thinking:

People sure know how to act like a-holes when given the means.

(Hey, I'm not judging -- I did get the Achievement for planting a live grenade in someone's back pocket in the same game.)

So, for fun and curiosity's sake, we asked some of our game-industry friends what sort of sick, depraved, evil video-game deeds that they try to get away with when no one's looking (and sometimes, even when someone is), starting with the guys who made the wedding-slaughter simulator. And don't forget to share your own terrible tales in the comments below.

Todd Howard - Game Director and Executive Producer, Bethesda Game Studios: In the first X-Com, if your guys get mind-controlled by an alien, they drop their weapons and then start going crazy, often attacking the others.

So I would send my squad out, all with grenades equipped and pins pulled. If they got mind-controlled, they would drop the grenade and blow themselves up. I love the idea of a commander handing out live grenades and saying “keep your wits” with a smirk.

Emil Pagliarulo - Lead Designer, Fallout 3/Bethesda Game Studios: The problem with evil in video games is that it tends to be very heavy-handed. And when it is, it’s uncomfortable and not a lot of fun -- at least for me. As a designer, I absolutely love creating evil gameplay for the player to experience. But as a player, it takes a lot for me to play that way. But make it funny, in a darkly humorous sort of way, and I’m in.

So for me, the ultimate evil moment came when I was playing The Lord of the Rings Online. I decided to try some of the game’s PVP [player vs. player] “Monster Play,” where you create a high-level monster character. Well, one of the first missions I got was to raid this Hobbit village.

Now, up until this point the game had been violent, sure, but I was playing as my human character, fighting Orcs, Goblins, spiders -- stuff like that. But when I created my own Orc and had to raid that Hobbit village? Wow. I mean, I was slaughtering innocent Hobbits left and right. Even long after I had completed my quest, I remember just hanging around, waiting for the cute little roly-polys to respawn, so I could slaughter them again and again and loot their body parts.

Being bad really never felt so good.

Jason Andersen - Director of Public Relations, Entertainment Consumers Association: I was playing Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, and in several of the levels, there are herds of irritatingly slow and lifeless cows that seem to get in my way. So, my personal side-mission in the game was to systematically “remove” all of the cows that crossed me. I’m a huge animal lover, but c’mon...this is the Wild West. Barbecue, anyone?

Hal Halpin - President, Entertainment Consumers Association: Back when Mario Kart 64 first came out, I was running GameWeek magazine. Four-player races quickly consumed the lunch hours of the sales and marketing departments, but none had the affliction more than me -- a dangerous thing for everyone.

Anyhow, we realized that if you got the lightning-bolt weapon and used it while other characters were about to jump the ramp on the Stadium track, they would not clear the gorge below. Instead, they'd fall down "The Hole" and lose a lot of time.

Like my character [Wario], I rarely hesitated in sending other racers off the cliff -- unless we had unofficial teammates or someone didn't use it on me...so I guess it's not completely "evil".

Robert Mull - Community Relations Director, EA Mythic: Back in the early days of Ultima Online, we were attending a large PVP tournament on our shard being hosted by several guilds. Player-run events are pretty common in UO, but this one was bigger and better promoted than most.

There were a considerable number of guards around to keep PKs [player killers] at bay. This was important as the event organizers wanted the contestants to wear their best gear for the tourney and not worry about being looted. Contestants were “searched” by official thieves to ensure they were carrying no illegal items into the arena. All of these precautions had the desired effect and a large group of people, wearing some of their best gear, showed up to cheer on their friends and favorites and enjoy the festivities.

After a couple hours of engaging dueling, the contestants dwindled down to the final two and everyone’s focus was on the arena. All the onlookers had crowded up as close to the arena as possible to get a good view, and it’s easy to picture everyone kicked back in their chairs lazily typing as they enjoyed the show at home.

Nobody really paid attention to the line of approximately eight warriors on horseback standing slightly off from the crowd in a nice row. At least they didn’t until all eight of them opened the gates simultaneously, and the horde of PKs came screaming through.

Everyone was so packed in tightly around the arena and so focused on the tournament that the raiders cut through the crowd like a hot knife through butter. After that it became a chaotic blur as isolated pockets fought back while others ran for safety.

In the end, the raiders had a field day with the gear they looted from the downed contestants and onlookers. The epic nature of the attack, with its carefully planned-out precision, sticks with me today as a truly memorable event…even if I did die.

Jason Wilson - Managing Editor, Bitmob: Baldur's Gate 2 allows you to embrace your dark soul and become the avatar of the god of murder.

Michael Donahoe - Editor, Bitmob: I hate being good in games. I always choose to be an asshole. I did every possible bad action in the original Knights of the Old Republic. I maxed out my Sith rating pretty darn quickly and made an effort to genuinely be an intergalactic dick. Hell, I even killed my own party member because she disagreed with me. Dumb Twi’lek bitch.

Also: In Animal Crossing, I had entirely too much fun hitting folks in the mug with my bug net. I’d also run around Tom Nook’s store for no reason other to make him cart his fat raccoon ass around. I know it’s not possible for him to get tired -- or annoyed -- but in my head, I was totally pissing him off.

Brett Bates - Editor, Bitmob: Whether you judge my actions in open-world games to be good or evil depends on your feelings for frontier justice. I tend to play these games as Dirty Harry would: I don't give a damn what the law says -- if you're guilty in my eyes, you're going to get a bullet in your head. Or maybe one in the leg to start, to get you to talk.

The game that best allowed me to act out my vigilante fantasies was Mass Effect. The details are hazy now, but I remember a particular encounter on one of the desolate planets where the game's side missions lived. There had been a slaughter at a research outpost, and when I caught up with the perpetrator, he gave me some convincing excuses for his motives. My crew talked of letting the courts decide his fate.

But I couldn't wash the blood of the innocent research crew from my mind. So I pulled out my gun, aimed, and shot him dead.

Maybe I was wrong to kill him, but he sure as hell deserved it.

Kris Pigna - Writer, Bitmob: Probably the evilest I've ever gotten in a video game was after being afflicted with vampirism in Oblivion. The quest to cure it is a long, tedious slog, and taking out my anger on tasty humans became all too easy. Hell, I started targeting specific NPCs for bloodsucking just out of spite.

Shopkeeper didn't accept my desired bargaining rate? "F*** you. Vampired." Lady strolling down the street looked at me funny? "F*** you. Vampired." Someone had the gall to ask the great Vampiro, as I began calling myself, to perform a menial quest? "So f***ing vampired." Even if I had to stalk them all night, and sometimes I did, their supple necks would know my fangs. It was like True Blood, except without all the chintzy special effects and cheesy writing.

Lance Darnell - Moderator, Bitmob: In Viva Piñata, I bred, raised, and sold 20 different species -- systematically gorging them, forcing them to copulate, and selling their offspring off for whatever price was offered.

Paul Gale - Moderator, Bitmob: My girlfriend, her family, and I were driving to an engagement party in Anaheim, CA, and several of us had our DSes out. I told them that they could talk via PictoChat to anyone within a several hundred feet radius.

They were all pretty impressed with this feature that Nintendo stuck in the little handheld, so I played a little trick on them. I turned off my system and changed my name from Paul Gale to "Pink Princess." From there, my girlfriend and her sisters started up a chat box with this "girl" that happened to be playing on her DS in a car close by on the freeway.

It was so funny, because I said that I, too, as the little girl, was on my way to Anaheim, and they all bought it! And the things I said about me...well, you could imagine! I felt so bad...so guilty...but it was so worth it. I later told them that it was me, and they felt very embarrassed but got a good laugh out of it in the end.

Raychul Moore - Freelancer, GamePro/co-host, Spooky Hour Horror Hour: The Sims allowed players to let their imaginations run wild and create the most obscene and evil situations, like my child dungeon. I think it was back in the Sims 1 days, I made this big stone building with dozens of small rooms. I filled each room with a security camera and one toy, and then I would throw a party to lure the children over.

The kids would instantly go into a room and play with the toy that I had left there. But when they would try to get up and leave, they would realize that the door they went through was actually one-way, so there was no exiting the small prison. Eventually I had a handful of rooms filled with different crying kids who had no food, beds, or even toilets -- and they slowly turned into ghost children.

I tried something similar in Sims 2, but this time it was a lone female Sim who would throw parties and invite male Sims into what they thought was her bedroom, only to find out it was actually a cell. She then filled the room with more and more men so that she could have a harem. They too had no access to bathrooms, food, or beds -- and slowly, her home became a house of death.

Did I mention that I like rainbows and unicorns and that my favorite color is pink?

Feargus Urquhart - CEO, Obsidian Entertainment: One of the horrible things you could do in Fallout 2 was to find a way to kill President Carlson of the NCR. What you did was watch his son and see that he would walk around and eventually go see his dad along a predictable path.

You could then time that path, and when the kid came out, you could pickpocket him and place a bomb on him with the timer set to the amount of time it would take for him to go back around and see his father. He would then go running along and play the way he normally would, eventually ending up with his father -- then boom, everyone in the vicinity dead.

Chris Avellone - Creative Director, Obsidian Entertainment: My experience is more designing possibilities for evil/good events rather than creating them. I suppose the evilest and most nihilistic moment I ever designed was my tip of the hat to munchkinism -- in Planescape: Torment, allowing the player to bring about the end of the multiverse and every living thing in it in exchange for a better weapon.

That said, slitting the throat of some wounded hometown bullies during a raid in Neverwinter Nights 2 where their deaths wouldn't be noticed in the carnage was another moment of tiny ruthless cruelty.

Crispin Boyer - Freelancer/Former EGM Editor: I want to start with the first game I can remember offering any kind of moral dilemma: the billion-button 1980 coin-op Defender. Being "good" in this granddaddy of shooters meant you had to swoop fast in a fighter and blast invading alien swarms before they snatched "humanoids" from a vectorscaped Earth. These beamed-up bystanders were transmogrified into multicolored mutants that would attack you like riled-up hornets, no doubt seeking revenge for your botched job.

Saving the world was waaaaay too hard in Defender, so it didn't take me long to figure the easy way out: I could soar nap-of-the-earth and blast the humanoids before the aliens had a chance to snatch them. The loss of all human life -- whether by alien abduction or friendly fire -- triggered Armageddon. The vector Earth exploded in a shower of sprites and the mutants came on en masse. But hey, at least now all I had to worry about was No. 1. Who needs humanoids, anyway?

And now let's warp 20 years ahead to the ultimate evil laboratory: The Sims. One of my favorite suburban abominations was a house with a crawlspace running between the exterior and interior walls. In this narrow space I placed a single Sim who went mad with much ado, starving to death and dropping trou to defile his cramped corridors. Meanwhile, the nice Sim family living inside the house blithely went about their daily lives. The scenario looked too funny in fast forward.

In another experiment, I locked two Sims -- a man and a woman -- in neighboring two-story towers with windows facing each other. I imagined the longing of both house-arrested residents as they gazed at each other from their wallpapered prisons...while they starved to death and pooped and peed all over the hardwood floors.

And the day I realized you could delete the ladder from the pool and watch your Sims drown...the coroner reports for most of my Sims listed either "act of god" or "death by misadventure."

Kevin Cassidy - Editor-in-Chief, GoNintendo: Something happened to me from the very first moment that I popped Uncharted: Drake's Fortune into my PS3. I don't know what overtook me, but something was compelling me to be the most ruthless predator that I could be.

For whatever reason, I was unwilling to accept anything but headshots on enemies. I guess part of this goal was simply for personal bragging rights. Could I really get through the entire game (minus boss situations) with headshots? Believe it or not, I actually managed to accomplish that. If I shot an enemy anywhere but the head, I would let myself get killed so I could start over from the last checkpoint.

As I said, this started off as nothing more than a personal goal. The thing is, as I went on, I started to realize just how evil my intentions were. It wasn't bad enough that I was shooting enemies to begin with -- I was only willing to accept one-bullet, instantly lethal shots.

Having completed this goal, I'm left wondering why I turned so sinister for my playthrough! I'm also a tad worried that I'm going to fall into the same, evil trap for the sequel.