Phrasemaker

Vault-Tec, Aperture, and the companies we’d probably still work for in real life (even knowing better).

The best fictional companies in video games don’t just fill in backstory. They shape the worlds around them, define the logic of their settings, and become institutions within the fiction — feared, trusted, worshipped, or blamed. Some are tech giants, others arms dealers or soft drink monopolies. Many are the reason things went horribly wrong in the first place. But all of them linger.

This is a look at the in-universe brands that became foundational to their games’ identities — the names behind the tech, the labs behind the portals, the corporations behind the catastrophes.

1. Umbrella Corporation (Resident Evil)

A pharmaceutical and biotechnology empire, Umbrella is the root of nearly every crisis in Resident Evil. Publicly a medical supplier, privately a weapons developer, it is responsible for the creation and release of the T-virus, along with a long list of other bio-organic weapons. Its executives work in shadows, its research labs are buried underground, and its experiments routinely spiral into outbreaks, monsters, and city-wide collapse.

2. Vault-Tec (Fallout)

Vault-Tec constructed the underground vaults meant to preserve American citizens from nuclear war. What wasn’t disclosed: the vaults were designed as social experiments, each one testing a different psychological or sociological condition. Vault-Tec’s presence haunts every Fallout game — through its marketing materials, failed experiments, and the rare survivors who emerge warped by its designs.

3. Aperture Science (Portal)

A once-competitive scientific research company, Aperture evolved into a sealed, spiraling labyrinth of test chambers run by an increasingly unhinged artificial intelligence. Best known for developing the Portal Gun, the company was eventually taken over by its own systems, leaving behind endless facility expansions, rogue AI behavior, and cryptic internal records. Its entire existence is a cautionary tale buried beneath years of abandoned tests.

4. Black Mesa (Half-Life)

A secretive, government-funded research complex in New Mexico, Black Mesa is where the resonance cascade begins — a catastrophic event that opens the portal to the alien world of Xen. Black Mesa’s experiments in teleportation and dimensional travel spiral into interdimensional invasion and the militarization of science. The events that begin at Black Mesa directly reshape the world in the Half-Life series.

5. Shinra Electric Power Company (Final Fantasy VII)

Shinra is an energy conglomerate that harvests the planet’s life force, known as mako, to power cities, weapons, and infrastructure. It maintains a military force, secret police, scientific division, and even space programs — all in the name of corporate expansion. Shinra’s exploitation of planetary energy is what ultimately sets the main story of Final Fantasy VII in motion.

6. Hyperion (Borderlands)

A weapons manufacturer and interplanetary corporation, Hyperion operates with ruthless efficiency and darkly comedic messaging. Known for its high-tech weaponry and aggressive branding, it functions as both arms dealer and authoritarian regime. By the time of Borderlands 2, Hyperion has taken over the planet Pandora, with its CEO positioning himself as both ruler and savior.

7. Nuka-Cola Corporation (Fallout)

Originally a pre-war soft drink company, Nuka-Cola evolved into a multimedia empire that extended into weapons development, theme parks, and propaganda. Its presence in the post-apocalyptic world is nearly inescapable — from faded billboards to mutated mascots. The corporation’s obsessive expansion mirrors the excesses that led to nuclear collapse, frozen in time across the wasteland.

8. Mann Co. (Team Fortress 2)

A weapons manufacturer that supplies both sides of the Team Fortress conflict, Mann Co. is a war economy built on absurdity. The company’s founder, Saxton Hale, is a hyper-aggressive executive who treats global conflict as brand strategy. In-universe, Mann Co. handles everything from weapon delivery to time travel, cloning, and combat hats — often simultaneously.

9. Nook Inc. (Animal Crossing)

A development firm run by Tom Nook, Nook Inc. offers deserted islands to new residents as part of a seemingly utopian relocation package. What follows is an open-ended process of personal debt, land development, and increasingly elaborate municipal upgrades — all gently encouraged by the company’s hands-off yet omnipresent influence. Its tone is friendly; its control total.

10. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza (Five Nights at Freddy’s)

A family entertainment franchise that masks something deeply wrong beneath the surface. From malfunctioning animatronics to unexplained disappearances, every location in the Freddy’s chain seems to house both nostalgia and horror. Across multiple games, timelines, and reboots, the company persists — expanding, rebranding, and reopening — no matter what happens behind the curtains.

These companies weren’t built for realism — they were built for narrative gravity. Each one leaves a trace, a logo, a slogan, or a catastrophic event that shapes the worlds they inhabit. In many cases, they are the world.