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| “ | Mikey's gone... and I'm gonna hunt down every one of those animals. | „ |
| ~ Jake promising to avenge his brother. |
Jake Conway is the main protagonist of the infamous 2013 Deep Silver video game Ride to Hell: Retribution.
He is voiced by Joe Assante.
Biography[]
After returning home from serving four years in the Vietnam War while still suffering from severe PTSD, Jake reunites with his uncle Mack Markham and his little brother Mikey. After getting some rest, Mikey asks Jake to take him into town so they can see a concert but Mack refuses to let him go out after dark since he still sees him as "just a kid" and Mikey rides off with his motorcycle in frustration, forcing Jake to chase after him. Jake eventually catches up with Mikey and the two stop to talk about the argument and get something to eat. While Jake is inside a restaurant, several gang members known as The Devil's Hand approach him after recognizing Mack's jacket on him and chase both Jake and Mikey out of town to a gas station where Mikey is captured. The gang mercilessly beats Mikey until he's forced to reveal that his jacket belonged to his father William "Toledo" Conway, the head of their rival gang, so they proceed to slash Mikey's throat and Jake is shot before being left for dead.
Miraculously, Jake survives his wounds and swears vengeance on Mikey's killers and The Devil's Hand as a whole. He then rides to a Devil's Hand hideout where he kills several men and gets the location of a drug dealer named Carlos for Jake's first target: A large sadist known as Anvil. After finding Carlos near a casino, he tells Jake that he last saw Anvil at a hotel across the street with a prostitute only to spot Anvil driving off and Jake chases after him until he hides inside of a brewery owned by The Devil's Hand. Luckily, a woman working on a nearby truck tells Jake her thieving ex-husband has the keys to the building, so Jake drives to her house where he beats him on her request and then after acquiring a gun in town from a friend of Mack named Tyrell, Jake returns to the brewery. After mowing through several guards Anvil escapes once again, though Mack arrives just in time to help chase down Anvil and shoots him until he crashes, though Anvil only reveals his boss ordered the deaths of both of Toledo's children before Jake slashes his throat while another Devil's Hand member watches from a distance.
After returning home, Mack tells Jake about an illegal fight club ran by the Devil's Hand where the star fighter is a man called Meathook, the man who directly killed Mikey. Mack knows a man called Dr. Blotter who sells drugs made by the Devil's Hand so Jake tracks him down to his home and after making a delivery for him, Blotter initially refuses to tell him any information, so Jake beats and tortures him until Blotter tells Jake his supplier is Colt, the man who interrogated Mikey. Blotter then tells Jake that Colt's girlfriend works as a barmaid in a nearby town, so Jake once again heads off and after beating beating several men who were harassing her, she tells Jake that Colt works on a farm where he makes his drugs. Jake heads to the farm and discovers it's protected by an electrified fence, so Jake murders three truckers to steal their gasoline truck and drives it to the town's power plant where he parks it at the gate, murders some people working there despite no evidence they were members of the Devil's Hand, and then destroys the plant by blowing up the truck.
Jake returns to the drug farm where he sets fire to the lab and then corners Colt at an airplane cemetery, where he shoots Colt in both of his knees and his groin before executing him with his own pistols. At a nearby house, Jake saves an elderly man from Devil's Hand members beating him and after racing him into town, he tells Jake where the fight club is. Jake enters the tournament and after beating every challenger in his way, he finally gets his hands on the man who killed Mikey, Meathook. Unfortunately, before he can reveal who the leader of the Devil's Hand is, Meathook is stabbed in the back by a Devil's Hand member.
At a nearby diner the man who killed Meathook, a neurotic junky called Greasy Steve, meets with the man who watched Jake kill Anvil, a man named Triple 6. Steve reveals to Triple 6 that Jake was the man they tried to kill at the gas station and who has been destroying their gang bit by bit, so Steve is ordered to take care of Jake by luring him into a trap or else Triple 6 will reveal to the boss that he killed Meathook. Steve meets Jake at a gas station where he reveals that he was at the fight club and "helped" Jake in his last fight before driving off, so a woman Steve was supposed to be going on a date with guides Jake to a mansion owned by the Devil's Hand. Eventually, Jake finds several prostitutes who tell Jake that Steve is a meth addict obsessed with racing and he can probably find him there, so Mack calls Jake to tell him he knows a former racer named Barnes who can improve his motorcycle.
Jake heads into town and after killing all of the Devil's Hand members attacking his house, Barnes challenges Jake to a race and after he wins, Barnes upgrades his bike. Jake enters the race and after gunning down all of the racers and forcing Steve to crash where he then reveals they were ordered by a man named Pretty Boy to kill Mikey and that one of Pretty Boy's two right hand men, either Triple 6 or King Dick, most likely know where he is. After getting his information, Jake blows up Greasy Steve with a stick of dynamite. The next morning, Triple 6 ambushes Jake at a gas station, but is saved by Mack just in time. After an intense gunfight, Mack tells Jake that Triple 6's real name is Damien Silver and his family owns a sawmill nearby.
Jake finds a lumberjack who works at the lumbermill and after Jake helps him find and deliver some drugs for him, Jake is ambushed and discovers that the man betrayed him and told Triple 6 everything while he was gone, so Jake attacks him with an axe until he reveals Triple 6 is at a hippy commune called Old Moon Ranch before Jake kills him. Shortly after arriving, Jake spots Triple 6 driving by and chases him back to the saw mill where Jake corners him in an office and it's revealed that the real leader of the Devil's Hand is a man named Caesar. After beating Triple 6 in a fight, he tells Jake that his father used to run the Devil's Hand with Caesar but the two had a falling out and now Caesar want Jake's entire family dead, him included. Triple 6 also tells Jake where he can find Pretty Boy, though Jake kills him anyways by allowing him to get torn to shreds by a tree debarker.
Jake then heads into town where he intimidates a Devil's Hand member into telling him where King Dick is, and he's told he owns a strip club. Jake goes to the club and the bartender directs him to another club where a stripper named Suzi tells Jake that King Dick is on a "royal drug tour", so Jake questions his prostitutes until one of them tells Jake that King Dick is at an abandoned church where he hides his cocaine. Jake tracks him down and after killing his men, Jake tortures him until King Dick reveals that a woman named Brandy knows where Pretty Boy is, and Jake drowns him in a holy water font. Jake returns to Mikey's girlfriend Ellie who tells him Brandy is most likely at a local speedway and after beating her in a race as well as making her rich by winning a second race, Brandy tells Jake to go to a nearby mine and collect a bike that belongs to a man named Orson for her.
Once Jake arrive at the mine, he meets hostile miners who mistake him for one of the Devil's Hand and try to kill him, so Jake is forced to fight his way through them until one of them tells Jake that Orson lives at a house near a graveyard and Jake heads straight there where he finds two Devil's Hand gang members vandalizing Mikey's grave. Jake kills both of them and is ambushed by more gang members but he's able to survive all of them. Jake find's Orson and his girlfriend at his house just before he leaves, though Jake is able to trick her into telling him where Orson's bike is due to her being drunk. Orson calls the police on Jake who kills them on his way to Tyrell who attaches a bomb to the bike in exchange for helping one of his friends who's selling drugs to the Devil's Hand. They suddenly ambush Jake and kill Tyrell's friend, though Jake is able to escape and tells Tyrell the bad news, then gives Brandy the booby-trapped motorcycle.
Mack helps Jake follow Brandy back to Pretty Boy's house where he detonates the bomb outside his house to force Pretty Boy to try and escape, though Jake eventually manages to catch up with him and knocks him unconscious. Jake kidnaps Pretty Boy, taking him back to his garage and tortures him until Pretty Boy reveals Jake's father and mother were killed by Caesar. Jake kills Pretty Boy by sawing off his arm which holds a map of Caesar's location on a tattoo and returns to the graveyard with Mack where he reveals Jake's father once raced a man named John McKenzie where the prize was a girl, Jake's mother. Toledo won the race but he once got drunk and made a bet where he gambled her once he was out of money and lost the second race, but refused to hand her over to him, John became infuriated making him think he was a traitor to the gang. One night while Mack was babysitting Jake and Mikey, John tracked down Toledo and Jake's mother while they were trying to escape, and killed them. Jake and Mack both assume John must actually be Caesar, and they're suddenly ambushed by a Devil's Hand gang member with grenades and Mack is injured.
Jake hurries back home to Ellie so she can tend to Mack's wounds and Tyrell calls over the radio to tell him that the Devil's Hand hijacked one of his shipments, forcing Jake to leave and chase down the army truck where he's once again ambushed. Jake tortures one of the gang members who tells him that the guns were going to Caesar to supply his army and Jake for once decides to let him live. After returning the truck to Tyrell, Ellie calls Jake where she tells him the Devil's Hand are at their house and after racing home, Jake discovers they have killed Mack and kidnapped Ellie on Caesar's orders. A note on Mack's body tells Jake that Caesar is at the Lost Valley Stadium.
After arriving at the unfinished stadium, Jake finds Ellie and Caesar reveals over the intercom system that Ellie is his daughter, though Ellie swears to Jake that she had left her father a long time ago for beating her and her mother, and Jake questions why she didn't tell him where Caesar was from the start. Ellie explains that she wanted to but she didn't know where her father was, but she knew that Jake was the only person capable of doing just that. Caesar tells Jake that when Retribution was just starting, he wanted to expand the gang to sell drugs but Toledo thought differently, not wanting to kill people whenever he wanted like Caesar did. After Toledo lost his second race and scarred Caesar's face, he chased them down and threw the both of them off of a cliff where he watched them both drown.
Several of Caesar's men ambush Jake and after he fights his way through all of them, forcing Caesar to try and escape. Jake takes Ellie on his bike and chases Caesar down until Jake manages to jump onto his bike and gouge out his eyes with his thumbs, forcing him to crash off of a cliff. While Caesar lays underneath his bike being covered in gasoline, Jake tosses his lighter onto him, blowing him up and avenging his family.
Personality[]
Due to his service in the Vietnam War, Jake is a very experienced fighter in both armed and unarmed combat, and can handle himself quite well even when he's severely outnumbered. However, because of the trauma from the events of the war, Jake is extremely brutal and rarely merciful with his enemies.
Despite being the game's main protagonist, he is far less moral when compared to other player characters in other video games. Jake is willing to violently torture members of the Devil Hand in exchange for information and then kill them even after promising to spare them as seen with Pretty Boy, whom he kills with a sander to the face. Nevertheless, Jake appears to have some moral standards as he once spared a Devil's Hand member described as young by the narrative (though this enemy's generic model is used for other enemies).
He's also willing to murder people who merely stand in his way of achieving his goals, especially police officers. The biggest example of his uncaring nature towards bystanders would be the time where he murders truckers, whose affiliation with the Devil's Hand was never fully confirmed, to steal their truck and uses it to blow up a power plant, just to knock out the power of an electric fence he simply could have driven through with the truck without killing people and causing a large power outage that could've hurt the entire nearby town.
Jake is also notably misogynistic, albeit unintentionally, due to the era the game takes place in and how he was raised. In one point, Jake is surprised to see a woman working as a mechanic. Jake also rescues women from sexual assault throughout the game, whom they always reward him with sex, even when Jake said a simple beer would have sufficed for a reward. That said, he appears have a standard against hurting women, as he never harms any women throughout the game. He's also refuses to take advantage of a drunk woman and instead sets her down on the bed when she passes out.
When it comes to his family and friends, Jake is irrefutably loyal, going to great lengths in order to help them even if it puts his own life in danger and helps his gang in any way that he can by doing favors such as assisting with jobs and buying weapons and upgrades for his motorcycle from them.
Appearance[]
Jake Conway is a tall man with a mullet styled haircut, stubble across his entire face, and tattoos going across his arms such as several snakes, eagles, skulls, guns, knives, and the words "Death From Above" on his left shoulder, possibly hinting that he rode in a helicopter as a gunner in Vietnam. Jake wears his signature Retribution biker gang jacket with a dark gray t-shirt underneath, his dog tags as a necklace, a pack of cigarettes under his right sleeve, a brown wristband on his left arm, a brown studded belt with a skull and crossbones buckle wrapped around his worn blue jeans, a radio strapped to his hip, a knife holster wrapped around his right leg, and dirty brown shoes.
Trivia[]
- Despite being the protagonist of the game, Jake is gravely criticized by many gamers, due to his unnecessary murders on people who had no involvement with the Devil's Hand and doing questionable acts, such as having sex with any women he saves right after they nearly get physically or sexually assaulted and his infamous act of destroying an electricity plant and killing many innocent people in the building all just so he can get through an electric fence.
- It is often debated if the truckers during the power outage sequence that Jake kills are affiliated with the Devil's Hand or not. Evidence suggesting they may be affiliates is that they attack Jake on sight and several were seen in the hideout of Colt, trying to assault a prostitute.
- That said, there is little evidence that the power plant guards or the police were affiliated with the Devil's Hand.
- It is often debated if the truckers during the power outage sequence that Jake kills are affiliated with the Devil's Hand or not. Evidence suggesting they may be affiliates is that they attack Jake on sight and several were seen in the hideout of Colt, trying to assault a prostitute.
- Brandy is the only named member of the Devil's Hand who Jake Conway never kills, though it's possible Jake had no need to since she had nothing to do with any of his family member's deaths and she never tried to betray him. Brandy simply disappears from the game after the explosion of the rigged motorcycle.
- A notable scene in the game has Jake attacked by miners who mistake him for a member of the Devil's Hand, though Jake seemingly intended to take them out with his fists, it is fully possible for the player to kill the miners with any gun of their choosing. Even if the player does this, the ending cutscene still shows Jake sparing the final miner.
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 Villains
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Retribution The Devil's Hand | ||