Colonel Starke

In the Free Radical Design developed action/adventure game Second Sight, Colonel Joshua Starke is an American colonel who is put in charge of a squad of U.S. Marines on a covert operation nicknamed 'WinterICE', which is tasked with travelling to the Tyumen Oblast in Siberia, Russia in order to search for the Russian scientist Victor Grienko, who claims to have 'revolutionized' the science of the psyche.
 

Plot

Before the game

According to the in-game PDA, Starke was an accomplished colonel with many successful operations behind him, when he decided to leave the ordinary service in order to lead small specialist operation teams. It is also stated that he 'pioneered the use of parapsychology in counter-terrorist operations', which, perhaps, is a reference to how the psychic Jayne Wilde used her powers to expose a terrorist cell and a briefcase nuke in Southern California. 
 

In the game

In the future, game protagonist John Vattic discovers that Colonel Starke was killed during the mission, either by snipers or by ambush at an oil pipeline close to the WinterICE camp - Vattic is, however, able to travel back in his mind and prevent this from happening, whereupon the colonel is instead dishonorably discharged from the Marines after he "screwed up in Russia", and has taken up residence in his apartment in a slum in Queens, New York.       
 
Vattic visits the colonel at his apartment, but they are ambushed by agents sent by the main antagonist, Hanson. Colonel Starke helps fight off the attackers and gets Vattic to an escape car - the colonel himself, however, is left behind, and his fate is unknown to the player (although all of this will never happen if Vattic succeeds in changing the past sufficiently).          

 

Personality

During the course of the game, Colonel Starke, who was originally a bit annoyed with having to 'nursemaid tourists' like the protagonist Dr. John Vattic, and only took Vattic on the team because of a recommendation by the psychic Jayne Wilde, turns to respect Vattic as the latter shows his proficiency in combat. 
Colonel Starke is mostly only referred to as 'the Colonel' in-game, and is portrayed as an experienced and disciplined soldier, who shouts orders to the whole of the WinterICE team during firefights.
 

Trivia

Colonel Starke was voiced by Tom Clarke-Hill, who has also voiced gritty, battle-hardened soldiers in several other games, including the role as Castor in Spartan: Total Warrior, Sgt. Rico Valasquez in the first Killzone game (that role was transferred to  Charles Everett in Killzone 2) and Sgt. Cortez in the TimeSplitters franchise, which was developed by Free Radical Design (now Crytek UK) - the same company who developed Second Sight.