Hey duders,

I was thinking this earlier today: Why do we call significant enemies "Bosses"? Like what's the etymology on calling a harder enemy a "boss". Isn't your boss the person you work for?

I think the more pertinent question is: why aren't mini-bosses called "assistant managers"?

Boss (video games) - Wikipedia

There is no direct source for the first instance of the term being used here, but supposed it comes from Crime Boss being a term for the leader of criminal gang.

I would suspect it has to do with the 'boss' being the leader of the other enemies so it's a fairly straightforward correlation as they are the person the other enemies work for. They aren't the protagonist's boss, they're the enemy boss.

This is the one. Cheers!

Wikipedia also mentions a game simply called “DND” that came out in 1975. It was, pretty much, a dungeon crawler RPG featuring what we would now call bosses.

Why do we call them “bosses”? I kinda like the above interpretation that they’re the leader of whatever group of bad guys you’ve been fighting and it just spiraled out into a name for a fight against a particularly tough enemy.

@nodima: Assistant (to the) Manager

I can see a whole new tree of terms for different kinds of enemies. "Oh no, this one's a real Compliance Officer!", "Don't worry about this one, he's just the Committee Chair. Acts mean but no real power."

To me, the boss in video games means the main target for each specific level or tier.

Is The Big Boss the Bruce Lee film where he climbs a big tower to get to the boss at the end? I'd like to think it's from that.

I remember when i was a kid, in the mid 80's, me and my friend would call the bosses "dragons". Not sure where we got that from. Might have been from Super Mario Bros, because the bowser boss looked like dragons to us.

My friend and I used to call them "Level Guys".

@shindig: Sadly, that was Game of Death

They were the folks willing to rat out co-workers, take overtime without pay and brown nose the final boss in order to get a 5% pay bump and be in a position of power over their contemporaries (which was what their desperate internal insecurities really wanted instead of just talking out how they feel with a professional due to pride.) They constantly hold above the regular minions in a display of the classic Kafkaesque template of 'Petty Tyrant.' So long as they control others, they fool themselves into thinking they control their own lives. This is why we need a video game enemies union to protect the evil little guys from the harmful inclinations of those that don't have the ethics of evil communities at heart.