I’ve put Claude Fido, Tommy Vercetti and Carl Johnson to death many times via ill-timed use of explosives and secondary blasts in the GTA series. Fido and Vercetti have gone swimming many times as well, which they aren’t actually equipped to do.
I think the unluckiest guy in video game history is the hero character in Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. It seems like every bullet fired in WWII has hit the guy, especially if I’m playing.
Surely someone from a “Konami code” game? The guy from Contra or the ship from Life Force.
I’ve also died billions of times as the guy from Metal Slug.
The frog in Zuma. I was obsessed by this game. I bought it and played it every free second of my life until I got to the end. Then I deleted it.
I’m not a game master, so it took me months to finish that last board and go into space (or heaven or whatever that was)-- I’m sure I killed that ball-spitting frog more than I ran Mario into a flaming turnythingamabob.
Mishkin from multiplayer Goldeneye, closely followed by Kirby in Super Smash Brothers.
For single player games, Bond in Goldeneye is probably first, followed by Link(who took the lead thanks to Twilight Princess) with Mario not far behind.
I dunno. Duke Nukem maybe. But an earlier poster said Pac Man and that is a definite maybe.
What is the one - player character for NES’s Contra called? Mad Dog? Anyway, for me, it’s him. With the cheat code I die 33 times each time I play and don’t come close to winning. With the game genie on, I probably waste 100 to 150 lives just to finish the damn game. If anyone ever tells me they can finish that game with just 3 lives, I’ll call them a liar until they can prove otherwise.
When I play Mario, the most I’ll ever die is 5 or 6 times each time I Play. Contra wins by a landslide.
1980-1985 or so: Galaga ship pilot
1985-1995: did not play many games, no system- mostly games of Twisted Metal, the military vehicle
1995-1999: the DOOM space marine
after that,
RPG- Karnak, my wizard/fighter in Neverwinter Nights
(in single-person only, the Nameless One from Planescape: Torment"
FPS- “Major_Disaster”, my Unreal name
MMORPG- E.Normus, my SS/Inv brute from City of Villains
I’ve won badges for dying with E.Normus.
Without a doubt, the members of H.U.N.T. from Rise of the Triad. Played enlessly with coworkers when it was the best TCP/IP game out there.
I’d have to say, the “Unnamed Ostrich Jockey” from Joust, which I still play through MAME constantly.
Best game ever.
The “unnamed space captain” in Elite I practically didn’t have a childhood cos of that game 
Though more lately “generic WW2 grunt” in Day Of Defeat and Call of Duty is probably catching up, if only because the average life expectancy of one of my grunts is about 10s.
I can’t believe I’m the first one to mention this:
King Graham
It’s almost impossible not to constantly die in the earlier King’s Quest games.
I stand corrected he did have a name:
It would have to be the Rambo looking guy in either of the Ikari warriors games. I must have dumped thousands of dollars into those games only to find new ways to walk into the sofball sized bullets
Sgt Schwartz
Jumpman.
(If you don’t know, you probably don’t want to.)
Ooh, here’s another one. Lunar Lander. I must have crashed that thing a hundred times a day when I played it.
It must be Mario. I mean, the hours upon hours upon hours I spent playing the Game&Watch Donkey Kong game must alone give him a pretty big head start.
Apart from him, I suppose the Doom space marine. All those deathmatches with frag counts of 50 or 100 really add up.
I would say Mario but one must take into account the amount of games the guy has over anyone else in the video game universe.
But going from a single game, I’d say I died more with Max Payne then with Mario.
I was a Ranger in EQ1. Dying became a catchphrase.
Princess Rosella, King’s Quest IV.
Ding Chavez.