I’d say Zero, from the Mega Man X series, because I can’t stand playing as X even if he has better ranged attacks.
Stupid auto-scrolling racer levels… :mad:
Oh my god! I just realized I have deceived you all in my initial response.
The character I have without a doubt died most as is… The Lemming. 
Lara Croft
Pitfall Harry
Sonya Blade
Pac-Man
The spaceship in Galaxian
The spaceship in Defender
The triangle thing in Tempest
The guy from Dig Dug
But Lara Croft must be number one. I was obsessed with the games for years.
Probably Ms Pacman. I was obsessed with that game for a long time.
Someone recently mentioned the game ‘n’ in another thread, and I’ve been addicted to it ever since. In the week or so I’ve been playing, I may well have moved that little ‘ninja’ into contention for first.
Yes, I was coming in here to say Spyro, it’s heartbreaking watching him struggle to stay aloft, then fall forever, isn’t it? Also American McGee’s Alice. (Stupid jump happy level! Dratted FISH! Gah, bomber beetles! The shrooms are alive?! Etc.) Lately though it’s been Patrick Galloway, through my weird luck with game architecture. I swear, I can get killed by the scenary, in varied bizarre ways. I managed to electrocute myself in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines in the first apartment you get. I was looking in the cabinents for goodies…and the door came off, so I dropped it on the ground, and stepped on the door to get a look into the cabinent. In a complete fluke, the game must have counted the knob thingy on the door as being in contact with the outlet, (by the fridge) and I got fried. Freaky, I tell you! I went back to a previous save, and tried to duplicate it, and Mr. Clawbane and one of our friends also tried to duplicate it, and they couldn’t. From way back in the dark days, the tank from that Tank Battalion Atari pixelicious game, or a car in Pole Position.
Do multiplayer games count? Cause you die 800 times an hour 
In that case, it would be an engineer from the original team fortress.
Agent Albatross, from Rolling Thunder. Between the crushing time limits, lots of absolutely perfectly placed enemies, deadly traps I had a second to react to, the lava areas in stages 4 and 8, the ability to take only one nonlethal hit before dying, I must have gotten that pathetic klutz whacked a thousand times.
Second would probably be Da Prince, Prince of Persia. Geez, where to begin…inconvenient spike traps. Inconvenient blade traps. All those other inconvenient traps. Falls. Extremely aggressive floating heads. One hit death snakes. And about twenty gazillion jumps where I either nailed it down to a tenth of a second or had to start over. Did I mention the extremely distant checkpoints that required me to repeat a lot of deadly sections many times over?
I played a grand total of three games in each series (2 arcade, 1 console). :eek:
Honorable mentions: Mega Man, Bill Rizer (even worse than Lance Bean thanks to Contra: Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra), Strider Hiryu (the final level is insane; I must’ve continued 15 times there alone), Simon Belmont, Mike Haggar, Jo Musashi, Bart Simpson.
I’m really tempted to name my mage from WoW (Lot of deaths–my first MMO char plus a squishy? Lots and LOTS of deaths until I figured things out, even discounting PvP). After that, probably Mario.
A lot of mine have been mentioned.
Spyro.
How about the Prince of Persia, the one before the Warrior Within? Lots of nasty deaths there.
The Nameless One, but it doesn’t count if it’s part of the plot I suppose.
Sam Fisher. I’m just lousy at sneaking around.
Do MUDs and/or MMORPGs count?
Well, you don’t play as a lemming, though if you screw up, you get to watch up to 99 of them march blithely to their deaths.
I suppose I’ve died a lot as the Lode Runner, the Nanotank, the Prince of Persia, that guy in the Commando game (without MAME cheats, I’d never have seen the end of the first level), the Bump’n’Jump car, my Unreal Tournament character…
Gosh, I’ve died a lot…
Fallout. Of course you have to reload the game every time the main character (you) die, but I also reload any time anyone in my party (Tycho, Ian, Katja, or Dogmeat) dies.
Bruce Lee
The guy from R-Type
I think if I had played for long enough the guy from Another World would rank also.
I’ve always thought that a great fun-but-useless addition to any MMORPG would be the ability to call up a world map flagged with every location where you’ve ever died.
“Let’s see… I died here, here, here, 83 times here…”
Probably Turok, from Turok: Dinosaur Hunter on my old N64. I blame the high number of deaths on the ridiculous pillar-hopping-over-a-bottomless-pit section before facing Longhunter, the first boss. Eventually got the hang of it, but lordy, sooooo many deaths.
Of “all-time”, it has to be the little guy in Robotron: 2084.
Gnomish healers in Nethack. Most people say tourists are the hardest class in that game, I say healers.
Hmmm, I’ve never tried a gnomish healer, I don’t think. Generally I don’t play healers much at all, if I pick a class it’s usually archeologist (gotta love digging), priest, or wizard.
For a while there I had given up on Nethack, and then I realized that I just had to adjust my screen res downward so that I could see the game on my new computer.