Gus Lloyd

Dr. Gus Lloyd (played by James Calvert) is the hero and main character of Deadly Games.

Gus works under Dr. Judy Chang as a grant-funded researcher for a university in Los Angeles. His project is to create antimatter via a "laser wave" that he and his partner Peter Rucker have been developing. On the side, he developed a video game with characters inspired by his life. An antimatter accident brought the video game's villains to life. Now Gus, Peter, and Gus's ex-wife Lauren work together to stop them and save the world.

Personality
Due to his belief that life has been cruel and unfair to him, Gus has developed a bitter, selfish, and vindictive personality. His intelligence often makes him self-centered, arrogant, and bossy. Despite this, he genuinely cares about the people in his life and goes to great lengths to protect them from the slightest possibility of harm. As the series progresses, he learns to empathize with Lauren and works on himself to some extent.

Skills
Gus has a doctoral-level understanding of particle physics. He also has a wide breadth of knowledge of biology, chemistry, and computer programming. He has taken helicopter flying lessons as well.

Biography
Gus is the son of prominent scientist Jordan Lloyd. Gus sees his childhood as difficult due to conflicts with his father. He believes that his father was domineering and monomaniacal about work. Gus blames his father for trying to mold Gus into something he wasn't.

In school, Gus was a frequent target of bullies. He participated in athletics but didn't excel. In junior high, he wrestled, but another wrestler by the name of Paul "The Wall" McMyers cut his winning streak short after an 18-second match ("Dr. Kramer"). In high school, he was third-fastest on the swim team, but the football team's quarterback bullied him incessantly. On graduation day of all four years of high school, this bully gave Gus a "turbo-noogie." Gus went on to base Killshot on this bully ("Killshot").

Before the events of Deadly Games, Gus married Lauren Ashborne. The relationship lasted twenty-nine months before Lauren divorced Gus ("The Trash Man"). The two quickly lost contact after the divorce. Gus blamed a number of others for the failure of their marriage: Shirley Ashborne, Lauren's mother who consistently interfered in the marriage; Roy Hopkins, an irate trash collector who threw out Lauren's wedding ring; Courtney Lake, Lauren's divorce attorney who called Gus "self-centered" in their divorce papers.

Gus processed his issues with his father, his ex-wife, and a number of other stressors by creating a video game that he called Deadly Games. Gus based its protagonist, the Cold Steel Kid, on himself. The main villain was Sebastian Jackal, inspired by his father. He based the Cold Steel Kid's love interest, the Girl, on Lauren. He used digitized and extrapolated photos to capture the likenesses of his acquaintances.

After receiving his PhD, Gus went to work for Dr. Chang. Although he had the credentials to be a teaching professor, he chose to work in his own laboratory with his best friend, Peter. Despite Gus's intelligence, his own work suffered from frequent periods of few results.

About a month before the end of his grant deadline, Gus experimented with cranking up the density. Although he succeeded in creating antimatter, he triggered an accident in which the laser wave read his video game code and used anti-matter to create physical copies of characters from the game. These characters acted on the artificial intelligence that Gus had programmed into them, but in the real world, this made them into murderers. With the help of Peter and Lauren, Gus set out to destroy all of their physical bodies and return them to the world of the video game.