Gene Carcani is a villified pharmaceutical CEO in Watch Dogs 2.
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Watch Dogs 2 takes dig at vanity of infamous pharmaceutical CEO

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 1 min

The designers of Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs 2 enjoy ripping stories from the headlines about cyberattacks, as many of the missions in the fictional game resemble real-life stories. Watch Dogs 2 debuts on Tuesday on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the PC.

One of the relatively minor side missions focuses on a greedy pharmaceutical company CEO named Gene Carcani. His story bears more than a passing resemblance to real life Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli, who drew scorn for hiking the cost of a life-saving drug by 4,000 percent. In the mission, the hacktivist anti-hero of Watch Dogs 2, Marcus Holloway, and his DedSec hacker group try to publicly shame the CEO.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.