As the credits roll he wanders off to keep shooting cops for a while because that's his idea of fun. At the end, when you've defeated everyone else trying to take over the city, he's still not done.
At the start of the game you bust him out of a courthouse where he's on trial for 387 murders and one attempted murder. In spite of that Johnny Gat remains Johnny Gat. It's the one where supporting characters die and nobody believes they're going to be brought back, they're just dead because – apparently I'm going to spoil Saints Row 2 as well now – crime is bad and sometimes even your joke character's girlfriend is murdered by motorbike samurais. It's smooshing grit and consequence into the cocoon from which its sequels will emerge on wings of pure batshit silliness.
Saints Row 2 is from 2008 but thanks to the delay at which games process culture it's still trying to be a Tarantino movie from the 1990s. Gat is the character who knows how things go in games. If Saints Row 2 came out today this would seem like a deliberate parody of Grand Theft Auto V's heist missions, where meticulous plans end in messy shoot-outs. Gat has a different suggestion: “shoot all the motherfuckers instead”. “While the guard's concerned with throwing me out, Gat'll sneak in through this security door,” he explains. He's got a model of the building laid out and everything. There's a scene in that game where Pierce, the sensible one who would rather be in the energy drink business, plots a casino robbery. To understand why he has that reputation, why fans love him while outsiders roll their eyes, we have to go back to Saints Row 2. You start Saints Row: The Third with every member of the gang wearing an oversized Gat mask during a bank robbery – even Gat himself has one, pointless as that makes the disguise.
Gat's a mascot for Saints Row, whether cameoing in games outside the series or within them.
The dude with the sunglasses and neck tattoos who seems like a generic video game badass is treated like he matters. Characters talk about how his loss changed them. Even though he's not in half the game – spoilers for the third and fourth Saints Rows, but Johnny Gat dies and then comes back to life – his absence is felt. She loved having superpowers and trashing a virtual city, but she did wonder what the deal was with Johnny Gat. A friend of mine started the Saints Row series with the fourth one.