High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! "The Terminator" (also known as the T-800, T-850 or T-101) refers to a number of fictional characters portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger – a cyborg, initially portrayed as a programmable assassin and military infiltration unit. "The Terminator" character first appeared as the titular antagonist in The Terminator, a 1984 film directed and co-written by James Cameron, and its sequels. The first film in the series features only one cyborg: the one portrayed by Schwarzenegger, although a second Terminator played by Franco Columbu is shown in a future flashback scene. In the first two sequels, Schwarzenegger`s Terminator is pitted against other Terminators; it appears briefly in the third sequel as a CGI model. In the sequels, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Schwarzenegger reprises the role, but with a twist: Schwarzenegger is the hero instead of the villain playing a different but visually identical Terminator in each of the three films. Within the Terminator universe created by Cameron, Terminators of the same "model" share identical characteristics. In the production of the films, this has allowed multiple Terminators to be portrayed by Schwarzenegger. In the context of the stories, this plot device provides a certain continuity for the human characters by exploiting their emotional familiarity with a particular "human" visage.