Chris Pratt, Guillermo del Toro, Elle Fanning and other Hollywood heavyweights have named their favourite games, and some of them are surprisingly deep cuts.
Video games and Hollywood are closer than ever before in 2026, thanks to the huge number of gaming adaptations at the moment, from Super Mario Galaxy to Elden Ring.
A new compilation video from Josh Horowitz, host of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, has put the spotlight on all the different answers he’s received from guests when asked to name their favourite video game.
As you might expect, there are signs some of them haven’t played a game for decades, with panicked namedrops of Super Mario Bros. and Pac-Man, but others mentioned more unexpected titles that show they know what they’re talking about.
Ryan Gosling, current star of Project Hail Mary, kicks things off with 1982’s Pitfall for the Atari 2600 (he’s 45, so he would’ve been two when it came out). ‘I like to jump on the alligators,’ he remarked, before breaking into chuckles.
His La La Land co-star, Emma Stone, highlighted Donkey Kong Country, while Mario’s big screen voice actor, Chris Pratt, chose Street Fighter 2 along with the expected Nintendo nods of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend Of Zelda on the NES.
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The true star of the video is Outer Banks and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery actress Madelyn Cline, who picked Returnal as her favourite. That’s still our favourite PlayStation 5 exclusive and an impressive choice for a celeb.
Stranger Things star Joe Keery is a fan of Civilisation 6, in-between bouts of Pokémon Red and The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time, while his co-star David Harbour is apparently a World Of Warcraft guy.
Rocketman’s Taron Egerton, meanwhile, goes for EA’s recent Star Wars Jedi games, although he seems to be just naming something he enjoyed recently.
Elle Fanning did the obvious thing of naming Death Stranding 2, which she’s in, but she also named Wii Sports and Guitar Hero, which are perfectly legitimate choices for a casual gamer.
Jacob Elordi, star of Euphoria and 2025’s Frankenstein, boldly – on public record – chose to go for Kingdom Hearts. Hollywood heartthrobs are just as flawed as everyone else, it turns out.
There are some interesting oddities from other names too. Jurassic World’s Bryce Dallas Howard throws out 1985’s Time Gal – an incredibly obscure laserdisc game that we doubt anyone else in the world cares about.
Dept. Q’s Matthew Goode goes for Chuckie Egg on the ZX Spectrum (no one other than a Brit would’ve picked that); while Wagner Moura, best known for playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos, mentioned River Raid for the Atari 2600.
Director Guillermo del Toro, a known gamer, can’t be stopped when it comes to naming his favourite titles – although some are tied to his known friend Hideo Kojima, who gave him a role in the Death Stranding games.
Along with the former, he named Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid, Red Dead Redemption, Left 4 Dead, 2018’s God Of War, and Shadow Of The Colossus. Which are actually kind of vanilla choices, even if they are all good.
At least they’re not just the first (and possibly last) games they ever played, though, which seems to be the case for a lot of the other celebs.
This isn’t the first video of this ilk to appear on Horowitz’s channel. A prior compilation in the same vein featured the likes of Will Ferrell, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and Reese Witherspoon.
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