Kieran Culkin's List of Essential Video Games

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When I first met up with Kieran Culkin, in late February at a moody cocktail bar in Brooklyn, he had just put his daughter, three-and-a-half, and son, two, to bed. The occasion for our conversation: his Esquire profile pegged to the fourth and final season of HBO’s Succession, (March 26), in which he plays Roman Roy, the potential heir to a global media empire. But Culkin could only take so much interrogation at a time, so at various points we talked about WWE wrestling, old Nickelodeon shows, and one of his biggest hobbies, gaming.

“I’m more of a retro gamer,” Culkin said. He’d first played the original Nintendo Entertainment System, then Super Nintendo, then Playstation—and the offerings on those consoles form the core of his recommendations. This is not a definitive list—just the games that, over the course of a long hang, Culkin namechecked.

For Culkin’s GOAT:

Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time*

“So if you’ve not done that, that’s the one to play. The game I have obsessed over the most.”

_{*Also available on Nintendo Switch with an online membership.}

For a F#@$-You Ending:

Zelda 2*

“Zelda’s hard. Did you ever play Zelda 2? Zelda 2 was kind of silly. It’s such a dickhead of a game because once it becomes fun, it’s a great game. And then when you get to the end, the end is fucking impossible. It took me a week of playing—fun, this is my adult life—to get to the end section. And it took me three weeks of playing every day for hours just to beat that last little fucking section, because they just decided, ‘You’ve come this far, and now, if you want to actually beat it, we’re going to make it impossible for you.’ I beat it, and I’ll never play it again.”

_{*Also available on Nintendo Switch with an online membership.}

For Stress Lovers:

Resident Evil

“Let’s talk about the fact that you had to turn all the way around in that game and wait for the zombie to come close to you, and then go like this [aims in the air], and then shoot their head off? That was a difficult game. A very stressful game. You’re in a mansion and you can pick the girl or the guy. The difference was the girl was obviously better because she could pick locks and get the certain doors that the guy couldn’t get into. So you’re like, Well, then I'll pick her ’cause she has a lock pick.”

For Masochistic Stress Lovers:

Resident Evil 2

“Also very stressful. Tough. Better, maybe.”

For Word-of-Mouth Rec #1:

Red Dead Redemption

“I never played that. But people loved that. My wife loved it.”

For Word-of-Mouth Rec #2:

Final Fantasy series

“I never did the Final Fantasies because I never did the RPG thing, but those always looked really, really appealing.”

For the Gaming Curious:

The Last of Us Parts I and II

“If you have not played The Last of Us, then you should play The Last of Us. And you should play its sequel as well. If you want to not have a video-game life, then don’t have a video-game life. But play those.”

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