Kieran Culkin's List of Essential Video Games

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Count the Succession actor as one of the unlucky many who was crushed by The Last of Us Part II. But that's not his GOAT.

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.

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

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“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