Years before he put on the cowl, Ben Affleck spent most of his time glued to a PC strategy game. On the October 12 episode of Josh Horowitz's Happy Sad Confused podcast, the Animals director revealed that Blizzard Entertainment's StarCraft swallowed three full years of his life right after he became famous.
Horowitz asked Affleck for his favorite video game of all time, or the one that "sucked the most life" out of him. After calling it a hard question, Affleck answered "There was a game called StarCraft that probably took the most life out of me for a period of time. I had just got famous and all I did was stay home for three years and play StarCraft."
The gaming talk comes near the end of the episode (52:40 mark), after a long conversation about his career. Check it out below:
From Good Will Hunting To StarCraft
The fame Affleck is talking about arrived fast. Good Will Hunting, the film he wrote with Matt Damon, opened in December 1997, and the pair won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in March 1998. StarCraft came out on PC at the end of that same month. Affleck's big summer blockbuster Armageddon was right around the corner, but at home, he was busy with Blizzard's sci-fi war between the Terrans, Protoss, and Zerg.
Games were part of the Good Will Hunting story, too. Affleck said that he and Damon were playing Doom while they worked on the script, and recalled "I remember writing and taking these long breaks to play Doom."
He is still a gamer today. Affleck praised Riot Games' tactical shooter Valorant as a great game, but admitted he gets crushed by kids who grew up playing it, sometimes to the point of asking if they are cheating, only for an 11-year-old to insult him back. "It's very humiliating," he said. He also loses to his 14-year-old son in NBA 2K, and said "it's all I can do not to get really petty and competitive."
Affleck also named Madden, Myst, Donkey Kong, Tetris, and Ms. Pac-Man as games he loves, and said he still keeps a stand-up Ms. Pac-Man arcade machine at home.
Batman, Daredevil, And Justice League
Superhero fans got plenty from the episode beyond the gaming stories. Affleck called the reshoots and Zack Snyder's exit from Justice League "the low point of my career," pointing to the studio being at odds with the filmmaker, along with what he was going through personally at the time. He did say he was glad Snyder eventually got his own cut released.
He also explained that he considered directing a standalone Batman movie but ultimately decided against it, and that he loved playing the older, broken version of the character drawn from Frank Miller's work. On the famous Batman voice, he said he wanted it to sound exhausted and gravelly, like a battered older Bruce Wayne, instead of relying on a voice modifier.
Asked if Kevin Feige had tried to bring him back as Daredevil, Affleck said "He hasn't. I wish he would." He added that he feels like he has done his superhero movies, but called Feige the only producer whose sense of what audiences want he would truly believe. Looking back at the 2003 film, where Feige was still a junior figure on set, Affleck joked that he wishes he could go back in time and ask him what they should do.
Affleck was on the show to promote Animals, the thriller he co-wrote, directed, and stars in with Kerry Washington, Gillian Anderson, and Steven Yeun. It began streaming on Netflix on October 9, and the podcast was the final stop on his press tour.
Are you surprised to find out that Affleck is a gamer? What old video games were you hooked on for the longest time? Personally mine is (and might still be) Vanilla World Of Warcraft.