Peter Serafinowicz’s Life In Gaming

Actor; writer; director; gamer - Peter Serafinowicz is a man who takes his console-time seriously.

“Like people got hooked on Breaking Bad, I got hooked on that,” the man soon to appear in Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy tells us of Dark Souls, the epic action role playing game which he’s become somewhat of a super fan of since its 2011 inception.

Excitingly, for forthcoming sequel Dark Souls II, he’s taken his fandom even further and voiced one of the characters in the game - so, with this in mind ahead of its March 14 release, we asked Serafinowicz to list the games to have made the most impact in his life so far.

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Earliest Game - Space War

“As a kid, my uncle would take me to video arcades. He was a computer genius. The first memory of this was playing on a machine called Space War, predating even Pong, for me. It was a simple two-player game which looked a bit like Asteroids, with two spaceships able to turn and fire missiles. It was pretty great.”

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First platformer - La-Mulana

“Frankly, this is just fucking nuts. It’s essentially a primitive, 2D version of Dark Souls where you - I can’t remember what the guy’s doing, actually - but he’s racing all over a really gothic world, and this is what was so addictive about it, the atmosphere and the speed of it all. Even now I can picture those beguiling levels.”

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Hardest game - Call Of Duty

“Call Of Duty games have always been difficult for me, especially online. I once joined a clan headed by Will Arnett and featuring a bunch of other guys I knew of like Justin Theroux and Rainn Wilson. Trouble was, these fellas were all double ‘prestige’, or whatever title you earn for slaughtering thousands of pixelated soldiers, and there’s me, just going around stabbing people with a little knife. Come to think of it, I probably poisoned myself.”

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Most eye-opening game – Half-Life

“Maybe it’s because it’s a world within a world in Half-Life, which might explain why I spent so much time wandering around on it back in 1998. This game opened doors, I’d seen nothing like it before then. The sequel is also 10-years-old plus and even that still looks amazing. The only aspect I don’t enjoy are the cut-scenes. At least it’s not like GTA, though, where you have 15 minutes of unescapable CG conversations, you can skip these.”

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Best Multiplayer - The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time

“While not strictly multi-player, playing this with my brother when he first moved down to London was a chapter in my life I’m fond of. We played a lot of Ocarina Of Time together, or rather he did, with me as his co-pilot. He was magnificent at that game, it was glorious to watch; I loved being his wingman. The other modern Nintendo classic for me is Super Mario 64. When that came out it was like magic. My flat at the time was a fucking tip and this game appeared in the middle of it all.”

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Best interactive game – Guitar Hero

“I had a role in Couples Retreat, playing a hotel owner who competes in Guitar Hero against Vince Vaughn's character. I remember we spent an afternoon practicing before that scene, and Vince was far better - I struggled to get the timing like he could. Beatles Rock Band was good, too. There’s something really strange how the popularity of these games dropped off, as if they never happened at all. It’s an odd phenomenon, like the world collectively said ‘okay, well we don’t like these musical games anymore'.”

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Guilty pleasure game - PaRappa The Rapper

“Man, I really loved this, and it’s so weird that so few people remember it, or admit to remembering it, from its PlayStation days. It was the first rhythm/action game I’d ever seen. They need to re-release it on IOS - that would be perfect to play.”

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Desert Island Disc – Dark Souls II

“I believe Graham Linehan recommended Dark Souls to me. Either way, it soon became the best video game I had ever played. There’s an old-fashioned medieval, English charm to what is an Asian-made game - haunting, beautiful, brooding in landscape and epically playable. This latest one is even better, so, naturally, I was delighted when asked to provide a voice for it. I even gave them some in-game noises, like jumping, excursion grunts and the infamous death groan - the first time I played it and heard my own death scream was quite easily one of the weirdest moments of my life so far.”

Dark Souls II is out on Xbox 360 and PS3 from March 14th; Darksoulsii.com