Being John Cusack.

I play just about everything. Be it Sports games like FIFA, Adventure titles like Uncharted and even the odd First Person Shooter…not including Aliens: Colonial Marines. Obviously.

Watching the latest trailers of the coming Triple-A games has become just as crucial to its success as any movie studio churning out teasers of their blockbuster releases.

San Diego ComicCon recently dropped the first tasters for Warner Bros Suicide Squad for instance which was immediately boot-legged by almost every person who can work a keyboard around the planet, where they each told us that Jared Leto’s Joker looked “sick”, whilst stuffing their faces with nacho cheese. God bless America.

In the world of videogames, we annually have E3; a showcase which continues to be the biggest platform for games publishers to announce their new titles, which we eagerly await spending our hard earned cash on over the coming year. In the months that follow, we’re then presented with a family bucket sized smattering of rehashed game footage featuring the same 3minutes of gameplay re-edited countless times, to varying drum& bass related noises, before its launch date. Let’s not pretend otherwise, because regardless of how silly this sounds, we still collectively watch every single one of them online, because its basically eye-heroin.

Thanks to social media, hype surrounding anything related to the culture now revolves around ‘the drop’; the moment that teaser lands on the internet and we, as visual-crack pedalling merchants, then share, and share again, doing all the work for them. And I’m ok with that. God forbid I miss someone’s theory surrounding the third naked person from the left in some insignificant scene in Game of Thrones that happened this one time.

So, upon hearing the latest trailer for Call Of Duty: Black Ops III Zombies had been uploaded to the net recently, I got understandably excited. COD: Advanced Warfare was my re-entry point for online FPS’s after years away from the fray and the proposed 1940s swing on proceedings looked neat (The Order 1886 & the coming Assassins Creed: Syndicate proving steam-punk continues to resonate solidly with gamers right now). BUT, I found myself spending less time watching the fluid game mechanics and vivid new arenas to traverse, instead, trying to pull all the celebrity names out of a hat featured in the 3minutes, like watching coverage of some meaningless after party on E! I was utterly ashamed of myself.

What’s wrong with me? Why aren’t I focusing on the game? Am I only excited to play this because I can be someone famous? The first face I recognised was the Man with Jaw of a Mastodon, Ron Perlman.

Fair do’s, he’s previously worked on the Halo & Fallout series and earned his stripes. It wasn’t long before Jeff Goldblum showed up to the party either. I began recalling the previous iteration of COD games, and remembered Exo-Zombies where I could actually play as John Malkovich, ploughing his way through the undead, which was super cool. Oh my God, I’m actually living some perverted version of the film, Being John Malkovich! Does this make me John Cusack? Come to think of it, how many celebrities have I actually been inside??

This really got my brain hamster going. How many celebs in recent years have realised the potential they have to make some serious dollar by attaching themselves to gaming projects. And, does this make the game more lucrative for somebody who wants to cause carnage to hordes of bloodthirsty monsters…as Lenny from Of Mice and Men?

Kiefer Sutherland made exactly the same move into television world he spearheaded the revolutionary '24' –here’s a Hollywood superstar who traded the red carpet, for Cable TV. And, it was massive. As I'm sure his bank balance is now too. It began a movement. I remember playing 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City back on the PlayStation 2 accompanied by the Mafioso tones of Ray Liotta as Tommy Vercetti, which was a masterstroke by Rockstar Games having been such a gangster tour de force in Goodfellas. In this instance, it worked perfectly. 

Have a look online and you’ll be dumbfounded at how many celebrities have cropped up in games, most of them an utter embarrassment they’d probably rather lock in the ‘Vault of Forgotten Sh*t I Once Did’. This doesn’t count movie franchises where the stars of the films have been transported to the small screen in a franchise spin-offs either, or Def Jam: Fight for NY which was ultimately a way to promote the hell out of rap stars, with more product placement in it than Casino Royale. I’m talking fully-fledged commitments to games, as a performer.

It’s a pay check for most. Aaron Staton from Mad Men was basically the exact same character from the TV show, this time as Cole Phelps in LA Noire. And now he had a hat. #Win I can’t imagine Mickey Rourke actually wanted to be in Bethesda’s Rogue Warrior either in which he can be heard saying lines such as ‘…it’s a total goat f*ck’, the script clearly written by a giraffe on the spectrum.

Personally, I don’t like to think I ever play games because I can voyeuristically watch my favourite icons or celebrities. That’s what the new wave of VR headsets are for. Or, One Night in Paris. Next time you play something with a celeb attached though, it’s definitely worth asking yourself the question, “Do I really want to play this, or do I just want to be John Cusack..?”

Call of Duty: Black Ops III is out November 6^th 2015 and available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PS3, Xbox360 & Windows.