Robin Williams dedicated a lot of time to being an entertainer, but when he wasn’t on the clock, there was a good chance he was entertaining himself by playing one of the many video games that he owned. The comedian’s interest in gaming dates back to the early days of home consoles, and he even named his daughter Zelda after the princess from the original Legend of Zelda. Here’s a commercial Williams and his daughter did for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D in 2011:
Williams was also a fan of World of Warcraft and was apparently known for trolling the other players he’d encounter online. After he passed in 2014, a character named Robin was added to one of the games as a tribute:
Williams spoke of his love for video games on many occasions, once referring to them as “cyber cocaine,” and made his favorites clear to anyone who asked. The Call of Duty series came up multiple times, though at one point, Williams said he would avoid playing online because of all the young kids he’d run into who would mop the floor with him. In a 2009 interview with Jimmy Fallon, Williams elaborated on the kinds of interactions he’d have with other players, saying, “It’s always weird, too…when you play online, and you get owned by a ten-year-old, going, ‘You’re my b—h.’”
More recently, Williams’s longtime friend Bobcat Goldthwait recounted overhearing some of these exchanges, which would indicate that Williams didn’t stay away from multiplayer games as much as he implied—or at least not when other people were around. “He’d be playing Call of Duty for hours on end…and I’d be like, ‘Really, bro, this is what we’re doing today?’” Goldthwait told Dana Gould in 2022. As he sat there watching Williams play one day, Goldthwait noticed that the voices of his opponents sounded pretty young, so he asked Williams, “How old are these people you’re playing?” “I don’t know, ten, twelve,” Williams responded.
Looking back on the experience, Goldthwait said, “I love that there’s people who are adults now that are like, ‘The genie from Aladdin called me a cocksucker.’ Cuz he did. He did. He called those kids terrible fucking names.”
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