Robin Williams spent hours online playing Call of Duty against kids as young as 10, and he did not go easy on them. Grown adults still remember getting called terrible names by the voice of the Aladdin genie.
Williams loved gaming so much he named his daughter Zelda after the Legend of Zelda princess. His son Zachary suggested it after Robin got hooked on the original NES game, and Robin later said it fit because “she’s really kind of magical.”
He and Zelda made the official Nintendo commercials together in 2011 for Ocarina of Time 3D and Skyward Sword, including the bit where he mixes her up with the character: “Hard to say. You’re both pretty magical.”
He called video games “cyber cocaine,” and had a sharper version of the joke too: “the closest thing to cocaine without having to talk to a dealer.” Then he’d act out the household fallout. “Come to bed.” “I can’t, I’m at level 14.”
In a 2009 interview with Jimmy Fallon, he described the humbling side of playing online: “It’s always weird, too … when you play online, and you get owned by a ten-year-old, going, ‘You’re my b—-.’”
His longtime friend Bobcat Goldthwait watched it play out up close. “He’d be playing Call of Duty for hours on end,” Goldthwait told Dana Gould in 2022, and when he asked how old the opponents were, Williams answered, “I don’t know, ten, twelve.”
Goldthwait’s takeaway: “I love that there’s people who are adults now that are like, ‘The genie from Aladdin called me a c—sucker.’ Cuz he did. He did. He called those kids terrible f—ing names.”
The Call of Duty habit followed him to actual war zones. After USO tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d find soldiers just back from patrol playing the game and tell them, “You’re living this stuff. And yet you’re still playing this game.”
He also played World of Warcraft and joked about logging in under the name “Morkus Maximus.” After he died in 2014, fans petitioned Blizzard for a tribute, and Warlords of Draenor added the Ever-Burning Lamp: rub it and a genie appears, shouts “Infinite cosmic power!” then shrinks down and mutters “itty bitty living space.”
