Guillermo del Toro is the director who describes BioShock as a masterwork of environmental storytelling. He is close personal friends with Hideo Kojima. He cites Death Stranding, Shadow of the Colossus, and Metal Gear Solid among the works that genuinely influence his films. He is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most cinematically engaged gamers working in Hollywood.
He also plays Angry Birds every single day.
“Every day of my life, every moment I have free, I’m still playing Angry Birds,” del Toro told IGN in a recent interview. “I’m really good at it.” The admission arrived without apparent embarrassment — and that might be the most interesting part of it.
The Quote That Caught Everyone Off Guard
Del Toro was being asked about his gaming habits for a profile that touched on his broader creative life when the Angry Birds revelation landed. It was, by his own framing, his go-to game for free time — not a guilty pleasure, not something he once downloaded and forgot, but a daily ritual he has maintained for what appears to be years.
Angry Birds launched in 2009. It became one of the best-selling mobile games ever made, with hundreds of millions of downloads at its peak, before the market moved on and the franchise declined into sequels of diminishing returns. That del Toro is still there, still launching birds at pigs, while most of the world has moved on to other mobile distractions, says something about his relationship with a game that happens to work exactly the way he wants it to.
Del Toro on Angry Birds: “Every day of my life, every moment I have free, I’m still playing Angry Birds. I’m really good at it.”
The Man Whose Actual Gaming Taste Is Impeccable
The Angry Birds habit is more interesting in context. Del Toro has spoken extensively about video games as an artistic medium in multiple interviews, and his choices are not casual. He holds BioShock up as an example of games achieving something comparable to great literature — the blend of beauty and grotesque matching what he does in his own films. Death Stranding, which he discussed with genuine depth, connects directly with his recurring theme of loneliness and human connection. His friendship with Kojima is not a celebrity cameo arrangement; it reflects a genuine shared aesthetic.
He has listed God of War, Red Dead Redemption, Left 4 Dead, and Shadow of the Colossus among his favourites. These are not the titles of someone who dabbles. Del Toro engages with games the way he engages with films — looking for the emotional architecture beneath the surface.
What the Angry Birds Habit Actually Tells Us About Gaming
There is a tendency to divide gaming culture into prestige and populist — the narrative RPG versus the mobile time-filler. Del Toro’s combination of tastes collapses that distinction.
He plays Death Stranding for what it says about the human condition. He plays Angry Birds because it is satisfying. Both things are true simultaneously, and neither diminishes the other. The same person who can articulate exactly why Shadow of the Colossus is a tragedy also wants something to do while waiting for a meeting to start.
Most regular gamers already know this — the Steam library sits alongside the iPhone game that never got deleted. It is just unusual to hear someone with del Toro’s cultural standing state it plainly, without the qualifications that usually soften these admissions. He is not explaining the guilty pleasure. He is just telling you he plays Angry Birds every day and is really good at it.
That kind of honesty is, in its own small way, a more accurate account of what gaming actually looks like for most people than any prestige endorsement could provide. Great games and simple ones coexist in the same person’s routine. Del Toro just happens to be unusually candid about both ends of that spectrum — and honest enough to admit, without any hedging, that the mobile game has been winning his spare moments for well over a decade.
