9 Best Celebrity Appearances In Video Games

Spyro the Dragon is not one of the most memorable series in the history of gaming. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it until I had to write this list. But if the original Spyro is an unmemorable series meekly sustained by nostalgia, it's 2004 reboots are a critical flatline that make Sonic 2006 look like a comeback success a la Mad Max: Fury Road. In this effort to revive the series, Sierra threw a truly absurd amount of money at the voice cast, with mixed results.

Casting Elijah Wood as Spyro is the kind of lazy casting you get when you want to sucker new fans in with the promise of Lord of the Rings: Frodo's a Dragon this Time. But I would argue that casting Gary Oldman as the Elder Dragon Ignitus brought life into a reboot trilogy that otherwise is profoundly unremarkable. At the time, he had just made his appearance in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. For perhaps the first time in his career, he was known for being an onscreen madmen AND a legitimate mentor figure to an iconic hero.

Casting an actor with an onscreen history of violence and insanity as a wise elder dragon is the kind of bonkers casting decision that can almost only happen by accident, but Sierra must be glad that it did - at least until the series shuffled off and faded into obscurity, anyway.