Video Game Stardom When Polish video game developers CD Projekt Red released an extended trailer for their upcoming title Cyberpunk 2077 at a trade show in 2019, they capped the event with a surprise appearance by a big Hollywood star: Keanu Reeves. It turns out that Reeves would be playing a supporting character who would be helping players throughout the game. This event suggests how the video games industry has used Hollywood stars to promote its products as interactive movies, but the fact that players interact alongside Reeves rather than as him evokes developers’ perennial unease about how to incorporate specific film stars into video games, which have long sold players fantasies of starring as the heroes of their favorite films. This paper will attempt to outline some common ways that popular video games have adapted stars and theories of stardom from Hollywood films and television shows. First, I will discuss the implications of casting gamers as or alongside established stars by analyzing players' interactions with stars in Detroit: Become Human (2018) and Death Stranding (2019). I will compare how the player characters in Detroit — all of whom are played by unknown actors — interact with characters played by Lance Henriksen and Clancy Brown with how Death Stranding casts players as Walking Dead star Norman Reedus and allow them to interact with characters played by Mads Mikkelsen, Guillermo Del Toro, and Conan O’Brien. Second, I will discuss how video games such as Uncharted 4 (2016) and The Last of Us Part II (2020) have adapted Hollywood’s textual strategies — including prominent onscreen credits and guarantors of authenticity — for constructing potentially anonymous voice- and motion-capture actors like Nolan North, Troy Baker, and Ashley Johnson as stars. By showing how these complicated interactions with video game stars complicate the common notion of player-as-star, I hope to illuminate the myriad ways that these Hollywood and Silicon Valley interact in the converged media economy..