When Tom Cruise got stuck on a video game and decided to ask the creators for help: “No endorsements!”
Tom Cruise is a tricky one. In the last 20 years or so, he has done a fine job of coming across as literally the nicest guy in movies; down to earth, up for taking the piss out of himself, fine with posing for endless selfies, coming across really well in interviews. He seems great, and a bloke you would sit in the pub with.
But, and it’s a big but, this is the same Tom Cruise who you can, with a cursory search of the interwebs, find jumping manically on a sofa on Oprah, being immensely worrying on those big Scientology award shows that have terrifying men in suits hugging each other, and giving some truly bizarre interviews about medicines.
So, which is it, Tom? Are we supposed to like you or not? Well, to give him his due, 20 years is a long time, and first and foremost, what Cruise is, and has always been, is a movie star. And if we reduce it down to simply that, then there’s a fair argument that he is probably the best at it, and has been getting better, consistently, over his long, long career.
If any proof of that were needed it’s that he has pushed action films to a place they’ve never been before, with the second half of Top Gun Maverick an astounding display of stunts and camera work and one scene in particular in the final Mission Impossible movie (clue: it involves Cruise inside a sinking nuclear submarine) so jaw-dropping it ranks as one of the finest action movie moments of all time.
The Tom Cruise we’re going to look at today, however, is 1990s Tom Cruise. This is the Jerry Maguire, Days of Thunder, biggest movie star in the world Tom Cruise, during the Nicole Kidman marriage and before the questionable Katie Holmes partnership and before he went full ‘insane laughing on a couch’. So Tom Cruise, but still just…off somehow.
An example of just how interesting Cruise was back in those days comes thanks to the apocryphal tale from Kotaku of how the star was passing a bit of down time while filming one of the earlier Mission Impossible movies here in London by having a go on a popular video game of the time, known as Marathon.
Reportedly, Cruise was having some issues with his progress on the first person shooter, and so in the absence of being able to look up a walkthrough (internet hadn’t been invented) or god forbid just ask someone near him to help out, he decided to call up the head office of Bungie, the game’s developers and see if someone could tell him what to do.
He ended up being put through to a writer named Matt Soell, who said: “Technically his lackey called me; Tom Cruise has people to do these things for him, you know. I passed the call to (Head of PR) Doug Zartman because the lackey was communicating poorly…He’s in a big dark room, there’s a corridor going out of it but the door doesn’t work, and there’s this monster shooting at him, and there’s another room he can see but he can’t get to…”
It would seem Cruise, who you can imagine might have been wearing one of those gaming headsets like he does in the Mission Impossible films despite the fact that online chat rooms were at least a decade off, had enough at that point and just decided to take care of things himself, much as he does when having to run really fast either toward or away from an explosion. Or pull someone out of a car that’s underwater.
As Soell adds: “Moments later, Tom Cruise grabbed the phone and started talking directly to Doug, who quickly helped him figure out whatever was confusing him. I believe the lackey was still listening in on an extension or something because at one point Doug jokingly asked Mr Cruise if he wanted to do an ad for the game and the lackey shouted ‘NO ENDORSEMENTS!’”
If Cruise is free these days, and it doesn’t seem likely, then he’ll soon get to play a reboot of Marathon, as Bungie currently have one in development for 2026, although it has caused no little controversy with early reviewers disappointed by what they’ve seen.
