Polygon's New Show With Stranger Things Star Gaten Matarazzo and Why Do We Love It

Gaten Matarazzo, known for playing Dustin Henderson on Stranger Things, is the latest guest on Shelf Quest on Polygon's YouTube channel — the monthly series where celebrities walk the aisles of Videogamesnewyork in New York's East Village, pick up physical game boxes, and talk through the titles that defined them. I started to love Polygon's videos because it's genuinely pleasant to watch charismatic people hold physical things we both played.

Matarazzo's episode is built around absence as much as access. His mother enforced a hard rule against violent games. While classmates logged hours in Call of Duty, he was steered toward family-oriented titles. The gap didn't close on its own.

"I was bummed every time my mom brought it up that I wasn't really allowed to play a lot of violent games."

— Gaten Matarazzo

The social cost was what stung. Gaming wasn't just entertainment for his peers — it was a shared language, a daily reference point. He remembers pressing his case at home.

"It's getting in the way of me being able to socialize."

— Gaten Matarazzo

He snuck rounds of Black Ops at a cousin's house, waiting until the adults went to bed. Guitar Hero consumed whatever space was left. Wii Sports and Wii Fit filled in the official hours. The restrictions were consistent, and so was his awareness of what he was missing.

The shift came when Matarazzo started working as a child actor — first in theater, then on Stranger Things. Long production days and older costars changed the domestic calculus. His mother recalibrated. The hard lines softened, and Matarazzo gained access to the medium on his own terms, later than most.

That late entry sharpened his taste. He didn't inherit the habit of grinding through annual releases. He picked carefully, and each one landed harder for it. Today he talks about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild with the kind of reverence his older costars might reserve for a formative Spielberg film. He doesn't dismiss his mother's instincts — he understands the logic — but he also recognizes how neatly a well-meant restriction can isolate a kid from something bigger than the game itself.

Games Matarazzo highlighted in the episode:

• Wii Sports
• Guitar Hero
• Wii Fit
• Black Ops
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I think this format is what separates Polygon from most gaming outlets — it's the closest thing games media has to the Criterion Closet Picks model, and watching real people handle physical editions in a store aisle produces stories a Zoom call never could.

Previously, Matthew Lillard — Scream, Hackers, Scooby-Doo — appeared in Shelf Quest's debut episode, tracing his gaming history from Pong-era arcades through an annual FIFA habit that still holds. Matarazzo brings a different starting point: not a generational arc, but a specific childhood restriction that made the medium matter more precisely because it stayed out of reach for so long.

Matarazzo is currently working on Pizza Movie, a Hulu comedy, and has a role in Andy Serkis' upcoming Animal Farm adaptation. He showed up to Shelf Quest as a player — someone who still remembers exactly what it felt like to watch everyone else talk about a game he hadn't been allowed to touch.

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