Forget WWE 2K: Dwayne Johnson’s All-Time Favorite Video Game Is Something Else

Dwayne Johnson is having a moment across pretty much every screen you own — WWE arenas, movie theaters, now even your game console — and somehow the most surprising piece of it is his taste in video games. The Final Boss says he still gets goosebumps every time he walks through the WWE curtain, the business that launched his Hollywood career. But when a fan video on X caught him naming his all-time favorite games, the WWE 2K series didn’t even make the podium.

The Rock’s favorite games? Not what you think

In that fan-shot clip, Johnson gets asked for his top video game of all time. His answer: EA Sports’ NFL Madden series. His runner-up: the original Donkey Kong. So yes, he’s a sports guy through and through, but not a WWE 2K guy — even with 2K Games publishing the very franchise built on the company that made him a global star. Inside baseball, sure, but it’s a fun little disconnect.

The Smashing Machine jumps from theaters to the Octagon

Johnson’s latest movie, The Smashing Machine — his Mark Kerr biopic — is pulling in loud praise from fans, critics, and other actors. And EA Sports just tipped its cap in a uniquely EA way: they added Mark Kerr himself to UFC 5 as a playable fighter.

That’s a neat twist of MMA history. Kerr only competed in four UFC bouts back in 1997 before heading over to Pride Fighting Championship, yet EA dropped him into the current game thanks to the buzz around Johnson’s film. The EA Sports UFC account even flagged the update on October 1, 2025, with a little history-lesson flair about one of the era’s most dominant heavyweights now being playable in UFC 5. Movie still crushing in theaters, and now the real guy is immortalized in a modern fighting game — not a bad legacy lap.

Why Johnson sees himself in Mark Kerr

Johnson told Sports Illustrated he connected hard with Kerr’s story — personally and professionally. He pointed to the 90s era when pro wrestlers crossed into Pride and MMA names crossed into wrestling, and to the darker side of both worlds that doesn’t always make the highlight reels.

I felt like there was some real connective tissue with Mark’s life and my own. In the 90s there were a lot of crossings between our worlds — wrestlers going to Pride, MMA guys coming to wrestling — and I was always in awe of Mark. As the years went by, we both suffered a lot of losses. We lost a lot of friends to addiction and to suicide — there was a rash in both of our businesses in those late 90s, early 2000s.

How the movie finally happened

Johnson first saw the Mark Kerr documentary when he was still a relatively new actor and immediately wanted to play him. It just took time to get the muscle behind it. By 2019, he had the power and the rights in hand to produce a proper biopic and went straight to Kerr to make it real. Fast-forward to now: The Smashing Machine is surging, and the ripple effects just put Kerr in a major sports game for the first time.

So to recap the weird, delightful mix: the WWE megastar who still gets chills in the ring prefers Madden and Donkey Kong over WWE 2K, just helped turn a 90s MMA icon into a 2025 video game fighter, and did it all because a long-gestating passion project finally broke through. That’s a career crossover only The Rock could pull off.