Matt Damon was offered "a bunch of money" to do a Bourne game but he wanted it 'more like Myst'

Matt Damon has confirmed that he didn't appear in The Bourne Conspiracy video game because it wasn't quite Myst-like enough for him.

The actor appeared in the latest episode of Hot Ones where, between taking bites of unpleasantly spicy chicken wings, he fielded a question about his reported reason for refusing to participate in 2008's The Bourne Conspiracy - a video game based on 2002's The Bourne Identity, which he starred in. That reason allegedly being it wasn't enough like Myst, the enigmatic puzzle adventure game.

"Yeah, wow, that's uh… No, I just didn't want to do just, like, a first-person shooter," Damon explains with a voice still quavering from the needlessly hot hot sauce. "They offered me a bunch of money, but it was like, if you can make it a little more - I don't know, like a little more thought had to go into it? Like Myst, I love that game. So I was like, 'you know, more like Myst.' And they were like, 'No,' and they just went and made it without me."

Our original review for Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy assessed it as good-looking but repetitive and "aggressively average." It's not a first-person shooter - it has a third-person perspective, and you do a lot of sneaking around and punching people on top of the typical stop-and-pop cover-based shooting you'd expect from a 2008 video game - but I get what Damon means. A Bourne game where you wander around a weird island pulling levers as you slowly activate more and more pieces of your sleeper agent identity may have been more memorable.

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and was formerly a staff writer at GamesRadar+.