Random Things of Vin Diesel Is A Low-Key Ultranerd (11 items)

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  (#1) He Founded His Own Video Game Studio

  In 2002, Vin Diesel founded video game company Tigon Studios. Not only does the company produce games based off of his famous action characters like Riddick, but Diesel also voices the characters himself. Tigon Studios also produced the driving-based game Wheelman.

  After several years of inactivity, Diesel reactivated the company in 2013 to make another Riddick game. According to Diesel, the games are a way to “flesh out the mythology more” without having to spend tens of millions of dollars making films.
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  (#2) He Grew Up Playing 'Dungeons & Dragons'

  Vin Diesel has been a serious Dungeons & Dragons fan ever since he was a kid growing up in New York City in the 1970s and '80s. In a March 2006 appearance on AMC’s Shootout, he discusses how the game allows players to fully immerse themselves in their characters and serves as a “training ground for our imaginations and an opportunity to explore our identities.”

  But D&D wasn’t just his childhood pastime. Diesel goes on to describe how he plays the game just as enthusiastically as a grown man. "Even while I was bouncing, which is the antithesis of Dungeons & Dragons... if I had a night off, I was playing Dungeons & Dragons," he said.
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  (#3) He Credits His Acting Career To 'D&D'

  In a 2014 appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Diesel explained why he felt playing Dungeons & Dragons was some of his earliest acting training.

  "I kind of became who I am because I played Dungeons & Dragons," he said. "We acted! Every time we played, for the first couple hours we would just be talking, shooting the sh*t, and then, once we started getting into the game, everything changed!"  

  Diesel added that he was "lucky" because he grew up in Westbeth, an artist's commune in New York City's West Village. "There were a whole bunch of out of work artists, and if you made more than $10,000 a year you were kicked out of the building," he explained. "So all these children of artists were, you know, fantasy roleplayers and we started playing Dungeons & Dragons."
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  (#4) He Even Tried To Get Dame Judi Dench Into 'Dungeons & Dragons'

  Dame Judi Dench played Aereon in The Chronicles of Riddick after Vin Diesel specifically requested her and had the writers rewrite the role for her. On set, the two developed a great relationship, and Dench even showed up for dinner at his house wearing a shirt with a giant "Diesel" logo. That night, he introduced her to Dungeons & Dragons.

  “We started reading Dungeons & Dragons books together,” he explained in a 2004 interview. “We were intensely getting into the mythology of Chronicles of Riddick.”
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  (#5) He Organizes Fighting Game Tournaments On 50-Foot Screens

  Diesel told Yahoo! Games that he loves fighting games and always wants to push the envelope in terms of gameplay. He even said he likes to play his favorite games, like Tekken, Dead or Alive, and Soul Calibur on 50-foot screens.

  “My dedication to these fighting games has been a little sick at times,” he said. “Because it’s been in these huge auditoriums, and I’ve created these tournaments - I have all these guys come and play, and we’d sooner be playing fighting games for money than poker.”
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  (#6) He Acquired The Rights To Riddick So He Could Invent His Own Sci-Fi Universe

  After turning down a role in 2 Fast 2 Furious, Diesel agreed to make a cameo in The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift in exchange for the rights to the Riddick series.

  In 2013, Riddick director David Twohy explained to HuffPost how Diesel managed the deal:

  After Chronicles, they said, “We are out of the Riddick business. It’s just a straight business calculation of us. You spent too much money and you didn’t make enough back. So, no, we’re not going to do anymore.” Vin, being the savvy guy he is, said, “Well, give me the rights back.” And they didn’t want to do that... I think this was about the time that Fast 3 had already shot and they were testing it. Maybe it wasn’t testing as well as it should have and they decided, “Maybe we need a cameo from Vin” - because he wasn’t in that movie. So, I do believe that in his savviness, Vin said, “Don’t pay me for that cameo. Just give me the rights back.”
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  (#7) He Wrote The Forward To A Book About 'Dungeons & Dragons'

  Diesel wrote the forward for the 2004 book 30 Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons. The retrospective offered a full chronological history of the game and also included essays from big names who love D&D, such as Diesel and Stephen Colbert.

  “The most important milestone for me was the birth of Melkor,” Diesel wrote about creating his character, a sort of multi-classed, spell-casting Ranger. In an appearance on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, Diesel said he created the character when he was 18 years old.
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  (#8) 'The Last Witch Hunter' Was Based Off Of Diesel's 'D&D' Character

  Around 2011, a mutual friend introduced Diesel to writer Cory Goodman because the two shared a passion for Dungeons & Dragons. Diesel told Yahoo! that after their initial meeting, Goodman went and wrote a whole movie for Diesel’s Melkor character.

  “Just the fact that I’d be playing a witch hunter speaks to how nerdy I was about the game, how committed I was to D&D because witch hunter [wasn’t a] class by TSR [the one-time publisher of D&D] at the time,” Diesel said. “It was a character that you could get from a third party book of characters called the Arcanum. There were a few characters that started there that eventually Dungeons & Dragons took over; one of those characters was a witch hunter.” 

  For the 2015 movie The Last Witch Hunter, the Melkor character was renamed Kaulder.
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  (#9) Melkor Had A Secret Cameo In 'xXx'

  In addition to inspiring The Last Witch Hunter, Melkor also made his way into Diesel’s 2002 film xXx. As Xander Cage, Diesel sports a variety of fake tattoos, one of which is the name "Melkor."

  The inclusion of his D&D character can be considered a subtle nod to his nerdy roots while playing an extreme sports-loving rebel.
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  (#10) He's Going To Launch A New Comic Universe With 'Bloodshot'

  Vin Diesel is set to star in Bloodshot, a science-fiction/action film based on the Valiant Comics superhero that will be released in March 2020. The popular series includes over 110 issues and has sold over 7.4 million copies. Deadline reports that “Sony is being aggressive with this one,” calling it a “a franchise play.”

  In an interview, Diesel discussed what drew him to the comic book role: "[T]here’s something interesting about how the character doesn’t abandon his humanity. It’s not heightened reality, it’s based in reality. It deals with issues like post-traumatic stress disorder. The script was one of the most interesting scripts I’ve ever read."
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  (#11) He Recorded Groot's Voice In Foreign Languages And As Baby Groot

  In 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Vin Diesel voiced the animated character Groot. He was so committed to the character that he even provided the voice of Groot in a number of different languages for the film’s international release, including Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin Chinese, French, Russian, and Latin-American Spanish.

  Then in 2017, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 introduced the extremely adorable Baby Groot. Although this incarnation of the character stands in complete contrast to his buff, tough guy image and deep voice, Diesel rose to the occasion to voice Baby Groot.

  Director James Gunn told Entertainment Weekly that there was very little editing done in post-production to alter Diesel’s vocal performance. “I mean, there’s a tiny amount of processing that we do on a few of our characters, but it’s very little,” he said. “It’s mostly just Vin’s voice. He’s able to, you know, speak in a much higher register than he normally does.”

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