Kevin Bacon's Appearance In The MCU Just Made An Old Party Game Much Easier

The game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, aka The Kevin Bacon Game — an old party competition where one person names an actor and the other person has to link that performer to Kevin Bacon in six steps or less — is a relic of the earliest days of the Internet. According to the EIDR blog, the whole game began with a 1994 interview with Premiere Magazine where Bacon said he had worked with almost everyone in the industry, or at least someone they had worked with. This sparked a message board thread that eventually resulted in a group of Albright College students inventing the now-famous game.

The game has taken on a life of its own at this point. The website The Oracle of Bacon can basically do the whole game for you, and it can usually do it in a lot less than six steps. It also gives out the Bacon number for each celebrity, which is the number of degrees that actor is from Kevin Bacon. That being said, according to The Toronto Star, you can just Google someone's name and the words "Bacon number" and Google will calculate the number for you. Collider even put together a list of the 11 movie casts to memorize to easily win the game. The "Footloose" actor even launched his non-profit, SixDegrees.org, in 2007, a website that uses the concept of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to match important charities to celebrity backers.

"The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special" stars Kevin Bacon as himself and, in doing so, the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe just dropped a Bacon number.

In "The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special," Drax (Dave Bautista) and Mantis (Pom Klementieff) try to give Peter "Star-Lord" Quill (Chris Pratt) Kevin Bacon as a Christmas present. It's a heartwarming and hilarious story of aliens who don't understand human boundaries trying to do something nice for a friend. In doing so, they've just made Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon a lot easier. Not only does it now mean that the entire cast of this holiday special has been in a project with Kevin Bacon — a cast that already includes such big names as Chris Pratt and Vin Diesel — but since the entire MCU is interconnected and all the characters end up overlapping with each other's properties, every single cast member in the entire MCU is now connected to Kevin Bacon. That's 30 movies before one even begins to factor in all of the MCU television shows.

As Atom Tickets points out, however, there was already a link to Kevin Bacon that went through the MCU. Josh Brolin, who played Thanos in "Avengers: Infinity War" and "Avengers: Endgame," was also in "Hollow Man" with none other than Kevin Bacon. But Bacon actually being in the MCU removes one degree of separation and a lot of the actors to appear in the MCU now have lower Bacon numbers. And with the MCU being so extensive, the entire game could pretty much be called The Two Degrees of Kevin Bacon at this point.