The bar is high for videogame voice acting in 2024—it's hard to accept anything less than excellence after the likes of Baldur's Gate 3 and Disco Elysium and so many other games have elevated their scripts with powerful performances.
But back in the '90s, that was far more the exception than the rule, a topic PC Gamer recently discussed with veteran game developers during a roundtable interview. «One of the hurdles, first of all, was the disdain that they had for videogames, like 'I'm a real actor, but whatever this is, it's gonna be silly,'» said Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia and the adventure game The Last Express.
Even when actors were brought in to work on a game, the circumstances of capturing their performances back then—especially for a rotoscoped production like The Last Express, which blurred the lines between analog and digital—were completely foreign to most of them. «As storytellers, to try to get them to believe in the reality of this character and this world without having a set built with costumes and all of the paraphernalia that would put them in the mood was a challenge in itself.
But it was so magic every time, that moment when the actors' eyes would light up and they would suddenly realize that this was a real character, a real situation, and they would start doing what they were capable of and what they were trained to do.» Khris Brown, who served as a voice editor and director at LucasArts in the '90s and later at Ubisoft, remembered that for most actors «their only understanding of media was really linear.» «Explaining interactivity, explaining the possibility of multiple outcomes and tracking emotional consistency throughout the multiple outcomes was a whole thing.
It was a learning process for us as well: How are we going to structure the scripts? How are we going to set up the recording so that the actors can stay in their own emotional moment?» As Mechner said, «The contempt from actors» was a real challenge for other early