Is it because most big console games of the time were made by Japanese studios who only had access to like z-tier Canadian anime dub actors or the first three gaijins that walked past their offices?
Fallout 2 had fucking :warf-wtf: in it, not to mention numerous other examples of sci fi and horror convention regulars you'd see pop up in PC games of the era
i assume you answered your own question. you'll also witness this phenomena when white people show up in japanese movies/tv shows.
remembering the cringe acting and dialogue of the rich white people in Squid Game :data-laughing:
I'd also wager that another factor was that PC games were marketed at huge 🤓s and publishers figured that throwing some well-known genre actors in your scifi or fantasy game would make them appeal more to that demographic. Console games on the other hand were largely aimed at children, though the PS1 would start making moves for the teen to 20-something frat boy crowd that the Xbox would embrace
I didn't have a gaming PC until about 2001-ish so I missed out on a lot of titles that were using big name voice talent. But I will say I was blown away with MGS1 back when and still am, it set the bar for voice work in a console game pretty high.
Video game voice acting just wasn't a "real" job back then. A lot of game devs did the voice acting themselves, for example. It wasn't generally seen as something important. I think the advancements of sound quality and generally of video games as a storytelling medium were necessary for people to start to consider video game voice acting a serious thing.
I would love to do the voice acting for games I work on. It would be complete dogshit but in a funny way I hope
Acting first, voice second. It's a lot easier to sound natural when it's your, y'know, natural voice.
Just study Deus Ex and you can certainly get the funny part down.
Is it because most big console games of the time were made by Japanese studios who only had access to like z-tier Canadian anime dub actors or the first three gaijins that walked past their offices?
I suspect it's this. The dude who did Jame's voice in Silent Hill 2 was a chainsaw salesman who just happened to be living in Japan with his daughter iirc, his kid tried out for a part and he got hired instead.
of all the Guys out there, he sure is a Guy. That's the best I can say about him.
I've always wondered as well. I was watching a dubbed cutscene of one of my favorite childhood games, Legend of Dragoons, and I laughed so hard at how bad it was.
I'm going with you, Chris is our old partner, y'know?!
Okay, let ME handle THIS.
RE 1 is a gem and I wish the franchise kept the camp voice work and live action scenes, it's so :marx-ok:
I seriously argue that the voice acting in CDi's Wand of Gamelon and Faces of Evil was the least bad part of those games. :morshupls:
Not even his first game.
He made an appearance in Mission Critical back in 95.
Someone recently posted a video about the voice acting for the original RE that pointed out something about the industry back then. Games like RE were made by Japanese developers who didn't speak much English. There's several layers of communication and translation between the original writers, the translators, the English script editors, and the voice crew. The actors wouldn't get a script that put everything into context; they'd typically get a big spreadsheet full of lines to record, and they'd go down the list one at a time, using different takes and emphasis just to cover all the bases and make the publisher happy.
The Japanese director gets the English voice lines back, hears "STOP it, don't OPEN that DOOR" and goes "ooh I like the cadence of this one" and uses it for the final game.
It was an international game of Telephone, using 1990s technology. These recordings were delivered by mail. It was a unique product of the time and available technology.
IIRC one of the classic "bad voice acting" games had its voice cast picked by physical resemblance to the ingame models, maybe it was Shenmue?
It wasn't just a thing in the 90s, it kept happening in Japanese titles for a while afterwards, like in Deadly Premonition. The game is heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, and EVERYONE in it maddeningly keeps pronouncing the first name of the story's Laura Palmer equivalent, Anna Graham, as "Ah-nah". It's not the only bit of weirdly stilted acting in that game but the same odd pronounciation is so consistent it must have been some bizarre insistence on part of the devs.
Answer for Asia/Eastern Europe/Latin America games: Not many people spoke English and it was rare to find someone who spoke without an accent. They had to get random Anglophonic people they knew. Most of the time, the script was translated wrong and the "voice actors" didn't care.
Answer for American/Western European games: They didn't have enough money to pay for good voice actors, so they used some staff members as voice actors.
