Current Events > Ever wonder why video game voice acting was so bad in the 1990s?

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I think an actor named Blum or something explained why in an interview. Studios wanted to churn out games quickly. He said he would only get one chance at each line. He'd be voicing multiple characters from multiple games in the same day. He had no knowledge of any of the characters to work off of.

Gee, it sure is BORING around here!

Not sure I remember what game that's from.

ExtremeLuchador posted...

actor named Blum

Bro.

It also didn't help that some of the voice actors had no experience in voice acting at all, and I presume, being friends and family of the dev team rewarded for their contribution with a six pack of their preferred beer.

archedsoul posted...

Bro.

Lol

Oh! My car!

imagine thinking you have to know a character's childhood to know how to emote to another human being

myztikrice posted...

imagine thinking you have to know a character's childhood to know how to emote to another human being

I meant they didn't even know the character's name sometimes.

They recorded it a lot like how the dialogue read in their heads lol.....
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Cheese was adored & often voice work was made to match perceived quality in animation or graphics or maturity level. The is I think if your audience is supposed to be a child, then talk at them like they're a child. I think they were emulating stuff like Star Wars or Power Rangers too....

Elder Scrolls & Fallout, for example, have yet to break this rule. Characters all kinda look like shit. The recordings kinda sound like shit. Makes for cohesive experience and encourages combat/exploration.

GTA does the same thing. NPCs in general, especially throwaway NPCs, tend to have a lower polygon count and a lower quality audio in their voice to match.... The player may end up viewing them as annoying or unimportant, and flee off to find the boss of the level, or try to kill the NPC, which are exciting & addictive staples of the gameplay. They also tend to lean on lower quality recordings so as not to raise the bar too high on what the player expects from the rest of the game. Also, by keeping it cartoony, they can match better with other multimedia... like cartoons for example. What voice work was done in the SNES days was equally cheesey if not way way worse too, so they were largely working from that point.

Because all of the voice acting budget for all 90s games went into this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jxr68j0n7Q

this room is huge

I remember playing Xenogears a few years back and the ending had a cutscene where they voiced the characters for some odd reason, with the most laughably terrible voice acting ever. I had to hold my sides from laughter, it was just so random and cringey to boot. There was no reason to suddenly voice the characters out of nowhere.

But I think this is entirely relegated to Japanese games. Personally I think the voice acting of computer games and other western games was quite stellar. I was actually shocked when I played older 90s crpgs and heard how much better the voice acting was compared to japanese games of the same era

90s voice acting was better, this "let's try to sound like movies and have 30 minutes of dialogue" bs is lame

Perfect Dark had some great voice acting.

Huh? Radio? What's going on with that radio?