Actors Eye Video-Game Voices

Merle Dandridge in "Half Life 2"


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Actors Eye Video-Game Voices
Trained Performers Tap a Market Seeking Higher Audio Quality
By Paul Hyman

Video game developers and publishers believe that "a high level of voice talent is an excellent way for them to distinguish their product in a video games market that has become increasingly more competitive," explains Brent Weinstein, a talent agent at United Talent Agency who specializes in deals involving interactive entertainment. "It's also good for the game, especially if it's based on a film or TV license. If you're going to make a game based on a movie we'll call 'Super Dude,' what better way to give the gamer an extension of the filmgoing experience than to feature the voice of Johnny Superstar, who played Super Dude in the movie, rather than some unknown's voice?"

But what does signing an A-list celebrity do to a game's budget?"

"An A-list actor participating in a game that's based on a big licensed product can expect to make six digits for a job," says Weinstein. "But it's well worth it, especially if the voice acting of a name actor is going to help the publisher differentiate his game from the other games out there."Some game developers, however, absolutely refuse to pay that much for celebrity talent, and one of them is Valve Software, whose "Half-Life 2" soared to No. 1 on the NPD Group's list of best-selling PC games in December."The going rate for audio talent is $570 for a four-hour day," says Bill Van Buren, content lead for the game, "and we paid everybody more than that. Our entire voiceover budget was a six-digit number, probably a little less than 1% of our entire budget of $40 million plus."Valve didn't budget more for voice over work simply because the original game, in 1998, got fairly high marks for its voice talent -- and the budget then was a total of just $10,000."

Frankly, we didn't think we'd sell a lot more copies by putting stars' names on the box given who our audience is," adds Van Buren. "It didn't seem to us that we'd get huge returns on a bigger investment."Van Buren explains that the production team was less interested in name value than it was in two things: achieving a level of voice acting that was on a par with the game's sophisticated graphics and technology, and creating "flexible" working conditions with the actors."If we could get somebody at a cheaper rate, we could do more sessions with them," says Van Buren. "And we do tend to make lots of changes until we get it right. It would be really hard to work with a diva on that kind of process. As it turned out, we actually got the best of both worlds. We were able to get the people we wanted and we got them at a rate where we could do several sessions with them and not break the budget."

Work With a Casting Director

The team wanted to bring back a few of the original game's actors for nostalgia's sake, and then worked with a casting director to identify the actors who could best fill the other roles."It may run contrary to what other developers feel, but for us the game and the characters come first," says Valve director of marketing Doug Lombardi. "In that spirit, we cast Robert Culp because we thought he'd make a great Dr. Wallace Breen, not because we thought we'd sell more copies with Robert Culp in the game. Similarly, we'd made a note on one character profile sheet that we should find 'someone like Robert Guillaume' for the part of Dr. Eli Vance. Then, to our surprise, we discovered that we could actually get Robert Guillaume."

The 130-page script was quite larger than the typical movie script, and each actor was recorded individually in three to six sessions of one to four hours each. Most of the work took place in a recording studio in Los Angeles, but occasionally, when an actor couldn't leave New York or San Francisco, they were connected to the studio by ISDN line and the directing was done long-distance."We found that the actors really liked working in this format; it was very casual for them," says Van Buren. "They didn't have to be on camera; there was no makeup or setup or anything. They just came in and we went at it. The reason each actor was recorded individually was so we could be sure we got the quality of performance we wanted for every single line."While it may have been true at one time that A-list actors had no interest in video game work, UTA's Weinstein says games have become so mainstream, and "everyone has heard the statistics about software sales, that most actors understand that games are no longer the ugly stepchild of TV and films."

Indeed, some actors are such big gamers that they view video game work as an exciting opportunity, while others don't necessarily understand the medium and need a bit more coaxing.The role that the Valve team found the most challenging to cast was that of Alyx Vance, who, according to Van Buren, needed to be sweet and feminine and then turn into "an incredibly strong action hero." The casting director did tryouts for the part with 100 actors and recommended 50 to the team, who narrowed the list down to the five best possibilities. They flew to Los Angeles and live readings were done with all five."It was immediately clear who the best person was," says Lombardi, "but we had to throw a pretty wide net in order to cast that one character."The role went to Merle Dandridge, a Broadway actress who has appeared in "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Aida" and who can currently be seen as Joanne Jefferson in "Rent." But, she says, the clear majority of her fan mail now comes from "Half-Life 2" fans."When I was first approached to do the project, the guy in my life thought I'd gotten the coolest job in the entire world. But, frankly, I had no idea what a big deal this was. And I don't think I really began to understand the magnitude of it until I started getting feedback from the public," she recalls. "Every time I'd mention to someone that I was in 'Half-Life 2,' they got so excited. There's this entire community out there that I had no idea existed."She admits she's no gamer and that she really needs to buy a more powerful computer before she can build up her "game-playing muscles."

Dandridge had been in Los Angeles guest-starring in several TV shows when she received a call from her agent asking if she'd like to do some voice over work. She recalls that her first reaction was that this was an opportunity to try something new and different, and that maybe she could learn something from the experience."My voice over work had been minimal and I was concerned that maybe I couldn't do the job," she explains. "But I worked with the Valve people for six sessions over a span of a year and a half, and I think they were very pleased with my delivery."Her only regret was not having the opportunity to meet her co-stars -- Culp, Guillaume, and Louis Gossett, Jr. Instead, her performances were done solo, responding only to their recorded dialogue.She describes the gig as much more lucrative than some of the TV work she's done and definitely less time-consuming. On TV, she says, her shooting days are 12 hours long; her entire workload on "Half-Life 2" took no longer than 15 hours over 18 months.
Would she do another videogame?"

Absolutely!" she says without hesitation. "I can't even tell you how great this experience was. If there is a 'Half-Life 3' -- heck, I'd work for Valve anytime. They were so good to me, so generous, that I can't say enough good things about them. If I can do more video game work, I certainly will."Dandridge may have that opportunity. According to Valve's Lombardi, as game production becomes more and more professional, game actors will need to be as good as actors in any other medium."I'm expecting to see more voice talent in games rather than less," he says. "From our point of view, it's a quality issue, not a marketing or promotional issue."And while it may increase game production budgets even further, Lombardi describes the cost as insignificant compared to the quality it can instill in a game."If you spend all this time developing great digital actors and then the minute they open their mouths, the whole illusion falls apart," he says, "using excellent voice talent is a no-brainer."