So, Jack, just a few questions for you because you worked on a ton of 2K games, obviously. And I think by and large, the stuff that you’ve worked on has had really exceptional voice work. I mean, BioShock is a standout in everybody’s mind.
Jack: Thank you.
But, at the same time, lots of video games suffer from terrible voice work. Either they’re horribly overacted or performances lack any kind of energy, any kind of vitality. It sounds like they’re phoning it in. What do you think is happening there?
Jack: Well, in my experience it’s been…in my younger days, not at this company, I worked on a bunch of titles that really didn’t have strong voice acting. I was always so into the story element of it and the characters. And it would just pull me out of the experience. So when I started at 2K, I did the math and everything. This was way back in the day when we used to operated under budgets and all this other stuff, working on licensed titles, and things like that. I did the math, and I figured out it was actually cheaper, faster and better to do it once and do it right even though it’s more expensive than doing it the easy way and then having to do it again because you screwed it up. So the first thing that you got to do is you got to come at it with enough of a budget, it can’t be just an afterthought. You can’t just hire your friends and just let the developers do the voices. You have to hire real actors. And it takes time to find the right actor. Like for the part of Joe, I went through every goomba in New York City and LA before we found Bobby. So you have to be willing to put in the time and the money to get the casting right. From there, it’s a matter of the performance. You are not going to get the same performance if you record one actor at a time like most games end up doing. That’s why, I called around, I found a studio that had stages enough to accommodate five or six actors, plus the director, plus some of our animators, a film crew, things like that. Like Bobby said, we ended up doing as a radio play. And that just adds to the natural flow of the dialogue. Especially as a nice bonus for us, I think every single one of the main characters knew each other and had worked with the other one before.
Bobby: When we were having a particularly tough time with a piece of dialogue or a part of a scene, we would actually have a guy get out of the booth because we were in separate stalls and look at us almost like off camera close up in a film and just get it right from him, his stuff being off camera. And then you get your stuff. Just playing right off him. Because that does help. That does help. There’s nothing quite like doing it to someone else. Hopefully, that comes through in the final product.