[Editor’s note: For the past week or so, we’ve been running a series of posts from Jason Bergman, senior producer at Bethesda Softworks. Jason’s a nice guy and an unique game industry figure because he’s worked as a journalist, a publicist and has been on the developer side for a few years now. He’s graced Techland with his wit and wisdom about everything from breaking into games to behind-the-scenes glimpses of the making of Fallout: New Vegas. We’ve been super-glad to have him on board and think you’ll enjoy his insights.]
What’s come before:
The Bergman Files: So You Want to Work in Games, Huh?
The Bergman Files: Ten of the Best Visions of the Post Apocalypse
The Bergman Files: How to Be Evil in Video Games
The Bergman Files: Five Funny Bugs Eradicated from Fallout: New Vegas
One of the best parts of working on Fallout: New Vegas was getting to oversee the production of the game’s voiceover work. It was no small task. Fallout: New Vegas–as an open world RPG–is extremely large, and even for a game like this it’s big.
How big are we talking about? Your average six-hour action game has probably 2,000 lines of dialog. And, by “lines,” I mean any time a character makes a sound, so that’s everything from full-on dialog sequences to those “ugh!” and “aargh!” hit reactions. A linear RPG with some side quests might have something in the area like 12,000 to 16,000 lines of dialog. That accounts for all the lines from the main quest as well as side quests. With a really big game like Fallout 3, you’re talking around 45,000 lines of dialog. That’s a core storyline containing dozens of main characters, hundreds of random people in the world, key cinematic sequences and so on. That’s a lot of dialog. Fallout: New Vegas? We had well over 60,000 lines. A lot of that is because we have so many different situations to worry about – is the player male or female? Are they aligned with faction X or Y? Have they killed person Z? We have a lot of alternate versions of our lines. Which doesn’t make the whole process any easier.
We spent over 600 hours recording all that dialog (at one point we had four studios going simultaneously), recording over 70 actors. It was a pretty crazy task undertaken by myself, Mikey Dowling (the dialog producer at Obsidian), and some very hard working people at Blindlight, our Hollywood casting and audio production agency.
It’s very easy to fall into a “let’s get celebrities!” mindset when casting a project like this, but I think we did a good job avoiding that. Yes, we have celebrities in the game, but whenever we cast one, we did it because we felt they would be right for the character and the game. Also the actor’s enthusiasm for the project definitely helped.
When we were thinking about casting Matthew Perry, we had a meeting with him and his people where we just sat around and talked about games for a few hours. He’s really, really into Fallout, and was supe- excited at the thought of being in the game. And while he hadn’t done any voiceover work before, his enthusiasm for the project meant he was willing to work very hard to get it right.
And that’s something people tend to miss about voiceover – it’s very, very hard work. Not every actor who appears on camera is capable of doing it. You’re in a soundproof room with a script you may have never seen before, being asked to act entirely with your voice. Forget doing cartoon voices; just try emoting without using your body at all. It ain’t easy. Now, imagine doing that for six hours a day!