The guys who do this a lot are absolute superheroes. One of our actors, the great Yuri Lowenthal is one of those guys who does that all day, every day. Same with Fred Tatasciore, another one of our VO pros. The majority of our cast is like that. Guys whose name you may not know off the top of your head, but you’ll recognize their voices or certainly their past work. Even for these professionals though, the sheer amount of work in Fallout: New Vegas was a bit daunting. Yuri plays MaleDefault01, which means he plays a lot of the random people you meet in the world. His script was the size of a phonebook.
What surprised me was when Rene Auberjonois – no stranger to VO work – said that he’d never played a role this size in a video game before. He plays Mr. House, our Howard Hughes-inspired overlord of the New Vegas strip. It’s a very meaty, very wordy role, and it’s pretty significant. Unless you go out of your way to do so, you’ll have at least a handful of encounters with that character while playing FNV. But anyway, Rene has been doing VO work for video games since the mid-90s. Pretty much as long as there have been games with VO, he’s been in them. So that was surprising. And as a huge Star Trek fan, (particularly Deep Space Nine, where he played Odo for seven seasons), I was overjoyed to work with him.
But, again, it’s hard work. And very different if the actor is used to on-camera acting. Danny Trejo, who plays Raul the Ghoul in Fallout: New Vegas was amused when we told him that we needed to stick pretty closely to the written script. He had just wrapped Machete, and I guess working with Robert Rodriguez is a very loose process, and the writer is the lowest guy on the totem pole. Unfortunately with a game like FNV, where we were simultaneously recording his role in multiple languages around the world, we needed to stick to the script. Let’s just say that there are very funny outtakes of Danny threatening the life of designer Travis Stout.
Working with these guys was really a delight, though. Wayne Newton – who had done some VO work before, but nothing quite as wacky as this – got so into it that he skipped breaks. He just powered through the script. He was also a pleasure to hang out with, loaded with stories of old Vegas. Felicia Day apparently missed the memo about being a celebrity, because she just quietly slipped into the studio while we were having lunch. She just sat out there in the waiting room like it was her dentist’s office until we looked over on the security camera and realized that it was her. Once we got her in the studio, though, she was all business. Really professional, no ego, open to direction. Pretty much exactly what you’d hope for.
I won’t say it was all smooth sailing, mind you. We did have some difficulties with some of our actors, which resulted in having to do some last minute recasting. And we had a lot of complications because the scripts were so large that designers were still writing them well into the recording process. But those problems were minimal, and for a project this size, you’d expect some kind of problems to come up. Looking back on it, it’s really quite amazing just how much we managed to get done in such a small period of time. More than a few actors would ask, “So, when is this coming out?” and after I told them, they’d look at me funny and say, “you mean this October?” I don’t know if anyone actually believed me.
Once the VO was recorded, Blindlight had a fleet of editors and engineers picking out our approved takes and delivering them to Obsidian for post-processing and integration into the game. It was a really daunting task that involved a ton of work by some of the best people in the business. Hopefully, everyone is as pleased with the end result as we all are.