[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!
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.