Bad acting in video games! It’s funny, but if we dig a little deeper, what else can we find? The simple reasons why so much of the acting in early games was so bad, whether or not some of these actors went on to do any more acting, and some of the technical reasons why it was so poor. Let’s jump in!
This YouTube video has the answers to the basic question of why acting in early games was so bad:
If you can’t or don’t want to watch the video (which I highly recommend), to sum up the most common reasons: No one had any idea what they were doing back then, the people involved usually didn’t really care about what they were doing, most of the budget went to other aspects of development (leading to members of the dev teams having to attempt to act; I don’t envy being in this position), actors usually performed alone and with little knowledge of context or character relationships (which a good director would provide), and their equipment sometimes wasn’t quite up to snuff, either, with bad microphones. I would posit a few other factors: Some of the people involved with acting and direction didn’t take games seriously, no one really had many connections to experienced actors and directors, and let’s be honest – game writing usually wasn’t that great back in the day. Games were frequently content to regurgitate fantasy/science fiction tropes to justify basic plots. Another aspect to this is how abysmal some of the Japanese-to-English localizations were at the time, as we’ll see in many examples.
Last Call for Last Alert
Oh, dear. Protagonist Guy Kazama of the CIA may be a bad enough dude to rescue the President, but he’s not bad enough to save us from this hack dub and its strangely earnest localization choices. The game plays out like a Metal Gear Solid parody warped back in time.
Highlights include a hostage that sounds like a Muppet and Kazama’s sick burns to some of the bosses:
“This river’s gonna turn red with your blood!”
Kazama: “How interesting, but it’s gonna be YOUR blood, not mine!”
He fares better in this exchange:
Colonel: “How DARE you kill these precious men who I’ve trained!”
Kazama: “Well, Colonel, you haven’t done a very good JOB of training them!”
We would truly be remiss if we didn’t include this famous exchange:
Steve: “You’ve shown me some fancy action here. The damages on this ship and the weapons aboard will come to a billion dollars.”
Kazama: “People will HATE you, Steve, if you’re too sting-y!”
And then, there’s… whatever this is:
Garcia: “Why would a hireling soldier like YOU run such a risk to torment ME like this? WHY?!”
Kazama: “Garcia, no one can hire my feelings!”
Kazama missed his calling, he has the soul of a poet. Less poetic is the bad lip syncing of some scenes.
Did the cast do anything else? Bad news, my hirelings: I couldn’t find any credits for the English dub cast, understandably.
The legacy: LA made the early rounds of the bad voice acting hall of fame when gaming magazines began to look a little into the past to have more content to talk about/make fun of. It was also the subject of a Retsupurae video. God, I miss Retsupurae.
Side note: It sure is something that Kazama cost a billion dollars of damage to the ship and its weapons, huh?
Here Cap-comes a New Challenger
Capcom! You love them, I love them, even in their mistakes. And none of their voice acting mistakes were bigger than in the original Resident Evil. Despite the acting, the game was a worldwide smash and an instant horror classic. But even back when RE was new, everyone dragged the voice acting.
A couple of notes: There were separate actors for the live-action scenes and the actual vocal performances, and Capcom refrained from having a Japanese dub because the quality wasn’t up to snuff.
Highlights: Chris going through reverse puberty screaming Rebecca’s name, and neither Barry nor Jill knowing what anything is:
Barry: “What is it?” “What is this?”
Jill: “What is it?”
“Blood! Hope it’s not Chris’ blood.”
Before Barry encounters a zombie (“What is it?”), and after (“What IS it?!”).
Jill: “What is all of this about?! I can’t figure it out at all.”
An infamous moment:
Barry: “That was too close! You were almost a Jill sandwich.”
Yeah, about this one. I didn’t know for years and years that a “sandwich” can also be a crude sexual reference. Capcom was probably just as ignorant of it as I was…
The moment when they encounter Forrest’s corpse:
Barry: “It’s Forrest. Oh my god!” (Said with so much emphasis that people frequently joke that he’s actually saying “cod”)
When Barry gives Jill a weapon, he says that it’s “really powerful, especially against living things!”
There are some inconsistencies with the script, like when the monsters are called “demons”, which is just a bit too metaphysical for what’s actually going on, and when the mansion is referred to as a mere “house”. That allows us to segue to Richard’s horrid performance: “This house is… dangerous! There are terrible demons… Ouch!” Sure, he was poisoned and wounded, but one isn’t convinced by this acting. In the remake, Richard’s performance is better and far easier to take seriously. It’s actually a little sad if you try to save Richard by providing him with an antidote, only to have him die protecting Jill from the giant snake that poisoned him in the first place. Richard, the underrated MVP of RE1.
Later, when Jill finds Barry in the lab:
Barry: “Jill! You’re here, too!”
Jill: “Yes, you’re here, too?!” Is there an echo in here?
When our intrepid duo learns about the “ultimate monster”, Tyrant:
Barry: “Do you think we could see… Tyrant… now?”
Jill: “Barry, you’re so optimistic.”
While we’re at it, we’ve been neglecting our snide old buddy Wesker, so let’s fix that right now. When he’s menaced by the Tyrant, he screams, “Don’t come this way! Nooo!” Some of these older Japanese games had the line, “Don’t come this way”, or worse, “Don’t come”, creating a fair bit of confusion and amusement among players familiar with English.
Jill and Barry have been having all of the fun, and that just ain’t fair, so let’s make fun of how weird Chris is when he accepts medic Rebecca’s offer to heal him: “Yes, please do something for me, temporarily!” I will say that Rebecca’s voice is pretty adorable, at least.
How about when Wesker corners Chris to show him Tyrant? “I’m soar-y for my lack of manners, but I’m not used to escorting men.” Yeah, we know. Pertinent to this conversation, Wesker is apparently Canadian, not British. I’ll give the actor points for making Wesker drip with sarcasm when he drops the mask of being the captain of the STARS Alpha Team, though.
Finally, in the ending where Chris survives with Rebecca, he seriously undersells how “weird” the case at the mansion was. Now to be fair, Capcom didn’t know how huge RE would be, but this example stands out because PTSD became a main component of Chris’ (admittedly somewhat inconsistent) character!
Did the cast do anything else? Hold onto your butt, because that is a definitive yes for some members of the cast. Clay Enniss (Richard Aiken) had one more role in a video game: Deep Fear, Sega’s big swing at their own horror IP. Dean Harington (Enrico Marini) has a bunch of credits for action flicks and some other video games, most prominently Super Smash Bros. Melee (Announcer/Master Hand/Crazy Hand). He also played a character in T.R.A.G.: Mission of Mercy, another RE-influenced game with criticized voice acting. Lynn Harris (Rebecca Chambers) has a lot of credits for video games, such as Sonic Mania (Amy Rose), Michigan: Report from Hell (yet another horror game with some bizarrely bad voice acting, during the mid-2000s, no less), Shenmue, Tekken Tag Tournament (Michelle Chang), Skies of Arcadia, Crazy Taxi, T.R.A.G., Clock Tower, various Tekken and Virtua Fighter games, and Soul Blade (Sophitia). Sergio Jones (Brad Vickers) has some live-action credits, but his sole other game credit is in DF (jeez, was this game an unofficial reunion for RE1 voice actors?). Ramsay Scott (Chris Redfield) only has video games to his name, and he seems to have stopped working in voiceover after 1999. For most of his credits, he worked under the name Scott McCulloch. He voiced Paul Phoenix in Tekken 1 and 2, and voiced the narrator in some game called Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He also did some incidental voices in The House of the Dead 1 and 2 and in Shenmue. Ward Sexton, also known as Ward E. Sexton, did the title call for RE1 and 4, and he did some motion capture for Silent Hill 2, as well as the voice for Ernest Baldwin in the “Born from a Wish” scenario in Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams.
Finally, perhaps the most notorious example, Barry Gjerde (Barry Burton), AKA Barry Oddbjorn Gjerde AKA Bally Syardi, has a few other game credits to his name: SB (Cervantes/Narrator), CT (Rick), Tobal No. 1 and 2, Legend of Legaia, Countdown Vampires (another RE wannabe that I’ve been morbidly curious about for years; maybe someday, it’ll make the YouTube rounds), WinBack: Covert Operations, Shenmue II, and the infamous NightCry. It’s safe to say, however, that Harris is by far the most successful of these actors in terms of the number of credits that she has.
How does it compare? I actually feel that the acting in RE1 is weaker than LA. Allow me to explain: I think that the people behind LA at least tried to do some different accents. They largely failed, but it was an effort to do something a little out of their comfort zone. I think that I’m more critical of RE1 because it’s the first entry in a series that I care about.
How did this happen? No one had any idea what they were doing. A lot of the dialog is nauseatingly literal due to a localization that was just that: overly literal. Derek Alexander came to the same conclusion in one of his videos, where he declared that the game didn’t suffer from a bad translation, but a poor localization.
The legacy: RE1 has some of the most famous bad acting in video games, but Capcom improved greatly in subsequent games, and they have been a good sport about it, giving a nod to the terrible dialog with the Jill’s Sandwiches shop in Dead Rising. Without getting too deeply into spoiler territory, Barry reappears as a playable character in Resident Evil Revelations 2, and they do something pretty awesome with one of his old, corny lines, against all odds.
Mega Bad Acting… to the Eighth Power!
Mega Man 8 didn’t get off easily, either, letting down the nice style of the anime cutscenes.
Highlights: Bad lip sync. Someone decided to give the kindly Dr. Light a strange, Elmer Fudd lisp, which isn’t an idea that I hate out of hand, but the dub was clearly rushed. MM8 has prominent examples of flubbed takes making it into a commercially released game, but it’s not the only one…
“We must recover all the energy immediately, W-Mega Man!”
Mega Man: “But where is Dr. Wiley?!”
“That’s a good question. We may a-be able to locate another energy emission from the radar room.”
How does it compare? Well, at least the actors in RE1 refrained from any mispronunciations. I think that the lack of obvious bloopers in RE1 may actually make MM8 the worst example of voice acting on this entire page!
Did the cast do anything else? Ruth Shiraishi played Mega Man, and also voiced X in Mega Man X4. Jack Evans, who voiced Light, Auto, and Frost Man, only has one other acting credit to his name: Pepsi Man?! Who, I stress, is not a Mega Man robot master. He’s a Pepsi mascot in Japan.
Mega Man X4: Zero Has a Meltdown
A girl that Zero liked, Iris, has seemingly died. Zero… doesn’t take it well.
“No, this can’t be happening! There’s no reason for me to go on- What- what am I fighting foooRRRUGGGH?!”
This somehow sounds much less emotional than the punctuation may suggest.
The dub suffers from some seriously rushed takes to fit the lip flaps. With hindsight, they should have shortened the lines to fit better, while still conveying what they wanted to.
This dub does Zero so dirty.
Did the cast do anything else? Wayne Doster (Zero) also had roles in DF and Shenmue.
How does it compare? Better than MM8 and RE1, but not as kitschy as LA.
Side note: At least they got Johnny Yong Bosch to play Zero in the English dub for Marvel vs Capcom 3. That game was the best~
Well, that’s all for now. Let me know if you want another installment of this wacky new series.
Video Game Journals 