Ada Wong (Resident Evil 2)

It Came from the Recording Booth #2: Solid Gold(man)

In this series, we review notably bad voice acting from old games, and determine just how bad they are, as well as look into whether or not any of the voice actors went on to do any more acting. This time, we gotta go fast to evaluate the acting in some of Sega’s earliest attempts.

It Came from the Recording Booth

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.