God of War 2 by SCEA

Greg deBeer, the Dialog Manager for Sony Computer Entertainment of America Foster City, sat down with Gamasutra and gave a very candid interview on the state of dialog and voice over’s in the video game industry. In this six page interview deBeer’s speaks of finding that original voice for a game, casting actors for their range, and most interestingly his thoughts on celebrities doing voice over for video games.

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This weekend brought Stephanie from Vox Daily to the Voice Coaches Marketing Expo down in New York and with it came great voice over panels and discussions. Now a days you can’t have a proper discussion about the future of voice over without mentioning the huge potential in the video game industry.

At the Expo Evan Skolnick, VO Producer at Vicarious Visions, put on an interesting panel about the state of voice over in the gaming sector today and Stephanie has a nice write-up about it and some facts and tips about the industry as a whole. Of course, one of the most important tips is still to play the games!

Some of the more interesting aspects of the article is just the shear volume of dialogue that goes into a video game as opposed to a movie. Your standard movie averages out at about 2,000 lines of dialogue as opposed to a video game which average tops out at roughly 8,000 lines! But it doesn’t end there as your blockbuster, voice-heavy games such as Mass Effect and Fallout 3 can have as many as 70,000 lines of dialogue! Try imagining reading 70,000 lines. You may need a glass of water after that session.

The article as a whole is a concise, handy guide to the seemingly wide open world that is video game voice acting and a recommended bookmark for all interested.

Game On : Gaming Voiceovers - via Vox Daily

With Grand Theft Auto IV being released on April 29th it stands to be the largest game in the series with help from its extensive music and audio tracks. With that in mind I thought it would be fun to take a look at some past GTA voice over recording sessions.

This video takes us all the way back to the turn of the century when recording for GTA Vice City began. Vice City is known for its enormous cast of big name actors providing voices for the game and developer RockStar just happen to have a camera rolling as they recorded their characters. Please keep in mind that this was an M Rated game and the language may not be suitable for everyone.