Image Credit: Michael Nagle for The New York Times

Michael Hollick has voiced the most well-known character in the year’s biggest blockbuster game when he took on the role of Niko Bellic in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 4. Now Michael was paid for his work and at a little over union scale he took home roughly $100,000. Not nearly as much as a famous-faced screen actor would have netted for a large role such as this, and Mr. Hollick will most likely never see another dime for his work. No residuals or royalties will come his way at all even after his voice will be heard by millions in online campaign and television commercials due to the current structure between union contracts and the game developers and publishers themselves.

In our time of ultra-fast broadband connections and the flood of voiced media that we take in everyday the Screen Actors Guild will use this discrepancy in royalties as a central issue in negotiations that are set to take place this summer. The result may end up being an actor’s strike which parallel’s the writer’s strike of last summer.

“Obviously I’m incredibly thankful to Rockstar for the opportunity to be in this game when I was just a nobody, an unknown quantity,” Said Hollick, “But it’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games. Yes, the technology is important, but it’s the human performances within them that people really connect to, and I hope actors will get more respect for the work they do within those technologies.”

To the actor this is an issue getting paid equally for the same work done across the many mediums. To the games industry it’s also an argument of equality. If the actor performing the character’s voice is to get royalties then why couldn’t the designer who created the character receive them as well, or the programmer who created the character’s AI. When a movie or television show is created does the camera operating pull in a portion of the back-end?

“For instance, our contracts say nothing about the use of voices for promotional purposes over the Internet,” Mr. Hollick said. “The first G.T.A. IV trailer generated something like 40 million hits online, and that’s my voice all over it, and I get nothing. If that were a radio spot, I would have. Same thing for the TV ads. I recorded those lines for the game, but now they’re all over television. It’s another gray area.”

After this summer’s negotiations this may be a non-issue, but it may also take another work stoppage for it to come to fruition. Bringing these issues to light will hopefully be eye opening for those in the industries, the voice over industry and the gaming industry, but I hope it doesn’t discourage great talent from working in the electronic media. Video games offer an entirely new level of performance for the voice actors that you just won’t find in commercials or even some animated television.

“So we would have the 50 pages of screaming, 10 pages of being shot, 10 pages of being thrown off a roof, 20 pages of being burnt alive, just screaming,” Hollick said. “The ones being burnt alive were the best. And I’d just be like: ‘Bring me more hot tea and honey and lemon. Earl Grey.’ “

A Video Game Star and His Less-Than-Stellar Pay [New York Times]