Studios like Keith Arem’s PCB Productions oversees voice casting, recording and sound design for games. Above is its mix stage.

Technological advances in gaming (highlighted by the introduction of Sony’s PlayStation 2 and the Microsoft Xbox at the beginning of the decade) have brought with them new creative challenges. Videogaming is evolving and redefining itself as it goes along; the people bringing these self-contained worlds to simulated life are simultaneously responding to and determining and the course this evolution is taking. Both original games and ones based on established movie/TV franchises strive to give players the most “immersive,” as close to real-life experience possible. The goal of realism on every level — from animation to historical detail — translates into the need for a new, more realistic style of voice acting.

“Prior to [the new Xbox and PlayStation systems] it didn't make sense to invest in professional acting talent, because game-playing was kind of a shallow experience,” says Lev Chapelsky, gm of Blindlight, a leading provider of production services to videogame studios. “The animation was pretty raw and the music didn’t have to be that great. But with that increase in the multimedia capabilities we realized the game producers needed to stop using their in-house recording engineers and animators as their actors — some guy from the accounting department reading a few lines into an Apple PC.”

Blindlight was well positioned to seize the moment — its core group of creatives was once part of icebox.com, an ambitious, ahead-of-its-time website producing original animation. The dot-com crash took place almost simultaneously with the arrival of the new game systems; Chapelsky and his associates basically stepped off a sinking ship and onto a new, more seaworthy one sailing by.

“Icebox was all about doing great entertainment production and testing it out online. We had this fantastic team and all this networking capability in Hollywood. When that thing went south there were a lot of people that didn't want to necessarily step back into their old jobs. So we said, ‘You know what guys, you don’t have to go away, let’s just re-direct you into the videogame world because they’re going to make this console jump and they’re going to need your services and they’re not going to go away.’

Blindlight’s Lev Chapelsky notes that prior to the next-gen gaming systems, no one invested in real acting talent. But now, game producers don’t use the accounting guy to read lines into an Apple PC.

“The game producers needed to bring in professional actors. When they’re investing a lot more money into realistic visual animation for the new consoles, bad voice acting from amateurs brings down the whole level of the experience — it was the weakest link in chain. You’re kind of throwing away the money you’re investing in that animation.”

While an earlier generation of hard-core gamers may have enjoyed the cheesy, grunt-‘n-groan heavy dialog of a first-person shooter game like Doom, the medium’s growing audience was turning to more sophisticated games that featured dozens or even hundreds of speaking characters. L.A.-area studios like Chapelsky’s Blindlight and Keith Arem’s PCB Productions began overseeing voice casting, recording and sound design, creating a new source of work for Hollywood’s pool of voice-over talent. According to Chapelsky, “There are two types of talent that make sense for games. The first are voice artists who are not household names and deliver vocal performances in character.”

Keith Arem breaks this group down into two subcategories: “The ones who do tons of voices, maybe 10 or 15 voices, but, while they have a huge range, they have no one distinctive main voice, and others who do have that distinctive voice, but can’t do a lot of other voices. If they try some, they’re too close to their original voices. Whenever you’re doing casting it’s a good thing to balance between the two.” Chapelsky adds that these voice artists are “typically scale actors and frankly they’re much better at this than the other category, which consists of well-known names — celebrities.”

A number of factors have conspired to make film and TV actors more prominent in the industry, not the least of which are games based on their movies and TV shows. Improved CGI game animation makes their digital doppelgangers look ever more accurate and lifelike, while effects and virtual environments can be adapted from special effects-oriented films and imported into the games.