What’s it like when a gamer (who admits he’s never been in a recording studio before) is given a chance to be a voice actor for a day?
Bitmob.com blogger Aaron Thomas says he “jumped on the opportunity” and along with fellow site staffer Shanker Srinivasan visited game developer 2K Sports’ headquarters in Novato, CA to record “crowd chatter” for the upcoming video game MLB 2K10.
You can read about their experience here, which includes interviews with audio director Joel Simmons and sound editor Justin Rothaug.
MLB 2K10 will have “around 10,000 clips of crowd chatter [recorded by nearly] 60 actors”, and the game will feature such baseball legends as Ty Cobb, Dizzy Dean, Honus Wagner and Andre Dawson.
Thomas says that he had a “fantastic time during [his] stint as a voice actor,” and adds that he has “an all-new appreciation for the work that goes into making a game like MLB 2K10 sound as close to the real thing as possible.”
“I was tired after a few hours,” Thomas says, “So I can only imagine what it’s like for the in-game announcers — they’re there for 5-6 hours a day, sometimes for weeks. Then, folks like Joel and Justin have the task of implementing tens-of-thousands of dialogue lines into the game. And just when they finish, it’s time to do it again for next year.”
Here’s a brief video clip of Shanker’s performance in the studio:
