Movie legend Sir Ben Kingsley told CVG today that he is to star in Fable III. Kingsley joins the growing cast of famous British actors lending their voices to the game alongside controversial chat show host Jonathan Ross and Monty Python star John Cleese.
“[Games] are as big a jump now as I suppose when cinema was invented,” said Kingsley. “People went from the stage to the cinema thinking ‘It’s not really acting, is it?’ Now, it’s video games, and it is acting. It’s very demanding.”
Kingsley will be voicing the King of Mist Peak, a character the actor describes as a “wonderful wizard character”.
Either Peter Molyneux has very famous friends, or big-name performers are starting to consider videogames a legitimate use of their talents. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, though. In the mid-90s, we saw all manner of actors lending their likenesses and voices to a wide selection of games. The final three entries in the Wing Commander saga featured Mark Hamill, Tom Wilson and, inexplicably, porn actress Ginger Lynn Allen. Sierra’s Gabriel Knight featured Tim Curry, Michael Dorn and Mark Hamill again. And Take Two’s Ripper featured Christopher Walken and John Rhys-Davies.
Since then, celebrity voiceovers have fallen somewhat out of favor. Video game and animation specialists such as Cam Clarke and Jennifer Hale came to the fore in their stead. And, of course, who could ignore Nolan North’s ubiquity? Is Fable III a sign of what we have to look forward to, though? Are more “proper” actors going to start lending their voices to video games?
Kingsley certainly seems to think that video games have a new air of legitimacy about them. Or is it just that Lionhead have enough money to throw around that they can get these actors to say whatever they want?
Who will be next to lend their famous voice to a video game? Ian McKellen? Alan Rickman? Ewan McGregor?
Hopefully as more and more “real” actors sign on to take part in video games, we’ll start to see – or rather, hear – less embarrassing voice acting. Certain genres have been worse on this front than others, with JRPGs traditionally being home to some of the most cringeworthy voice acting ever to abuse our ears. Would a Square Enix floppy-haired pretty boy be better or worse with someone like Daniel Radcliffe providing his voice?
More to the point, does having an A-list actor providing the voice to a character in a game really provide any benefit to how well the game plays? It helps the presentation, sure, but there have been plenty of games with poor voice acting which have still been big hits. The “laughing scene” in Final Fantasy X is still fresh in many gamers’ minds, after all.
Still, if nothing else it’s another thing to lend games a much-needed sense of mainstream legitimacy. As non-gamers see their favorite actors getting involved in a new medium, it’s entirely possible they’ll be more likely to try it for themselves instead of judging it from the sidelines.
Unless their name’s Roger Ebert.
