Synapse, the new VR game from developer nDreams, brings two voice acting legends, Jennifer Hale and David Hayter, together for a sci-fi story where the mind is a battlefield. But it isn't the first time the voices of Commander Shepard and Solid Snake have worked together. In fact, their working relationship dates back to the mid '90s.
"I was the voice of the Black Cat in the '90s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man series and Dave was Captain America," Hale says, from her home recording studio. "And we became fast friends, pretty much straight out of the gate. He's one of my favorite humans. He and his family are extended family to me, and I love them very much. They're my people." Hayter shares the sentiment, calling Hale one of his "very best friends."
If you've seen the trailer for Synapse, though, you know that the pair have a very different relationship in the PS VR2 first-person shooter. Hayter plays Colonel Peter Conrad, a high-ranking military official whose mind the player has been sent to infiltrate. Hale's Handler Clara Sorensen is your guide, talking you through your psychonautical mission step-by-step. Conrad, meanwhile, is intent on making the player's job as difficult as possible.
"The game itself is a battle of the wills between these two intense characters who are really using the player to get back at the other one," Hayter says. "It was very gratifying to know that I was going voice-to-voice with Jennifer. I mean, intimidating, but at least you know, you're getting firepower coming at you in a big way."
But I wondered about the challenges of developing that dynamic when the pair were voice acting at separate times from separate locations — the norm for most video games (though Hale notes that Hayter managed to get the cast of the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metal Gear Solid series together for those games' sessions). During this interview, Hale was speaking from her "purpose-built" soundproof office space in her home on Vancouver Island, a "broadcast quality" studio which she had built after moving back to Canada in the early days of the pandemic. Hayter, meanwhile, has something more humble. "I have this horrible mocked up little space in my closet that's sort of soundproofed, so I'll go in there [when recording]," he says from his home office in Los Angeles.
So, does that distance make it difficult to convey the personal, antagonistic relationship between the Handler and the Colonel? "I've known Dave for a minute, so I can kind of imagine him, he's in my head," Hale says. Hayter, meanwhile, says he didn't even know that he was acting opposite Hale until the game was revealed. "I just had to create chemistry with the unidentified Streep-esque actor that was playing opposite me," he says.
That's a challenge inherent to voice acting, they say, creating something natural and emotionally compelling within bizarrely constrained circumstances. Hale talks about the "cube" that she needs to work within while recording, meaning the proximity to the microphone she needs to maintain for audio quality while still putting "physical life" into her performance. Hayter notes the almost complete lack of room for improvisation in video game voice acting.
"When we do 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars: The Old Republic, the line is already programmed in, syllable by syllable, so if they've added an extra word that seems kind of awkward, sometimes I'll say, 'Can I say it like this?' and sometimes they say, 'Okay,' but for the most part, you just have to deliver it exactly as written and that… is part of hopefully what a professional brings to it, the ability to take a line that might be written in an awkward way and making it sound as natural as possible so that the engineers don't have to be tortured, so the computer programmers don't have to be tortured and the whole thing runs smoothly."
But Hale and Hayter are quick to state the importance of writers in the game-making process, an important note as the Writer's Guild of America is currently striking for fair pay and better working conditions in film and television, industries in which both actors also work. Hale says that if a line seems awkward to her at first, her first instinct is that she must be missing something. "That's me. I need more information. I need to put it together, because there's some key piece I've missed, and it's probably a really delicious little piece," she says. Hayter mentions a story about David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, being approached by an actor who said, "My character wouldn't say this," and replying, "Who says it's your character?" Having worked as a screenwriter — on X-Men, X2, Watchmen and other projects — Hayter can see both sides of that coin. "If the writing's good, there is a reason why you're saying it that way, and you want to find it out."
Both express the idea that their job as an actor is to bring that vision to life. Hayter notes that acting in a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill requires a very different approach than acting in, say, a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty. Fear would be misplaced for a hard-charging military leader, and macho grit and bravado would be wrong for someone wandering alone through a horrifying abandoned town. The genre, as expressed by the writer, calls for a specific performance and it's the actor's job to tune into the proper frequency. Synapse, in which players are fighting through the Colonel's psyche, requires a very specific approach.
"In Synapse, you're in my brain and when I think at you, you hear it and my voice echoes across the entire world that you're occupying," Hayter says. "So you want to honor that, and you want to play that in a way that really takes advantage of the fact that your voice is a god of this world. And especially in this game where the player is pulled between Jennifer and myself, it's these two world-affecting voices coming at you and there's a lot of fun to that."
It's hard to think of a better pair of actors' to embody the voices of god for gamers than Hayter and Hale who have been omnipresent in the medium for decades. You can infiltrate Hayter's head with Hale's help when Synapse launches on July 4.