If you grew up with gaming in the 90s or, in my case, played them a long time afterwards, you're probably aware of the quality of voice acting commonly found in video games at the time. The voice acting in most of these games from this decade ranged from half-decent to hilariously terrible, and it usually leaned towards the latter. Some of the most notorious examples of games with this kind of acting include the OG Resident Evil trilogy, Sonic Adventure, Mega Man 8 & X4, and, to a lesser extent, the first Silent Hill. The aforementioned games, while amazing experiences, are continuously clowned on for obvious reasons. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of the garbage-tier voice performances seen in that particular era.

I know games back then didn't have the budget for high-quality voice work, but like, was this really the best people they could find? I'm not sure if it was the actors themselves, the voice direction (or lack thereof), or the fact that proper translation was impossible to do in the 90s. I have nothing against the voice actors who worked on these games, I'm sure they're really nice people who were just doing their job. However, I can't help but laugh at how abysmal video game voice acting was in the 1990s.

Yes.

90s games would have terrible voice acting for the same reasons as modern games. Time, budget, and availability issues. With Japanese games coming over to the west, if the localization team didn't have a dubbing company on speed dial, then their only option was to just grab whoever they could find. Also, dude this was the 90s. Voice acting in gaming was a fancy new feature so just hearing Megaman talk was awesome even if he sounded like a woman for some reason. A lot of the things gamers take for granted these days were absolutely mindblowing 30 years ago.

Modern games have way more egregious voice acting if you ask me. It's one of the main reasons I don't play many modern releases.

Examples? I have a weird nostalgia for atrocious voice acting in '90's video games (particularly from Capcom's games, their reputation for hilariously-bad voice acting continued into the 2000s with Dante's "I thought you were filled with LIIIIIIGGGGHHHHT"), but I feel voice acting these days is at least professionally done as a whole. The only really egregious examples I can think of after the PS2 era were Arc Rise Fantasia on the Wii and certain scenes in Dragon Age: Veilguard (obviously). Oh yeah, that one weird Kao the Kangaroo reboot--the outdated Internet meme references making up like 80% of the dialogue didn't help. Korean games like Lies of P and Stellar Blade, definitely--like Squid Game and the other growing amount of Korean shows dubbed in English, it seems like it will be a decade or two before we figure out how to dub Korean into English to the same "okay" standard we now dub Japanese into English.

Okay, so there are a few examples I can think of myself, and generally (unfortunately) they come from indie games from over-ambitious developers, similar to how, as much as I love the sheer amount of creative indie animation we get these days from Newground's Movie Portal alone, the amateurish voice acting from the animators' friends tends to take me out of what is otherwise an impressive bit of animation that punches above its indie/hobbyist weight.

With games from Japan, I immediately default to the Japanese dub with English subtitles, not bothering with seeing if the English dub is okay, so maybe that affects my opinion that modern game voice acting is at least overall more professional than it was in the '90's if I prefer to listen to games from non-English speaking countries in their intended original language (with English subtitles, of course).

Name a game with voice acting that released in the last 10 years or so. Chances are that's one of the reasons I didn't play it.

Blasphemous, Fire Emblem Fates, Metal Gear Solid V. I tried to pick three games with very different directions, I'm curious to hear your reasoning.

I'd prefer all three games if they didn't have voice acting.

Uhh...Ghost of Tsushima? Though again, even though that game is actually Western-developed, I jumped at the opportunity to set the voice acting to its more authentic Japanese dub (with English subtitles) before starting up the game, so I couldn't tell you what the English dub is like.

Now that I think about it, though...as someone who doesn't like wearing headphones (the ones with the strap over the head always seem to give me a headache after about 30 minutes, and as much as I clean my ears every single day, twice a day, my inner ears are still too gross for earbuds) and plays a lot of Steam Deck these days to distract from whatever lousy rom-com my sister makes me sit through, I feel like it would be nice if devs recognized for the first time in a while that they don't HAVE to put full voice acting in their games--especially indie devs, who can't afford to hire anyone besides their immediate friends and family anyway and, again, voice acting in indie games tend to feel more amateurish than in AAA games with actual voice direction and recording booths. I'm particularly tired of playing otherwise-family-friendly games on my handheld, but then suddenly some female character screams in a vaguely-seductive way and everyone in earshot thinks I'm playing a hentai, as opposed to Kirby or Pokemon. I adore games like Demon's Turf which wisely give you the option to turn off voice acting entirely, more games should do that, especially with the Steam Deck and the Switch (mayber Switch 2) making handheld gaming more popular than ever with people too lazy to wear headphones or earbuds.

Particularly after that AI-voiced Darth Vader controversy in Fortnite, there's a lot of debate about whether gaming companies can and should hire voice actors, even if they can't quite afford it. Here's a third option--why not just avoid voice acting at all when most would probably PREFER simply reading the text and doing their own voices in their head, or make a game with dialogue-free cutscenes like Astro Bot? It's cheaper while not actively stealing jobs away from humans--you're just making a game where voice acting is not necessary.

Okay but why, that's what I'm curious about. Because a preference is one thing, I get that. But you said modern games have "egregious voice acting" which is the part I'd like to hear you elaborate on.

It's just personal taste. What more can I say?

Also I said both have egregious voice acting. I just said I find modern games VA more egregious, usually because there's so much more of it.

Comically exaggerated, high-energy voices were exciting. It was how people talked in TV ads (called commercials because it set the standards for marketing). Some people might still prefer that style today.

Personally, I think it's grating but no worse than the current trend to hire actors who sound half-hearted and— the aspect that that bothers me the worst— are indistingiushable from each other in important scenes.

But back to the past: voice actors for dubs and some initial subs were expected to match up with what happened onscreen. That's tricky. Japanese-English translations outside of time-generous fan spaces (where translations were rewritten for higher quality) was typically bad. The dialogue suffered from the official translators misunderstandings about what the originating culture and target cultures had in common.

I'm not sure, but I suspect improvements in recording technology has helped, too. Sitting in any quiet space with a phone, specialty app, and a tiny mic can produce a decent sound file today. The old sound booths could be psychologically unnerving, with very little except imagination to help maintain the character.

Hey good question. I don't really care to bring up dub quality in general but here's an interesting little fact that might shine a bit of light on the subject:

Japanese games are inherently tied in with the English language, and have been since the days of arcades where their goofy 4000 character alphabet was difficult to put into games due to memory limitations and resolutions. You could reasonably simplify this to some extent, like utilizing the basic alphabet, but even then the 50-at-minimum characters would still take up space, and at the time there wasn't really that many important things to read. So, arcade games were mostly in English. Then following suit, a lot of game menus ended up in English, such as an intro screen saying PRESS START instead of スタート押して or something like that. Basically there's a lot more English than you think.

I assume this may have carried on to voice acting as well, because there's more than a few Japanese games that do not have Japanese voice acting. At all. Notably, Capcom's older games have a whole lot of this. It stretches from being basic (like Street Fighter having an English-speaking announcer) to extreme (Devil May Cry and Resident Evil, among others, having purely English voice acting despite being story-heavy)

I won't say this creates bad voice acting, people not caring creates bad voice acting and a whole lot of people did not and continue not to care, but it does seem to create an odd candence that the voice actors speak in. They're essentially adopting bizzare exaggerated Japanese mannerisms but in English. Comes across as very natural if you're used to it but if you've no idea what such a thing is like it might come across as offputting or bad, and nobody'll think to change it because who the hell would waste money on two English dubs of the same game?

I think some modern games still do this but in a much more clever way. The first Dark Souls at least also had a purely English voice cast but they let a good translation company take the reigns and told them to make something that sounded more natural in English since unlike the previous examples it wasn't meant to have comedic tones in it.

While browsing BlueSky I realized that many 90's video games sound like mid-to-late 2000's online videos, here's the example btw.

Modern games have way more egregious voice acting if you ask me. It's one of the main reasons I don't play many modern releases.

Just asking, why do you hate modern day Video Game Voice Acting?

if the localization team didn't have a dubbing company on speed dial, then their only option was to just grab whoever they could find.

Funny enough, this was the case with German localization of Half-Life 2.

Also, is it okay to talk about non-English/non-Japanese gaming voice acting from the 90's (like VAs in French, Russian, Korean or Spanish) on this thread?

The concept of voices in video games was still novel at the time so they weren't too concerned with the quality of the acting itself. Regardless, IMO there's something endearing about that campy acting that a lot of modern games that try to ape ''prestige TV'' can't capture.

A lot of 90s games I know about have amazing voice acting. I guess I just never focused on Japanese to english translated games or resident evil. I'm more of a looking glass technologies, valve, team 17, kinda guy. Dues ex got some good and bad voice acting too XD. Look I'm not from the 90s, but to make connections with the past, I would assume voice actors were met for film and not videogames, being hired for something nobody in that field was prepared for.

Games looked closer to cartoons than real life, so voice actors, being voice actors, instead of being naturalistic TV or film actors, used their already existing skills voicing cartoons or dubbing anime or what have you. The GTA 3 producers had trouble emphasizing to their actors that they wanted downplayed, subtle, naturalistic acting approaches because of this (the actors again often assumed it was like a cartoon and accordingly overacted), which shows how Rockstar wanted to shift the perception. It really ranged on the background of the actor, and the director explicitly laying out how they wanted the performance to come across. Without much direction, those who specialize in voicing animations will use their "animation voice" style.

Wow, got some mileage from a hot take that is generally bullshit, but let's play around with it.

Dialogue in most non-RPG in 90's video games was generally quite sparse and was served as a pure narrative function, and partly because of that, most publishers didn't put that much effort in voice acting, and most good VAs viewed it as a side gig. In addition, (for Japnese games) a lot of publishers were wishy-washy on anything Japanese that didn't have the "cool appeal" that transcended cultures, which generally meant that there was always going to be some awkward dialogue, regardless of voice acting.

Once games became big, the quality improved and big name VAs and celebs steped in. The problem is that the writing didn't improve that much, albeit less on culture washing and more about being edgy. Even with that, the effort was always there, but the commitments were spotty. (It probably doesn't help that some games can attract a big name, only for a game to be crap, making it a cheap cash-in)

Nowadays, it's more or less standard fare for a big budget game to have quality VAs and writing. Of course, there is always going to be bad actors, (in many forms mind you) writers and what have you muck up the waters and embarrass themselves, but that's part and parcel in all entertainment, I suppose.

"Hey, It's up to us to take out Umbrella"

It was cool back then the way they were doing it

they were being edgy

They were being cool

but with everything, it eventually becomes a joke

We take for granted that everyone with a microphone bills themselves as a voice actor today. All the best ones, of which there are too many for everyone to find steady work, can record their lines with studio-level quality at home and send the full uncompressed audio over high speed internet to their clients.

Now let's look at the 90s realistically. There is no VA industry, just a few fully-booked studio employees voicing 30 characters each, not looking for side gigs. So game devs needed VAs that didn't exist to come into a sound booth that game devs didn't have, to read lines absent a dedicated performance director, before even talking about money. It makes total sense that in an era where Hollywood and the game industry didn't have any overlap, they did the best with what they had.

Admittedly, I don't prefer mediocre voice acting myself in the likes of Typing of The Dead, Resident Evil, and Animal Soccer World [the last one's a blast nonetheless].

Yet some cases bring in a great definition and individualization for characters like Wesker, all the enemies of CarnEvil, both the Mario and Link CDI games, and I.M. Meen.

The voice acting gives 'em more character, y'know? A tone and enunciation specific to those subjects, making them more memorable for casual players and the internet as we know.

nah man, I love the old 90's bad voice acting. charming as hell and theres some real daimonds in the rough elements that you just dont get in modern voice acting anymore.

It was cheesy, and I love it. I want my video games to sound like an '80s Saturday morning cartoon.

In the case of RE, I'm almost certain they were just random white people that just happen to be around the studio.

It's a lot of things. I believe companies like Working Designs were hiring actors who weren't experienced with animated voices. Also, the way it's translated can impact the quality. To me, a hyper literal translation can be just as cringy as one that's taking too many liberties. The biggest problem I have with bad translations is that they just don't sound like conversational English, regardless of whether it's bad acting or bad scripting, or a combination of the two.

Just my 2 cents, but most games in the 90's didn't have voice acting. It was mainly dialogue boxes. Voice acting came in properly in the early 2000s.

I remember in 2001, final fantasy X came out and conker's bad fur day, and we were all like "WTF!!! THEY TALK!!! THEY FUCKING TALK!!!! THIS IS THE FUTURE!!!!"

Infact I'm adding to this cos I'm remembering shit, Grim Fandango and The Discworld games were 90's and they had sick voice acting. Just to undermined my above point.

The story behind the original Resident Evil's infamous acting goes that there was zero localization and the non-english speaking developers just went with the takes they thought sounded cool.

More effort goes in to that sort of thing nowadays but these days I'd say characters are so frequently miscast that I think it comes out as a wash. We have better acting but characters with voices that just don't match.

have to agree. like the voice acting in shenmue 3 and the newer dynasty warriors games are an insult to the series's legacy

they aren't even funny bad anymore, they are just dry and clunky bad.

Thanks, you reminded me how much of a living nuisance Steve Burnside was.