Video Games - A Love Letter
In honour of National Video Games Day, a few thoughts on what video games mean to me in 2024.
I was obsessed with video games as a child. Obsessed. My parents got me a Sega Mega Drive when I was seven and I was hooked. Every birthday or Christmas present was a new game, and I gorged myself on all the classic titles of the era; Sonic, Cool Spot, Earthworm Gym, Micro Machines V3, Toy Story and more. So fixated was I, in fact, that I was asked to go on Richard and Judy with the hosts of Bad Influence (remember that one?) to review an advance copy of the first ever FIFA game live on TV, when the cartridge that held the game was just a chipboard with no plastic around it.
My allegiance was to Sega. I invested my hard saved pocket money in a Saturn, then a Dreamcast, then watched in despair as they fell into obsolescence way ahead of their time, one after the other, despite the astonishingly progressive titles you couldn’t find anywhere else. My PS2 and GameCube friends laughed at me. I felt personally affronted.
Maybe it was the sense of rejection, maybe it was the hormones, but video games and I took some time apart around adolescence, with only the occasional test drive of someone else’s GTA or Gran Turismo keeping me in the loop as to what was going on. I was aware of a major cultural shift and kept hearing names like Fallout, Mass Effect and Red Dead Redemption, to name but a few, but i couldn’t quite imagine what they were.
Flash forward to 2020, and I was asked to be in my first video game, Mortal Shell. The quality of the writing, the creative freedom it offered me as an actor, the sheer passion and kindness of the small team of insanely talented people I worked for lifted me up, at a time when a few hard years in the acting game had really knocked me down.
I began to actively pursue game acting as a career, researching the industry, trying out all kinds of weird voices, recording and refining them, writing and rewriting scenes until I felt confident enough to put down a reel. I told my acting agent to push for game auditions while I sought out the indie studios myself.
It took a little while, but eventually the indie roles started coming in, giving me the opportunity to work first hand with developers. Then I got cast in two big projects at SIDE and Pitstop in the same week. More projects came in after that. I secured a voice agent. I was able to reinvest the money I was earning in further coaching and mocap training. Things were starting to happen.
But something was missing - here’s a confession for you - I wasn’t actually playing video games. I was experiencing them second hand through YouTube videos and web articles. If I’m honest, it made me feel like a bit of a fraud. So I finally took the plunge and bought myself an XBox Series X and a Game Pass Subscription as a business purchase.
And I got to work.
To say my mind was blown is an understatement. It wasn’t like getting a new car after ten years with the old one, where the stereo is a little bit more fancy and the air-con actually works. This was a whole new world, a whole new universe, thousands of new universes, all painstakingly crafted from the ground up, locations and situations beyond my wildest fantasies populated with joyfully bonkers people and creatures, nail-biting stealth missions and impossible moral choices with potentially devastating consequences which, happily, unlike real life, you can revisit if you get wrong.
It’s true, I have barely begun to scratch the surface of almost twenty years of astonishing creative advances. I rarely get to sit down for more than an hour of uninterrupted single player play because the kids hog the TV. And yet, in that time, titles like Mass Effect, Starfield and As Dusk Falls have taught me more about my questionable moral judgement than I would like to know. Hi-Fi Rush has awakened my carefree inner delinquent. And - my favourite of all - It Takes Two has given me hours of perfect wide-eyed wonder, watching on with pride and joy as my eight year old daughter proves herself a mastermind at solving complex logistical puzzles, while I can only sit back and follow her orders.
This last week video games offered up another gift of a professional variety: the offer to join BAFTA as a Connect member, in recognition of my contribution to the industry thus far. Just the concept of such an institution taking time to even consider my work, let alone validate it, brought a tear to my eye; this time four years ago it felt totally unachievable. Voice acting can be a lonely profession at times, locked in a box where no one can hear you scream (if all is going well), so I am excited beyond measure at the possibility of meeting many of my peers for the first time, sharing experiences and discussing crazy, stupid ideas that maybe, just maybe, might actually turn into something.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying thank you, video games, for all that you have done for me. I owe you one.