[quote=“keefer, post:29, topic:2734, full:true”]Almost every actor used in a pinball is professional on one level or another, with relatively few exceptions (Steve Ritchie on whatever he does, Ed Boon as Rudy are some of the most notable). We used, I think, 5 different voice actors on WOZ, for example. They all even went through a tryout and everything.
In my experience, “regular” voice actors are about 10x more than relatively unknown/more obscure talent. A-listers, recently, again IME, have been 10x above THAT.
So, I can get a professional voice actor for somewhere around 1000/game, a Billy West type for around 10,000/game, and a Martin Freeman type for around 100,000/game. These are approximate of course, but most definitely in the ballpark.
There’s no guild of pinball voice actors or anything. It really is all about budget, and that budget is typically very low.
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I see. Thanks for the detailed explanations. When I mean “professional,” I mean someone who has had a lot of past roles in narrative fiction and acts as either his or her means of income (like Wendee Lee or Yuri Lowenthal) or as the job they enjoy doing the most (like Monica Rial or Christine Cabanos). I do remember visiting a convention panel hosted by Kyle Hebert in which he said he took a job for as low as $50 (it was for a tiny two-person indie game company), though I take it he’s more an exception than a rule and this is something he wouldn’t do regularly. He also has his own homemade recording studio specifically so he and his colleagues can perform for companies not big enough to have access to one. (And Spike Spencer has gone on record saying he regularly takes on roles he dislikes because he needs the money, referring to it as “whoring out.” Apparently, his best-known role, that of Shinji in Neon Genesis Evangelion, he really doesn’t like.)
Why it confuses me as such is, as I mentioned prior, companies that make digital pinball like Zen Studios and KAZe will draw from those groups and do it all the time. I take it that the expenses of making physical machines leaves little room to afford these actors.
So has it ever happened, where a pinball machine’s voices are done by these people? I suppose a better word for it would be “dedicated” actors, maybe?