Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic by Alex Kane

Author:Alex Kane [Kane, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Games & Activities, Video & Electronic, Computers, Programming, Games, General
ISBN: 9781940535210
Google: wl6mDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1940535212
Goodreads: 36523485
Publisher: Boss Fight Books
Published: 2019-03-09T01:53:57+00:00

VO

With the exception of George Lucas, there’s one name that’s appeared in the credits of more Star Wars games than anyone else’s: Darragh O’Farrell. For more than two decades, he’s been the go-to voice-over (VO) director for Star Wars video game projects, in the LucasArts era and beyond.

O’Farrell was working in animation in Los Angeles, circa ’94, when he got wind that LucasArts was on the hunt for a VO director. “The company could see things were going from floppy disk to CD-ROM,” he says. “As a film company, they needed to embrace the talent side of things a little bit more, which is how I ended up starting there.” O’Farrell’s first game was The Dig, a 1995 point-and-click adventure adapted from a story by Steven Spielberg. It starred Robert Patrick, who’d played the villain in Terminator 2, and featured cutscenes by Lucasfilm’s renowned visual-effects studio, Industrial Light & Magic. “We were used to doing games that had like 10,000 lines of [recorded] dialogue, when no other company was really doing that at the time,” O’Farrell says.

What made the casting and sound departments at LucasArts unique, compared to other internal teams, was that they worked on all of the publisher’s titles. With Star Wars games, in particular, music and sound design has always been one of the key pillars holding the larger experience together. Knights of the Old Republic would be no different.

“We did want to have the BioWare DNA of story, and companion characters that you cared about, and choices that had impact,” lead designer James Ohlen recalls. “But we also knew this: We couldn’t do something that was text-heavy like Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights, because Star Wars is a very cinematic experience. And the fan expectations would be different than Dungeons & Dragons fans’ expectations. They’d be less understanding of walls of text and lots of reading, which is why [KotOR] was the first game where all of the non-player characters had full voice-over.”

O’Farrell remembers an early meeting with producer Mike Gallo and project director Casey Hudson, at which point the plan, he says, was still to do what BioWare had done in the past—a handful of spoken lines per interaction, with the majority of dialogue being displayed in text form. O’Farrell threw out a suggestion: “Why don’t we record the whole thing?”

Gallo and Hudson exchanged glances.

“We can do that?” said Hudson.

O’Farrell nodded. “As long as there’s room on the disc.” He told them he’d work on getting the budget approved; they still had about a year before it would be time to go into the studio.

“It was one of the most ambitious projects that LucasArts or BioWare had ever attempted,” Gallo says. “I don’t think BioWare had fully voiced anything in the same way that we were doing with this game. Certainly not that size. It was a huge budget for us, internally. It was a massive undertaking.”

LucasArts got its money’s worth, however. Pull up the IMDb entry on Knights of the Old Republic, and you’ll be greeted with a veritable who’s who of the voice-over industry.

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