And then they would feel badass, like they could take on the world.Īs we recorded that first game - it only took 10 days, while Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots took nine months - I began to feel like I might be a part of something very special at last. He was a role that everyone would be able to step into. And absolutely done with being called a legend.Īs my voice roughened, and the weight of experience crept into it, I felt a zing of electricity shoot up my spine. Tired of being dragged back onto the field. So as I read the lines, the voice that began to emerge was lower, rougher. Like some kind of irresponsible fighter pilot who doesn’t know when to shut up. My voice, my speaking voice, is young and cocky. He’d already retired when Colonel Campbell went back to Alaska to bring him back for one last mission. My suspicions were confirmed.Įxcept … Snake was older than me. I remember looking into the house in stunned wonder, and seeing Adam working at the mixing board, I thought, “Hey, I’ve got a job now too!” Jen had been cast in Metal Gear first, (as Naomi Hunter) and when she found out from Kris that I had landed the lead, she asked if she could be the one to let me know. “Is it me?” I asked, with sick, desperate hope. “Guess who’s going to make some mo- ney?!” She trilled, in a delighted sing-song. “Hey, it’s Jennifer,” she said in her valuable, silken purr. Jennifer was also a well-known voice-over actress, my voice-over mentor and occasional fairy godmother. It was Jennifer Hale, my friend of about five years. “Hello?” I said, as the kids did in those days. Much like Captain Kirk, I flipped it open. I was eating and hanging with the band, when my Motorola Star-Tac flip-phone rang with a digital chirp. I would join them most days, primarily because they always had free food laid out, and you could usually snag a beer from the band fridge. Given my poverty, I spent a good deal of time visiting my friend Adam Duritz, whose band Counting Crows was recording their third album in a sprawling ranch house up in the Hollywood hills. But after a week had gone by and I’d heard nothing, I figured it was just another lost opportunity. I put my all into it.I felt good about the audition. It was exactly the sort of action hero I’d always wanted to play. I was auditioning for the role of Snake: a hard-edged Special Forces soldier heading into an infiltration mission solo. Keiko told me the title, in enthusiastic, heavily accented Japanese, “Metal Gear: Solid!”īut in 1985, my family had moved me to Japan, where I went to high school, and I had spent the past five years recording voice work for Anime titles like Moldiver, They Were Eleven, Yu Yu Hakusho and War in the Pocket.So I was familiar with weird, Japanese titles.Īnd besides, a gig was a gig. I asked what the game was going to be called. I was once cast as the lead in a feature film adaptation of Pilgrim’s Progress, which eventually lost its funding and transformed into a horrible little stage adaptation, which was to be mounted on some youth group church stage in Orange County.īut this one felt different from the start. I had been on a lot of strange auditions, for a lot of weird projects that went nowhere. ![]() Kris greeted me warmly, and the Japanese casting director, Keiko, took me on a tour of the artwork hanging on the walls, drawn by a man named Yoji Shinkawa. The house had been converted into casting offices, and the living room had been turned into a makeshift recording studio. I drove down to a strange little house on Orange Avenue, right in the middle of Hollywood. Kris Zimmerman, the casting director I’d worked with on Captain Planet (my first real Hollywood voice-over job) wanted me to come in to read for a secret, new video game project. Smack in the middle of this existential crisis, my agent got a call. The concept of anyone ever knowing my name as a result of my work seemed impossible at best. Now, I was left wondering if I would ever be able to make a decent living for myself in the entertainment industry. I’d come to Hollywood at the age of 20 with dreams of fame, intending to be an action star along the lines of Harrison Ford or Tom Cruise. So by ‘98, I was depressed and flat broke. We won some awards and traveled to film festivals all around the world, but we did not land a deal for distribution. In ’97, I had produced and starred in my first, little indie film, Burn. Twenty years ago, I was a young man, making my way in Hollywood as best I could.
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