Silver Tongues of Hollywood: Mass Effect 2 Reveals Voice Cast

Jayne Cobb, Commander Worf, The Arbiter, Trinity, and Chris from Family Guy will all embark on a galaxy-changing journey come January 2010. That's right -- Bioware will play host to Hollywood's finest in the newest installment in the Mass Effect series. Let's all hope the developer's script writers live up to the intimidatingly talented actors the company has employed.

The cast of Kingdom Hearts, which boasted the voice of NSYNC's Lance Bass, has finally been bested. Luckily, Bioware doesn't employ former boyband stars [via Gamespot]:

Believe it or not, Jen Taylor -- the voice of Cortana -- made only $1000 for her work in Halo 2, which sold 8.46 million copies worldwide. But that was 2004, and since then the circumstances of voice-over artists have changed immensely. Acting in video games is no longer a simple side business for unemployed stage performers. It's becoming increasingly clear that as developers continue to fabricate more intriguing and complex stories, more and more actors are drawn away from Hollywood scripts and toward ones written in Silicon Valley. Bioware is here to prove that.

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Juan Letona

December 10, 2009

Video games are not all developed in the Silicon Valley, for example, Bioware's main office is in Canada. Hollywood is the Mecca of American movies, Silicon Valley is not the Hollywood of video games.

Omar Yusuf

As a Canadian, it took considerable strength not to boast the fact that BioWare is based in Edmonton. But you certainly have a point.

Silicon Valley may not be the Hollywood of games. But that's only because video games don't have a "Mecca" so to speak.

The majority of games are developed by small studios owned by holding companies based in San Francisco, Paris, Seattle, New York or Tokyo. The development industry is geographically disparate. But if you want to compare the film and gaming industries, your best bet is to compare Hollywood to the Bay Area/Silicon Valley. I mean, everyone from EA to Activision sits somewhere between Irvine and Redwood City.

But again, you certainly have a point.

Irvine is a eight hour drive to Redwood city, and I still fail to see your point. By your definition we do not include American teams in Austin, Seattle, Boston and Raleigh. We also miss to include the leading Japanese giants in Nintendo, and Sony. Silicon Valley is an important part in the video game industry, but it is just not the heart of it all.

My point is that video games don't have a geographic "heart". Having said that, the Bay Area is an example I used to compare the industry with Hollywood.

Besides, that wasn't the point of the article. The article was meant to bring attention to changing casting procedures among developers. ;)

Kevin Zhang-xing

December 11, 2009

Oh noes, my Kingdom Hearts has been bested.