Fallout Developer Profile – Chris Borders

No Mutants Allowed has posted another one of their Fallout Developer Profiles, this time featuring Fallout/Fallout 2/Fallout Tactics voiceover supervisor Chris Borders.

Q: Tell us a little about your role in the making of Fallout 1/2/3 (Van Buren)/Tactics?

A: Well, I worked on almost all of them so I will give you a little about each.

When I was first introduced to the original “Fallout”, it was being called GURPS (based on the original game), and we had some meetings to discuss the audio, script, and concept. We had a really good budget, and Tim Cain wanted some high profile actors to voice these characters. At that point in time in videogame history, not many videogame companies were casting celebrity actors unless it was based on a film license. We decided to cast Fallout just like an original movie, so I started contacting all of my Hollywood contacts that I had at the time. We ended up with an amazing cast that fit each character to a tee (Ron Perlman, Keith David, Tony Shalhoub, David Warner, Brad Garrett, Richard Moll, CCH Pounder, Richard Dean Anderson, Clancy Brown, Cree Summer, just to name a few). All of the actors were really great, and most at the time had never worked on a videogame before, so it was kind of like Television was to actors in the late 1940’s.

When we started work on “Fallout II”, we approached it very much the same way we did the original Fallout. We again cast really good actors for it, and added some new names to match what we were after (Jeffrey Jones, Michael Dorn, Peter Jason, Kevin Michael Richardson, Dwight Schultz, just to name a few). Again, all of the actors were great to work with!

When we did “Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel”, the game had changed somewhat. More actors were needed; however, there were less cut-scene, and more in-game dialogue, so I had to cast a good deal of top-notch union voice actors that I work with a lot. I did cast celebrity Kurtwood Smith, R. Lee Ermey, and of course Ron Perlman again for the “Narrator”. R. Lee Ermey was really cool, and had great stories about his work on “Full Metal Jacket” (playing the drill sergeant). He is about as “Semper Fi” as any actor can get!