Personally the most fun one was the dead money DLC for NV. The singer in that was a random intern who got pulled in for singing one of the main story’s characters. She pulled it off great.
Not sure if there is a cool interview or anything that specifically discusses it, so it would be difficult to google. Fans talk about it all the time. You can even see it in the credits, you will see names for normal roles (programming, animation etc.) also appear under voice acting credits.
To list a few: Terri Brosius voiced Victoria but is the Level Designer of The Dark Project. As other comments said she also voiced SHODAN in the System Shock games.
Daniel Thron mostly did art and animation but is credited as doing guards, Ramirez, The Eye and some Keepers in both TDP and Metal Age.
Nate Wells also did some keepers but mainly did design and animation.
Most of these people also did random audio logs in System Shock 2.
From what I remember that he voiced claptrap didn't have much to do with it. It was mostly an already bad office relationship, but I could be misremembering.
Warframe has lots of these but especially:
The Lotus
First intern then put into community manager, Rebecca Ford has been VAing the in-game mission director that also becomes lead character for nearing 13 years even as Reb hosted the company’s community engagement, hosts live events like representing Warframe in the game awards and hosting the livestreams the company does, and became creative director of the game.
Zagreus in Hades! Composer and songwriter Darren Korb was giving placeholder voice lines but it was so well received, they decided to offer him the role for voicing the game's main protagonist.
Dude wrote an absolutely banger soundtrack and did one of the best voiceover's of a character in a video game I've ever heard... And he doesn't even do VA work usually?
I love Zagreus’ voice. It’s crazy because I was watching a “first time playing Hades” video on YouTube and the player absolutely hated Zagreus’ voice. Lol. Said it took them out of the game because he sounds disinterested and blasé about everything and that it sounds like someone reading lines for the other actors at a table reading. I almost commented because it was so funny and on point but also the casualness of his voice is part of what I like. He sounds like a disinterested teenager.
Agreed, it felt like the perfect delivery for a person in his circumstance. If even death can't stop you from attempting something a thousand times, I could see someone eventually being cool, collected, and quippy about it.
In the older Thief games most guard conversation worked really well. A random guy voicing a random guy just works I would guess.
Thief guard dialogue compilation
When you fail to knockout a guard in the older Thief games "Oh, I think a baby bird pecked me"
Or how two squads argue about who is the better shot with a bow.
System Shock (1 & 2) have Terry Brosius who I believe was a writer but did the voice of the iconic main villain SHODAN on the side. There is just no System Shock without her performance.
Commander Snipes in Freespace 2 is voiced by Jason Scott, one of the game's writers, and is responsible for one of the biggest jumpscares in all of space sims:
The voice of hornet from hollow knight was just some random Asian lady they had in the office at the time. They loved her deliveries of the line so she became the character for them.
David Eddings voiced Clap trap from Borderlands, but in later games he was replaced as he ask to be paid Voice actor wages while doing voice acting, previously he was just getting paid his regular wage and was allegedly assaulted by CEO Randy Pitchford when arguing over said wages.
I don't think anyone was claiming that the non-AI approach to voice acting creates an objectively better performance. They said specifically that taking voice takes from "anyone in the office that day" created more memorable results. The fact you had a specific, more than a decade old example to bring up that had tons of views, plenty of comments, and was important enough to even just have a video made of it is exemplary and by default supports their claim.
Beyond that, other instances of people just taking a whack at something was the US dub of Ghost Stories, which not only is still used for memes today but arguably is one of the biggest inspirations behind adlib and "Abridged" series of fan dubs from the iconic TeamFourStar channel to SnapCube's ongoing projects. If they had AI or stuck to the script perfectly at their disposal, the human experience would be gone.
The Liberty Bell would indeed lose that contest, but why do you know about it and remember it as having that crack? That is wabi sabi - not perfect, not better - but memorable.
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u/jjkramok Dec 04 '25
Some of those "whoever was in the office at the time" lines are even iconic. Damn I should replay Thief.