Interviews | Fallout 3
Bethesda’s Pete Hines On The Sounds Of Fallout 3
October 24, 2008
Bethesda vice president Pete Hines, one of the honchos behind Fallout 3, took some time to talk about the role of sound in their new title. While gamers explore post-apocalyptic Washington DC they’ll here the familiar sounds from previous titles, “You’ll recognize all the original sound affects. There are a lot of iconic sounds that we wanted to bring to the table. Ron Perlman is the narrator, he was the narrator for the first two games so he’s the narrator again,” says Hines. Bethesda did more than simply preserve Fallout’s sonic source material. According to Hines, they upgraded in a few areas.
“The original Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 was ‘Ink Spots meets the post-apocalypse.’ The Ink Spots is the band that sings the song “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” that we use in the intro,” says Hines, “The developers of the original game [Black Isle Studios] couldn’t get the rights to that song so we just said, we gotta get it and we did. I think we have three Ink Spot songs. It was just, what sets the vibe for this world and the music is a big part of it.”
Besides getting the license for the Ink Spots, who played at Bethesda’s L.A. launch party earlier this month, Bethesda went out of their way to bring in new voice talent, selecting Liam Neeson to play the role of your character’s father. Part of the reason behind the choice was Neeson’s lack of acting in games. When asked what’s the benefit of taking actors without much game voiceover experience Hines responded, “Number one you won’t get a reaction from gamers along the lines of ‘Oh, it’s that guy again, in another video game.’” The developers spent time writing the characters in Fallout 3 and deciding what kind of reaction they wanted gamers to get when they heard that particular character’s voice. From there they drew up a list and started going after actors and used audio clips as an audition.
“By listening to audio instead of watching actors in a previous role you can ask the question does that voice have the personality to bring to the character? Going back to Oblivion and using Terence Stamp, he had never done a video game but he brought the right presence to the role of the villain Mankar Camoran,” says Hines. “And the same goes for Liam Neeson. He just had the right father figure presence we wanted to bring to this role. We felt he was a good fit.”
You can get your copy of Fallout 3 at select Best Buy shops on October 27th at midnight. Or you could just get the sucker off of Amazon below.
