lip-synching gave us the flexibility we needed in casting.
Tatiana is a case in point. We used three casting agencies and auditioned hundreds
of actors in both L.A. and San Francisco, looking for the face and voice of a six-
teen-year-old Russian princess. The actress who ended up doing the voice is Russian
and lives in L.A., the one we filmed is American and lives in San Francisco. To find one
actor who was that good for both, we would have certainly needed to go out of state, if
not to Russia!
By the way, we recorded the voices first and then created animated visuals to
match, so the voice actors were free to create their own performance, as they would
with a radio play or doing a Disney cartoon. It gives you a more natural voice perfor-
mance than overdubbing. I think when you force actors to lip-synch to previously filmed
action, you lose something in the performance.
Reality seems to have been a dominant goal in your design of the game,
whether it’s the native speakers for the voice acting or it’s the authentically
modeled train cars. Why did you go to such great lengths to make the game as
real as possible?
It’s a matter of respect for the player. Whether it’s a history world or a fantasy world, I
think that players respond to the amount of detail and consistency that the creators of
the game put into it. And even if the player doesn’t pay enough attention to the conduc-
tors to figure out that one of them is close to retirement and the other one is a young
married guy, or that they have opposite political views, even so, whenever you pass
them in the corridor and overhear a little bit of one of their conversations, you get the
subliminal feeling that you’re hearing a real conversation between two real people. If
we hadn’t bothered, then whenever you walked by, you’d hear something artificial and
think, “You know, that sounds like something they just staged for my benefit.” The fact
that what you see in the game is just the tip of the iceberg, and that all the characters
have their own history, and their own reality under the surface, you feel the mass of
that, and the weight of it, though you don’t actually see anything more than the tip.
Do you think computer games in general should strive for greater realism?
Well, realism is a bit of a loaded term. I don’t mean to imply that games should be more
realistic in terms of representing our world. Even something likeSuper Mario Bros.,
which is completely a fantasy setting, has its own consistency. If a character can jump
off a ledge and float to the bottom in one situation, you shouldn’t have another situation
where he jumps off and he gets crushed. As long as the creators actually took the time
to think, “What are the rules for gravity in this world, and under what circumstances
can you get hurt?” As long as the game plays by its own rules, players will accept it. In
Last Express, we chose a real historical moment, and we were very conscious about try-
ing to represent faithfully what was going on in the world at that time, and to respect
that reality when drawing the constraints of our fictional world.
Chapter 18: Interview: Jordan Mechner 333