PERFORMANCE ART
There is something subversive to the casting of Troy Baker as Sam Drake. Nathan Drake is played by Nolan North, for so long the hardest-working man in videogame voice acting, and Naughty Dog has cast the young pretender to North’s throne as Nate’s older brother. Yet put the two in same room and there’s no trace of animosity. It’s hard to get a word in edgeways, in fact, and tougher still to keep the pair from veering off on tangents. “It just seemed like a perfect fit,” Druckmann says. “Knowing the relationship between Nolan and Troy, and how they’re already like best buddies and almost like brothers, we knew we could play off that energy on stage.”
Baker has been lending his voice to games for a decade, but look back on his early career and you’ll find such intriguing roles as Miscellaneous Voices, Additional Voice Talent and Various Soldiers. It’s only in recent years that he’s hit the big time,
with starring roles in BioShock Infinite,
Infamous: Second Son and, of course, as Joel in The Last Of Us. For him, Uncharted has long been an obsession. “When I first came to LA, all I wanted to do was be in Uncharted. I wanted to get shot by Nathan Drake. There was so much about
Uncharted that made me want to do this [for a living]. I’d done some other stuff before, but I was like, ‘If that’s how they’re doing it, that’s how I want to do it.’ Which is something I think the industry as a whole was saying. Everyone was like, ‘We want to do it the Naughty Dog way’.”
Few would manage it. Naughty Dog’s approach to voiceover work is more common among people making movies than developing games, with table readings and rehearsals at which North has a habit of making little tweaks to the script. It’s his right – as Druckmann puts it, “Nolan owns Nathan Drake.” When Drake thinks wryly out loud as he clambers up yet another cliff face or contemplates a yawning chasm before his mud-stained shoes, it’s often the improvisational result of North commenting on a video of the scene that’s playing during recording. Crucially, for A Thief’s End, Baker and North have recorded their scenes together in the same room at the same time, often while wearing motion-capture suits.
Yet there is often a very good reason for the way most companies keep their actors apart, as North makes clear while explaining that this isn’t the first time he and Baker have shared a voice booth, although previously it was hardly on this scale. “The closest we’ve come was that
Transformers one [ Fall Of Cybertron], where I did Cliffjumper and he did Jazz. Those two go on a mission together, and they put us in the booth at the same time, so we actually got to riff off each other rather than do it separately. It should have taken an hour. It took about three.”