Dominik Diamond, host of the famous British show GamesMaster, is voicing a game’s protagonist for the first time after 50 years of playing games. In an article he wrote for The Guardian, he explains how he joined the survival horror project Black Tides Draga’s Wake.
It all began 16 months ago when Greg Strangis contacted him. “I listen to you on the radio, and your voice won’t leave my ears!” Strangis told him, inviting Diamond to his garage in a remote location to see the game he was making. Diamond admits that the invitation sounded strange. But he also recalls that his career began in a similar way: when he was 21, he was invited to a church in east London to audition for GamesMaster.
Diamond calls Strangis, who has a large but well-groomed beard and speaks very quickly, a “hipster Rasputin.” Strangis is a character artist who has worked with Rockstar, Naughty Dog, and Guillermo del Toro. The game takes place in the 1900s, aboard an old, decaying steamship, following an unsuccessful robbery. The protagonist, Draga, is a large and tough sailor with a dark past. An ancient god is growing inside him.
According to Diamond, the problem was that this protagonist looked nothing like him. He is neither a sailor nor a large, tough man. He jokes that the only ancient god to have infected him in his life was gout. So he had to act. Diamond studied drama at the University of Bristol in the early 1990s, but says they spent more time analyzing obscure old Russian plays than performing on stage.
When he first saw his voice performances in the game, he did not like them. On screen was a powerful hero crushing giant monsters, but Diamond’s weak voice was coming from him. He did not tell Strangis, instead making his voice slightly deeper and starting to speak more naturally. It worked. Strangis’s direction also helped him work comfortably.
The most difficult part was improvising the battle sounds. The team can add these sounds anywhere in the game, making everything appear natural. In reality, however, they are being produced by a Scottish father in his 50s in a garage in rural Nova Scotia. Diamond jokes that he had not made sounds like that since his honeymoon, while the person beside him kept demanding that he be more aggressive.
The team’s work inspired Diamond. Developers living in different parts of the world make the game in their free time, sending one another ideas, images, and animations. It reminds him of the ZX Spectrum era, when people wrote games in their own rooms at home. According to Diamond, such teams show that game creation is still alive at a time when major publishers are closing studios around the world. He does not want to be the weak link in the team, so he has worked hard to ensure that a publisher viewing the game does not lose interest because of his voice.
Playing the game feels strange to him. When Draga dies, he feels bad because the protagonist speaks with his voice. He experiences the same feeling when he watches other people play. The best moment came when he showed his children footage from the game without telling them anything. The children smiled when they realized that the voice of the horror game’s powerful protagonist belonged to their father. Diamond calls it one of his favorite moments as a parent.
After this experience, he also views voice acting in games differently. He never used to pay attention to it because he thought the character speaking was simply the character itself. Diamond says this shows how good the voice acting is. At least in games released after the first Resident Evil. He now appreciates Nolan North’s work as Nathan Drake, Ashley Johnson’s work in The Last of Us, and the work of all the actors in Expedition 33 much more.
The announcement trailer for Black Tides Draga’s Wake was released a month ago and received 200,000 views within its first few days. Strangis is currently in talks with various publishers.