In mid-December, two Indiana Joneses met on stage at the Game Awards in Los Angeles, an annual event celebrating excellence in video games that has become a highlight of the industry’s awards season. If the BAFTA Games Awards are like the Oscars, this ceremony maintains the fun of the Golden Globes (in its heyday) with the thrill of the Super Bowl (in terms of the sheer amount of trailers that drop throughout the livestream). The entire auditorium at the Peacock Theater rose in a standing ovation when a surprise guest emerged. 

Harrison Ford slowly took his place next to presenter Troy Baker, the actor who portrayed Ford himself — specifically, the 1980s version of Ford’s Indy. Baker channeled the Hollywood icon with a spot-on vocal and performance-capture act for the fast-selling 2024 adventure game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade films.

“It’s a fever dream,” Baker recalls to Entertainment Weekly months later in February. “We knew that it would’ve been great for Harrison to, in some way, give us the thumbs up.” In typical Ford fashion, though, Baker remembers “having no idea what that man was going to say,” noting, “He waved off the teleprompter and just riffed.” But Ford graciously quipped to Baker in an aside, “I think this guy did a great job. If I’d known he was so good, I would’ve done it myself.”

Says Baker, “I was like, ‘That’s all I need to hear, man.'”

The moment felt emblematic of where gaming is at this current time. Propelled by years of advancements with realistic animation and an emphasis on storytelling, gaming now stands side by side with movies and TV as an engine for narrative-driven cinematic experiences. Baker, an A-lister in his own right for portraying some of the most popular characters in games, like Joel in The Last of Us and Booker DeWitt in BioShock, is now one of many actors at the forefront of the medium. Erika Ishii, who had her own breakthroughs playing Valkyrie in Apex Legends and headlining the recently announced Ghost of Tsushima sequel, Ghost of Yōtei, considers herself “a beneficiary of that movement” that began with people like Baker.

Gaming, as a business, now rivals — and even outpaces — other entertainment sectors on paper, including Hollywood. In 2024, a year that saw the industry hit hard by layoffs, game sales reached $58.7 billion (as reported by the Entertainment Software Association, Circana, and Sensor Tower), compared to an estimated $30 billion from the global box office in the same span (per Gower Street Analytics). A 2019 Netflix earnings report stated the company’s feelings on the matter very clearly: In terms of consumers’ attention, “we compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO.” And now even Netflix is in the gaming business. 

“To me, one of the reasons why video games have continued to flood into the collective common consciousness and the zeitgeist is because they are in every way where the arrow has been pointing for storytelling since we began drawing on cave walls… How can I best tell you my story? How can I best let you know you had to have been there?” Baker muses on the matter. “The thing that games do that none of those mediums do is they really make you the agent. You are the one who’s driving.”

A star(rion) is born

Neil Newbon is another big name, propelled by his turn as the frisky vampiric rogue Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3, which earned him a BAFTA nomination and a Game Awards win in 2024. He’s now trying to take actors involved in gaming to the next level. On Dec. 11, Newbon assembled 17 of his fellow stars at studio Loft 1923 in Los Angeles: Baker, Abubakar Salim (Bayek in Assassin’s Creed), Alix Wilton Regan (the “Female Inquisitor” of Dragon Age: Inquisition), performance-capture artist Andi Norris (Donna Benviento in Resident Evil Village), Anjali Bhimani (Symmetra in Overwatch, Rampart in Apex Legends), Ben Starr (Clive in Final Fantasy XVI), Bryan Dechart (Connor in Detroit: Become Human), Fred Tatasciore (Bane in Batman: Arkham Shadow), Maggie Robertson (Lady Dimitrescu in Resident Evil Village, Orin the Red in Baldur’s Gate 3), Matthew Mercer (Leon S. Kennedy in Resident Evil 6, Vincent Valentine in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth), Melina Juergens (newly minted Game Award winner for Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II), Melanie Liburd (Saga Anderson in Alan Wake II), Nick Apostolides (Leon in Resident Evil 2 and 4), Roger Clark (Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption II), Sam Lake (Alex Casey in Alan Wake II, the creative director of Remedy Entertainment), and Yuri Lowenthal (Peter Parker in Marvel’s Spider-Man). 

Together, they executed an ambitious photo shoot with photographer Ivan Weiss, the kind of glossy magazine-style spread typically reserved for their colleagues on the film and television side. Two other shoots followed at later dates around the world: one in New York City with Ishii and Noshir Dalal (Charles Smith in Red Dead Redemption II, Bode Akuna in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor), and one in London with 11 others. Those in the U.K. included Ace Ruele (a founder of Creature Bionics), David Menkin (Luke Skywalker of Lego Star Wars, Dag Nithisson in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla), Devora Wilde (Lae’zel in Baldur’s Gate 3), Díana Bermudez (the Guardian in Baldur’s Gate 3), Doug Cockle (Geralt of The Witcher), BAFTA winner Jane Perry (Diana Burnwood in Hitman, Selene in Returnal), Jennifer English (Shadowheart in Baldur’s Gate 3, Lantenna in Elden Ring), Jennifer Hale (Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, Rivet in Ratched and Clank: Rift Apart), Joseph Balderrama (Cody in Split Fiction), Luisa Guerreiro (Caroline Scott-Kenway in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag), and BAFTA-nominated Samantha Béart (Karlach in Baldur’s Gate 3). 

The final group shot, a composite of the images captured across the three locations, now launches the Pixel Pack. It’s what Newbon and co. are calling this collective of actors redefining the role of talent in the gaming business. At a time when SAG-AFTRA’s “Interactive Media (Video Game) Strike” continues the fight for better workplace protections, including from A.I. replacements, the Pixel Pack seeks to remind everyone of a simple truth: The actors within the gaming sector are indeed actors, and they are pushing for recognition and respect as artists. 

“I’ve been working as an actor for 28 years, in games for about 15 years, over like 150 odd projects,” Newbon, who also works as a director and producer, says. “Having come from theater, film, TV, I noticed that there was a psych difference in the environment of games, really that it was a much closer-knit community. It was interesting, probably just before the pandemic, [seeing] how seriously people take game storytelling, as well as games generally, how it’s considered an art form and how bit by bit I’ve seen the needs and demands for great acting exponentially explode. So this is a good time to talk about it.”

More than just talk about it, though, the Pixel Pack is an opportunity to educate, to demystify the level of caliber of craft that goes into games. Following EW’s exclusive story, additional media opportunities, talks, and social media engagements are planned to further the conversation. Newbon is set to speak at next week’s GDC (Game Developers Conference), where he plans to cover topics such as actor and director relationships, as well as the need to keep performers in games as opposed to A.I. replacements. 

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“Looking ahead, my vision is to establish the Pixel Pack as an annual initiative, one that not only celebrates established talent, but also uplifts emerging actors in the gaming industry,” Newbon states. “By fostering inspiration, awareness, and advocacy, we can strengthen our collective voice and ensure that performance in games continues to be recognized, respected, and protected.”

Leveling up

Newbon remembers his first professional gaming job. It was for Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, which debuted in 2012. Coming from the TV and film realm, the Birmingham-born English actor spent three weeks working with members of the U.S. Navy SEALs in Oxford. “Those guys were lovely and terrifying simultaneously,” he remarks. The experience became a launching pad into a variety of other gaming gigs across both performance capture and voiceover — “all character building, all creature work, all multi-role work,” he recalls. “In one day, you’d play 10 different types of characters, learning about game mechanics, locomotion.”

Yet he remembers the types of conversations he would hear from professionals behind the scenes. “I had conversations about, ‘That’s going to look really good when we get the real actors in.’ I was like, ‘What do you mean real actors?’ I’m a real actor. I went to the f—ing Edinburgh Festival, man! So then I realized there was a disconnect between ‘motion-capture artists,’ which was the old technical term for us, and actors, which meant people still hadn’t quite got the idea of what an actor could do here.”

The general vibe at the time, and for a long time after, felt dismissive. “I’ve had agents turn down three-week mo-cap gigs that I didn’t even know about,” Newbon mentions. “They just didn’t want me to do it, which is not cool. But this was a long time ago. I got rid of those agents.” 

This isn’t an isolated experience, either. Lowenthal, who got his start in the New York theater and indie film scenes, moved to Los Angeles in 2002 and became known, in some circles, as the man you’ve killed the most. “I play so many side characters in video games that, basically, my job is for you to kill me,” he says. “I live to die… but I love it so much that I can’t stop.”

Lowenthal considers 2003’s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, in which he executed the title part, where his career in gaming really began. Still, he felt some pockets of the industry didn’t consider him and his fellow actors in this space to be actors at all. 

“I think most stage and screen actors at that point assumed that they didn’t even get actors to do that type of work unless they happened to be a gamer at that time, which was much less prevalent,” he remembers. “I know from talking to some people at the time, other actors who didn’t come from the voice-acting world who were more on-camera people, it was looked at as slumming it in a way. They’re like, ‘Don’t tell anybody, but I worked on the video game because I needed the money,’ or whatever.”

Mercer and Hale, who have both been in the game just as long (if not longer) than many of their peers, as evidenced by the endless scroll of their IMDb credits, relay similar observations. “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met through the years that, when they hear what I do, they’re like, ‘I’ve always wanted to get into voiceover,'” Mercer, who’s now more prominently known for his involvement in the Dungeons & Dragons troupe Critical Role and their animated series The Legend of Vox Machina, remarks. “And you’re like, ‘That’s cool, but have you ever trained or do you just do silly voices on your time off?'”

Hale believes one of the biggest misconceptions about what they do is the skill required. “The work we do in games — this does not cover performance capture but in voice capture — is 85 to 90 percent cold reading,” she says. “The entirety of Mass Effect, I saw no line before the moment I recorded it. It was all cold reading on the spot. A couple takes, maybe a few, and it goes out to market. That’s it.” She notes that this scenario isn’t much different even now. “So voice performers have to be incredibly skilled in the game arena, even more so than in other arenas,” Hale continues. “It’s extraordinarily demanding.”

With Mass Effect, one of her more widely recognized projects as the voice of Commander Shepard, Hale remembers a specific experience when she attended the 2010 Spike Video Game Awards (a predecessor to today’s Game Awards) as a nominee in the “Best Performance by a Human Female” category. “A voice performer was very much treated like the utensils on the table,” she describes. “I really appreciated being invited, but I had an experience where I waited and waited and waited for my category to be announced. I had a 6-month-old at home who I was still nursing. I really was watching the clock. I finally sought out the stage manager toward the end of the show. He goes, ‘What’s your category?’ And I told him the category. He said, ‘Oh, we taped that earlier with the winner.’ The dismissiveness of it — definitely I felt that.”

However, Hale prides herself on the discipline she developed over time to focus less on those moments and more on the wins — and there have been clear wins in changing the perception around the acting part of the craft, something she has seen happen more in the past five to seven years.

“There was a time when working in television — before the rise of prestige TV — was seen as a step down from film,” Steve Kniebihly, a prominent cinematic and performance-capture director (Resident Evil 3, Resident Evil Village), tells EW over email. “Video games have suffered from a similar perception for a long time. But now? We’re in the era of prestige video games. Actors like Neil, who understood early on the potential of this medium and fully committed to it, are an absolute delight to work with. They don’t treat it as just a job — they see it as an opportunity to craft deep, nuanced characters that resonate with players in a way that no other medium can achieve.”

Rebecca Ford, creative director of Canadian publisher Digital Extremes behind Warframe, says they didn’t always utilize truly experienced voice actors. “When we originally shipped Warframe, we did so as a last-ditch effort to save our studio — developing the narrative wasn’t as important to us as getting the game into players’ hands,” she recalls. “Retroactively, we started to build narrative into Warframe as a core mechanic when we started to realize our players really enjoyed the stories we were telling and wanted to get to know the actors behind the characters.”

Pioneers

Ford and Newbon — the latter having starred in two of the most recent Warframe updates — point to institutions like BAFTA, which began including video games among its awards recipients in 2004, for getting the conversation rolling around performance in games. Others highlight specific works that contributed to the cultural shift. The Last of Us (2013), the widely praised series featuring Baker as Joel and Ashley Johnson as Ellie that went on to inspire the equally lauded HBO TV drama, comes up repeatedly in various conversations with members of the Pixel Pack. Mercer, who was involved in the game as “additional voices,” calls The Last of Us “a watershed moment for what video games could be as a storytelling medium.” Salim notes how “they captured the nuance and the power of…almost like film, TV acting where there was a lot of subtext.” Ishii was breaking into the industry around the release of The Last of Us, and she likens that experience to “being there at the advent of cinema.”

“It became like the fridge, it became the Kleenex, it became the brand name for quality and storytelling within games,” Baker reflects of The Last of Us. “Then you started having all subsequent stories that were told from there.” He points to French game designer David Cage, the founder of studio Quantic Dream, behind such titles as Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human. Baker also references a fellow member of the Pixel Pack, Sam Lake of Finnish gaming studio Remedy Entertainment, which released Alan Wake and Max Payne. “That is straight up the same kind of film noir, dark mystery stories that I loved within TV and film.”

Having studied English literature, Lake first entered the field as a writer for Remedy’s Death Rally and since rose through the ranks to become their creative director who now oversees titles like 2023’s Alan Wake II (co-directed and co-written by Lake) and the sequel to 2019’s Control (written by Lake) — both of which exist within the same overarching world as part of the “Remedy Connected Universe.”

Speaking to his own journey in gaming, “I was frustrated along the way, that it felt like the business side of it and the commercial side of it, which is part of any entertainment product — and underlining the word ‘product’ — was very much dominant,” Lake observed over the years. “Yes, there were reviews, but mostly all the articles being written were from the perspective of ‘How big of a budget?’ or ‘How big of a commercial success?’ But that has changed project by project. With Alan Wake II now, I felt very proud. Looking at reactions, I felt that now we have arrived and we are on equal footing.”

Salim is also in a unique position as both an actor and developer. In addition to roles in mainstream TV projects like Raised by Wolves and House of the Dragon, he launched his own studio, Surgent Studios, in 2019. Their debut gaming title, Tales of Kenzera: Zau, a fantasy epic rooted in African myth, became a highly personal project inspired by his own dad’s passing. Salim voices its central character, who goes on dangerous missions for the God of Death to barter for the life of his late father. “One of Surgent Studio’s missions is essentially to tell stories that are human, that go beyond race, gender,” he says. “It’s very raw. It’s very real.”

He hopes to turn the Tales of Kenzera into a multimedia franchise. The current state of the industry — i.e. the mass layoffs from gaming studio to gaming studio — “definitely slowed things down a bit,” Salim notes, but he says “it seems to have really resonated well within the film and TV space behind the scenes.” That appetite for gaming adaptations has only grown. As creators use films as an influence (in Lake’s case, that was Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and arthouse horror for Alan Wake II), Hollywood moved full force into adapting games. 

With talks of adapting Tales of Kenzera, Salim says, “The Last of Us and Fallout have made it a lot easier to be able to have these conversations.”

Game changers

The conversations around gaming continue to change on the business side for the actors themselves. Pam Goldman, the director of animation and a talent agent at Buchwald agency (who represents Newbon), pinpoints the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as a major turning point when most Hollywood studios, TV networks, and productions halted live-action projects worldwide. “What was the last thing standing? It was voice,” Goldman says, referring to how actors continued voiceover jobs by recording at home or in isolated studio spaces. “I have not had a down day since March of 2020. It’s only increased. Because every television, film, theater, celebrity talent became available to these people, the complete consciousness of this group twisted on their head.”

And her buyers aren’t looking for the same type of voice work, either. The attitudes around gaming once deemed the field “almost cheesy and childish and juvenile,” Goldman remarks. As a result, projects often sought “cartoony” or “wacky” deliveries for characters. That’s not so prevalent now. “There’s always an exception to the rule, but 99 percent of the time, every audition I get is naturalistic, grounded,” she says. 

Ford shares her own experience working with Newbon on Warframe. “We had him voice a talking fish,” she writes over email. “It was a very serious talking fish, but it was a talking fish, and it was treated very seriously narratively, but it’s hard to ignore the comedic aspects of it, and our community really had a ton of fun with it.”

Now, Goldman and Buchwald at large do not distinguish between a stage or screen actor and a “voiceover actor.” She says, “There’s no difference in the people who are booking these things. In games, it’s not voiceover people anymore. And that is the big shift. They don’t want just random people plugged in because they can do a Russian accent. They want authenticity.”

On the same topic, Hale looks back to the evolution of voice acting between the releases of Mass Effect (2007) and Mass Effect 2 (2010) alone. “In the beginning, the visuals technologically were where they were, and we had to be slightly presentational to push what was happening,” she notes. “But as those visuals became so much more hyperrealistic, we could actually drop back and do one of my favorite things. Thought registers on camera. Now we’re in the space where we can relax and allow thought to just register on the mic.”

Many of the actors coming up in the gaming scene today are of that same school of thought. Robertson, for one, didn’t grow up as a gamer and had no clue what the industry was like when she auditioned for her first professional game role, Lady Dimitrescu, the towering and deadly chic vampire of Resident Evil Village. “Having a Shakespeare background, I pulled a lot of Shakespeare stuff into this,” Robertson explains. “There was something very Shakespearean in the way that she utilizes language. It’s not just the claws, it’s not just her transforming into a beast at the end that does damage. It’s her words. She really uses the power of her words to hurt.”

It’s a testament to this kind of work that turned “Lady D,” a nickname Robertson now uses for her character, into an instant internet sensation, prompting all kinds of memes and fan art. Well, that and the fact that Lady D is rendered in the game as a 9-foot-6-inch curvaceous woman, in heels and a wide-brimmed hat. The thirsty responses Robertson saw online were…something else. “I had no concept at that time of what being in a video game could offer me in my career, in my life,” she remarks. “My only intention was to do the best work that I could do and, honestly, not make a fool of myself. And then to see the way that she was embraced by audiences, it was just very surreal. It really truly changed my life in every possible way.”

Each actor within the Pixel Pack experienced a similar moment when one of their characters hit the fandom in a big way. Salim remembers “it being a lot” when the Assassin’s Creed audience latched onto his role as Bayek. He credits the material itself. “It was deep, man. It was dealing with a lot of stuff: the father who lost a child, who was on this revenge path, broken up with his wife because of it.” Mercer, too, is often recognized by the countless “additional voices” he records for NPC characters across a host of different titles. “It is always wild people picking it out,” he says.

Newbon found himself in a similar situation to his Resident Evil Village costar, Robertson. Both actors were also a part of Baldur’s Gate 3, and because of the many romance options for players to utilize in this Dungeons & Dragons-based hit from Larian Studios, Newbon’s Astarion became the focus of many a thirst meme. “It was very lovely to have your work complimented by so many people and to have an impact on so many people…. It’s definitely taught me a lot about humility and about keeping yourself very centered,” he reflects. “Maggie definitely expressed, ‘this is how you handle it,’ and I think she did such a great job that when it was my turn, randomly, I felt very capable.” 

This is a big reason why the Pixel Pack wants to elevate all the talent that goes into gaming, but especially the actors. For a long time, these thespians weren’t allowed to promote projects in the same ways actors in Hollywood are typically carted out. In some cases, they were even contractually forbidden to do so. Mainly developers and behind-the-scenes technicians were the ones out front promoting the material. And yet actors, like everyone involved in the Pixel Pack, become so popular with fans that they often become the faces of their games. 

“We’re bound by the contracts we sign on these projects, and the majority of studios don’t necessarily want the performers to be doing media interviews unless it’s a very specific outlet under very specific constraints,” Mercer says, clarifying that not every company takes this approach. He has his own theories as to why that is, but ultimately shares, “I think it’s been for a long time a missed opportunity to also show the heart behind the performances [which] are also why people connect with these games.”

The big boss fight

This particular acting community maintains other concerns for the future of their profession, some of which SAG-AFTRA is currently combating, at least for union members. The union is still very much in negotiations to secure a fair contract with U.S. game employers after initially announcing the strike in July 2024.

Ishii brings up an issue she’s been forced to deal with over the years: “For multiple projects I’ve been on, I received a lot of online abuse from trolls,” she divulges. “That doesn’t bother me, but it’s interesting that some companies are beginning to offer support in the form of a PR company or their community manager or even a sheet of dos and do nots for what to discuss online.”

Ishii had to navigate this matter herself in the years before she became a known name. She often spoke about games through YouTube and Twitch streams, and developed an audience that way. In her words, she was a fan herself. “You rail against the man, and then one day you wake up and you are the man… I shitposted about video games quite a lot. I still do. Only now suddenly I am a literal face of a video game. So you have to separate out what is professional to post, even on your own personal channels.”

A.I. is another issue brought up by multiple members of the Pixel Pack. Newbon shares a character-creator app once featured his voice as part of its library without permission. It wasn’t even his Astarion voice, he notes. It was Neil Newbon’s voice. “That was definitely a boundary overstepping,” he comments. “This is the problem with A.I., that people are very carelessly using it to not only create characters that they shouldn’t be using, but also people.”

There seems to be a real concern that studios will further embrace A.I., at least to provide dialogue for NPCs, in the face of the mass layoffs facing the industry. Since 2022, tens of thousands of jobs were eliminated. According to a GDC report, one in 10 video game developers were laid off in 2024 alone, with the official reason provided often relating to “restructuring,” “declining revenue,” and “market shifts.” Though, 19 percent of the companies didn’t offer any reason.

Newbon agrees A.I. is a real problem, but folks like Hale and Goldman aren’t so concerned with A.I. replacements. They’re confident players are more prone to connect with a character if there’s a real performer behind it. Kniebihly agrees. “There’s no doubt that the industry is going through a challenging time. Layoffs, budget cuts, and uncertainty have made it clear that nothing is guaranteed — even for successful studios,” he says. “To me, what makes this job interesting in the first place is that weird, intangible chemistry between an actor and a director. It’s the trust at the core of that relationship that pushes everyone to give the best of themselves and creates more than the sum of its parts. And I’m not going to get that from A.I. anytime soon.”