Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524863
52 M PS E . O R G EM: As you were making that transition to work on games, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in your work? KZS: The thing is that it's just the same. Gaming voice-over is the same thing as animated voice-over, except it follows a different storyline, and there's a lot more content. Animated shows back then were done with the entire cast and games, because of the massive content, are largely recorded one actor at a time. EM: Did you find there was more studio oversight on casting for games compared to animation? Or did you always have full control? KZS: No, no. The casting people don't have full control. It all has to be approved. I think the TV series was a little more challenging to get the people in. I can tell you my Metal Gear Solid casting story though. EM: I would love to hear that! KZS: This is an amazing story. After I left Hanna-Barbera, I got a phone call. I don't remember if this is the game I had to quit my full-time job at Hanna-Barbera for or not. On the phone, this Japanese lady says, "We want to have you direct Metal Gear." And who knew what Metal Gear was? Right? You know? Please. She said, "We would like you to direct two weeks of auditions." I think it was for 20 characters, so that's a lot of auditions. I said, "Sure," and she said, "Okay, we've got a casting director from Torrance, California. She's an on-camera, commercial casting director and she's going to bring in the talent, "David Hayter came in and he was wearing khakis, a white T-shirt, and a head bandana. Unbeknownst to him." Back in the day, we always had storyboards. But the past several years, it's mainly been just a script, and you just have to imagine it. You've got the creative people with you, so they can explain to you how it's going to look. It is also possible that animation is done to a scratch track, and then the chosen actor would ADR to the timing of the scratch audio. For a show that I worked on called Close Enough, we would do some of it to full animation. We replaced the scratch track with the fully animated ADR. EM: Before you got your first game job, what excited you about games as a storytelling medium in the mid-'90s? KZS: My son played them, and Mario was fun. By the time the games I worked on were out, I couldn't even play them. It's just not what my brain does. They're a heck of a lot of fun to watch, and they're a hell of a lot of fun to make. To me, it's a movie. It's a really, really long movie. With a lot of options. EM: What was the first game that you worked on? KZS: It was called Monty Python's Holy Grail. Gordon was the voice director and I was the assistant director to Gordon on that project. I did a lot of the casting, except for the Monty Python people, but it's not really that entertaining of a story. It's just that we got to work with some of the people that were Monty Python at the time, and that was really a blast. Kris Zimmerman Salter spending time with one of her horses.