Voice actor Neil Newbon has become one of the hottest names in the business following his impeccable turn as Astarion in the massively popular Baldur’s Gate 3, but he’s by no means a newcomer when it comes to video games, having already lent his vocal talents to games such as Resident Evil Village and Detroit: Become Human. He’s also a lifelong gamer, as he recently revealed on GINX TV’s The Games That Made Me.
During an hour-long chat, Newbon spoke not only about his career but also his favourite video games – and he revealed that he began his gaming education on the legendary ZX Spectrum:
The ZX Spectrum was my first thing, I don’t even remember how I convinced my family to get me one. I think it was like a way I could be occupied because I had a lot of energy so it was like ‘just give him that and he’ll just, you know, that’s where he’ll be’.
But having to make your own games was kind of interesting, like you’d have to read out from magazines, like, you know, ‘line 10, go to 20, if this go to x’. All that kind of basic language that you had to learn to make a game and then play it. Of course it was on cassette tapes, so it took 45 minutes to load the game. It was a real emotional investment. You know, god forbid if it actually crashed, you’d think ‘Can I do this again? Because I spent 45 minutes watching this thing load’.
People complaining about loading screens now, oh man get over it. Dude. We had to spend an entire afternoon to play a game. It was like, you had to commit – and it was one game.
I remember playing Zoids and the thing crashed and I screamed because I suddenly got this thing that I haven’t been able to do before, and then sitting with the emotional resonance of ‘not only do I have to load it again, but I then have to play it again to the exact same…’ It was a nightmare.
Newbon also cites Julian Gollop’s work on the system as especially impactful. “I was first introduced to his games through Rebelstar Raiders, which became Rebelstar and then Rebelstar II,” he explains. As a child, Newbon found the fact that each character under your control had a name to be strangely moving:
They all had names. They became like real little dudes. As opposed to Manic Miner or Chuckie Egg or whatever. So as a kid, I started filling in the background of who they were and who they were to each other. You know, Kurt Levine likes this person and doesn’t like that person. Jasper is like a bit of a douche, so, you know, so nobody likes Jasper, things like that. It was just interesting because it was a very interesting simplified strategic game, but it was really fun and it felt like an actual movie, you know, on the ZX Spectrum with tiny graphics.
Newbon – who also recently voices Dracula in Vampire Survivors’ Castlevania expansion – adds that, back in the ’80s, games were a lot less forgiving than they are today:
The games were not easy. They weren’t. It’s interesting being an older gamer, because like, I remember when nothing was explained to you.
You had basic information of instructions. The Great Escape on ZX Spectrum, it had like a very basic AI sets of like behaviours for all of the characters like the German guards, the British POWs. But there was no explanation of how all these things work together. You had to learn the game. I really like that. I really like it when games don’t give you much information. They just let you go out there, you know, like old MMORPGs and things like that. I really like them because there wasn’t a huge amount of information, you had to learn, or ask other people, that kind of stuff.
You can check out the full interview – in which Newbon also discusses Final Fantasy, Fallout and earlier Baldur’s Gate games – here.
Go on.... treat yourself to a new game.
