Best Voice Acting in a Game

“All right, I’ve been thinking, when life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons! What am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down — with the lemons!”

Valve have created many masterpieces over the years, as game developers some regard them as innovators that have shaped the industry and in many ways rebuilt it from the ground up. Steam, their Digital Rights Management and Marketplace was resisted by many developers in its early days but today most PC, Mac, and Linux games are distributed through it, others have challenged it like Origin from EA now defunct, and Epic Games which is still going but arguably survives only because of a few choice titles that are exclusive to it.

The Half-Life universe is perhaps Valve's greatest creation, it was and still is the driver behind development of the Source Engine which has gone on to be used in many other Valve products and is available for third party developers to use. It's one of a handful of game engines I have used myself when developing games. Despite Half-Life's dominance and citation as Valve's flagship series, it was a spin-off from the franchise that would go on to develop a life of it's own in the form of the Portal series.

Portal has been mentioned a few times during this challenge and for good reason, it is one of the definitive titles in the 3D First Person Puzzle genre, in fact many other games in the genre borrow elements from Portal so frequently that nods to it and Easter eggs abound. The first game in the series is quintessential and brought an entire generation's attention to a genre that had been overlooked for the most part by the industry. Pre-Portal, games that revolved around puzzles were seen exclusively as the pursuit of casual gamers and never something you'd expect a AAA studio to release, Portal changed that perception.

Despite its significance it's not the first game in the series that I hold the most love for, that honour goes to Portal 2, the successor and I am not alone in that view. Portal 2 took the original game concept, stretched it out, polished it, and then dropped it from a thousand feet and smashed it up to make it look messy-chic. The story of Portal 2 opens some time after the events of the first game, it's left somewhat ambiguous as to how much time is passed, if one of the automated announcements in the opening sequence is to be believed then most of humanity is likely long dead.

Without narration both Portal 1 and 2 would be very lonely desolate games. The former would be clinical and the latter almost dystopian in nature. These games come into their own using a delicate blend of gameplay and punctuation by narration. The first game provides this through the voice of GLaDOS portrayed by Ellen McLain, GLaDOS, the Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System is a malevolent AI who initially gains the player's trust but quickly loses it and becomes the main antagonist of the game. At the end of the first game she is left in ruins. The second game in the series sees her resurrection and the story that follows deals with the ramifications of her destruction in the first game.

Both games take place in the Enrichment Centre, a research facility belonging to Aperture Science. The first game takes place entirely within the modern research centre and its backrooms whilst the second game sees the player fall deep into the bowels of the structure, down into the precursor the original facility built inside a salt mine that was abandoned decades prior and sealed possibly due to a mutant race of Praying Mantis Men.

Where the first game spends its entirety narrated by GLaDOS, the second sees us encounter the voice of Cave Johnson, founder of Aperture Science portrayed by J.K. Simmons. His automated announcements can be heard around the facility as you navigate the testing tracks and their interconnections. It's from these automated announcements that we get my favourite quote of the game, the lemons.

Voice acting in games was not new, automated announcements as you played the game were also not new, they had been done before, but the Portal series finds a balance between humour and information, between guiding the player through their objective and providing entertainment in the process. Portal 2 does this best, whether it is the return of Ellen McLain as GLaDOS, J.K. Simmons as Cave Johnson, or Stephen Merchant as Wheatley the lovable idiot turned omnipotent overlord.