Kevin Conroy Did Not Enjoy His Experience Voicing Batman in the BATMAN: ARKHAM Games
An old interview has resurfaced of the late Batman voice actor Kevin Conroy talking about his experience voicing Batman in the Batman: Arkham video games. Conroy spent years having a great experience voicing the character in WB’s Batman: The Animated Series, but it was a very different experience for the video games and it’s one that he didn’t seem to enjoy.
Conroy explained that the only recording process he'd known of was the one that he was a part of for Batman: The Animated Series, and when he did those, all of the actors gathered together in the studio, which allowed them to play off of each other while recording their lines. He shared:
"I didn't understand how unique it was until 20 years later when I started doing the Arkham games. Because of the algorithms, and how they're constructed, they have to have each voice completely clean and in your own take. You do four hours a day alone, in a booth, in a vacuum, creating the character, keeping the character’s voice alive, and then creating the situation for each line. Then they want it three times, you know. ‘Give it to us angry! Oh, keep that anger and give it to us with a little irony! Oh, we love the anger and we love the irony, now just sweeten it with a little bit of love.’ By the time you get out of there you’re pulling out your hair and you’re going, ‘what the f**k do they want me to say!?’"
He went on to talk about the process of regarding the games saying that he would go through two four-hour recording sessions a day, with a lunch break in between, for a week at a time. As dialogue was being added to the game, he would come in and record as needed. He said the process for Arkham Knight took two years, and during that that he recorded some 37,000 lines of dialog. He also pointed out that the developers never reused the grunts of pain and effort recorded for previous games.
While Conroy’s experience was difficult for these games, he did respect them and said: "They're incredible games, aren't they? They're just so beautiful."