Remember kids a gaming website isn’t a gaming website until it gets a picture of a famous videogame character and then snaps a poor picture of the guy that voiced him next to it. In that train of thought here are 10 favourite videogame characters and some information on the voice behind the polygons.

 

Also if you enjoyed this list why not look at Part 2?

 

 

 

 

Steve Downes is relativity unknown outside of Chicago where he hosts a radio show for one of the local stations, 97.1 WDRV. He’s only done one other piece of voice work for videogames, Gunnar in the 1999 RPG ‘Septerra Core: Legacy of the Creator’ which ultimately got him noticed and he ended up working on Halo: Combat Evolved. Steve doesn’t really like mentioning that he does voice-work for videogames but isn’t above mentioning it to children to gain their approval.

 

I love nothing more than watching voice actors scream into a mic that and it’s really weird seeing the voices I know come out of an alien mouth or rather, a human one.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh boy well this could take a while so let’s just hit the obvious one first. He’s Bender in the popular cartoon series ‘Futurama’. Then he’s done numerous other cartoon voice work such as Jake Long in ‘American Dragon’, Dreamslayer in ‘Justice League Unlimited’ as well as doing work for Spongbob Square Pants and Batman: The brave and Bold. He’s also done numerous videogame work other than in Gears of War, like the second half of the brilliant commentators in Mad World or Wakka in Final Fantasy X.

 

And here he is shouting at a drunk Mexican.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Martinet pretty much shows the world that doing vaguely offensive impressions of ethnic minorities can only lead to great things. His Italian voice was picked to be Mario, arguably the most famous video-game character of all time. Where else would you have heard him though? Probably no were else, while Charles has appeared in an impressive amount of TV shows and voice work of many games (outside of Mario) they are often so small you would think he’s just a very successful extra. Aside from doing Mario he also voices Luigi, Wario Waluigi, Toadsworth and their baby counterparts, as so many Mario games are being made each year he probably doesn’t have a lot of time to do other things. All those yahoos must be gruelling of the 54 year old, just look at the white hair.

 

He is pretty obsessed with the character as this interview shows.

 

 

 

 

 

Terrence 'T.C.' Carson is pretty interesting when it comes to this list, in that he is pretty successful outside of just voice work. He was Kyle Barker in the sitcom ‘Living Single’, was Steward Eddie Carson in U-571 and was Eugene Dix in Final Destination 2. That’s not to say he hasn’t done voice work before, he was a jazz musician in the Life and Times of Tim (check out the show, very good), was Mace Windu in cartoon and animated movie ‘Star Wars: The Clone Wars’ and was the Sword Master in ‘Afro Samurai’.

 

Aside from having a great acting voice he’s also an impressive singer as the next clip shows, wow.

 

 

 

 

 

America’s most bad-ass is actually Canadian; David Hayter has been an actor since the age of 9. If you think I was referring to Solid Snake in the last sentence you clearly didn’t know that David was the voice of Captain America in the ‘Spider-Man animated series’ of 1994 and many of his other appearances. Aside from doing voice work for many Marvel Comic based cartoons he’s also a writer. He was partly involved in the screenplays for ‘Watchmen’, ‘X2: X-Men United’ and ‘The Scorpion King’. Fans of the Metal Gear series should also breathe a sigh of relief as rumour has it that David Hayter is also doing writing for the upcoming Metal Gear movie.

 

He’s also writing for the upcoming Lost Planet movie, I just hope it’s better than either of the games. Check out his interview here.