Note
We hd a lot of fun recording this. Ken Levine was in his office in Boston and I was in a recording studio in New York, and we did it all by phone. I’m not sure how Ken had cast me – we had never met – but we played around with some voices for Sander until we found one he liked. We’d do several takes of each speech – sometimes many takes – with both of us laughing after he called cut. Ken kept saying “Now try one really big, really go for it”.
I went in to do a few retakes a month later and asked one of the Irrational Games reps there at the studio what the character of Cohen looked like. He showed me a few early renderings and I said “Wow!” and told them that I looked kind of like that in a play I had just done.
Here is Sander Cohen:
And here is how I looked in the play I’d performed in just prior to recording Bioshock:
(That play was “In This Corner”, writen by Steve Drukman – see project page here ) But it gets odder:
Later in the play I looked like this:
Red cummerbund and bow tie!
Here is Sander in Burial at Sea:
Synchronicity?
*
Also, re the Bioshock series, a footnote: I recorded the voice for a character as they were assembling Bioshock 2 but they wound up not using them in the final game, some giant robotic creature. I asked what it looked like and they said “A rabbit crossed with the Trojan Horse”.
Spawn of The Wild Bunny? We’ll never know.
