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When you go to a job interview, you usually have a good idea of what the job is. If not, you should have a good sense by the time you start the job.

Things are different in the world of video games. For example, Tim Downie was recording motion capture for Baldur’s Gate 3, but he didn’t know who he was playing, or what the video game was.

Downie recalls the phone call he got weeks after his audition. He was offered the role of Gale Dekarios, but they wouldn’t tell him the character’s name.

“Three weeks later they said, ‘Do you remember that video game,’” Downie recalls during a panel at Florida Supercon. “I was like, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘Well, you got the part. You are a wizard.’ ‘Fantastic! What’s the wizard’s name?’ ‘We can’t tell you that.’ ‘Okay, can you tell me what the game’s called?’ ‘Well, they’re not saying.’ Sure enough, they didn’t tell me what the name of the game was for about 18 months of recording.”

“So, you’re standing there in a suit full of things, having done a year and a half of recording, and you would still say, ‘Come on, surely now because we’re friends, you can tell me what this game is called.’ I found out two and a half years later from the audition what the game was called and what the character was called. So, that was the journey,” Downie says with amusement.

“It was a real journey of self-discovery because you have no real idea what this is. I haven’t played D&D, I didn’t really know the world. I knew it from the cartoon, the ‘80s cartoon. That was kind of my in. I kind of fell into it almost.”

The next time you get confused at work, don’t feel so bad. Some video game actors don’t even know what their job is.

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