“Kept you waiting, huh?” David Hayter said upon taking the stage at New York Comic Con this weekend. The panel got off to a slightly late start, but host Trent Cannon had a number of people to wrangle. The panel, entitled “Beyond the Codec: The Voice Cast of Metal Gear Solid,” had a host of actors. Jennifer Hale (Dr. Naomi Hunter), Christopher Randolph (Otacon), Tasia Valenza (Sniper Wolf), and Cam Clarke (Liquid Snake) joined Hayter for the retrospective.
The panel immediately kicked off with fan questions. One person asked about the cast’s favorite moments from recording, and Hale definitely had one. She had Hayter tell the story of recording Metal Gear Solid 4. Hayter related that during the scene when Dr. Hunter sees how aged Snake has become during his medical exam, Hale had the line “Oh, Snake…” which she said pityingly. Hayter started to improvise that it wasn’t that bad, so Hale responded, “It’s so shriveled!”
If that wasn’t enough, the line nearly ended up in the game. The Japanese team just assumed they were reading the script. Solid Snake “narrowly avoided becoming Shriveled Snake,” Hayter said, to laughter from the crowd.
The entire cast seemed to have a lot of fun recording with each other. And that showed in how good natured they were in responding to fan questions. Hayter laughed about getting inundated with requests for Cameos (he’s taking a break). He talked about frequently sitting in a corner and going, “This is Snake. I hear it’s your birthday!” in places like O’Hare Airport, because you have just six days to do a Cameo once it’s requested.
The panel oscillated (oceloted?) between the silly and the serious. Randolph talked about the voice director for Metal Gear Solid 5 letting him know when he slipped from Huey Emmerich to Otacon, his son. “It’s a very subtle difference,” he explained.
Did they know Metal Gear Solid would become such a phenomenon? Not at all. “But it’s you guys and the conventions that really let us know the shelf life [of these titles],” Clarke told the crowd.
In fact, they recorded the first game in a house. That’s how low-key it was at the time. “We had to stop constantly,” Hale explained, saying that airplanes would be flying overhead and buses and motorcycles would be going by as they recorded.
In fact, this lead to an interesting observation. When asked about remakes Hayter mentioned that Konami brought him in for Metal Gear Solid Delta, the remake of the third game, just for some pickup lines. For the most part, the original audio held up. But he said that if Konami ever remakes the original Metal Gear Solid, they’d likely have to bring back the cast to re-record. “You can hear traffic in the background,” he noted, sharing that for contemporary sound systems they’d “probably have to re-record.” The rest of the cast expressed excitement at the potential prospect of reprising their roles.
But it wouldn’t be the first time. Valenza explained that when GameCube remake Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes was in development, Hayter’s fee had gone up since he wrote the screenplay for X-Men. Konami decided to recast the other roles to compensate. But when Hayter got wind of this he took a pay cut so everyone else could return. “He’s a heck of a nice guy,” Valenza said in relating the story.
For his part, Hayter said that it greatly helped to have the main cast all record together. Since then it’s something he’s insisted on. He explained that in playing through Delta, he felt that some of his audio he’d have done differently but he still “love[s] the scenes with the boss.”
The reason he felt some audio sounded off? For the first game, the cast recorded based on the game’s footage. For Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3, they didn’t have the footage yet so they just guessed at what was happening—out of sequence no less. With 4, they at least got access to the motion-capture footage which helped immensely.
As such, “I think I’m proudest of the Old Snake performance,” shared Hayter. But he’s proud of all of the games since “each one is so unique.”
“I thought you were going to say you were proudest of Metal Gear Solid 5,” Randolph responded, rubbing salt in the wound. For reference, series creator Hideo Kojima replaced Hayter’s Big Boss role with Kiefer Sutherland for the final game in the series.
But Hayter took this jab in good nature at the panel, as he joked with everyone about pouring salt in Snake’s wounds.
What was it like to work with Kojima? “We have no idea,” Hayter admitted. He explained that they only met two or three times. Kris Zimmerman Salter directs the English language performers and deserves that credit. But still, “Kojima is a genius.”
“He does an incredible amount of research on where the world is going,” Hayter said of Kojima’s ability to write stories ahead of their time. He praised Kojima’s take on AI in Metal Gear Solid 2 in particular. “It’s pretty damn relevant.”
The actors also shared a lot of respect for one another. Since voice actors can often get pigeonholed, they hoped that people may see their cast mates in live action roles as well. “We get characterized in a way that’s difficult to overcome,” noted Randolph. But he has hope, praising the recent examples of Troy Baker and Ashley Johnson appearing in The Last of Us on HBO.
Hayter shared that aside from his own role, Otacon is his favorite. “He’s my ride or die,” Hayter nodded. But then acted aghast when Randolph hesitated when posed with the same question. Fittingly, his other favorite roles are toss up between Snake and Sniper Wolf.
This prompted Valenza to nod. She loved how the role of Sniper Wolf afforded her such a long and dramatic death scene. “Actors like to chew the furniture,” she said with a smile.
