When American developer Visual Concepts thought it was a great idea to get pro basketball players in to do voice acting work. What was it expecting?

NBA 2K15 & Voice Acting

Seeing as we did a piece on bad voice acting in video games recently, we’re annoyed we missed this one. It’s glorious!

This bad boy hit the shelves in October 2014. Sports games are big business in the industry and generally offer a new iteration each year.

EA’s notorious FIFA series, for example, causes a massive raucous each year. A former colleague of ours, an apprentice, dedicated all of his spare time to it—even running a YouTube channel of his relentless matches. You go girl.

Anyway, this is basketball we’re on about here. And The NBKA series is a big one. The 2015 season iteration met with decent reviews on went on to shift some seven million units.

And they all got to listen to this stuff. Money well spot, most certainly.

What remains now, however, is voice acting so hilarious in its weirdness we were laughing ourselves stupid last night.

We immediately cancelled our intended post to run this stuff.

NBKA 2015 was the first game in the series to introduce RPG elements and conversation tree paths for the career mode option.

All fairly standard in sports games these days. But the devs brought in the real players to do some of the voiceover work.

Some had an unfair advantage over the others as they’d done advertisements and were more familiar with the process.

Voice acting may come across as easy, but it takes a lot of talent to do very well.

And that’s why many of the highly skilled basketball players fell flat on their arses.

Some of the dialogue delivery is barely coherent, as if mumbled out by a drunk or alien disguised as a human.

Other times it’s clear the basketball player struggled enormously to deliver the lines in an authentic way.

As, you know, they’re not professional voice actors. They play basketball for a living.

Anyway, they tried there best (probably). And that’s all that matters.

But it seems like Visual Concepts avoided bothering doing this again. Which is a good idea if you’re trying to make a serious sports game.

But, you know, there’s room for a comedy version as well if the devs fancy it.

Anyway, thanks for that! There’s a lovely compilation of the best bits to cherish lovingly for years to come.