As you may have been moved by the death at eighty of Tim Curry, also because the liberating force of his Frank ‘n’ Further in The Rocky Horror Picture Show remains, after fifty years, truly evergreen and contagious. There is, however, an aspect that in these moments can be overlooked: his commitment as a voice actor and, more generally, the peripheral work that a career built on iconic roles often entails. Personally, we’ve come across him on PC screens multiple times, as the voice of famous and less famous video games. In one case, Curry even stepped in personally.
The Video Games Featuring Tim Curry’s Voice: A Brief Overview
In the early 1990s, the video game market was just beginning to embrace CD-ROMs: the era of “multimedia” was born, where a game could boast full voice acting thanks to the greater storage space, compared to what floppy disks could offer. Tim Curry made his debut in that world in 1993, lending his voice to the lead character, a roguish bookstore proprietor in a grim voodoo tale set in New Orleans, in the masterpiece Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers (Sierra, by Jane Jensen): an adventure game of the point-and-click variety, a measured form of gaming that relied on exploration, dialogue, and puzzle-solving rather than reflexes. He shared the narration in that instance with Mark Hamill, voice of detective Mosley, Gabriel’s ally. His sly, somewhat playful interpretation drew some critique, but he nonetheless reprised the role in the third installment, Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred Blood of the Damned (1999, Sierra, again by Jane Jensen), skipping the second because that one used live-action actors in full-motion video, and Curry would have cost too much, in addition to not resembling at all the blond, cursed, sarcastic figure on screen.
casting him in flesh and blood did not deter Interplay, which cast him in Frankenstein: Through the Eyes of the Monster (1995, for PC, Mac and Saturn), where in a first-person view we were a dead man revived by him, there on the screen, in the role of a stern Dr. Frankenstein.
Apart from this exception, it was his low and ruthless voice that propelled Tim Curry toward villain roles in video games, from the cartoony antagonists in Toonstruck (1996, Virgin) to the almost satanic figure in Brutal Legend (Double Fine Productions / EA, 2009), where he portrayed the grotesque Doviculus, leader of the demonic race of the Infected Spirals in the metal-lands encountered by an ironic roadie voiced with a voice not by Jack Black.
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