Troy Baker Is Ready to Swap Voice Acting for Game Development

Troy Baker is the man the game studios have on speed dial for his voice-acting talents, and now the man behind Joel in The Last Of Us, Sam from Uncharted, and Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones And The Great Circle wants to make his own.

In a recent interview, he spoke about how he’s been inspired by Abubakar Salim, the voice actor for Assassin’s Creed Origins, who went on to make the Afro-futurist action game Tales of Kenzera: Zau. He also name-checked Ken Levine, Hideo Kojima, Neil Druckmann, Todd Howard, and Vince Zampella, saying he learned a lot working alongside them.

“What I am excited about doing is taking those tenets, taking those principles of wildly successful titles – not just in terms of sales and figures, but the stories that have defined the industry – and being able to innovate and replicate and emulate those processes and practices into the stories that I want to tell,” he told Eurogamer. “So, I am going to take my time, because I want to make sure that, when I finally do tell a story, it’s one of just as high a caliber of those that I am trying to emulate.”

Baker truly has some of the most sought-after vocal cords in both games and animation, with over 430 voice-acting credits to his name. The man has range too, working on everything from BioShock Infinite to The Simpsons. Most recently he plays the hero Jack Pepper in Mouse: P.I. for Hire and is currently working on Naughty Dog’s upcoming Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet and Levine’s Judas.

Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.