I still remember how surprised I was when I found out it was him, Rutger ruddy Hauer. A legend. The guy from Blade Runner.
That’s what I was thinking way back in May 2017. I wasn’t somewhere flashy – I was in a small office in Krakow, Poland, being shown a game by the Layers of Fear studio Bloober. It was an impressive demo. The game, Observer, looked great – a lot like Blade Runner, in fact. It was a sci-fi detective game where you hacked minds to sift through memories for clues, and being in minds gave Bloober dramatic licence to warp and twist, wrongfoot and scare.
But the icing on the cake was the voice – the voice of lead character Daniel Lazarski. Before I even knew who it was – before I even knew it was someone famous – it made an impression. The voice had power, gravitas.
“[Daniel Lazarski] was no longer our creation only” -Bloober on Rutger Hauer’s involvement in Observer
Voices fascinate me and it bothers me when there’s cheap voicework in games. It sounds weak and hammy. But this voice oozed quality. It was gravelly, gnarled, and measured. I hung on every unrushed word.
I asked who it was but Bloober couldn’t tell me. It was an ace up the sleeve for another day. ‘Someone big’ was all I was allowed to know.
Weeks later, I worked it out, I was sure of it. I emailed Bloober. “Marshall Bell.” Boom, mic drop. “Hahahaha – wrong, keep trying,” came the reply.
I’d been utterly convinced. I’d seen a little still of the character in the game – on a dossier file or a detective badge or something – and it had been the spit of Bell. Who else could it be? Then I had the rushing intake of realisation.