Reply With Quote"As long as you're here, you may as well leave a message at the beep."
For those who don't know, CAMEO is a platform on which you can pay various celebrities for customized shoutout videos. The price is set by the performer and can vary wildly.
Now imagine for a moment that our well known favorite Stephen Russell were to appear on CAMEO...
Would you pay for custom Garrett lines for your FM?
"As long as you're here, you may as well leave a message at the beep."
Stephen has been asked in the past about doing voice lines for fan missions, and his answer was that he wouldn't be allowed to without going through Eidos's (presumably now Square Enix's) lawyers.
i've always wondered if this was actually the case - jeff baker was paid to do new voice lines for a morrowind mod and he happily obliged, and i'm certain other fan projects have done things like this. are videogame voice actors typically prohibited from doing work for mods? is it a union thing? did eidos specifically prevent stephen from doing it at the time? i'm not sure if there are any actual legal precedents for thisOriginally Posted by nicked
Perhaps there was a clause in his contract saying that Eidos had exclusive rights to his voice as Garrett's for their projects?
considering eidos's history i wouldn't be surprised if they were that ballsy and snuck that into his contract, it just doesn't sound especially likely to me
Russell's response referenced above was posted here on TTLG at the time, so it really did happen. He politely refused to do custom Garrett lines for a fan work because he was prohibited from doing so.
Wow seriously?I wonder why? I mean, what do the gain by prohibiting him from that?!
Control over an aspect of their IP. It's just business.
As for why other voice actors have done it, perhaps they had more favourable contracts. Or perhaps Stephen Russell was just trying to politely say no without any awkwardness.
Well, Eidos does own the character of Garrett but aside from that, I would assume his Actors Union would have something to say about non union work.Wow seriously?
Just being petty. Remember what they did to the franchise?Wow seriously?
This has me thinking: they may have said that he can't do Garrett, but what about other characters? He voiced Benny, didn't he? And what about commissioning him for an original character or a character mentioned in passing? I could see his baritone fitting a character like the Hammerite Smith-In-Exile.
You could probably commission him to voice a character if he has time, but it couldn't be a character in the Thief franchise canon, for the same reason as with Garrett - intellectual property rights.
What if it was a total conversion?
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