Kevin Conroy Says Arkham Games Are Exhausting

Kevin Conroy is proud to do video games, but always finds the work incredibly draining

Kevin Conroy has been the defining voice of Batman for a quarter of a century. Sure, there are others who have voiced Batman and do it perfectly well, but when you ask anybody who the voice of Batman is, it’s Kevin Conroy. He was already pretty popular for the role in shows like Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League, but he arguably gets even more recognition these days for his work in the seminal Arkham video game series, which set a high bar for how a superhero video game is done.

Kevin Conroy has voiced Batman for nearly every single Arkham game, with the exception of the prequel Arkham Origins. And frankly, though he’s always proud of the finished product, he finds the work severely exhausting:

"Thirty-Six thousand lines of dialogue in Arkham Knight. Thirty-six thousand lines of dialogue. And you record them line after line after line, alone, because with the science of how the game is built, they have to have everything completely clean and separate. So you’re alone for days at a time, eight hours a day, line after line after line, trying to keep the character fresh, trying to keep the line readings fresh, trying to keep your voice in the right place. And doing it all with no feedback from any other actors. You’re doing it alone! It’s so hard. By the end of the week, I’m just dead. And it’s not as fulfilling as acting in the episodic shows, because those are like little plays, you have interaction with the other actors and it’s so much fun. Games, the fulfillment is in seeing the games at the end, because they’re fantastic. They’re beautiful works of art, and you feel so proud to be a part of them. But the actual process of building them is brutal."

See Kevin Conroy talk about this and how he prefers traditional short form animation below:

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Well we certainly appreciate all the hard work Kevin Conroy puts in for those video games, he’s a big part of why they are so excellent and hopefully he’ll be doing more Batman video games in the future. Kevin Conroy will be back as the voice of Batman in Justice League Action on Cartoon Network this Fall.

h/t Comicbook.com