10 Actors Who Reprised Iconic Roles In Video Games
Taking time out of Hollywood to lend their voices to our favourite games.
Video games have a strange relationship with other media. TV and movies in particular seem to be obsessed with capitalising on the success of their shows and films by converting them into games.
These very rarely go over well with critics or fans. Usually, the finished product feels rushed or simply lazy on the part of the developer, and it's rare for the rights to a movie tie-in game to go to any sort of reputable studio.
It's long since become something of a given that tie-in games are generally awful and worth avoiding at all costs, but sadly, it took us all far too long to learn that lesson.
As a result, there's a wealth of movie tie-in games to go back and (ahem...) enjoy - dating way back to the days of arcade machines and even a handful of modern movie tie-ins limping their way onto current-gen consoles.
Sometimes, despite the practically inherent lack of quality, these games are able to entice the movies' stars back to reprise their roles. While their motivations for doing so are anyone's guess (that is to say, almost certainly contractual obligations or good old-fashioned money), let's take a look at some of the times actors reprised their roles for video games.
10. William Shatner As Captain Kirk - Star Trek: Legacy (2006)
Star Trek: Legacy was released in 2006 for Windows and the Xbox 360.
A pretty standard RTS with a Star Trek skin, Legacy was none too popular with critics, despite its apparently ambitious nature.
The game gave players an opportunity to control a fleet of Federation ships through different eras of Star Trek canon, and boasted an impressive voice cast to boot.
Most notably, William Shatner returned to lend his inimitable voice to Captain James T. Kirk, but he wasn't alone.
Alongside Shatner, the four leads from other Star Trek shows all reprised their roles as captains; with Patrick Stewart as TNG's Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Avery Brooks as Deep Space Nine's Captain Benjamin Sisko, Kate Mulgrew as Voyager's Captain Kathryn Janeway, and Scott Bakula as Enterprise's Captain Jonathan Archer.
Although critics derided the game's bugs, graphical issues and unwieldy controls, fans of the Star Trek franchise were undoubtedly thrilled to have an opportunity to experience so much of Trek's rich and expansive story in one place.
While it's a shame that the game didn't work out as planned, the ambition alone (and the paycheck, of course) was apparently enough to bring five actors back to reprise their iconic roles.