Giving voice to China’s biggest video game

He’s the character crafting weapons and upgrading armour as gamers fight their way past rats, bears and centipedes – a sword-wielding blacksmith with a tiger’s head and… a Brummie accent.

Actor James Alexander, from Birmingham, was picked to play Yin Tiger for the English voiceover of the Chinese video game hit Black Myth: Wukong.

The creators loved his accent so much they encouraged him to keep it for the part.

His Brummie tones are now being heard through millions of headphones across the world, with the game selling 10 million copies in the first three days of its release in August.

Black Myth: Wukong has sparked a tourism boom in China, prompting fans to visit breathtaking locations featured and also introduces a new audience to the 16th Century Chinese novel on which it is based.

The success of the game was “well deserved”, said the voice actor.

“I woke up the morning it was released and had a message on my phone saying there were two million people playing, which was just mad,” he said.

“A lot of love has clearly gone into it.”

The 32-year-old was cast by British creative services company PitStop Productions to play five parts.

The Chinese client had provided detailed character briefs, he explained, “and seeing that as a voice actor you get excited thinking ‘oh I can spice that up a bit'”.

The character of Yin Tiger, was “a bit stoic and a bit irritable as well,” he said.

“The Brummie accent leans in nicely to having that kind of humble nature to it, but also you can be quite threatening with it as well.”

Yin Tiger is one of dozens of bosses players encounter as they move through the game’s storyline.

He also voices a Scorpion Lord “who’s drunk because he’s got an unfortunate back story where he lost his wife to a large chicken”.

A “dim-witted” rat man was given a soft West Country accent, and a “very threatening ox” was “a bit more Cockney”, he explained.

The actor is no stranger to working on popular releases, having voiced about 20 characters in last year’s hit game Baldur’s Gate 3.

Others he appears in include Brawl Stars, Warhammer 40K: Darktide, Horizon Call of the Mountain and the latest TV adaptation of Watership Down.

The former supermarket worker said he had had no formal acting training and is “constantly kicking myself I get to be part of these insane stories and experiences”.

He had always been a mimic he explained – trying to replicate voices he heard on TV or games – and had initially started applying for opportunities through casting websites.

“That was seven years ago and if you’d said to me then I would be in this game or that game I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said.

Beth Park from PitStop, with studios in London, said she had cast and directed more than 60 actors playing “a couple of hundred” parts in the Chinese game.

A snippet of it, previously released on YouTube, had resulted in a “definite buzz”, garnering millions of views ahead of its release.

But the numbers playing the game on its release were “just crazy”, she said.

Within 24 hours, it broke the record for the most-played single-player title ever released on gaming platform Steam.

It is the Chinese video game industry’s first AAA release – a title typically given to big-budget games from major companies.

Some early controversy surrounding its release has not dented its popularity with fans, with the game reportedly selling more than 20 million copies.

“I’ve worked on games that are incredibly popular in the past, and it’s always just really lovely to have your work experienced by so many people,” Ms Park said.

The action game is based on the classic 16th Century Chinese novel Journey to the West, with players taking on the role of the Destined One – a monkey with supernatural powers in search of magic objects.

The lead character is based on Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, a key character in the classic which was “incredibly important” in Chinese culture, added Ms Park.

For the English voiceover version, the Chinese company had been keen to use British regional accents, she explained.

“But I didn’t want the player to think ‘now we’re in a very specific part of Britain’, so I went more for the character fitting the type of voice – so I tried to keep it fairly broad.

“We just snuck in a few accents here and there if it felt right.”

Megan Richards, who plays one of the game’s Spider Sisters, said her first experience of voicing a video game had been “incredibly positive”.

“It’s amazing the sort of worldwide and universal reach that it has had,” she said.

The actor is also starring in Amazon Studio’s production The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, playing Harfoot Poppy Proudfellow, of which series two has just been released.

She said the two jobs were “incomparable”.

“For this season we had three units going, so three separate crews working at the same time, which is massive,” she said.

“And then compare that to just three people working in a booth.”

Her Singaporean heritage and Mandarin lessons as a child had helped her identify and pronounce some of the Chinese names in the game,” she explained.

“I have never been part of a project that has Asian influence in it, so it’s really nice to have that background and also able to see that representation in a video game.”

Tourists had been flocking to remote parts of China to visit ancient temples and pagodas featured in the game after a government department released a video showing the real-world attractions.

“I can only imagine how beautiful they are in real life,” added Ms Park.

“Games are intangible, so it’s really nice when real world things happen because of the work.”