Joe Micheals
| Joe Micheals | |
|---|---|
| |
| Biographical information | |
| Title(s) |
|
- “The recording sessions for Portal 2 were great fun. One bit of direction was to 'make it sound like [I was] the announcer for a ride at Disneyland!'”
- — Joe Micheals[1]
Joe Micheals is an American voice actor who voiced the Announcer in Portal 2 and in the Robot Repair minigame from The Lab.[2] He is often confused with Joe Romersa, another voice actor, as they are sometimes credited under the same name.
Biography[edit]
Micheals knew that he wanted to do voice-over work from an early age, as he was always fascinated by radio. When he was a teenager, he created his own radio commercials by reciting ads out of the newspaper and mixing the dialogue with Top 40 music, broadcasting the results to his local neighborhood in Millwood, Washington. His creations caught the attention of a manager at a local radio station, KJRB, who hired Micheals and gave him his start in the industry. Though radio was his passion, Micheals also developed an appreciation for the artistry of voice-over work, which led him to branch out into doing voice-over work for commercials, television, film, and eventually, video games. Over the course of his career, Micheals has lent his voice to everything from employee instruction videos and automated phone systems to critically-acclaimed video games such as Portal 2.[1]
On February 26, 2016, YouTuber Tyler McVicker discovered the existence of unused audio files from Robot Repair featuring Joe Micheals in an early version of the Steam VR Performance Test application. These files consist of raw voice acting sessions of Micheals running lines with a few Portal 2 writers, including Erik Wolpaw, which demonstrate how the writers directed Micheals in his performance as the Announcer.[3] After McVicker compiled some of these files into a 20-minute-long video that he uploaded to YouTube, which can be viewed here, Micheals featured the video on his own website.[1]
Selected gameography[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Joe Micheals' personal website
- ↑ The Lab credits
- ↑ Uncovered voice files reveal how Valve makes games funny, Destructoid (February 28, 2016)
