Nintendo Sound Effects

July 9, 2009 7:50 PM

Nintendo sound effects: How did Nintendo get the sounds for some of the characters in Mario Kart Wii? Is there a person out there who sounds like Yoshi?

As I was playing Mario Kart Wii tonight, I realized that some of the characters are relatively normal...Mario and Luigi could easily just be regular people with a few vocal effects, and I'm sure we all know someone who sounds like Donkey Kong. But some of them are really weird--like King Boo...obviously that isn't a human, but is it just some kind of digital effect or an object in the real world? I'm especially interested in Yoshi because that one is right on the edge of it being plausible that it's a person.

I'm aware of Foley Artists and the idea that most sound effects are really just mundane objects being manipulated and recorded on tape. Is something similar at play here, or do real people voice cartoonish video game characters?

posted by DMan to technology (5 comments total)

Kazumi Totaka is the voice actor for Yoshi
posted by Frasermoo at 8:21 PM on July 9

How yoshi's voice is made (maybe)
posted by hindmost at 9:36 PM on July 9

While it's true Mario and Luigi have pretty standard speech, it might also interest to learn that the same voice actor provides voices for Mario, Luigi, Wario (!), and Waluigi.
posted by brett at 9:37 PM on July 9

When I lived in Japan I did voiceover work for a surfing video game.
posted by vincele at 10:14 PM on July 9 [1 favorite]

We ended up doing several takes because they wanted: girly grunts of frustration and excitement a grown woman would make when learning to surf. As imagined by a Japanese software developer.

So I had to make sexy, child-like noises, but not too sexy. They raised my natural voice several octaves so that they'd get that childish voice Japanese media demands of women performers.

Creepy then, creepy now.

Other voice work I did in Japan never required more than a couple of takes, so it was definitely the noises they wanted that caused problems.

By the way, I was embedded in the Japanese surfing scene at the time. No Japanese women surfers "in real life" emitted the noises those software developers were after. Video games are fantasy and all that, but weird all the same.
posted by vincele at 9:22 PM on July 10