(Thanks to Brian Crecente, editor of Kotaku and my evil twin, for pointing me to this story)
IGN got it right. The Washington Times got it wrong. Gamespot got it right. The New York Post got it wrong.
What is it? It's the answer to this question: Will Al Pacino be providing the voice of Tony Montana in the upcoming Scarface video game?
The correct answer, as a Vivendi source recently told Kotaku, is no, although you'd be hard pressed to figure that out from yesterday's press release announcing the game's cast. The relevant excerpt from the release:
Ensuring an authentic videogame experience of the movie, film actor Al Pacino has lent his likeness to the game, assuring that players will embark on a journey that delivers the essence and soul of the Scarface mythology. The game's roster of voice actors also includes original Scarface cast members Steven Bauer and Robert Loggia (who played Manny Ray and Frank Lopez respectively), comedians Jay Mohr and Cheech Marin, and actors James Woods, Miguel Sandoval, Robert Davi, Michael Rappaport and Michael York.
The bold emphasis above is added by me and, I think, gets to the heart of the confusion. The "also" in this sentence could be interpreted to mean that Al Pacino is also a voice actor, or that this list of actors from the Scarface movie happen to be voice actors for the game as well. Read it too quickly and you'll likely come to the wrong conclusion.
Semantics aside, the press release doesn't explicitly state whether Pacino is or is not providing his voice in the game. The safe assumption would be that he isn't, since Vivendi would likely want to promote Al Pacino's full involvement as much as possible. Still, assuming either way from this press release without talking to Vivendi is a little risky. TotalVideoGames hedged their bets and simply said the release "makes no mention to [Pacino's] voice being used or not."
The problem for some sites came from questionable sourcing. Voodoo Extreme 3D cited the faulty New York Post story for their information without looking to confirm their facts independently. No word on why the Post got it wrong, though I'd suspect they simply misread the release in a rush to publish first. After all, this is the same paper that famously and falsely reported John Kerry's pick of Dick Gephardt as running mate in last year's election.
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I'm glad you covered this, I thought it was a terribly-worded press release. Or ingeniously-worded, considering how much play Vivendi got out of it.
ReplyDeleteAs it happens, Radical Entertainment taught a class I took on Computer Game Design. We were shown some preliminary work being done on Scarface, and they talked a little about Al Pacino and the voice acting thing.
ReplyDeleteSomeone in the class asked if Al Pacino would be doing the voice since he's kind of old now, and the response from the Radical guys was basically "No. But we've got a young voice actor who Pacino approved for us." This was back in January around 9am, so it's likely mangled greatly, but the basic idea is the same. Since this was before the game was actually announced, Vivendi Universal or Radical may have changed their minds on the topic too. Take it as you may.