I agree it's bad, but for some reason I find it bad in a good way. I almost never skip dialog in these games, and usually I skip because I read so much faster than the delivery. I definitely wouldn't call it the worst voice acting performance. The accent is atrocious, but the characterization is actually pretty good. Play the second game for some examples of bad acting :)

Heh, I dunno, I remember not thinking it was bad when I did my original play through of SOTF in 93 or 94. Course I was only about 10 then...I also remember being excited for Tim to come back and do it for GK3. Then again, I've completed some games where the voice actors don't even speak English, yet are reading pages of english lines, so, I might just be a bad judge.

I like his voice acting in both GK1 and GK3 and I also like many of his TV and movie performances. But I can't really say if his accent is bad or not as I'm not native English speaker.

I know his accent was all over the place in GK1, but it was bearable, and everything he said was worth hearing, anyway. Gabriel remained a well-written, intelligent, fleshed-out character that had genuine human flaws and had an everyman appeal.

Tim Curry really exaggerated the bad accent in GK3 and his inflection has a whiny twang at the end of most of what he said. His pronunciation speeds varied from moderate to slow in syntax - a bit similar, I think, to Jack Nicholson's well-known vocal patterns.

I think, also, with GK3, it wasn't a great deal of how Tim delivered his lines, but rather what was written for his character. You have to remember that with GK1, the narration (choice of spoken or written) provided much of the information in the story, and, occasionally, Gabriel's internal thoughts. Gabriel himself would sometimes chime in after the narration, as part of a fourth-wall breaking moment, or to flesh out the dialog. The dialog here was always well-written, in-character and worth listening to. The entire script of GK1 was written by Jane Jensen.

GK3, on the other hand, had no narration. Everything in the game world that you'd interact with to receive a verbal response was provided by the two main characters. Most of these remarks were written by Jane Jensen, but there were quite a few that were written by another member of the design team. That's why, at times, some of the things Gabriel says in GK3 are either obnoxious, unfunny, inappropriate, and, regrettably, out of character. I think many people would agree, if they compared the versions of his character between games, they'd come to the conclusion that the GK1 and GK2 Gabriel is the true one.

Despite all this, Jane would have, of course, permitted these script modifications. She was the lead designer after all. Though it makes me wonder what she was thinking. Perhaps, with the limitations of the 3D technology, they couldn't properly animate emotions, so they instead exaggerated them through voice-overs. Or maybe they tried to increase the comedy angle and tried to pepper it with Tim Curry's oily charm. Another thing to consider is that the onus should be on the voice director and how effectively they can be to provide guidance, not necessarily on the actors.

In any event, it turned me off Gabriel's character in the 3rd game. I expected him to be quite different, considering the horrors and trauma he'd witnessed in the last two games. Not some wise-cracking, sarcastic, smarmy, sleazy, jackass.

Well whenever an English actor tries to do an American accent it usually ends up getting complained about, and whenever an American actor tries to do an English accent the same happens. Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins is a notorious example of a terrible "Landan" accent, and apparently Jude Law in Cold Mountain sounded terrible to Americans.

I could tell Tim Curry's accent was changing here and there in GK, but I could still tell it was a New Orleans accent. Then again, my single experience with that accent in Gambit in the X-Men cartoon...

Odd you should say so. While I'm not from New Orleans, I am from the deep South (US) and I thought he did a great job. A little exaggerated maybe but I know some guys who actually sound like that. Tim got an A from me on his voice work.

GK3 is another matter.

The game holds such esteem from my childhood that I'll overlook any voice acting - good bad or otherwise...

Same goes with the actual video acting from the 2nd game...

This is exactly what I felt while playing the third game years ago. I was so taken aback by Gabriel's sudden change of personality that it distracted from the game. Worse still was that it often didn't even feel like Gabe a lot of the time. Like iamtheman says, there was plenty of out-of-character dialogue. Hell, I thought the whole romance subplot felt out of character, but this may have stemmed from how poorly it was presented either by the writer(s) or by the way it was spoken/discussed in game.

I've always felt that taking a game like Gabriel Knight which relied so heavily on it's artistic style and atmosphere, and then slamming it into a poorly handled 3-D world is.. well.. pretty much like what happened to way too many Adventure genre games, I'm afraid.

I know this is a bit of an old thread, but it was only on the second page and I felt compelled to add to the discussion. I strongly agree that compared to the previous two games, this feels like the odd-man out.

I'm replaying the series now, so here is my take on an older conversation ;)

I think he improves in the 3rd from the first. I was most surprised to hear a very current sounding Leah Remini in the first game.

The only thing that really draws attention to the voice acting for me is the way he pauses at the end of every sentence and adds that mysterious and forced sinister twist to his last word...

"Tell me about..... voodoo"

"I'm going to.... leave"

I can do it too:

"I'll have a ham.... sandwich"

"I have an itch on my... kneecap"

Can I have some money now?

All in all he fills the role ok, but I was surprised to see who it really was. I'm guessing it was a character choice which IMHO wasn't all bad.... just surprising/interesting.