Dragon Age fan favourite character Morrigan found her voice after Farscape and Stargate SG-1 actress Claudia Black sent in a demo tape containing a surprising recording.
Medieval poetry? Fantasy literature? No, it was Black giving a beat poet rendition of Smack That by Akon (feat. Eminem).
Writing on Bluesky, Dragon Age creator David Gaider today revealed that BioWare had previously wanted Morrigan to be a teenager. There were also plans for the character to be Middle Eastern, though this fell through when legendary actress Shoreh Aghdashloo was no longer available to voice Morrigan’s mum Flemeth.
As plans changed around him, Gaider recalls being given Black’s recording and instantly becoming a fan. The rest is history.
As a reminder, here are (some of) the lyrics to Smack That by Akon (feat. Eminem).
I feel you creepin’, I can see it from my shadow / Wanna jump up in my Lamborghini Gallardo? / Maybe go to my place and just kick it like Tae Bo? / And possibly bend you over? / Look back and watch me
Smack that, all on the floor / Smack that, give me some more /
Smack that, ’til you get sore / Smack that, oh
“I lost my goddamn mind,” Gaider wrote. “Yes, I still have the recording. No, you cannot have it.
“Naturally, we jumped on that immediately. As I recall, this was met with resistance from higher up – they had this image of Morrigan as young, like 18 years old (no idea where this came from) and complained that Claudia sounded ‘too old’.
“The first two sessions we asked her to pitch her voice up and it was AWFUL. So Caroline [Livingstone, BioWare’s veteran VO Director] and I did the sneaky thing, and on the third session we asked her to just… act. Use her natural voice. We loved her performance so much we had the feeling that the team would love it too and forget their nonsense. They did.”
BioWare recently said that a Dragon Age trilogy remaster “wouldn’t be easy”, because hardly anyone at the studio still knows how its old engine works. This differs from Mass Effect, which was made in the still-friendly Unreal Engine.
For now, then, there’s the excellent Dragon Age Veilguard – in which Morrigan, of course, once again appears. “A fantasy role-playing game of astonishing spectacle,” our Bertie wrote in Eurogamer’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard review.
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