February 2000 - Archived Interview with IGN:
IGN64: So Tim how long have you been working in the games business, and what titles have you lent your voice to?
Tim: It was, I think, 1990, and it started when I was playing drums in a band. Some of the musicians were musicians for Williams/Bally Midway, composing songs for all the pinball machines. They asked me if I could do a Mr. Howell -- they were doing a Gilligan's Island game and they couldn't find anyone who could do him, so they were kind of stuck -- and I did it. That was the beginning, and they started bringing me in for different pinball games. The first big one was Twilight Zone -- they had been looking in Chicago for a Rod Sterling, and they turned to me again. Because they [Midway] were friends, it was a kind of an easy-going thing. I wasn't out soliciting myself or going through an agent or anything, but it turns out I had some more abilities than some of the people they were going through the agencies for.
So I established myself with that game. It's funny, there were folks on the Internet who were convinced that what they had done was collected all of Rod Sterling's speech from different Twilight Zones and cut it up to paste it into the pinball game.
It was pretty good! We nailed it. That was one of the good ones. Then, briefly, I'll list a few of the other ones I worked on: Popeye, The Shadow (where I played... The Shadow), Road Show (which was a great one, a good redneck pinball game where a guy goes across the country wrecking things with his bulldozer... Carline Carter Cash was the female in that one), Judge Dredd, Junkyard, World Cup Soccer (which was done during the Olympics), Attack From Mars and its recent sequel Revenge From Mars (which is the first video and pinball-integrated pinball game, and also -- another milestone -- the last of the pinball era for Midway.
Then there was NBA Jam -- that was my first video game. IGN64: That's quite a way to break in.
Tim: Yeah, that was the first of its kind in the sports genre. No one had ever done any elaborate voice-over work on a sports game, and there weren't really any big sports games in the arcades at that point. Mark Turmell, genius that he is, saw the opening, and that game took off and ended up surprising everyone. It became the biggest selling arcade game in history, beating out Pac-Man and Space Invaders. The first year it took in 900 million dollars in quarters. [laughing] If you think that Jurrassic Park, after everything -- video sales, box office, and all their worldwide marketing campaign -- did about that, it was pretty amazing. At that time Midway was licensing their arcade game to Acclaim, and when they did the home version they called me and I did that.
That was back in the early days when there was such limited space on those machines that we literally had to go over, ten or fifteen times, something like "He's on fire!" as fast as we could until it was [wording it extremely fast] "H's o'fire!" "Fr' dn'tn!" and "P'pn!" There was just no room. It was screaming as fast and as loud as you can, and when I look back at that game, I think that it was, well, just not very good. But it was only because of the restrictions. I had it in me! I wanted to let it go, but it was just really, really difficult working on that format and under those restrictions.
Read the full Interview: http://www.ign.com/articles/2000/02/16/breaking-into-the-industry-tim-kitzrow