Who was the voice actor of the pilot in the Descent Freespace intro cinematic?

Question

Recently rewatched the intro cinematic for Descent Freespace (aka Freespace 1):

I'm just blown away by the pilot's acting. I Googled around but couldn't find the actor's name. Game's credits don't list them either. Anyone know?

Answer 1

Unfortunately this question will be nearly impossible to answer.

In the 90s voice acting was mostly done in house, professional voice actors (or actors) were a rarity only used in few games. Volition was a branch of Parallax (the descent devs) and Freespace was their first game as an independent company. It's unlikely, they employed known voice actors for their first effort.

The Imdb page only lists three known voice actors, two of which had Freespace as their only project in this timeframe and the third, Valerie Milenka Repnau, doing several voice acting jobs in video games. But since she is a woman, we can rule her out as Lt. ashs voice actor. The two men had bigger roles in the game and are also unlikely to be Lt. Ash. As Ash only exists for the intro movie, it's most likely that one of the developers served as his voice actor. A clue to this is, that one of VAs on imdb is Duncan McPherson, who worked as a developer at Volition in the late 90s. So even a fairly big role like the training instructor was filled with a dev.

There are no sources out there, which can confirm who lent this character his voice and this makes the question impossible to answer, the best we have is that it is one the following people: Rick Barrows, Phil Strang, Jeffrey Coleman, Mark Allender, Dan Kuhlman or Jeremy Barnal (the males listed on the synchronization cast on your mobygames link minus the two we can eliminate).

Your best bet to get a definitive answer would be to contact Volition directly and ask them. Though I wouldn't bet on them knowing who voiced an intro character in a 21 year old game, but possibly they've documented it and can find the files.