The Alters should have been here by now, but after a short delay to add more polish, 11 Bit Studios announced a new release date for the survival, resource management game involving clones, and some hard-hitting messages. We were lucky enough to have sat down with Alex Jordan, the face and voice of the entire cast of The Alters, and chat about the game, his potential return in a Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, and Natural Six, his Dungeons & Dragons-based team of voice actors and game dev friends.
The Alters, Mr. Hands, and a Graphic Novel
During a jam-packed trip to Gamescom 2024, we sat down with Alex Jordan and, over the course of an hour, got the lowdown on all his upcoming projects, most prominently that of The Alters. Some of the below has been edited for clarity and relevance.
First and foremost, for those readers of Thumb Wars who don’t know who you are, would you mind just explaining, firstly, who you are and what you do?
So my name is Alex Jordan, and I am an actor. My most prominent work and most of my work is in voice acting for video games and cartoons, and I still do stage and screen, but very much in the video game scene.
Mr. Hands is probably your most well-known work to date, but the story of how it happened must be a mad one, with the heavy shift in direction and, of course, the change in voice actor?
Yeah, so we have this man who operates the underground criminal scene within Dogtown and we need someone to reflect that and they [CD Projekt Red] basically felt that the existing character didn’t really match that and also narratively wouldn’t match what they wanted the Dogtown story to be, so they basically just gave them a total redesign. They re-auditioned, they were like ‘We need a new voice to match it.’
I auditioned, and I didn’t know what I was auditioning for. I knew the game I was auditioning for because in the audition script was the word ‘choom’, so I’m like, I know what I’m auditioning for, but I didn’t know what character or anything I was auditioning for. I actually found out that I didn’t get the character I auditioned for originally, but I did get Mr. Hands, “Bad luck that you didn’t get this one, but good news, you got this”.
I don’t actually know which character I auditioned for voice-wise, I don’t know, maybe it was Kurt Haskin just because of what they were asking for the voice, I don’t know but Mr. Hands is what I got, and is my first, and only tattoo so far — quite literally close to my heart.
When are we going to see Mr. Hands again? Are you going to be back for Orion?
I would love to be back for Orion. It’s a weird one, right, because from a performer’s perspective and also a fan of the world – I absolutely adore Cyberpunk 2077 so much -, I would love to be back, hell yes I want to be back in that world, I want to be playing this character again. I would want to see a world in which Mr. Hands is the big bad. That’s such a cool thing with this guy who has these machinations, these grand plans, and you know all of the Fixers, he seems to have the biggest plans, so that would be super cool.
Equally, as a fan of the game and a player, I would also love to see Night City 100 years on jump forward to 2177 that would be super cool as well, so I don’t know if they will have Mr. Hands back in it, but I will always be ready and willing to jump in with my full heart.
Now, onto The Alters, what’s it been like working on such a uniquely different game from anything else out there right now?
Incredible. Absolutely incredible. There are interactions the Alters have, and there are ways in which their storylines overlap and weave together, so that in one instance, it’s just utterly different. For example, this character and where they are now, and then the end of the gam,e there are three or four different ways that they can end the game that are totally different,t but it’s all dependent on you.
You can never have all the Alters in one playthrough, so it depends on ‘Did you have that Alter’ or if these two Alters, if they’re in the base together, could have totally different endings. It’s mind-bending.
As a performer, how do you differentiate between them and snap between the different Alters as you need to?
Yeah, you know what we very often do scene-to-scene, sometimes you get to the short scenes where it’s just interactions they have around the base, I’m changing every like five lines to a different voice, boom next one, next one, next one.
The thing we always wanted to make hugely important, like, was a huge part of making this game work was that for those eleven of them, at no point did any of them feel cartoony. They have to all feel like fundamentally believable characters, real people, real characters, real voices. It’d be the easiest thing to take them all and go, “Great, we do eleven of them and we go crazy and wacky”, but with this, we have a guy who creates these Alters and they all fork. They all go off in their own different directions, but they all fundamentally… We call it branching, which means creating your Alters, and they branch off ‘Proto Jan’.
The best way of looking at it is he is the tree trunk and they are the branches, right, so fundamentally all the voices have to sound like they have stemmed from the same tree trunk, but they have to feel like they have their own leaves and they are their own identity. They’re similar enough that they are fundamentally believably the same person, but different enough that you can believe they live different lives, and also different enough that when they do talk together on screen, it’s not confusing who’s talking.
To make that work, we have kept the core sound the same, but there are choices that have been made that actually are stylistic choices. It’s a stylistic choice for some Jan’s to, for example, have different accents from one another. Now people might be like, ‘Why do they have a different accent if they are the same person they came from the same place?’.
You know, for some of them, as a teenager, they moved to a different part of the country, and that kind of affected them over time. My accent has changed since I’ve lived in London, so it’s a stylistic choice to have some of them have slightly different regional accents. It’s a quick way to have you understand the core of a character who is super laid back, and an accent can give you that.
As the star(s) of The Alters, what do you think the prevailing message or theme is?
We want this feeling of impending doom, and you’re fighting against something, you’re fighting against time. You know the choices you make in the game mean more because you have to make choices at the moment. It will make the choices more difficult, you’re like “Well, I will never be able to go back and correct this, it’s a tough choice, it has to be made now”, and in life, all the hardest choices truly are made because of time.
It’s also thematic, it fits with the idea of the game, which is ‘What if that one time you had done something different?’, where would you be at this point in time? Time is a constant theme throughout. ‘I never took the time to be with this person, I should have spent more time with them’, or ‘the amount of time that I spent on this when I should have been focusing on that’. Time is just as important throughout this story as you know the decisions because they are interlinked and woven together, but from a purely mechanical point of view, a gaming mechanic point of view, it just makes everything in the game that much more exciting.
The core of the game is ‘What if what if, what if, what if?’. What if I’ve done this, what if I’ve done that, it’s always ‘what if’ it’s kind of the slogan of the game, but the real, actual question of the game is ‘what next’ because the point is that you can sit and ask what if as much as you want, and it will always be a valid question.
You will always be able to consider it, and you will always be able to have different answers, but at the end of it all, when you’ve thought about it all, the only true question after that is ‘What next’. I think it’s a double-sided coin. I think until you’ve played it, you’ll see the what-if on one side of the coin, and once you’ve played it you flip the coin over and you go, what next?
It’s going to stack, the more Alters you have, the more things will stack as you get towards the climax of the game, and the more you’re going to feel like you’ve stacked too many plates too high and you’re now trying to spin those plates and juggle everything.
Considering you just brought it up, how many endings are there?
There are a lot. That’s a good question, and is it something we can say? The number of endings… One thing I would say is that you can never get all the Alters in any playthrough. You’re going to have to do multiple playthroughs to get all the Alters, and depending on the Alters you have, there will be different endings, so your decision affects it.
Also, their [The Alters] relationships build between one another and may also impact the ending. Let’s say you only made four Alters in the entire game, even within having those same four Alters, you’d be able to get different endings depending on the choices you made with those four, and then you get different ‘stuff’ if you don’t have the same four.
Who’s your favorite out of the eleven Alters?
This is so interesting. I love this because just like parents have favorites and they just don’t say, so my answer is always my favorite is Jan, but it would be remiss of me not to say Jan, Jan, Jan, and also Jan, but also mention Jan, Jan, Jan, and Jan.
I do have favorites, but I don’t know if I want to say my favorite because I don’t want to spoil anything about who could be there. what I will say is there was an Alter that I love, and then as the game went on, because of what they go through and the choices they make in the game, I was like, “Oh I don’t know if I like you as much anymore”, which I think is great.
The fact that there is that level of changeability within the Alters themselves, not just your choices but theirs, I think, is another level of this game that blows my mind.
Do you think you’ll be coming back for a sequel, and more importantly, does it need a sequel?
I will always love to come back to Jan Dolski. I think you know it’s a crazy cool universe, and I think there are really cool ways in which you could do sequel-type stuff or DLC but I think, the way 11 Bit Studios create such unique games they could probably do sequel stuff that is almost an entirely different style of game within this world.
That’s what’s great about 11 Bit Studios is they have so many different styles of game and games that they publish, and the one thing that binds all of these games is what they say as the slogan is ‘meaningful, meaningful games, meaningful stories, meaningful narrative’, so I think there are ways in which you could do it even without it being a direct sequel.
I also think you know it’s the kind of thing that would be great and cool as a graphic novel even if you did a thing of Jan Dalski’s story going on, that would be super cool as well if it had a spiritual success or in a different medium it’s something that I think would be cool and also I wouldn’t put past 11 Bit Studios because they are really cool at doing things like that. I would absolutely love it [his likeness in a graphic novel of The Alters]. I’ve got a story that I’ve been writing, and I’m like one day I’d love to get into a major graphic novel. I’m a big fan of the medium.
Is it just time that’s stopping you from doing that?
I had like this long period of almost a year now, of just eight hours a day five days a week in the booth, and when you’re in the booth – What I think a lot of people don’t realize is they’ll go “That’s eight hours a day that’s a working day!”, but when you’re in the booth, you can’t be sat there checking your phone, someone sends you an email “Oh I just need to pop out I’ve got this thing with my mortgage I just need to go and sort”… You can’t do it you’re in the booth you are off grid for 8 hours a day and all the things have to somehow fit into it.
At the same time, I’ve started this Dungeons and Dragons [meaning Natural Six] business, and we film on the weekends, and you know, yeah, life has become extremely hard to find time, and unfortunately, something has to take a back seat.
As you mentioned Dungeons and Dragons, do you mind telling us about Natural Six?
100%. Natural Six is a D&D actual play series with myself, Ben Starr who plays Clive in Final Fantasy 16 now Arthur in Warframe 1999, Doug Cockle who is Geralt in The Witcher series, Harry McEntire who played a character called Aethelwold in The Last Kingdom on Netflix and Noah in Xenoblade, Aoife Wilson who was at Eurogamer and is now working at Larian Studios, as well as heading up their new YouTube channel and then Holly Bennett who was at PlayStation Access and then worked for Frontier, but is now at Square Enix.
We get together, we play D&D, and it has given me such a sense of childlike wonder. I go to bed excited, and I bounce out of bed. I genuinely love it, I get so excited for it, I get so ready for it, but also I just get really excited to create stuff with my friends and spend time with these people we’ve become so close. Our WhatsApp group is non-stop. It’s just stuff going on, and every day is just like non-stop messages, and I think I talk to them as much as I talk to my wife! They’re just a great group, and we get on so well, and we just enjoy spending time with each other outside of it, and I think that shows when we play. I think there is that great chemistry, and now we’ve got friends in the space who are now kind of linked into Natural Six.
We’ve got a mechanic in it called the ‘Deck of Many Friends’, and the ‘Deck of Many Friends’ is designed like each card in the deck is a character designed and created by someone in the voice acting TTRPG D&D scene. So we’ve got Matt Mercer, Neil Newbon, Anjali Bhimani, Troy Baker… You know phenomenal people, but we’re now kind of weaving into our story, and it’s just so cool to get to collaborate with these people, and it feels amazing.
I’ve been doing this job now full-time since 2013, and a lot of it is sat, waiting and auditioning and waiting for people to bring work to you to bring stuff to you to create something yourself which is like I’m not waiting around for anyone here this is my thing this is our thing.
I’ve got some amazing cosplayers. who have made a cosplay of my Kobold character, and I’m like, this is mind-bending. I thought my character would be the last one to get a cosplay because it’s so tricky! It genuinely feels amazing, the feeling of creating is all that is ever really at the core of any voice-acting work that you do. You want to create something cool, and you want to share it with people, so to be part of the genesis of that, to be part of the actual very root of that, to see it through to its completion has just been the greatest joy.
Is there anything you never get to share that you’d like to?
Because of what my PC could handle a lot of the time when I was younger, my first love was strategy games, RTS, and stuff like Total War. That was my first love, then, as I was out earning my own money and was able to afford my own Xbox, I fell in love with RPGs. This game [The Alters] feels like the most incredible blend of the two, and when I first looked at it, when I first saw all the stuff, I was asking, “How is this going to work?”.
You know this is a base-building, survival strategy, and resource-gathering game, but none of it works without this narrative, one of the most confusing and challenging narratives you will ever play as a gamer, and I was like, “How are they going to make this all come together?”. And then I played the first hands-on and I was like “This is so good, this is amazing, it’s so excellently woven together, they’ve woven it together beautifully.
There is a story, a root in the story of all of the Jan’s that is painful. It has dark elements, elements that will remind people of things you know that happened in their childhood… people aren’t ready for how much this game will make them feel, how much it will make them question things in their own lives, and how much it will relate to things in their own life and how much it will make them stop at the end of it all and ask themselves the question ‘sure what if but what next?’
For more Thumb Wars Gaming coverage, check out our interview with Ryan Greene, Atomfall’s Art Director, or Dream A Lot, the duo responsible for the incredible 30th Anniversary of PlayStation Trailer.
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Luke Addison is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Thumb Wars. Having previously been a part of multiple outlets over the years, including building an entire gaming team from nothing to something, he thought it best to forge his own path and answer only to himself. As likely to be found playing the latest game as he is in the kitchen relaxing (by cooking), he always brings the same bold and brash attitude to everything he does, with a heavy leaning on sarcasm and dry wit!
