Command & Conquer’s original EVA comes back for the 4K remaster

The original voice actor of Command & Conquer’s battlefield network, EVA, will reprise her role in the forthcoming 4K remaster version of the first game, Petroglyph Games and Electronic Arts announced this morning.

Kia Huntzinger’s performance in the 24-year-old Command and Conquer harkens back to the “wild west of development,” audio director Frank Klepacki said in a note to fans. As the office manager at Westwood Games, Huntzinger recorded voice messages and paged employees, before then-audio director Paul Mudra had her record some lines for what would become the player’s AI assistant, famously doing so from a padded closet.

“In many ways, she was the unofficial voice of the company once you made it past the front door because we listened to her throughout the day,” Klepacki said today.

Huntzinger was, creatively, the only logical choice to voice EVA in the remaster, as developers are trying to faithfully adhere to fans’ memories of the 1995 game. With the original tapes of Huntzinger’s recording sessions — “Our base is under attack,” and “Ion cannon ready,” — long since missing, Klepacki brought her in to do the whole thing again. This time she recorded in more professional surroundings.

In an interview 10 years ago, Huntzinger noted that she began at Westwood in 1993, working her way up from the studio’s receptionist to its director of finance when it was closed and its operations and some employees merged into EA Los Angeles.

Jim Vessella, the remaster’s creative director, noted that players will have the option of choosing Huntzinger’s remastered EVA voice-over, or the original audio. However, the original narrator’s voice will not be re-recorded. Martin Alper, who was also the President of Westwood’s parent company, Virgin Interactive Entertainment, died in 2015, “and we didn’t feel it would be the same to replace his performance with another actor,” Vessella wrote. “Frank will do his best to clean up the original audio.”

The 4K remaster of Command & Conquer, also known as Tiberian Dawn, was announced in November 2018. It will be joined by its 1996 sequel, Command & Conquer: Red Alert on a single remaster, though that project does not yet have a release date or window.