Wayne June, famed narrator of the Darkest Dungeon games, has died

Wayne June, the famed narrator of the Darkest Dungeon games, has died. June’s passing was announced on Bluesky by Darkest Dungeon creative director Chris Bourassa, who described June as “ancestor, academic, artist, and friend.”

“Twelve years ago, Tyler [Red Hook co-founder Tyler Sigman] and I reached out to Wayne, humbly asking him to narrate our indie game’s trailer,” Bourassa wrote. “Since those magical moments when we first paired his reading with the footage, it has been an incredible and fulfilling collaboration. Wayne’s singular baritone and masterful cadence elevated everything he read. He was a consummate professional, and his love of his craft was an inspiration. His inimitable work is woven into the very fabric of our industry in a way that cannot be forgotten.

“It is one of my greatest honors to have written for him this past decade. Though I never got to shake his hand, I knew him to be a friend. Thank you, Wayne.”

Bourassa told PC Gamer that he first encountered June’s work through his readings of HP Lovecraft audiobooks, which he listened to regularly in the years leading up to Red Hook’s founding. He once emailed June to express his appreciation, and June replied with a reading of Edgar Allen Poe.

“Chris lent me those CDs (yup, CDs) and I listened to them, really finding that Wayne’s reading of Lovecraft brought the work to a whole new level,” Sigman wrote in a message to the Red Hook team, shared with PC Gamer. “The trailer called for a narrator, and one day it popped in Chris’ head to reach out to Wayne and see if he wouldn’t mind reading for a videogame trailer.

“I think more verbatim, it was, ‘We should get somebody like Wayne June to narrate the trailer.’ Then we thought—wait, Wayne June reads stuff for a living! Maybe he would do it! The work of course was so good that we decided to add a narrator to the game itself.”

June’s voice became a central part of Darkest Dungeon, and there was never any doubt that he’d return for Darkest Dungeon 2: Sigman and Bourassa said in a 2020 interview that while they were looking at ways to adjust the narration to fit the sequel’s changed structure, “the narrator is part of Darkest Dungeon’s identity.”

Many of June’s lines in Darkest Dungeon became repeated sayings within the game’s community, with phrases appearing in comment threads as sincere or ironic replies to the given topic. “I often find myself randomly quoting the narrator’s lines throughout my day, both while playing other games and just doing normal household activities and chores,” redditor nurse_uwu shared in response to the news. An extensive wiki page catalogues all the passages from the first game, with linked sound files.

There on Reddit, fittingly, many offered their tributes in the form of these passages:

“Up ahead — a light in the limitless expanse…”

“Ruin has come to our family. :(“

“Great adversity has a beauty, it is the fire that tempers the blade.”

Darkest Dungeon and Darkest Dungeon 2 are June’s only listed videogame credits, although he can also be heard in a Dota 2 announcer pack. But his work was so impactful that we roped him into working for us as the announcer of the PC Gaming Show in 2017 and 2018. We also had him narrate the reveal of the Large Pixel Collider in 2016, and while that PC may be dated, the video remains one of our favorite things we created from that era:

“Wayne was always, I mean always, easy to work with,” Bourassa told PC Gamer. “His deliveries would often come super late at night, and I’d regularly sneak out of bed to go and listen to them. It was such a joy, hearing how he’d inject life and drama into the script – I’ll never forget the anticipation of opening his new recordings, hunched over my computer in the dark with my headphones on. Better than Christmas. It got so that I could anticipate his delivery, and would write with his voice in my head. It was a special collaboration, and one I will be eternally grateful for. His work is nothing short of iconic, and deserves to be recognized and celebrated at the highest levels of our industry.”

A cause of death was not announced.