Dispatch Developers Reveal How Aaron Paul’s Performance Changed the Game

There are a million things that have to go right for a video game to be a success. Well, maybe not a million. But a lot. Michael Choung, the CEO of AdHoc Studio – which released the popular superhero workplace comedy game Dispatch last year – admits as much. Choung says that there were “probably 20 decisions in the last seven years” that aligned to make the game a huge success. And casting Aaron Paul as Dispatch’s protagonist, Robert Robertson/Mecha Man, was one of those decisions.

I spoke exclusively with Choung and Dispatch Creative Director/Executive Producer Nick Herman ahead of the DICE Awards (Dispatch is nominated for six, including Game of the Year) on February 12 to break down everything that had to go right in order for Dispatch to see the light of day. Herman says that, although they had “pretty decent” temporary tracks out of the stand-in actors they hired before the main cast got into the studio, Paul’s performance pushed the entire development of the game in a new direction.

“Once we cast Aaron Paul and brought him into the booth, he brought a lot more gravitas,” Herman says. “He brought a heaviness to the character that started to allow us to take him more seriously. You can actually feel that he’s got this burden on his shoulders and this weight from his past, and the game got a little bit more serious. When we were working with him we realized that was a good thing. We wanted that depth to show up in the game.”

Paul, perhaps best known for his Emmy-winning turn as Jesse Pinkman on Breaking Bad, is nominated for a DICE Award for Outstanding Achievement in Character, a nomination he shares with Herman and Dispatch’s other Narrative and Creative Directors. Laura Bailey, Paul’s co-star in the game who plays Courtney/Invisigal, is nominated for the same award. Herman says that assembling an all-star cast – which also includes Jeffrey Wright, Matthew Mercer, and Ashley Johnson – was both a creative and strategic decision.

“We knew that we wanted to have some big talent that when people see the name, they’d go, ‘Oh I know who that is. I know that actor and I like them,’” Herman says. “Aaron just read the script and he liked it. So we were very fortunate. We needed that tier, especially when you’re going into rooms with a lot of suits who have a lot of money and make decisions.”

“I think there’s a desire for people to want there to be this puppet mastery strategy around this stuff,” Choung adds. “But we just like these voices. You want it to be creatively compelling. (But) then you have these other additional bonuses: (the actors) having a huge audience, they (come from) different worlds. A lot of them were friends. They were people that we’d worked with before. So it’s years and years of experience just coming to bear.”