Meet The Team Behind Hollow Knight's Bewilderingly Ambitious Voice Mod

The world of Hollow Knight, Hallownest, is one that lingers in the mind. Its intricate map, intriguing lore, and desolate yet inviting corridors have earned it a place in the annals of great metroidvanias, alongside the planet Zebes and Dracula’s various castles. However, its chitinous inhabitants have chittered only in their bug languages for the years since its release–until now. A massive team of voice actors and modders recently released a mod called Hallownest Vocalized, which grants English-speaking voices to every inhabitant of the bug-filled land, from the lowliest grub to the toughest boss, and adds vocal narration to every text in the game’s lengthy bestiary and various lore tablets.

Organized by director and YouTuber “Ccmaci,” the project took shape over two years of constant production. By his own admission, his initial goal of giving a voice to “everything” in Hollow Knight seemed ambitious from the start, but ultimately doable. However, once he had enlisted more than 100 volunteer voice actors to fill the roles, he realized just how bold of an undertaking he had committed himself to. “The word ‘everything’ meant something larger with each passing month,” he explains.

Ccmaci first played Hollow Knight back in 2019, and like so many others, he was utterly enraptured by it from the start. His enjoyment went deeper than simply seeing everything that it had to offer–he was so immersed that the world of Hallownest felt real to him in a way that no other game ever had. He was almost disappointed when he started his second playthrough and found that Hollow Knight’s opening area, the Crossroads, had lost the magic. For the first time, he felt like he was navigating a 2D video game level, not an inhabited world.

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