Noob Saibot is an undead wraith-like warrior covered in black and is one of Mortal Kombat‘s edgier characters. However, it wasn’t until Mortal Kombat 11 where his voice reflected that darkness. Sean Chiplock was the actor that gave Noob that deeper voice, which serves as a huge departure from his usual roles in anime and his recent stint as Spider-Man in Marvel’s Avengers. And Chiplock pulled from an obscure game to get to this voice: 2005’s abysmally received Shadow the Hedgehog.
Chiplock spoke in detail about this odd inspiration during a recent interview with ComingSoon after only briefly mentioning in various other places like a past AMA and Twitter reply. It was something that came to him out of the secrecy surrounding the project. According to him, the unnamed game just described the character as “wraith-like, ethereal, not of this world.” This gave him some freedom in how he wanted to tackle the role. His first take was “very breathy, very ghost-like” in a way that somewhat sounded like Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, but more sinister and like he was perpetually having a slight asthma flare-up. He then went in the complete opposite direction for his second submission.
“So then I wanted to do the exact opposite of that for take two,” said Chiplock. “If I did something higher pitched and wispy, I want something very gravelly, very rumbly, very deep. And I thought, ‘Well, what sounds very ethereal, wraith-like, and not of this world?'”
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And those three buzzwords conjured up a character from a forgotten Sonic spin-off game with an average MetaCritic score of 48.
“This is gonna show my age more than anything else, but do you remember a GameCube game [that was also on PS2 and Xbox] called Shadow the Hedgehog?” he said. “So Sean Schemmel voices this character named Black Doom and Black Doom is literally this alien creature who wears these large shrouds and floats everywhere and every time he talks, it’s [starts talking in his Noob Saibot voice] all the way down here. ‘Shadow, collect the Chaos Emeralds.’ And I always loved it because it was just so definite. Like how much more foreboding can you get than that? It’s an homage to a game that I actually played to completion, which is very rare. And that’s the one that I ended up booking.”
This take on the character is somewhat controversial since it is a big change from his voice in prior Mortal Kombat games. But even though there are some who disliked the direction Chiplock took (and have bugged him about it), more seemed to like the more baritone take, as shown from a few of the praiseworthy comments on the game’s reveal trailer and an informal GameFAQs poll and Reddit poll that went up right after. Even Erron Black called the voice “sexy” in one of the pre-fight character intros between the two.
Chiplock seemed to also have the same attitude when he reflected on his portrayal, saying the tone fit the character and that this was his “contribution to history.”
“Some people are like, ‘Oh, this is the perfect voice for him.’ I’ve had people say that it sounds so campy for him and ask why it was so over the top and I’m like, ‘Because it’s an undead dude who’s completely shrouded in black and all he wants to do is cause chaos. The voice that I pulled is from someone who does exactly that.’ So I have no regrets. That was my contribution to history.”
