Red Hook will “never, ever” use generative AI to recreate Wayne June’s voice, creative director Chris Bourassa said over the weekend as fan discussion turned to possible replacement actors for a hypothetical Darkest Dungeon 3. Bourassa said June had given the studio permission to train an AI on his voice in one of his last emails before he died, but the company declined.
Bourassa wrote that the team had never asked June to do it. He said the offer appeared to come from June as a way to help the game, the team and the fans, and that Red Hook donated to his family anyway. June died in January last year.
The exchange landed because June’s voice is not a side element in Darkest Dungeon. He voiced the Ancestor, the doomed figure who kills himself shortly before the events of the game, and whose suicide note opens the cinematic and whose voice keeps returning to the player throughout the story. His delivery helped define the series, and Bourassa made clear he sees that performance as off-limits to machines.
“I would never, ever erode his incredible and timeless performances by teaching a machine to sound like him,” Bourassa wrote. He added that June’s voice and delivery was “human” and said he was grateful to have written for him. The comments were a direct response to a Reddit post about who might replace June in any future installment, though the new game itself remains hypothetical.
The dispute also arrives in a wider fight across the creative industries over whether companies should use generative AI to imitate dead performers. SAG-AFTRA took Epic to court last May over the use of generated AI to recreate James Earl Jones, a case that underscored how fraught the technology has become even when a performer’s legacy is at stake.
Bourassa said Red Hook would not let fear drive the decision. “In this moment, the Most Right thing we can choose is to eschew AI and preserve Wayne’s legacy,” he wrote. For now, that settles the question the fan debate raised: June’s voice will remain what it has always been in Darkest Dungeon, and not a machine-made copy of it.
