Ottsel la vista, baby.

“Okay, everything with more than two legs, start trembling! Because the Daxternator is in the building!”

So what’s it take, anyway, to write the kind of character-rich dialogue that so brings alive Daxter, for the PSP? Well, according to Dan Arey, the lead writer, it takes a commitment to character for character’s sake. Daxter originally emerged as a sidekick for Jak, in the Jak and Daxter series, precisely because Jak almost never spoke and somebody had to “crack all the jokes, lay some eggs, and generally say the things no one else was willing, or had the fur to say,” as Arey puts it. So right from the start Daxter was all about mouth. To give that mouth a stable personality, of course, Daxter had to have hopes, fears, dreams, and flaws, too, so Arey made him care about “himself first, riches second, and then the women as a close third, but he also cares about Jak and his friends more than he lets on.” And once you’ve got the soul in place, it’s time for some attitude, that personal style that sets each of us apart from the crowd. So Arey articulated Daxter as “a little pinch of greedy Daffy Duck, a couple of tablespoons of smart-mouth Bart Simpson, and a quarter cup of Costello from Abbott and Costello, with a pinch of crass and inappropriate Cartman, and a little, shall we say ‘over-attraction’ to the opposite sex.”

No human identity exists in a vacuum—personality, to a large degree, is a social phenomenon, defined through constant interaction with others. So Daxter needed a constellation of secondary characters to talk to and draw out different parts of his personality, their own character traits orbiting Daxter’s “like the moon,” as Arey puts it. “They pull the tides of change, bringing out and revealing different aspects of the hero's deeper soul.” Taryn, for example, the smoking hot digital babe in thong underwear, brings Daxter hardware, tells him what he’s got to do next, and lets him do a little moonstruck leering. Ximon and Osmo, the father and son team, define Daxter as hero by the simple act of depending on him, and Tic, Daxter's very own side-kick, frees Daxter from being merely a planet in orbit around Jak.

With all this in place, it’s time to write the cut scenes embedded in the game—which brings us, at last, to the actual writing and recording of dialogue. Embedded scenes have a lot of work to do, moving story and character forward and telling the player what to do next. But they also have to be entertaining, with the spontaneous feel of life. To prompt his creativity, Arey writes with the specific voice actors in mind—in this case, David Herman of Mad TV and Office Space playing Ximon, Susan Eisenberg of Justice League doing Taryn, Phil LeMarr, another Mad TV actor, doing Kaiden, and Dana Kelly as old Osmo. The Daxternator himself gets the voice of Max Casella, the first-rate character actor who plays Benny Fazio on The Sopranos and starred as Vinnie on Doogie Howser, M.D., as well as in feature-film roles opposite Johnny Depp in Ed Wood, Steve Martin in Sgt Bilko, and Robert De Niro, in Analyze This.

“Casting truly is 80% of the work,” Arey says. “Cast well and it's smooth sailing. Cast poorly and your face melts like the guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark.” In the case of Casella, the casting was so spot-on that Arey knew from Casella’s first audition, over five years ago, that Daxter was going to need his own game someday.

Each voice actor records his or her part separately, in a sound booth, and then the parts all get edited together to create the scenes, but Arey preserves the spontaneous, reactive feel of true dialogue by getting into the booth with the actors and reading the opposite roles. With the microphones left on and the digital recorders running for the whole session, Arey says he just goes at it with the actors, “sweating and laughing and bringing the scene to life,” as he puts it. “I'm no actor, but I am a ham and a cartoon, so I get close to the mood and then the actor responds. The engineers love it, and after the actors get used to it, they love it, saying it is the most spontaneous and free they've ever felt in a recording session.” The first take usually isn’t the best—everybody needs a chance to feel out the lines and get inside them—but by the second or third Arey and the actors usually hit their sweet spot, where their confident in the lines but not yet bored of them.

Like a lot of designers, Arey grew up wanting to write and direct movies—his influences include early Warner Brothers, Monty Python, the Billy Wilder of Some Like It Hot, and of course Brad Bird of Pixar. But once Arey got hooked on gaming, he never looked back. “I realized it was the new media, like film in the 1920s,” he says, echoing a common sentiment with guys in his line of work, “the place I could make a major impact. We’re still unlocking the secrets, searching for our Citizen Kane moment.”

What Arey means by this, apparently, is that moment when the art form matures, reaching beyond the joys of digital distraction toward a richly esthetic and emotional experience. Daxter makes no pretense to being the gamer’s Citizen Kane—it’s a lighthearted confection about a wisecracking Ottsel, after all—but there certainly are flickers of richness, and they very much achieve the more immediate goal Arey has set for himself, “to make it feel like you’re playing a Pixar movie.” And there’s nothing wrong with that.