Upcoming retro FPS Warhammer 40k Boltgun stars veteran TV actor Rahul Kohli as the voice of its Space Marine protagonist. During Wargamer’s interview with developer Auroch Digital, lead designer Grant Stewart tells us how it felt to work with Kohli: “I sort of feel bad saying this, but it was a joy to utterly waste his talents”.
Boltgun is inspired by classic 90s shooters, the kind where you tend not to talk to the monsters, so Kohli’s voice lines are fairly few and far between. Stewart says “His sole communication is to point and shout Warhammer themed obscenities at enemies”. He adds “We’ve wasted [Kohli’s] talent completely, he just shouts things at cultists before you smash them up with your chainsword”.
The protagonist of Warhammer 40k Boltgun is the Space Marine Malum Caedo, an Ultramarines Sternguard veteran (firearm specialist). Stewart says “We wanted to get someone who’s a real serious pro actor, and ideally a Warhammer fan” to provide Caedo’s voice. Lead Producer Anthony O’Neill adds that when the game was first announced “[Kohli] was one of the first people to tweet about Boltgun so at that point everyone was saying Yep, we need Rahul, he’s perfect for the role”.
Kohli took to this role with gusto and “nailed every line”, Stewart says. He adds “it was a delight” to work with Kohli. O’Neill recalls that “during the recording, the first thing I noticed about him as he came into the recording studio was that he was wearing a Chaos Black T-shirt”, printed with the label of a classic Games Workshop paint for miniatures. He adds that Kohli “really knows his stuff”.
Kohli, who has starred in TV series including Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Bly Manor, and provided the voice of the Scarecrow in the Harley Quinn animated series, is very open about being a massive 40k fan. He frequently shared pictures of himself painting miniatures via his Twitter (until he quit the platform) and recently appeared in a video series with the YouTube channel Play On Tabletop.
It happens that Ultramarines are also Kohli’s Warhammer 40k faction of choice – he’s even painted a miniature of his character Malum Caedo. In an interview with Warhammer Community on April 11, Kohli says “To have voiced an Ultramarine in a first person shooter? I mean, I’ve kind of peaked. It definitely feels like the perfect project”.
The Warhammer 40k Boltgun release date is less than a month away. If you want to know more about the game, check out our first two interviews with Auroch Digital, in which we discuss the team’s retro inspirations, and the surprisingly high tech needed to create such a low-tech looking game.