Recently, the author of the YouTube channel @Zarudnev presented a public version of the Russian voice-over for Bully: Scholarship Edition – the famous "school GTA" from Rockstar. AI technologies were used to voice the lines.
@Zarudnev also revealed the backstory of the localization's appearance. User aNONIM almost single-handedly prepared the basis for a complete Bully voice-over:
Approximately a year and a half to two years ago, aNONIM bought a PlayStation 3, installed a terabyte drive, and began collecting a library of games. One of them was Bully. Online, he found a partial Russian voice-over for cutscenes and several neural network experiments. After that, the idea arose to make not separate videos, but a full dubbing of the entire game. He had almost no programming knowledge, so he had to learn a lot with ChatGPT and guys from the modding community. As a result, aNONIM figured out how to unpack and assemble game files, and then did a huge amount of preparatory work.
This aNONIM, @Zarudnev says, extracted audio, transcribed lines, determined the duration of each line down to milliseconds, and more. The volume of work is estimated at approximately 40 thousand lines:
After that, he tried to hand over the project to various studios and teams, including DreamVoice, GameVoice, and other collectives. But almost everywhere the answer was the same: the project is too big, the game is old, and the amount of work is enormous.
Due to life circumstances, aNONIM postponed the project, and then saw news about @Zarudnev's work (he also does other AI voice-overs), and so the tech enthusiast received a prepared database. And now gamers will be able to play "school GTA" with unofficial full localization.
The Russian AI voice-over for Bully: Scholarship Edition has already been published online and is freely available.