Troy Baker says he wants to make his own video game someday

Troy Baker has spent years as one of gaming’s most recognizable voices, from The Last of Us and Uncharted to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Now he is talking about stepping out from behind the performance and into the role of game maker himself.

Baker said he was “beginning the conversations” about what story he wants to tell and who he wants to tell it with, a line that matters because it suggests more than a celebrity side project. He is not talking about slapping his name on a box and calling it a day. He is talking about authorship, about building something from the ground up after a career spent inside other people’s worlds.

The clearest model in front of him is Abubakar Salim. Salim founded Surgent Studios in 2019, and his debut game, Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, launched on April 23, 2024 through EA Originals. Salim has described that game as deeply personal, shaped by grief after the death of his father, and Baker has pointed to that path as proof that an actor can become a creator with real ownership of the work. Salim even joked to Baker, “Don’t do it,” a warning that sounds half like camaraderie and half like a knowing nod to how hard game development can be.

That warning is not empty. Baker has spent enough time around the industry’s biggest creative names to understand the scale of what he would be taking on. He name-checked Ken Levine, Hideo Kojima, Neil Druckmann, Todd Howard, and Vince Zampella as people he has learned from, a list that spans prestige narrative design, blockbuster worldbuilding, and studio leadership. Baker’s interest in making a game of his own suggests he has been studying not just performances, but the machinery behind them.

He also said he does not want to rush the process and wants the finished project to be high-caliber. That is the line that keeps this from reading like a vanity announcement. Baker is not pitching a quick celebrity collaboration or a cameo-laden marketing stunt. He is signaling patience, and in an industry where actor-to-developer moves are still relatively rare, patience is often what separates a novelty from a serious new studio voice.

Baker’s profile makes the idea even more striking. After voicing one of the medium’s most legendary characters in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he is now considering whether the next step is not another performance at all, but ownership of the idea itself. If he follows through, he would join a small but growing group of talent who are no longer content to help tell games. They want to make them.