If you've ever played Super Monkey Ball, there's a 100% chance you've heard this: - "Ready? Go!" That is the voice of the Super Monkey Ball announcer, and he is omnipresent throughout the entire Monkey Ball experience. You never go more than a few seconds without hearing his voice - Roll off the side of a level
and you'll hear him say: Run out of time, and you'll hear: And, perhaps most
satisfying of all, finish a level and you'll get to hear him yell: - The announcer chimes in constantly during a standard game of Monkey Ball, and that's to say nothing
of the party games. The Monkey Ball announcer is present in every single Monkey Ball minigame including Monkey Target: - Very good! Monkey Baseball: - Hooome ruuun! Monkey Bowling: - Turkey! And... all the others, you get the idea. All that to say this: anybody
who's played Super Monkey Ball has heard this man's voice
tens of thousands of times, but... who exactly is he? Now, for most games, this would be a relatively easy question to answer - you'd simply pop over to the credits and check for yourself, right? But if you bounce your way all to the end of Super Monkey Ball's
interactive credit sequence, you'll find that the only
mention of any voice acting at all is categorized
under "Monkey Voice", and the only names listed
are the Japanese voice actors for the playable monkey characters. The narrator's identity
is nowhere to be found. See, it turns out the
role of the announcer in Super Monkey Ball is uncredited. Nobody knows who he is. He's completely anonymous. Now, of course people
have their own theories about the Monkey Ball
announcer's identity, and while researching who
this guy could possibly be, there were two names that kept coming up over and over and over: Jack Merluzzi and Patrick Harlan. Now, the very first time Jack
Merluzzi's name popped up on my radar was also the
thing that kicked off this entire Super Monkey Ball adventure. Way back in January, I tweeted: "I wonder what the Super Monkey
Ball announcer did today. I hope he had a good weekend." and somebody replied, "I
think he is Jack Merluzzi, but it's hard to find info on that stuff." Now, I was intrigued by
this, so I asked this person for more info, and they told me that Jack had done uncredited voice work on plenty of other Japanese games over the years, including the announcer voice in Tekken 5 and in King of Fighters
XIII... and honestly, if you listen to the King of
Fighters XIII system voice: - Select your character. Select the order. You've gotta admit, it
sounds like it could be the same guy. Now that evidence might seem
a little anecdotal on its own, but to understand what makes Jack Merluzzi a really compelling
candidate, you need to know a little bit about the
creators of Super Monkey Ball. See, Super Monkey Ball and
its sequel Super Monkey Ball 2 were developed by Amusement Vision, a division of Sega that
was founded in 2000 and then dissolved in 2005. And in Amusement Vision's short existence, they only shipped three
original console games: Super Monkey Ball, Super Monkey Ball 2, and a little game called F-Zero GX. Now, there are a lot of
voice actors who worked on F-Zero GX - all of them
uncredited - but by far the most prolific performer on the game was Jack Merluzzi. Jack voiced Dr. Clash,
Black Shadow, Mr. Zero, Beast Man, QQQ, the Skull, Dai Goroh, and, last but not least... the F-Zero announcer. - Three, two, one, go. An announcer, by the
way, who had more than a few phrases in common with the Super Monkey Ball announcer: - Thanks for playing. - Thanks for playing. - And the more I looked into this - the more I looked into Jack
Merluzzi as a candidate - the more it seemed to fit: here we had a voice actor, active in Japan in the early 2000s when
Monkey Ball was made, known specifically for doing announcer voices who had worked uncredited
on Amusement Visions only other game besides Monkey Ball. It had to be Jack, right? Six months ago, I reached out
to Jack Meluzzi's management via email and I never heard back. Over the summer, in July, I
reached out again...and nothing. I was about to give up, and
then finally, after four emails and one very awkward phone
call, I got the following email from Jack's manager: "Hello, Nick. I'm sorry
for emailing you back late. We are now in the
production week for theater. Jack is very busy this
time of year, helping with several stage productions in addition to his regular narration work. Also, most of the games he
is involved with include NDA (non-disclosure agreements) which prevent him from discussing that. However, I can say that Jack did not voice the Super Monkey Ball
series in the link you sent. Thank you for understanding. Shinji. I was a little shocked to read this email, but also, I guess that settled it. Against all odds, the
announcer in Monkey Ball is NOT Jack Merluzzi. I crossed Jack off my
mental list of candidates and moved onto the only
other one: Patrick Harlan. Now, Jack Merluzzi was more
of a personal pet theory, but Patrick Harlan is by far the person most commonly believed to be the Super Monkey Ball announcer. Patrick's name comes up
constantly when looking into this. For example, on this YouTube
video composed entirely of clips of the Monkey Ball
narrator voice, somebody said, "wonder who was the announcer," and somebody else replied,
"I think the announcer is Patrick Harlan, the voice
of Gongon and Dr. Bad-Boon." And a third guy replies,
"hey... you're right." Likewise, when I talk to
my friends who are experts on Super Monkey Ball, or even
just taking a cursory search of a popular Super Monkey Ball discord, they always bring up Patrick's name as the most likely candidate. And it's not just
internet hearsay, either - there is some pretty compelling evidence that Patrick is the guy we're looking for, and that evidence is found within the Super Monkey
Ball series itself. See, while Patrick is nowhere
to be found in the credits of Super Monkey Ball
1, Patrick does show up in the credits of Super Monkey Ball 2. Play through these interactive credits - an entirely different minigame from in the first game - get to
the Monkey Voice section, and there you'll see Patrick Harlan, the only American name on the entire staff of both games. Now, here's where it gets interesting. In most places you look,
Patrick is credited as doing the voice of two characters in Super Monkey Ball 2: Gongon, the monkey who sounds like this; and Dr. Bad-Boon, who sounds like this: And while both those voices
are barely recognizable as human, the logic goes like this: since Patrick is already
confirmed to have contributed his vocal talents in some way to the Super Monkey Ball
franchise, and since he's the only native English
speaker on the game's staff, it just makes the most sense
that Patrick is the announcer. Hell, go to Patrick
Harlan's Wikipedia page and he's listed as "Monkey voice and narrator in Super Monkey Ball 2." At this point, the evidence
seemed clear: Patrick Harlan had to be the voice of the
announcer in Super Monkey Ball. He is literally the only guy it could be. All that was left was to confirm it with the man himself. Simple, right? - Goal. (speaking in Japanese) - The thing is... Patrick
Harlan is not an easy guy to get a hold of. While he may not be a household name here in the west, Patrick
is a certifiable celebrity over in Japan. Turn on the TV in Japan,
and it won't be long before you see Patrick's face. He's been a comedian living in Tokyo for over 20 years, and he's also half of the two man manzai
comedy duo, PakkunMakkun. (speaking in Japanese) Patrick does commercials,
public appearances, he co-hosts TV shows: (speaking in Japanese) Patrick is easily in the
running for being one of the most famous
American-born celebrities living in Japan. For this reason, I knew hunting down Patrick
was going to be tricky. Understandably, there
has been no contact info for Patrick Harlan
available on the Internet, and in an act of desperation, I had even tried months ago to reach
out through his management, but never heard back. It didn't take long for me to realize that if I was gonna speak to
this guy, I would have to track him down in person. Out of options and desperate for some sort of resolution, I knew what I had to do, so I booked a plane
ticket and got on a flight to Tokyo in search of answers. Upon arriving in Tokyo, I
began formulating a plan. I already knew that there was no way to contact Patrick
directly, so that wasn't gonna be an option, and I started looking for other ways to reach out to the man. Eventually, I found an
article about Patrick in a local newspaper
called the Japan Times and was able to piece together
the reporter's email address. I reached out, explaining the situation of this reporter, not
expecting much of anything, but incredibly, just a few minutes later, in my inbox I had a reply. Here's what that reporter told me. "Patrick's email address
is (whooshing noise), although I can't guarantee he'll reply. He can be quite a tricky
person to get a hold of because his schedule changes quite a lot, but that's probably your best bet." The next morning, I
excitedly fired off an email to Patrick, telling him
I wanted to speak to him about his days a voice
actor in the early 2000s, and then I waited. No reply. I kept waiting. Nothing. Soon, almost an entire week had passed and I still hadn't
heard back from Patrick. I don't know what I expected - I had been warned that
he was not an easy guy to get a hold of, but I
was running out of time. I only had a few days left in Japan, and meeting up with
Patrick was a major part of my reason for coming. Out of total desperation, I fired off one last late night email to Patrick, figuring it was at least worth a shot and then fell asleep. The next morning, having
overslept, I rolled over, picked up my phone, and saw this: "Hi, Nick, you've actually caught me on a good day. I'm free 'til two if you want to meet for liquids or solids. Pat." Disheveled but excited,
I jumped out of bed and immediately called Patrick on the phone number he
had given me, terrified that I had overslept and missed my chance. Two o'clock was only a couple hours away and I wanted to do everything in my power to make this appointment,
so I called Patrick. (phone ringing) Hey, Patrick, it's Nick. - Hi, Nick, thank for reaching out. Well, if you've got something
to do at two o' clock, I am happy to come to you. Do you have any favorite lunch or coffee places you'd recommend? - Oh, tell you what,
I'll look something up and I'll meet you at the station. Ooh, okay, sounds good. All right, looking forward to meeting you. - All right. All right, see you soon. - See you soon. Bye.
- Okay, bye-bye. And suddenly, just like
that, I had scheduled an in person meeting
with the Patrick Harlan. Soon, I left my Airbnb and
began making my way towards the train station Patrick
had asked me to meet him at. As I made my way toward Shinjuku, I still couldn't quite believe this was happening. It seemed kind of crazy
to be taking time out of a celebrity like
Patrick's day just to answer this trivial question
that we basically knew the answer to already about a video game from 18 years ago, but at
the same time, I was excited to just have it so the
world could finally know with absolute certainty that this man was the announcer from Super Monkey Ball. Finally, I met up with
Patrick and he brought me to a nearby kebab restaurant for lunch and we began our interview. So, if you can introduce
yourself and tell me what you do? - Sure. My name is Patrick Harlan. I go by the stage name
Pakuun of the manzai-komi - which means a comic duo - PakuunMakuun. I am, at least in my
telling, the original... the first American-born comedian in Japan and I've been here for 26 years. I've been a professional comedian for 23, and I am probably the most famous American that no Americans know. (laughing) That's a good way of putting it. I know in your early
years in Japan, you did a little bit of voice work, right? - Mhm. Can you tell me some of
the projects you worked on? - You probably know better than I. Okay, (laughing) it's been a while. So, the one that I'm most interested in is Super Monkey Ball. - (laughing) Okay.
Super Monkey Ball is my personal... one of my
favorite game series of all time. - Okay. And you're credited as doing the voice of Gongon. - Okay, what's his voice? He's like, (grunting)
...he doesn't really talk a lot. It's mostly monkey noises, and then there's Dr. Bad-Boon. - Okay.
But one of the mysteries that I was hoping to
solve while I was here is there's a narrator in that game, and nobody knows who
he is, he's uncredited, but the working theory is
that it's Patrick Harlan. - Really? wow!
Yeah, but nobody knows for sure. I've got some clips of him.
- Okay. I know this almost impossible, but this--
- Well, we'll see if it sounds like me. Honestly, I was nervous, the answer to this
question was finally right within my grasp. This was it! This was the moment of truth! I pulled up a YouTube video of the Super Monkey Ball announcer's voice and I pressed play. - "Clear, goal, goal, goal, go, go, go, lose, lose, player one, player two, player three, player four, rank
in, ready, ready, results." - That's not me. That's not you...?! - No! So many people have... So there's a few possible answers, but Patrick Harlan is the one
that everybody seems confident is the right answer. "I think the announcer is Patrick Harlan, the voice of Gongon and Dr. Bad-Boon." "Hey, you're right." (laughing) Maybe not! Seemingly not. - Sorry, Jim. Sorry,
Josh, I don't think so. Wow. I was floored. Patrick Harlan was not the Super Monkey Ball announcer. Just a few minutes ago, I was confident, thinking I'd had the answer in my hands, and suddenly, I had felt like I had no idea, no leads, nothing. I was overwhelmed. When I finally came to,
Patrick was still talking, and graciously, he
offered to help steer me in the right direction. - Have you talked to
the old narrating crew? - Brian, I can't remember his last name, but I
can come up with it... Chris Wells... Michael
Nashtut... there used to be a group of us who did
this, lots and lots of voices. And they might be able to help us suss out who this is here.
- Yeah. Patrick explained to me that back in the day, there was a
small tightly knit crew of English voice actors
living here in Tokyo and that most of them all knew each other. (laughing)
All right, well, I'll keep digging. - 'Ready, geeeaaauuux!' I
don't usually say 'geeaauuux.' Yeah, he definitely says 'geaux.' - 'Geaux.' (laughing)
you've gotta look at the guy who, when he answers his
phone or says good morning in Japanese, he's like
'Oh-hie-yao go-zayy-mahs.' Listen for that 'Geaux.'
- 'Geaux. Geaux.'. Amazing. All righty, well, I'll let you-- - Yeah, sorry to waste your time, buddy-- You did not! You did not. I said my goodbyes to
Patrick and I headed home. I was torn. On the one hand, the number of possible candidates for
the Monkey Ball announcer had suddenly gone from
two people... to infinity. It was extremely daunting. I thought this trip was a tactical strike, a surefire hit where I
just pop over to Japan, as one does, and casually confirm a long-held Super Monkey Ball fan theory. But that theory... had
just been shot down. I had thought I was
rolling up to the goal, but as it turns out, I had
suddenly hit a ceiling. And yet, somehow, in a weird
way, this road block left me feeling reinvigorated.
I had just discovered that the entire Internet
was wrong about something - something significant -
and the responsibility to uncover the truth landed
squarely on my shoulders. I went back my Airbnb to regroup. I only had a little bit
of time left in Tokyo, just a few hours, so I
decided I would spend that time chasing down every last lead. After our discussion, Patrick
had given me the number of another voice actor named Chris Wells - a guy who, according to
Patrick, knew everyone in this underworld of Tokyo
narrators and voice actors, and a guy who might be able to point me in the right direction. So I gave Chris a call. (phone ringing) (speaking in Japanese) Hi, is this Chris? - Hi, this is Nick Robinson. Patrick Harlan gave me your phone number. Yes, yeah, hey, nice to meet you. All righty. I was speaking to Patrick because I'm trying to
find the uncredited voice of the announcer in Super Monkey Ball, the Sega game from 2001,
and it's proven very tricky because the only credited English speaker on the game is Patrick,
but it's not his voice and I'm curious if you have any good leads or any idea who might
have done work with Sega as an English speaker in 2001. I know that's pretty broad,
but I'm trying to chase down every lead here. Yeah, sure. What's the name? Oh, no worries... Now, while Chris wasn't able to identify this voice on
the spot, Chris told me that there was a resource
that I hadn't looked into yet. See, there existed what
amounted to a full list of every single English
speaking voice actor active in Tokyo, Japan in the
early 2000s. And that list? That list was the voice cast
of the video game Shenmue. Yeah? Wow. And Chris' point was a great one. Shenmue had a voice cast cast chock-full of Tokyo-based English
speaking voice actors, so if the Super Monkey Ball
guy was anywhere to be found, there was a significant chance he was somewhere on this list. Now, this was exciting - it felt like the first remotely
concrete lead I had since I hopes were dashed that Patrick was the Super Monkey Ball announcer
- but Shenmue also had a cast of over 70 people, and
there was no real guarantee at the end of the day that any one of them was definitely the culprit. And worse than that... I was out of time. Well, Chris, thank you
so much for your time. I actually have to catch a flight back to Los Angeles in a couple hours. But thank you so, so much
for your help, seriously. If this mystery gets solved,
it's gonna be because of this conversation,
because of your help today, so thank you so much. Thank you so much, Chris. Thanks, have a good rest of your day, bye. With my mystery still
unsolved, I flew back to Los Angeles feeling more
than a little dejected. Honestly, the whole situation
was a little maddening. Here I had poured so much time and energy into uncovering the identity of the Super Monkey Ball announcer, but at the end of the day, I was
going home empty-handed... And, what's worse, I
had no idea if I was 95% of the way to solving the
mystery or 5% of the way there. I felt like I had failed. Over the weeks that
followed, I reached out to everybody I could
from the Shenmue cast, but a lot of them were
hard to get in touch with, and many of them had no public internet presence to speak of. I was haunted by the potential
dead ends in this situation. If I learned anything from the
interviews I had conducted, it was that being an
English-speaking voice actor in Japan was a busy job. Often, these guys have multiple
voice recording sessions every single day, and this
was just one specific session from over 18 years ago. We're talking about a
video game from 2001. This was so long ago at this point that it seemed like
most of the voice actors from that era barely remembered anything from back in those days. What if I found the culprit
and he simply didn't remember? I was ready to give up. - Ready? Go! In a hail-mary last ditch effort to solve this mystery, I fired off
one last email to Chris, the guy I had spoken to
on the phone, to see if he could help me get in touch
with the last few people I hadn't been able to contact,
and if this didn't work I was ready to set down
this mystery for good. I emailed Chris, but I
didn't hear back right away. But then, a few hours
later, I got an email - an email from a name I didn't recognize. It was from a man named Brian Matt - a name that was nowhere on my
list of potential candidates to be the Super Monkey Ball announcer - and it read as follows: Hello, Chris and Nick, hope you're both doing well. Yes, I did this narration. Can't remember which company, but, yes, that is my voice. Hope you are both well. Yoroshiku onegai itashimasu, Brian. My heart practically stopped. Could this really be the guy? Frantically, I emailed this Brian guy back trying not to sound too
excited and asked him if he would agree to an
interview. He said yes. (phone ringing) Hey.
- Hey, hello, how are you? Good, how are you? - Good, good, good. - You found me. I did..! that's exactly how I
feel right now - I found you. Finally, I found him. I guess just to start,
question number one for me is, how much do you remember of this role? Do you remember the session? - Yes, I do. I do remember going there and it took roughly two
and half, three hours, maybe a half hour break, and at that time, it's funny, the director's
there, the producer's there, the Sega sponsors are there.
There's many, many people in the room - and then when
you hit a certain pitch or you hit a certain tone... "Go! GO! Congratulations!" - ...and then they're like,
hey, keep going, keep going, then they just add and
add, and add, and add. - So I do remember that in
particular. We do a lot of work, I'm sure Chris Wells or Patrick told ya. - It's in and out, in and out, in and out, - I hate to say it's a commodity, but... Have you ever seen what the gameplay of Super Monkey Ball is like? - I saw it actually in the studio. Oh, interesting! You were seeing it as you were recording the
voice over a little bit? - No, I saw it first just to get the idea and then I got to see
what the whole characters and try to understand
the insanity of it all, to get an understanding
- otherwise, I mean, you really don't know, so when you're going into something that's a game like this, like I said, they're not
gonna use the standard, "It's a Sony," they're not
gonna [want] the low voice. They want someone who...
I mean, monkeys are crazy, They want someone who's a crazy
monkey, I guess you could say. Totally, yeah, that actually does make perfect sense. I feel like this interview
would be incomplete if I didn't ask you to revisit the voice at least a little. Like, I
just wanna hear... it's been like 20 years, I just
wanna hear a little bit of the "ready" and "go,"
and just that cadence again. I think that's what would
be the perfect end cap to this if you have it in you. - 'Congratulations! Ready? Go!' yeah. Oh, my God. I wanna highlight this moment, I wanna pinpoint this,
because it was this moment that he said "ready!" and
"go!" in the exact voice of the Monkey Ball announcer, it was then that I knew
with 100% certainty this was the guy. - "Ready? Go!" Now, with the mystery finally solved, there was only one real
question left, which was: who was this Brian Matt guy and how did I not find him before? Well, the thing about that
is... I did find him before. On multiple occasions
actually. Let me explain. See, in putting together
this video - the one you're watching right now - I went through all my interviews multiple times when editing all this together. I thought back to my conversations
with Patrick and Chris and... I found something interesting: It turns out that Brian
guy that Patrick remembered and the Matt guy that Chris
remembered - both of them were the same guy. So the
person who contacted me - the guy I just interviewed
- his name is Brian Matt. They remembered his first
and last name separately. Incredibly, it turns out
that Patrick and Chris had BOTH been right: without any of us realizing
it, both of them had been able to accurately identify the voice of the Monkey Ball announcer
when I played it for them. Unknowingly, we had had all
the puzzle pieces right under our nose the entire time.
But only in hindsight were we able to put the puzzle together. - Goal@ At the end of all this, I couldn't help but feel incredibly grateful to the people who helped me on this journey
- the guys who took time out of their lives to help
some random YouTuber on a search that probably seemed
very inconsequential for them. For almost 20 years, the
Super Monkey Ball announcer was completely anonymous
- a faceless, nameless, disembodied voice that
was inexorably to millions and millions of
childhoods... mine included. Without the help of Patrick
Harlan or Chris Wells - without their expertise, their network of Tokyo-based narrator
friends from the old days, their incredible ear for
detecting each others' voices, without those things,
who knows how much longer the Monkey Ball announcer's identity would have stayed a mystery? Maybe he would have taken
another 18 years before we figured it out - or
maybe it would have remained a mystery forever. And, y'know, maybe you're asking yourself, "Who cares?" Maybe you're just laying in bed and you've been watching
this YouTube video and you've been too lazy to turn it off, so you watched all the way to the end and you're not a Monkey
Ball fan. That's fine. I think that's a lot of
my audience, frankly. But... I care. Like... it's important to *me*. The idea of this guy going uncredited for the rest of time... bothered me. Like, putting aside the
personal satisfaction I get from cracking open a mystery like this, there's something about
finding these blind spots and finding these voices that
I've heard literally tens of thousands - maybe hundreds
of thousands of times... - Ready? Go! When I reflect on this, I
think about my experience playing Monkey Ball as
a kid - the way that these small voice clips that
this guy Brian Matt recorded in a studio somewhere
in Tokyo 18 years ago - the way that they're burned into my head, the way that the exact cadence and rhythm of the way he read these lines is... just feels like it's a part of my soul. I think about how there are millions of people who had that
experience just like me: millions of kids and
adults, all the speedrunners who played Monkey Ball
hours a day for over a decade now - how many
times they've heard this guy say "Ready, go!",
"fall out," all that stuff. It's tempting to... to
make this into a joke for me and to act like this is trivial and it isn't important, but honestly, if I'm being real, it is. This, to me, is important. And... yeah. I'm just... it feels good to have solved this mystery, so... I'll leave it at that. Thank you for watching. - [Announcer] "Thanks for
watching youtube.com/babylonian! Don't forget to like this
video and subscriiiibe!"
my childhood
Ready? Go!
I never played this game but the video was very fun to watch. I can imagine it must've been a fun experience for the voice actor to realise people like him this much.
Man make a new super monkey ball game already!π€©
Okay I'll watch that later
Video is gold.
Yeah that was a good video
He needs help