Master pinball voice actor Fred Young has died.
Fred was the voice for a generation of pinball machines from Data East Pinball, Sega Pinball and Stern Pinball.
He began mimicking voices aged seven and soon became the regular go-to guy for many voice over jobs, not only imitating famous celebrities but also using his own commanding voice.
His introduction to the pinball world came when he was in a recording studio doing voice overs for an All State Insurance commercial in 1989. Fred often left cassette tapes demonstrating his vocal capabilities around recording studios and production houses in the hope of attracting more work. One such tape came to the attention of the Joe Kaminkow and Brian Schmidt who, at the time, were creating games at Data East Pinball.
They asked if Fred would be able to voice a selection of characters for their upcoming Star Trek pinball.
Fred hadn’t worked on any pinballs before, but was willing to give it a shot.
Back then, they recorded the voices for a number of upcoming titles in a single recording session. In his first one, Fred recorded the callouts for the games Star Trek, Checkpoint, Batman and King Kong.
That led to more pinball voice work, including Back to the Future and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Data East Pinball.
This was in an era where movie studios were much less controlling of their licensed themes, and most pinball games went to operators rather than home collectors. Since then, collectors have become the dominant market and they are more demanding about the content in their games, to the point where they demand lines from the actual actors from the movies and won’t accept sound-alikes.
Fred made an appearance at Pinball Expo in 1990 where he presented a seminar about his work in the industry. This led to a phone call from Alvin G Pinball to do voice work for them. Fred went on to record the voices for all the Alvin G games.
In the meantime, he was asked to record the lead characters’ voices for Data East’s upcoming Back to the Future game, followed by Joe Pesci’s voice as the Leo Getz character in the Lethal Weapon 3 game.
Starship Troopers and Star Wars soon followed, with Fred recording the voices for all the characters in Star Wars except Princess Leia and R2-D2.
In all, Fred reckoned he has recorded voices for at least thirty-two pinball titles – possibly more – covering more than 723,000 actual machines.
Before the 40th anniversary edition in 2024, Fred had last spoken at Pinball Expo back in 2006.
He returned for last year’s Pinball Expo where he held a seminar entitled The Voice Of The Machine Returns, which you can hear in Part One of our Pinball Expo coverage and also below.
It was at Pinball Expo 2024 where Fred’s outstanding contribution to pinball was finally recognised through his induction into the Pinball Expo Hall of Fame. His induction was read by Gary Stern.
(picture: Jim Schelberg)
We will miss Fred’s huge, unbridled enthusiasm for the pinball community and his amazing voice talent. We would meet him in the corridors and halls at Pinball Expos each year and he never failed to crack a joke and perform a few celebrity voices.
(picture: Jim Schelberg)
His work lives on, of course, in the many, many games in which you can still hear his voice, and also in all the Pinball News video and audio recordings, where he voices the introductory “This is a Pinball News production” wording.
