Highlights

  • Vin Diesel's extensive knowledge of Ark: Survival Evolved led to his enthusiastic involvement in the animated series.
  • The pandemic contributed to other high-profile actors being interested in voice acting for the show.
  • The animated series expands on Ark's story with its stellar cast, characters, and plot, offering a new perspective on the game.

Ark: Survival Evolved and its expanded/updated version, Ark: Survival Ascended, are well-known survival crafting and multiplayer experiences. While the games focus mainly on players weathering the obstacles (and other players) that the vast open-world maps present, there are also a number of collectibles and notes that flesh out the setting's lore and other aspects. These form the basis of Ark: Survival Evolved's overarching story framework, and within them are many intriguing details with wider implications about much of Ark's in-universe history, events, and major figures.

Part 1 of Ark: The Animated Series was recently released on Paramount Plus, and includes the first 6 episodes (with 7 more to come forming Part 2.) Ark series creator Jeremy Stieglitz, who also serves as director and executive producer on the show, discussed with Game ZXC about how, though a series of circumstances both positive and negative, the show's ensemble star cast was chosen, and the approach the writing team took to bring their characters to life for Ark's animated adaptation.

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How Ark: The Animated Series' Cast Came Together

Describing the situation leading up to the creation of the show, Stieglitz noted one member of its talented cast who was quite enthusiastic about the games, making it a natural fit for them to join the project: Vin Diesel.

One who was definitely a fan, bigger than us-- the developers even--because he was telling us about bugs and issues with the game, some of them being things we were unaware of, was Vin Diesel . He reached out and we went to meet him. And then all night he talked us under the table [laughs.] Some people say, “drink under the table,” we got "talked under the table" about Ark: Survival Evolved by Vin Diesel! So, we thought, 'OK, we have to do something with him.' Vin was already an immense fan, and was immediately keen on it because he knew the game so well, probably better than we did in some ways, and loved it.

Envisioning and Writing Ark: The Animated Series' Cast and Characters

Regarding other elements involved in casting and writing for Ark: The Animated Series, Stieglitz shared that it was a mixture of wish-casting and timeliness that played a part in the end result, with the pandemic freeing up some actors' schedules and leading to Ark's stacked cast.

One of the reasons we got so many of those actors was due to the pandemic. That certainly wasn't a fun time for anybody. Lots of people were stuck at home with nothing to do, including major Hollywood talent . And voice acting for this project seemed like a good way to help get through that. So that was definitely a factor.

He went on to say that he and the writers did specifically have all the high-profile names involved in mind when working out the script. Fortunately, the creative team behind Ark: The Animated Series ended up getting who they wanted for the roles in question, with Michelle Yeoh name-dropped as a person that a character (Mei-Yin) had been written specifically for.

We did cast in our heads in advance of writing, and that was dangerous for us, because if we didn’t get the person we wanted, we would’ve had to re-think the voice. We literally said, for example, "Let’s write Mei-Yin as if it’s Michelle Yeoh saying these lines." And thank goodness we got her because it would’ve sounded very different coming from anybody else. That was the case for pretty much all the characters.

Via this combination of its characters, cast, and plot, the series is able to expand and further delve into the story of Ark: Survival Evolved, taking fans and audiences into interesting and previously unseen territory in the animated adaptation.

Ark: The Animated Series Part 1 is currently available for streaming on Paramount Plus. Part 2 will release at a later date.