Robert "Robbie" Belgrade is an American musician and voice actor currently residing in the San Francisco bay area. He was the original English language voice actor for Alucard in the PlayStation version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. He was replaced in later ports of the game by Yuri Lowenthal, although he would later reprise this role in the fan game Castlevania: The Lecarde Chronicles 2.
Belgrade is well known to fans for narrating several games in the Tekken series, as well as for voicing characters like Signas in Mega Man X7 and Rock in Soul Blade.
Biography[]
Belgrade is a multi-instrumentalist. He has studied, played and performed on many different instruments over the years. These include piano, trumpet, flute, saxophone, clarinet, voice, tabla, bongos, congas, viola, pandeiro, riqq, cajon, recorder, guitar and bass. His current focus is primarily on piano, clarinet and percussion instruments that use finger technique more than full hand strokes.
Belgrade hails from Marin County, California. He began his studies in Western classical music on the piano, trumpet and flute. Later on, he studied the saxophone and improvisation under John Handy. He also studied vocal music under Ali Akbar Khan at the Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, and tabla under Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain and Swapan Chaudhuri. He currently resides in Tokyo, Japan, and performs in a wide range of musical genres, including R&B, jazz, Latin and Indian music.
Being a saxophonist and a jazz musician, much of the music he has composed, performed and recorded has taken place within a jazz-based context. Some of this music can be found on four albums released by the contemporary world music group TATOPANI: Forbidden Fruit, Themes From Dreams, Azure, and more recently, New Directions.
Belgrade is also a music educator. He has taught music to students of all ages, both in public schools and privately. Additionally, he has worked for more than twenty years doing narration, TV and radio commercials, voiceovers for computer games, etc.
His debut doing voiceover in video games was in the 1996 Science Fiction role-playing game Star Ocean, as the starship captain in the game's prologue. He worked regularly as a voice actor in video games from 1994 to 2007. He is best known for his work in the 1997 Konami game Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, where he voiced the lead character Alucard. He is also known as the narrator of the story segments in Tekken 5.
More recently, he voiced the character Orlok Dracule in the English version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, an independent Castlevania spiritual successor video game directed by Koji Igarashi, former and renown director of said series. This particular role is noteworthy as Orlok is a direct homage to Alucard.
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Trivia[]
- In addition to voicing Alucard (a dhampir), Belgrade also voiced the vampire Baron Stoker in Konami's 2007 reboot of their Boktai franchise, Lunar Knights.
- All of his video game roles were recorded while living in Japan.