Adventure Gamers - Forums

The Riven game is twenty years old but it still sits on my shelf and its haunting beauty still lives in my brain. Just recently, I read the following somewhere on the internet: “Sheila Goold was an actress who portrayed Catherine in Riven: The Sequel to Myst. RAWA did not like her voice, so it was dubbed by Rengin Altay.”

I knew that, but as a Riven/Myst fan I’ve always found it offensive they didn’t use Sheila’s voice. I suspect it was perfectly fine if not a little young since she was only 33, I believe, when she played Catherine who was a mother of two very grown and adult sons. I think this incident would have been disheartening at the time and unfair to her budding career. Sheila IS the face of Riven in my opinion and she played Catherine so beautifully. She gave Riven its lovely mysterious edge and helped make Riven an iconic game. Sheila Goold deserves full appreciation for the important role she played. That phrase “they did not like her voice” bothers me because I’ve heard her speak and it’s a fluid good voice. I wonder if it bothered her a little, too, over the twenty years that followed before she died, still too young, in 2017.