The Hellboy Himself Was Paid ‘$40 And A Sandwich’ To Voice Fallout‘s Most Iconic Line

Ron Perlman has been in every Fallout game but he’s never played them. He seems to barely even remember narrating the now iconic line “War. War never changes,” when the first game launched back in 1997. He says he was paid basically nothing and never bothered to find out what the game, which would spawn one of the biggest franchises, was about.

“I’m not a gamer,” Perlman said in a recent Joe Vulpis Podcast interview (via PC Gamer). “I wouldn’t know how to put a game—I wouldn’t know which game goes into which piece of hardware. I’ve never played any of the games. The whole Fallout thing is a mystery to me.”

The Hellboy actor has had character roles in some of the games but is most known for narrating the openings in which he outlines the geopolitical rivalries that precipitated a mass nuclear war. “In 2077, the storm of world war had come again,” he says at the beginning of Fallout 1. “In two brief hours, most of the planet was reduced to cinders. And from the ashes of nuclear devastation, a new civilization would struggle to arise.”

While the lines have stuck in fans’ heads for years, Perlman doesn’t appear to have ever given them a second thought. “They invited me to do the very first Fallout back in the ’90s, I think,” he said on the podcast. “They gave me $40 and a sandwich. And a year and a half later, I get a call. ‘Hey, you remember Fallout?’ ‘No.'”

Fallout is now not just one of the biggest game series around but also one of the most popular TV shows on streaming thanks to the Amazon Prime adaptation. “I didn’t see that coming,” Perlman notes. He hasn’t appeared in the show yet, and there’s no indication that he will, but it would be pretty cool. Season 3 starts filming later this year so there’s plenty of time to make it happen.