Tiny Tina's Wonderlands' Ashly Burch Tells Us What It's Like Voicing Gaming's Craziest Character

“A bit? That’s kind of hard. I’ve been in it for quite a long time!” This is how Ashly Burch starts our conversation when I ask her to tell me a little bit about her experience in the gaming industry. And it’s true — she’s prolific.

As well as playing one of the main characters in Apple TV+’s gaming themed series Mythic Quest, Burch also writes for the show, including ‘Everlight,’ one of the two special episodes that aired between seasons one and two. She’s the voice of some of the most influential characters in recent games, including Aloy in Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West, Viper in Valorant and Chloe Price in Life is Strange. She also created the referential sketch comedy series Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? with her brother, in which they examined trends and themes in the gaming industry. Most recently, Burch voiced Tiny Tina in Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a game which renewed a lot of players’ love of the Borderlands series.

We’re chatting now with Sam Winkler, lead writer of Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, but I can’t help but ask about some of Burch’s other work, as well. She’s played some of my favourite characters, and her voice has a magical ability to make me relive the emotions I felt when I played as those characters for the first time. She does the same now for Tiny Tina, having voiced her since the character was introduced in Borderlands 2 — in fact, Tiny Tina is partially based on her.

“Anthony Burch, my brother, was hired to write Borderlands 2,” Burch tells me.

“He started writing Tiny Tina, who he based partially on my character from our web series and partially on our friend from high school named Christina — hence Tina — who is actually a really wonderful visual artist but a complete maniac. She’s just so bizarre. Her art is really lovely and conceptual and abstract and then you meet her and she’s like,” – Burch’s eyes light up with mischief and she makes a crazy sound here – “a total weirdo. So Tina was kind of a marriage between those two.”

Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is the first time an entire game has been centred around the 13-year-old explosives expert. It makes me even happier to learn that Burch was involved in writing Wonderlands.

POPSUGAR Australia: How did Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands come about? Did Gearbox approach you about the idea of an entire game centered around Tina?

Sam Winkler: We worked with Ash on Borderlands 3 and so we’d already had some interesting conversations about how to advance the character both in time and… you know, I was going to say maturity, but no.

For every new instalment you want to advance the character and show new, interesting sides of them, and while we were developing Borderlands 3 our devs were coming up with cool ideas for whatever the next Bunkers and Badasses thing would be. And eventually we had enough interest and enough ideas, and we knew that the fanbase was so interested in going back to that space, that we pulled the trigger and made it into a standalone game. There was no question that Tina had to lead that.

PS: Tina is one of the longest-serving characters in the Borderlands series by now – how did you work with Gearbox to ensure you nailed her character in Wonderlands?

Ashly Burch: I feel a lot of ownership over Tina because she was created by my brother and based on a character that he and I created together, so she’s not hard to access — I don’t have to go into my mind cave and discover her, she’s pretty on the tip of my tongue. But what was really interesting about B3 and then Wonderlands was working with this whole new awesome group of writers who were taking on the franchise and making it their own. It was cool to see how a completely new group of people could take something that’s been established and make it their own while still having it feel true to the character.

SW: I don’t think it’s an understatement to say it’s an honour to work on a character like Tina — seriously, one of the most identifiable video game characters around in the last decade. It’s simultaneously really exciting, it’s extremely humbling and it’s the kind of thing that, theoretically, you might lose a few hours of sleep on every night. But it’s always reassuring to have someone like Ashly in the role who can serve as this guiding light. At my worst, I know that Ashly will always Tina-fy a line if I say the driest thing possible. But also we’re able to bounce off each other. You toss out ideas in the booth all the time for different lines, and we workshop it, we bounce back and forth, like “does this work? If you add this weird, unidentifiable sound at the end of the line does that make it hit better? Yes, I guess so!” It’s the kind of toolbox that every writer or creator could only dream of.

PS: I can’t think of anyone better to ask this question: How would you describe the character of Tina? And how did you bring her to life and balance her erraticism with her heart?

AB: Man, Tina is a multifaceted creature! I mean, she’s Chaotic Great. She’s controlling, she’s lonely, she’s loving, she’s traumatised, she’s funny, she’s hypersexual, she’s quick to anger and also quick to forgive. She’s a horny teenager, a petulant child, a brilliant storyteller and… a murderer?

SW: 100% a murderer. Canonically a murderer.

AB: So she’s got a lot of stuff going on! Wonderlands was interesting because it’s the first installation of the Borderlands franchise where Tina has the most to say. She’s not just popping in talking about badonkadonks and asking you to blow something up. You’re with Tina for a solid 30-40 hour campaign. So it became an interesting thing to balance. Tina had to deliver gameplay information and tutorial information, which isn’t something she’s really had to do before. So we got to play with what it looks like when Tina is at a 10 versus when she’s at a two. And, in this moment are we trying to get as much character and funny out of it as we can or do we just need this to be informational? We tried to inject her personality into everything that we recorded, but it was cool to find these different shades of Tina being more in control and being more of the engaged storyteller versus the bananas, chaotic, explosions expert that she is sometimes. And so much of that is the script, and then also just calibrating in the booth. Making sure that we’re not hitting the same notes over the head too much and trying to find Tina in every line without blowing people’s eardrums out.

PS: Is it true that a lot of Tina’s accents and asides in Wonderlands weren’t written into the script? That you improvised them during recording? How did you make sure that fit in with everyone else’s lines?

SW: That is 100% true! I can only think of a couple of times when I’ve ever noted *puts on a monster voice* “and then you go up here” and then *puts on a sing-song voice* “you speak like an erudite princess.” That is all Ashly.

We have internal character sheets that list the pillars of the character. I think on that sheet my intro was: “Imagine a golden retriever who only ate marshmallow cereal and was raised by the internet.” I think that’s a very strong pillar for Tina.

And what I liked about bringing in Andy Samburg, Will Arnett and Wanda Sykes was that, amazingly, Tina ends up being the straight man sometimes, which is a wild situation to find yourself in.

PS: What’s next for Tiny Tina?

SW: Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands was very successful, it was received better than we possibly could have hoped and we very much consider it to be a new IP standing on its own, distinct from Borderlands. I imagine this is not the last you’ll be seeing of either Wonderlands or Tiny Tina.

And Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands is now available on Steam alongside the third DLC.

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Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands’ Ashly Burch Tells Us What It’s Like Voicing Gaming’s Craziest Character

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