Larry Robertson, better known to a lot of ears as Larry O’Brien, didn’t set out to become a voice inside one of the biggest sports video game franchises on earth. He just kept showing up to work. Every day. Twelve to fifteen auditions a day. For years. The Madden gig wasn’t a splashy, “your agent called our agent” kind of moment. It was a quiet listing on a voiceover clearinghouse site, buried among a dozen other jobs he read cold that afternoon.

And then, two weeks later, his phone rang.

A Hidden Audition That Turned into Madden

By the mid-2000s, Larry, who you have probably heard over a PA system at local track meets, had already been doing voiceover work since the early 2000s. Like most modern VO pros, he found gigs online through a subscription platform that works like a clearinghouse where producers post projects with pay, length, and the kind of voice they want, and voice actors submit quick auditions. Sometimes the listings are vague on purpose. No company name. No product. Just a general description and a script.

That’s exactly what happened here.

One listing simply said it was for a sports play-byplay sound for a video game. No brand. No hint it was the Madden. Larry read the sample, sent it in, and moved on. When you’re auditioning a dozen times a day, you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to fall in love with any one shot.

Two weeks later, a producer reached out and told him the role was for Madden, and asked if he would he be interested?

Larry’s answer was immediately yes.

Larry O’Brien’s “hometown radio” play-by-play

is available as a selectable commentary option in Madden NFL 06, 07, and 08. Turn it on in the audio/commentary settings to hear his calls in-game.

Working on Madden

The audition that got him in the door was tiny—about 22 seconds. But it was enough for EA’s team to fly him to Orlando for a short in-studio test. They wanted to hear that voice in their space, on their gear, through their pipeline.

The session wasn’t some high-pressure boot camp. Larry described it as casual, laid back, the way most VO sessions are when the producer trusts the talent to bring their own instincts to the mic. After the test, they showed him around the Orlando facility, put him in a hotel, handled the transportation, and sent him back home.

Soon after, the call came, and Larry was hired.

Recording Madden from Fargo… Above a Dance Floor

Here’s the part that still feels a little wild.

Larry’s Madden work wasn’t done in Orlando. It was done in Fargo, in a downtown studio that, by his own description, wasn’t fancy. At that time he had an office above the Old Broadway building—literally above the wildest dance floor in town. He used to walk in Monday mornings and find books knocked off shelves from the weekend bass thump.

That studio is where Madden happened.

Four mornings a week, around 9 a.m., EA producers would call him. They were writing fresh scripts daily, sending them over, then recording in real time over the phone. Larry would read while they listened live, occasionally stopping him for a tweak on inflection or tone.

“Third and a mile”… or “third and a ton”

One of the cooler details is how collaborative those sessions were. Larry wasn’t just a talking head reading copy; he was part of shaping what made it into the game.

He remembers one line in particular. The script read: “It’s third and a mile.”

Larry paused. That phrasing sounded too close to Al Michaels’ “third and a mile,” and the producers agreed. They asked, ‘what would you say?’

Larry answered instantly saying, “third and a ton.”

That’s the line that made it into Madden.

It’s a small moment, but it shows what EA was going for with this experiment—something that felt more like a hometown radio call than a polished national TV booth.

Larry had never done live playby-play in his life and doesn’t pretend otherwise. This wasn’t about recreating the real-time rhythm of a broadcast. It was about recording thousands of standalone pieces of language so the game could build commentary on the fly.

A lot of what he recorded weren’t full sentences. They were just short phrases or partial lines. The game engine would stitch those fragments together dynamically based on what was happening in your matchup. Doing it this way reduced mistakes (four words are easier to nail than fifteen), and it gave Madden the flexibility to generate endless combinations during gameplay

But there was one huge wrinkle.

To make the system work, Larry had to record every NFL player’s name—around 1,700 of them at the time. And not once. Three times each.

Each pass had a different emotional style:

Hometown excitement — the “that’s my guy” tone when your team makes a play.
Neutral call — routine, descriptive play-by-play.
Opponent reaction — the feel when the other team does something big.

That alone was a huge chunk of the workload. And some names were brutal.

Larry laughs remembering having to hunt down pronunciations. One that sticks out was Amobi Okoye. Okoye was drafted in 2007, and Larry and the producers had to stop and track down the correct pronunciation before recording it three different ways. It’s the kind of detail nobody thinks about while playing, but it’s what keeps a game from sounding fake.

The first year took about 71 hours of recording. The second year was far less, more like corrections, tweaks, and updated names—maybe 15 to 20 hours.

Why the “Hometown Radio Guy” Idea Happened

Larry wasn’t credited in the game. His name never appeared in the usual places. And while the work itself was a blast, the experiment didn’t last long, about three years.

His understanding is that Madden’s team built the “hometown radio announcer” option to mimic a real NFL viewing experience. Think about NFL Films highlights—how often they overlay radio calls on top of game footage. EA saw that as an element missing from the Madden feel.

But the audience wanted the big national booth voices. Fans wanted to hear the recognizable stars—John Madden and Al Michaels. So EA moved back in that direction.

Larry takes it in stride. For him, the win wasn’t fame. It was the craft. The weirdness. The scale. The fact that a voice from Fargo could live inside a game played everywhere.

Larry never played the game. The copy of Madden they gave him is still wrapped in plastic. But he did get the surreal, slightly hilarious payoff anyway. A friend told him her kids had the game, and it was “awesome” to hear his voice.

Then she added, “now your voice is in my house all day, every day.”

Larry’s response was perfect. “There’s a volume button on that controller, you know.”

Beyond Madden

Madden might be the flashpoint in Larry O’Brien’s story, but it sits inside a much larger body of work that shows how wide his range really is. Over the years, he’s voiced projects for major national and global brands, often landing them the same way he landed Madden—through constant auditions, consistency, and being ready for anything.

On the automotive side alone, he’s recorded the DVD owner’s manual for Corvette, and that relationship led to additional work for Ford through the same Detroit-area producer he’s stayed close with. He’s also done commercial work for household-name giants like McDonald’s, Microsoft, and even the U.S. Marine Corps, the kind of credits that tell you a voice is trusted at the highest level.

His football résumé goes deeper than Madden too. Larry has voiced a promo for the NFL Network, and he recorded material for the NFL Players Association, aimed at rookies during their annual symposium—basically the league’s “welcome to the NFL, here’s what you need to know” moment. Those are smaller roles compared to Madden, but they’re the kind that put you right in the bloodstream of the sport.

Then there are the projects that show his character chops. He recently voiced a Disney World promo—only to discover weeks later he’d been cast as a Hispanic grandfather in the spot. That surprise is pretty emblematic of Larry’s career. He walks into sessions blind, then finds out he’s become someone completely different. He’s also voiced campaigns for Huel, a UK-based nutrition/energy brand expanding into North America, and he regularly takes on quirky, character-driven ads—like a talking-dog-style spot for Nebraska Crossing that leans hard into comedy and personality

Some of his most fascinating work is the stuff you hope never gets used. One job had him recording a calm emergency announcement for an offshore oil rig—the warning that would play if everything went wrong. Larry jokes about hoping nobody ever hears it, but it’s also a reminder that voice actors sometimes carry serious, high-stakes responsibility in unseen ways.

Through all of it, Larry’s career has been defined by volume and versatility. He auditions constantly, records daily, works with clients from Fargo to Los Angeles to the UK, and keeps building a body of work that’s way bigger than any one game—no matter how iconic that game is.