why is the speech recording to inane?

[kjs]

Could they not have hired Harrison Ford to voice over Indy? Also, I find the recording quality lacking. Sound like they recorded it with a potatoe at the time when it was released in 1992. Are the voice actors even professionals, or were they just dudes who thought it would be cool if they were permitted to voice the characters?

[Rutgercs85]

Harrison Ford was unavailable at the time of recording. So they used Doug Lee instead.

[DarkMoe]

well, to be fair, Nick Jameson is a professional actor, most known probably for being President Suvarov on 24, and Max on the original Sam and Max game, or dr Fred in DOTT. Now .. he playing Dr Ubermann here is terrible.

Doug Lee did an acceptable work in general, problem are other characters with really weird accents like Heimdall and Alain Trottier

[*P0P$*FR3$H3NM3Y3R*]

Talkie versions simply weren't a big thing back then. They had to hedge their bets in terms of VO production cost, since CD-ROM drives were still a rare sight in consumer computers. The margin of people that would pay premium for an innovation like a talkie version simply wasn't huge. Tho Fate of Atlantis eventually sold over a million of copies, only a fraction of sales could be expected to be a talkie version (which came a year later anyway).
In hindsight, voice over production is a no brainer, but it would still take til 1994 when Star Trek 25th Anniversary CD-ROM released, which featured a full cast of the original series actors reprising their roles for a computer game.

[Ajax]

I agree that Dr. Bjorn Heimdall sounds bad. If I were Icelandic I wouldn't know whether to laugh or feel insulted. Still, for a game that came out in 1992 the fact that it has voiced characters at all is surprising. Most of the games from this era had bad voice acting or none at all. Morrowind, which came out 10 years later in 2002 has barely any voiced characters for instance.