David Menkin had a very good week.
“Every time I open my computer, good things come to mind,” he said. We spoke via video call on Tuesday, just days before his next big project was released: pragmaticCapcom’s long-in-development third-person shooter is set on the moon. He had received congratulations from people who had played it before its release and saw his name in the credits. Even though his reviews have improved, he still wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that he starred in the game because it hadn’t been released yet at the time of our chat.
“I have gamers and streamers messaging me and I can say, ‘Thank you,’ and send little blue hearts. But I can’t tell my brothers or sisters,” Menkin said. “One of my nephews, he once did something that made him think, ‘So, you’re up to something?’ And I just shrugged coldly.”
He recently had to return to the booth to record some more lines pragmatic trailer, which gave rise to uneasy feelings. “I realized that I had to mourn this incident again,” Menkin said.
“Last year, end of year, I was sitting on the steps in London with that bunch of flowers [Capcom had] it was given to me to say thank you, and I can’t talk about it with anyone. You’re not allowed to talk about this and you have to mourn it alone and no one really understands it,” Menkin said. “And it’s like, ‘It’s just a game.’ No, no. This has been like a year and a half of my life.”
Menkin plays Hugh, an astronaut who ventures to a research base on the moon. His team eventually disintegrates and he is quickly attacked by killer robots. With the childish android Diana at her side — or rather, on her back — she must investigate the robot threat and ensure it doesn’t reach Earth.
Menkin joins the cast pragmatic in 2024. He recalled seeing it on the PlayStation 5’s “Future of Gaming” reveal stream in June 2020, and then “completely forgot about it.” And who could blame him? pragmatic It was originally scheduled to be released in 2022, and will finally arrive on April 17, 2026.
“When I got the job, they brought us on to do something that was really great, and very unusual in our industry, unfortunately, which was a table read,” he said. “I worked with two of my fellow actors, one of whom was Grace [Saif]who plays Diana. And that’s when we gain knowledge, not only about the game, but also about the long history of the game.”
They read some early cutscenes, such as when Hugh says Diana’s name and when they reach the 3D-printed New York Level, and are off to the races.
So many pragmatic depending on the relationship between Hugh and Diana. But Menkin and Saif never really got together enough to build that relationship. “It’s going to be a bit of a technical nightmare [the development team]Menkin said. Much of the play, like most games, was shot with the actors in different locations. “We’re used to it. This is how this industry works.”
Menkin would record his lines, and then Saif would be able to work on his recording when he came into the booth. Menkin noted that he had to stay away from the recording pragmatic for a while, and when she came back, Saif was in front of her. “So I make sure that I never miss a beat so I can hear her amazing performance every time.”
He likened the process to how a film or TV actor works facing tennis balls that stand in for CGI characters. “We had all these safety protocols in place to make sure everything stayed real and I was given what I needed to be able to envision it properly or envision it well enough for it all to come together,” Menkin said. He noted how the director, writer, audio team, and more will combine to create “gaming magic.”
“I don’t have any skills. All I can do is act,” Menkin said. “Thankfully there were people to make sure I felt safe enough to do my job and in the end everything went smoothly and successfully.”
pragmatic is a new IP and not part of an established franchise, like some of Menkin’s other roles, such as Malos in it Xenoblade Chronicles 2 or Barnabus in Final Fantasy XVI. (When I asked if Menkin wondered if he would be joining a Mega Man game in 2024, he replied, “I’m contractually unable to respond to this.”) That newness brings different challenges to the role.
“Which shoes should I wear? Hopefully they are the right shoes,” said Menkin. “I’ve never had an experience like this when I came in and I realized that I have to accept who Hugh is and I have to try my hardest to play him and then I have to leave it and hope.”
He compared it to the nervousness of recording dialogue like Luke Skywalker did Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Story. “Your heart is falling out of your ass. You’re just freaking out, but you’re happy at the same time.” […] You hope you will get this feeling again, whatever it is.”
Menkin has always been a space and science fiction expert. “My whole career has been out of reach,” he says, and he’s not wrong. He played Neil Armstrong in the short film and returned to play the astronaut in the audio drama Buzzing opposite John Lithgow. “I’ve made all the famous quotes, Neil’s famous quotes,” Menkin said. “I know a lot about that damn moon.”
His love of space, and especially the moon, drove Menkin crazy when the Artemis 2 mission took place on the same moon. pragmatic will be released. He wanted to post about it on his social media pages, but embargoes and strict contracts made him hesitant to do so.
“I don’t want anyone from Capcom to say, ‘Excuse me, is that a picture of the moon or a picture of the moon? We moon?’” he joked.
Menkin described himself as a “really bad liar”, meaning he had to “power down, completely boot up” in order not to give away his secrets ahead of the game’s launch. When the review embargo lifted on Monday and people started chatting pragmatic online, Menkin took the opportunity to sneak in a post. He placed REM’s “Man on the Moon” over the image pragmatic‘s moon and share it as a story. “I was like, ‘Just get it out of your system, move on,’” he said. However, after the game came out, he was finally free.
“My job is very strange,” Menkin muses.
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.