Warframe: 1999’s Ben Starr is proud to be gaming’s class clown

Last weekend, Warframe fans gathered in London, Ontario, for TennoCon, an event dedicated to the popular MMO. It was a busy weekend full of panels, demos, and announcements. Digital Trends attended the show, getting our first taste of Warframe: 1999. The upcoming update to the long-running series promises new story, weapons, and maybe even a bit of smooching in an alternate version of the Y2K era.

The star of that expansion? Ben Starr, the voice actor known for both his role as Clive in Final Fantasy XVI and his very online persona. I sat down with Ben Starr at TennCon to talk about his Warframe: 1999 character Arthur Nightingale, late ’90s nostalgia, and his knack for comedy — oh, and his presidential position in the “gerbil breeding society.”

How much do you remember of the year 1999?

I remember everything about 1999. I still go back to the year 2000 and see that as a benchmark in my life. For those people who weren’t alive, I don’t think it could be overstated how everyone was aware of what year it was. It was Y2K, the entire world could end. This sense of something new … there’s something so exciting and dangerous about what that represents. Especially where I grew up, in London, the millennium was massive. We had the Millennium Dome, we had the London Eye. A lot of the iconic landmarks that exist in London now were because of that. And so that aesthetic [in Warframe: 1999] is so incredibly nostalgic for me, you know. And I think they’ve captured it so brilliantly. It isn’t 1999, it’s how we imagine 1999 was, or how cool that period was.

There’s something so exciting and dangerous about what that represents

I studied history at university, and the most interesting aspect of history to me … is the historiography. It’s how human beings chose to catalog that period of time in which they existed. Why were humans choosing to look upon the period in which they lived and reflect in that way? And that is what this is. This is a 2024 take on 1999 about how the people who