Alanah Pearce Australian Journalist From Cairns

Early life

Alanah Pearce was born on 24 August 1993 in Cairns, Queensland, Australia. She grew up in Cairns and later lived for nine years in Brisbane. From a young age she was interested in writing and video games, and she kept reviews of the games she played in her diaries. While she was working at a call centre, she came across a listing for a volunteer games journalist position, and it pushed her toward a career in journalism. She went on to earn a bachelor's degree in mass communication at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

Career

Between 2012 and 2015 Pearce wrote gaming news for around a dozen outlets, among them Impulse Gamer, Zelda Universe and the BBC, and she also spent time at Australian radio and television stations. In 2012 she started a YouTube channel where she posts game reviews and personal videos. As of May 2025 the channel had about 662,000 subscribers.

In 2015 she moved to the United States, having concluded that the Australian games industry was too small. Later that year she began work as an editor and writer at the website IGN. In 2017 she took over from Naomi Kyle as host of IGN's Daily Fix news programme, and in 2018 she co-hosted the SXSW Gaming Awards with Rich Campbell. She left IGN in 2018 and joined the production company Rooster Teeth, where she appeared regularly in videos for its Funhaus division and, from 2019, co-hosted the Inside Gaming news show. She left Rooster Teeth in October 2020.

In November 2020 she joined Sony's Santa Monica Studio as a video game writer, having already consulted on three games and worked on two others before joining. She stayed until December 2024, when she announced that she was leaving so that she could visit her family in Australia more often, and that she planned to focus on freelance work, live streaming and content creation. One project from her time at the studio, God of War Laufey, was announced in June 2026.

Pearce has also worked as a voice actor, with credits that include Gears 5 and Afterparty in 2019, Dispatch in 2025 and Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun 2 in 2026. She lent her voice and likeness to a character in Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020. On screen she appeared in the 2024 anthology film V/H/S/Beyond as Halley, in the segment "Stowaway", and she is credited as the Familiar Voice in the film Iron Lung, released in 2026. She also appeared in Dead Take in 2025.

Her podcasting work includes hosting Play, Watch, Listen with Troy Baker, Mike Bithell and Austin Wintory, along with Red Lips, Orange Car, Video Game Writing 101 and Voice Acting 101. She previously hosted Idiots and a Broad, and was a founding host of the Kinda Funny Xcast, which she left several months after its premiere because of scheduling conflicts with her new job at Santa Monica Studio.

In April 2023 she took part in the Creator Clash 2 boxing event, where she beat the content creator RIPmika by split decision. In 2026 she launched an independent production company, Charred Pictures, which focuses on adapting video games into films and television series in cooperation with the developers of those games. Its first project in development is a film based on the horror game Faith: The Unholy Trinity by Airdorf Games.

Recognition

Pearce was nominated for Content Creator of the Year at The Game Awards in 2020. In November of that year she was also named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list for gaming.

Public roles

Pearce has supported AbleGamers, a charity focused on accessibility in video games, by helping with fundraising. In November 2020 she co-hosted the first Video Game Accessibility Awards with the organisation's chief operating officer, Steven Spohn, and she returned to present the second event in March 2022.