SungWon Cho (ProZD)

written by Nartana Nólë
on 3.13.26 in 💫 Talent Spotlight

SungWon Cho (ProZD): A Formal Assessment of an Ongoing and Somewhat Improbable Career

SungWon Cho, born December 9, 1990, in Rochester, Minnesota, to South Korean parents, and subsequently relocated during childhood to DeWitt, Michigan, is a voice actor, comedian, YouTuber, and live-action performer whose career arc follows a trajectory so improbable that it would be rejected as unrealistic fiction if submitted to a creative writing workshop. He operates professionally under his legal name and digitally under the handle ProZD, a username he invented in elementary school and whose meaning he declined to disclose publicly for the better part of two decades on the grounds that it is, in his own assessment, deeply embarrassing. On April 26, 2022, he revealed the meaning to his wife, after fourteen years together. This detail is not relevant to his professional output in any measurable way, and yet it feels important to mention.

Foundational Research and the Accumulation of Qualifications

Cho’s early exposure to vocal performance came through a friend’s high school radio plays, which, like most high school radio plays, were presumably not reviewed by any major trades. He went on to attend Michigan State University, where he participated in live theatrical performances with some regularity and graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Media Information and Technology, a credential that is perhaps most notable for being a perfectly normal degree that has since been applied to a perfectly unusual career.

In October 2012, Cho began posting daily vocal content to Tumblr, as one does when one has a degree in Media Information and Technology and a broad range of character voices. The audience grew. Then, in a development that functions as a case study in how the internet occasionally makes decisions on behalf of everyone, a video of Cho singing “Let It Go” from Frozen in an approximation of Goofy’s voice circulated widely enough to constitute going viral, which is a process roughly analogous to accidentally sneezing in a large building and having the acoustics carry the sound into three conference rooms simultaneously.

The Vine Period: A Closed Chapter, Reviewed for the Record

Cho subsequently established a presence on Vine, the short-form video platform that operated between 2013 and 2016 before being discontinued, which is to say it was shut down precisely as Cho was building significant traction on it, because the universe has a particular sense of timing. He accumulated over 140,000 followers on the platform and was a finalist for the 9th Shorty Awards for Vine of the Year. When Vine announced its closure in 2016, Cho, having apparently anticipated that placing one’s entire professional infrastructure on a single platform is structurally similar to building a house on a folding table, had already been expanding his YouTube channel, to which his audience migrated with him.

Entry into Professional Voice Acting: The Zeus Incident

The transition from enthusiastic online vocal performer to professional voice actor was initiated, according to available records, by voice director Deven Mack, who observed one of Cho’s YouTube videos and arranged an audition for the independent game Apotheon. Cho secured the role of Zeus, the main antagonist of a game set in Greek mythology, which is by any standard an appropriate first professional credit for someone who had been performing character voices into the void for several years and is, by coincidence, the king of the gods. This outcome, while satisfying from a narrative standpoint, was not the result of any particular plan so much as someone paying attention at the right moment, a circumstance that describes the origin of several important careers and also most lottery wins.

The Gen:Lock Era and the Formal Acquisition of Representation

In mid-2018, Creative Artists Agency reached out to Cho, an event that coincided with his already planned relocation to Los Angeles to pursue voice acting more seriously. He was subsequently cast in the Rooster Teeth animated series gen:LOCK as Heng Li Wu, marking what might be classified as his first major studio animated voice role. The CAA signing had, in part, been preceded by a near-miss with a Marvel Cinematic Universe sitcom called New Warriors, for which Cho was one of two finalists for the role of Microbe. He did not receive the part; the show was later shelved before its premiere. This sequence of events, in which a rejected audition for a cancelled show nonetheless redirected a career into a more productive lane, functions as evidence that professional trajectories are occasionally improved by their own obstacles, much as a river becomes more interesting after encountering a large rock.

Video Game Credits: A Partial but Substantial Ledger

The video game section of Cho’s professional record is, to use technical terminology, a lot. In 2019, he voiced FL4K in Borderlands 3, a Beastmaster class character who travels with three companions and speaks in a cadence suggesting that existential calm and lethal capability are not mutually exclusive. The role constituted a significant entry into AAA game voice work and is among his most recognizable credits in that medium.

In 2022, Cho voiced Ratatoskr in God of War Ragnarok, a fast-talking squirrel who functions as a guide and commentary mechanism within the game’s world. Cho was also a credited writer on the game for the character, a distinction that separates the role from a standard voice performance in the same way that being asked to both perform in and co-author a section of a production separates a session musician from a composer. Additional video game credits of note include Holst Sigiswald Goneril in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, a role that arrived after Cho had reportedly played through the related title Fire Emblem: Three Houses five times, which is the kind of dedication that most people reserve for much shorter games.

Anime Dubbing: An Extensive and Ongoing Portfolio

Cho’s anime dubbing work spans a range of studios, series, and character types. Among his most prominent credits is Senshi in Delicious in Dungeon, a 2024 Netflix anime series based on the manga by Ryoko Kui, in which Cho voices a dwarf who approaches the cooking of dungeon monsters with the methodical enthusiasm of someone who has given the matter considerably more thought than anyone around him. Cho had publicly identified Senshi as his favorite character in the source material before being cast in the role, a fact that is either a testament to cosmic reward or to the universe occasionally reading the room.

Further anime credits of record include Mordecai in the animated adaptation of Lackadaisy, a role Cho had informally practiced through unofficial comic dubs before being cast; Cat Viper in One Piece; Choromatsu’s replacement in Mr. Osomatsu; and roles in Aggretsuko, Ranking of Kings, Pluto, and OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, among others. The list is long enough that cataloguing it in full would constitute a separate document, and several separate documents already exist for this purpose on multiple fan wikis.

Live-Action Work: An Unexpected Annex to the Main Building

In 2017, Cho made his live-action debut as Detective Joe Furuya, the lead character in Crunchyroll’s Anime Crimes Division, a comedy series in which the premise involves law enforcement operating within an anime-themed world. The performance earned Cho a nomination for Best Acting in a Comedy at the 8th Streamy Awards. Whether this constitutes a career pivot or simply an additional column in a spreadsheet that was already quite wide is a question best left to administrative interpretation.

In 2023, Cho appeared in a supporting role as Ritchie Cheung in the Canadian biographical drama BlackBerry, a film about the rise and fall of the smartphone company of the same name and which received notably favorable critical reception. His IMDb profile records additional voice work in the 2024 animated film IF, and the 2025 Sony Pictures Animation production KPop Demon Hunters, in which he voices Abby Saja. Each of these credits arrives in a register slightly different from the last, as though someone is systematically testing the outer boundaries of a filing system.

YouTube and Online Presence: The Operation That Started Everything and Has Not Stopped

Cho’s YouTube channel, operating under the ProZD brand, has exceeded 3.75 million subscribers and produces short comedy sketches that are, by design, low-budget, and which frequently feature Cho voicing multiple characters within a single scene. The videos are organized around recurring fictional universes, including an anime parody universe and a role-playing game parody universe, both of which began as Vine content and were transplanted to YouTube with their internal continuity intact. He additionally co-hosts the Let’s Play channel ProZD Plays Games with friend and editor Jay Choi, which launched in 2021 and has exceeded 100,000 subscribers, a figure that would be the primary achievement of most channels and is here a footnote.

Personal Details, Noted for Completeness

Cho became engaged in October 2015 to Anne Marie Salter, a professional illustrator, having met her through an online Super Mario fan fiction community, which is a sentence that requires no embellishment. They married on May 28, 2016. They have two cats named Effie and Sophie, who appear in Cho’s videos and have presumably not been informed of his subscriber count.

SungWon Cho, who started by providing voices for his friend’s radio plays in a Michigan high school, has since lent those voices to a god of Greek mythology, a squirrel in Norse cosmology, a dwarf with strong opinions about dungeon cuisine, a gangster cat in a Prohibition-era animated drama, a looter-shooter Beastmaster, and a supporting character in a well-regarded Canadian tech industry film, without, as far as can be determined, any of these things being part of a coherent plan. The career, viewed in total, resembles less a trajectory than a map drawn by someone who kept finding interesting rooms and decided to document them all.

Now Read The VO Dirt!Voice Actors D.C. Douglas Knows and Loves!

OR CHECK OUT THE LATEST BLOG DROPPING:D.C. Douglas Returns as Lysandre in Pokémon Masters EX