this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Earliest voice I can remember in a game was BLADES OF STEEL on the NES.
Had a DOS game (which was a port of something even older) that started with a "BARBARIAN!". Had the worst control scheme I'll ever see. Function keys for fuck's sake.
First one that I heard that comes to my mind is Super Smash TV on the SNES.
"BIG MONEY. BIG PRIZES. I LOVE IT."
"I'D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR."
"GOOD LUCK. YOU'LL NEED IT."
Mine was SKI OR DIE, and young me was very impressed. If anything, I might actually be more impressed now by the ingenuity in tricking chiptune technology into sounding plausibly like a human voice!
The NES actually did have a 7-bit PCM audio channel, there wasn't really any "tricking" beyond finding the storage capacity to hold a sample of useful size.
Okay, more I'm legitimately interested. All this time I'd assumed that the voice was a clever manipulation of the chiptune tech to make it sound like a human being. But it was actually just a dramatically compressed audio clip? That might be even more impressive.
Some technical details then, if you're interested!
https://www.nesdev.org/wiki/APU#DMC_($4010%E2%80%93$4013)
The most important point for getting "higher" quality audio from it is probably this:
Which is why you generally only heard it on title screens. Usage in games was much rarer, and usually much shorter samples.
I had more limited time on the NES. It was mostly duck hunt and Mario 2 and 3 for me.