Earliest example of voice playback on a console?

Earliest I can think of is "wise fwom yaw gwave" in Altered Beast. I'm sure there were some more on the NES, can't think what though.

 

I remember the awful Three Stooges game on the nes having voice samples.

 

I do remember Skate or Die II had voice playback on the intro.

 

I was about to say that, toubabokoomi. I was suprised the NES was capable of doing it. Were there any games on the SMS that had some sort of voice playback on it?

 

The NES has a 7-bit digital sound channel dedicated to sampled sounds, so it definitely can do voices/samples. The only limitation is the limited ROM space of early cartridges, really.

Intellivision had its Intellivoice module, so that counts for voices in a console game. Then there's "ffffpike" on the Vectrex. That's 1982. Anything earlier?

 

Intellivoice was an artificial speech program, right? I'm looking more for in-game stuff. (edit, ok, it was used in games, but was it actually used much? What for?)

I presume you mean Spike for Vectrex by the way? Could you elaborate a bit on what kind of voice content there was?

 

Bayou Billy for the NES had some voice in the title

 

Sesame Street: Big Bird's Hide and Speak claims to be the first on the NES. Not sure if that's true though, it was released 11/90 if that helps. (according to DP's guide)

- But if Bayou Billy has voice samples, it is earliest named so far released 05/89
- Three Stooges 10/89
- Altered Beast 07/90
- Skate or Die II released 10/90

 

i'm not sure if this fits, but i remember there being an atari 2600 or 7800 game that had some sort of voice sample in it. It wasn't able to show any graphics on screen while it was doing it, so it was just a blank screen. I vaugly remember reading an article about it somewhere.

 

Master System afterburner had the "get ready" afaik, been some years :emb:

 

iirc double dribble for nes had a voice sample.

 

the astro blaster arcade game featured speech synthesis.
i owned the cab once, even had german voice acting! too bad i didnt dump it, i dont think the roms are in mame yet.
anyway, that game is from 1981, thats definitively the earliest mentioned so far.
this game doesnt use samples(wouldve been way too costly back then) but speech synthesis to do the voice acting.

iirc, the first computer text-to-speech speech synthesis was done around 1968 to 1970.
there might be games before astro blaster that featured voice playback, but my guess is that its one of the earliest examples.

 

Populous on the Master System had a very distorted "Welcome to Populous" at the start.

 

You may be correct on the voice part, but it's not the first FC/NES game to have the potential of playing actual voice samples. As ccovell also said, the DMC sound channel could have had anything from voice samples to musical instruments. The earliest I remember is Super Mario Bros 3, released Oct 1988, but it may not be the earliest for the NES.

 

Cheers for the info, but I'm after console games really.

Often early speech synthesis did use very low bitrate samples, by the way, stored on ROM in banks of small phonemes ("ahh" "ooh" etc) that could be built up into words. The BBC Micro had a couple of different speech modules like this I think, and that's pretty early 80s.

 

The Intellivoice module was not just a "speech program" but an add-on that allowed carts to use speech in-game.

Space Spartans is probably the most well-known as the player received audible updates from the ship's "onboard computer."

-hl718

 

Ikari Warriors 2 for the NES had quite a bit of speech in-game, such as a really distorted 'COME ON, LETS FIGHT' before each boss battle.. pretty sure that predated Adventures of Bayou Billy (title screen said, "The Adventures of Bayou Billy!") .. couple other konami games announced their title in similar fashion: the aforementioned Double Dribble, and i thiiiiiink Blades of Steel?

 

oooh ooh, I just remembered. golden axe. didnt that have small amounts of voice? like "mmmm" when you ate the food?

 

Not that I'll be any further help on this subject but...

Just for clarification, are you looking for earliest 'speech synthesis' or actual pre-recorded dialogue? (or both?) This could help narrow down the possible canidates.

 

Berserk - Atari 5200