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Fun fact. The original sound file for "SEGA" that played right before you started some of the original Genesis titles was larger than the games themselves.
Looks like we're returning to tradition.
For me, that is a very fun fact. I can hear that "SEGA" in my head. Now it seems obvious, but little kid me didn't understand why we had such amazing graphics and sound, but so few spoken words.
The video game goddesses "sega" and the dude gods "rise from the grave" are probably the earliest I remember.
"Finish Him" from Mortal Kombat was also genesis no? "Round 1, FIGHT!" I think was street fighter, but for me at least sf2 on SNES was my intro to that series..
Anywhoots I'm less mad now about balders gate 3 asking me to pick a voice for my character that it (so far, for me) uses for literally none of the dialog options.
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.
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–$4013)
The most important point for getting "higher" quality audio from it is probably this:
The $4011 register can be used to play PCM samples directly by setting the counter value at a high frequency. Because this requires intensive use of the CPU, when used in games all other gameplay is usually halted to facilitate this.
Which is why you generally only heard it on title screens. Usage in games was much rarer, and usually much shorter samples.
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."
I had more limited time on the NES. It was mostly duck hunt and Mario 2 and 3 for me.
To be fair we had no idea how to pronounce it before that.
They were also sometimes used to detect piracy by looking at the code to create them making sure it was "official" in timing and white space.