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Video games as a medium have grown immensely quickly. From humble origins in 80s arcades to VR headsets of the modern day, they have often times featured themselves as the crossroads of artistry and technical innovation. They naturally go hand-in-hand.
From the dawn of time, voice has been one of the strongest tools in telling a story, and voice-acting seems inextricably tied to video games. Yet when did actual human voices first occur in video games, and when did they become so common we forgot that, at one point, they weren’t?
What Was The First Usage Of Voice In Video Games?
When we think of video game voice-acting now, it’s hard to divorce ourselves from the image of someone in a studio recording their lines, and seeing those lines directly spoken through a character’s mouth.Motion capture plays a big role in this too, capturing the small intricacies of a character as they speak.
Yet early games had no such technology, especially home consoles which paled in terms of both computing and graphical power in comparison to much larger arcade cabinets. It is for this very reason thatvideo game voice-acting first occurred on arcades, though perhaps not in the means you expected.
The initial usage of voice in video games was not through recorded lines being played back in a digital space, butthrough speech synthesis. This is separate from voice modulation and the like, instead recording certain sounds and syllables so that they can be continually constructed into other words.This saves an immense amount of spacecompared to individually recording whole sentences, an essential act when space was such a rare commodity.
In 1980, the two first games to use speech synthesis to perform a limited form of voice acting werethe arcade games Stratovox and Berzerk, in that order. These were simple first uses, shouting small phrases and making ominous. But those humble beginnings would quickly lead to increased voice work in video games.
Stratovox used speech synthesis forboth English and Japanese.
What Was The First Game To Use Full Voice-Acting?
When we consider the more traditional form of voice-acting, the type used in animated films for decades already at this point, it happened a bit later for games, though only a short while after speech synthesis. Beginning in 1983,Dragon’s Lair was released for arcades using the LaserDisc technology, allowing for incredible amounts of storage relative to what was common at the time.
Dragon’s Lair was, as a result of the hand-animated scenes, rather limited in terms of actual gameplay. It was quite simplistic, with the main joys coming fromuncovering the many, many animated scenesthat had been created. Just about every death had a unique scene, really enticing you to explore as much as you could even if you did not find success.
The main animator of the game wasDon Bluth. This animation had such expert crafting due to that experience, and how voice work could be used in conjunction with that went with it naturally. Of course, games were still a modest medium at this stage, sobudgets were dramatically lowercompared to what they are today.
As such,all voice-acting in Dragon’s Lair was performed by the actual staffon the game. Baby steps, but one that had now laid down the foundations.
When Did Voice Acting Become Common In Video Games?
In the 1980s, arcades reigned supreme over home consoles due to their increased power. This meant that much of the heavy animation and voice work just didn’t work on home consoles.The storage mediums weren’t big enough, the hardware couldn’t process the sounds nor play them as fast as the games required. But by the late 1980s, arcades started to die out with the advent of powerful home consoles.
So how did that affect voice-acting in games? Well,Dragon’s Lair attempted many home versions, though plenty of these had to cut certain voice lines or animated scenes. It simply couldn’t be ported because of the hardware differences. So voice-acting had to be newly made for modern hardware.
This first started withDay of the Tentacle by LucasArts. With CD-ROMs now becoming common, the possibility of fitting fully recorded dialogue on home machines became possible. With the prestige associated with them, LucasArts also managed torecruit veteran voice actors to recordfor the game. Not only could the game be played on home machines with detailed animations, but it featured stellar voice-acting too.
Day of the Tentacle did not initially plan on using voice-acting, only deciding on it after realizing thatCD-ROMs had become common enough to justify it.
By this point,many consoles started to adapt disc-based mediaas well, the PS1 being such a console. Aside from storage limitations, the next biggest hurdle was budget. You needed to be able to afford professional voice-acting. As such,this restricted voice-acting to only primary projects, or important moments within a game. In this sense, Final Fantasy 10 was a major player in terms of video-game voice-acting for having such a large cast that was professionally voiced.
From then on, voice-acting was simply the norm.Storage was no longer an issue, and gaming was a big enough industry that money was no longer an issue for those who already had the means to record voice. So by that merit, you could say thatby the PS2, voice-acting had already became a common occurrence, and even an expectation of many games.
