How voice acting was done in games during the mid 80's-90's?

Sanicderpy · Post by **Sanicderpy** » 2020-12-04, 13:09:10

Before CD's were used in Consoles, PC's and some Arcade hardware, many voice samples in games (especially in Arcade games and consoles such as the Mega Drive and SNES) had uncredited voice actors (unless if the game was based on a licensed franchise such as a TV show). This made me believe that either developers or other employees of the game company who produced the said game (for example Street Fighter 2 by Capcom) presumably did all of the character's and/or announcer voice samples. Although Tim Kitzrow did the announcer voice samples for NBA Jam, so not all games had the employees (presumably) doing the voice samples.

I know that many arcade games from the late 70's to the early 80's used speech synthesis which sounded similar to text-to-speech programs and modules (such as the DECtalk) at the time, however many later games's voice samples sound way too complex to be speech synthesis (if they were that would be very impressive for speech synthesis to create something like that).

I thought this would be interesting to bring up as I haven't really seen this topic talked about around the internet especially games that predate the mainstream use of CD-Rom's (or released on a medium aside from CD's) in consoles and such.

kingcandy · Post by **kingcandy** » 2020-12-04, 17:18:19

from what I understand, most of the voice acting was dun in house by members of the development team. Even duke Nukem was at one point voiced by someone with direct ties to the project (in this case, Marketing executive Joe Seagler). there were fiew exceptions, like the star wars and indiana joens arcade games using voice clips from the source material or Michael Ri narrating the attract modes of Don Blooth's laserdisk games.
the closest thing we got to a professional voice actor in a non licence based, non laserdisk game was indipendent Film director Earny Fasilios as the iconic dungian master in gauntlet 1 and 2.

Soundshock · Post by **Soundshock** » 2020-12-04, 20:36:14

You might be interested in the Top Cast podcast episode with Dan Forden (of Mortal Kombat fame) from 2010. It's pretty dry but he gets into a detail about the technical side of his time in Williams in the 80's and describes the tools used, pulling people out of the office to record lines, and the difficulty of encoding CVSD without losing all the S and TH sounds. Williams used CVSD encoding for speech from 1979 until 1993, it sounded terrible but was at least understandable if the audio was polished up before hand. Games like Space Station made the most of the technical limitations by intentionally adding mic squelch sound effects and leaning into the walkie-talkie sound.

ZoeDenver · Post by **ZoeDenver** » 2021-03-02, 21:59:12

Wow, what an interesting info, i did not know that.

patsm00re18 · Post by **patsm00re18** » 2021-03-12, 6:06:29

The voice acting taste in 80's to 90's has been surprised me always. It is different from 2000's to 2010's.

patsm00re18 · Post by **patsm00re18** » 2021-03-17, 3:47:33

I love every voice actor on doing it in a games. Link to Google

VB edit: Link removed. Can you please stop throwing random links to Google?

cetera · Post by **cetera** » 2021-10-29, 4:24:18

i imagine a japanese person with a cheap mic recording right into maybe a keyboard/sampler so it was digitized and they just had to transfer it to a computer and edit

also this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqq4lTbuJ8s