Stratovox

Stratovox is a 1980 arcade machine from the Japanese company Sun Electronics. Its historical importance is mostly acoustic: it stands among the first arcade games that talked to the player through speech synthesis. At a time when cabinets communicated in beeps, a voice coming out of one was something people remembered.

Mechanically it is shooting from a fixed position along the bottom of the screen at enemies above, the scheme that defined the genre in 1980. What separates it from plain target practice is the requirement to protect human figures that the enemy carries away; losing them matters as much as your own survival.

Nineteen eighty was a turning point for coin-operated games. Arcades were at their peak, the technology changed every few months, and manufacturers were hunting for anything that would distinguish their cabinet from the dozens standing beside it. Speech was exactly that kind of trick: it cost nothing in graphics performance and stopped passers-by immediately.

The controls are simple in the manner of the period, the game is for one player, and difficulty climbs at the rate needed to separate you from a coin in reasonable time.

Technically this rested on a dedicated circuit that assembled phonemes rather than replaying a recording. The memory in a cabinet of that era could not hold a lengthy audio sample, so the voice had to be generated, which is why it sounded metallic and why the sounds ran into one another. That timbre became a marker of the period, and in a noisy arcade it also cut straight through everything else.

Ever heard what speech synthesis sounded like in 1980? This cabinet starts directly in your browser on OldGame.cz, so you can listen for yourself.