Game:

Quadrun (1983)

Duration: 15:49

3,103 views

142

As more games were released, they started to tell a story. In Donkey Kong you save Pauline. Video games started to have characters, plots and cutscenes, almost like a movie. Looking for a way to innovate, Sunsoft created a fixed shooter called Stratovox, which was the first game ever made to feature voice synthesis. Released later that year, Berzerk took voices in video games to a new level. However, unfortunately the 2600 version of the same game removed the voices.

Atari's competition, the Intellivison, created the Intellivoice, which brought voices to the home console market. Unfortunately for Mattel, however, the peripheral did not sell well. Programmer Steve Woita, interesting in learning the Atari 2600 hardware, began working on his first 2600 game, Quadrun. What is so special about it?


Chapters:

0:00 Introduction
1:13 Early Arcade Games
2:08 First Talking Arcade Game
2:46 Berzerk
3:10 Adding Voices to Video Games
3:47 Voice Compression
4:40 The Intellivoice
5:36 Why the Intellivoice Failed
7:09 Quadrun
8:29 How Woita Pulled Off the Voice
9:27 Quadrun Review
12:02 Why Quadrun Wasn't Widely Released
13:09 Conclusion
14:43 Bloopers

Sources:

Additional info on Quadrun - http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/quadrun/quadrun.htm

First talking video game - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratovox

Bezerk - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk_(video_game)

Intellivision & Intellivoice - https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=console%2Fintellivision

Steve Woita - http://www.brettweisswords.com/2018/03/snes-omnibus-spotlight-16-steve-woita.html

2001 Interview with Steve Woita - http://www.ataricompendium.com/archives/interviews/steve_woita/interview_steve_woita.html


Special thanks to the users from pexel.com for the stock footage:

Pressmaster
cottonbro
Gilmer Diaz Estela
Kampus Production
Tima Miroshnichenko
Ulrich Scharwächter
Kelly Lacy
Creativ Medium
Mikhail Nilov
Distill
Free Videos
Joseph Redfield
Alex Green
Ron Lach


All music came from Harris Heller. Shoutouts to him and his website: https://www.streambeats.com/

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#pojr #SteveWoita #Quadrun

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