Sesame Street: Big Bird's Hide & Speak (NES) Playthrough
157A playthrough of Hi Tech Expressions' license-based edutainment game for the NES, Sesame Street: Big Bird's Hide & Speak.
Following in the footsteps of Rare's Sesame Street ABC and 123, Big Bird's Hide & Speak was Hi Tech Expressions' third Sesame Street game on the NES. It was also the first game in the series to be developed by Riedel Software Productions, the company behind NES TV show-based games like Win, Lose, or Draw and MTV's Remote Control (https://youtu.be/Rf7wsVVnh-U).
Starring the voice of Caroll Spinney, the puppeteer and VA behind Big Bird and Oscar in the TV show, Big Bird's Hide & Speak is a collection of six memory and literacy-focused minigames that was marketed as "the first talking game for the NES" for kids age 3 and up.
The first two minigames ask kids to identify the various Sesame Street characters (Bert, Ernie, Grover, Elmo, and The Count) that appear in the windows of the apartment building. The third and fourth minigames concentrate on letter recognition, and the fifth and six introduce the spelling of simple three-letter words.
Rather than being a huge gimmick, the game's big selling point, the digitized speech, is what gives the cart some real value as an educational tool. Big Bird explains the goal of each game and the controls, he clearly identifies the elements that kids need to know in order to win, and he provides meaningful feedback. All this all works in service of providing a game that young kids who hadn't yet learned to read could play on their own.
Though Hide & Speak wasn't the first NES game to feature digitized speech - that honor would probably go to Nintendo's Wild Gunman (https://youtu.be/ALh4dz32eg4) - it was the first to use speech as an integral component of its gameplay. Based on ESS's speech synthesis technology that was used in such Commodore 64 games as Ghostbusters and Impossible Mission, the speech engine does an impressive job of stitching samples of words together to form complete sentences. The speech is clear and intelligible, and it lacks the compression artifacts and the audible distortion that were commonly heard in NES games with digitized effects.
The game is a bit plain and lacks the personality and energy of Rare's Sesame Street games, but it served its purpose as an effective educational tool for young children, and it did so with an unexpected but welcome bit of technical flair.
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