Videogames Speak Up
LUCKY! The talking Stratovox game
The logo for Sunsoft, 1980
Speech comes (barely) to videogames in Taito’s 1980 release of Galaxian knock-off Stratovox. That’s human speech, not human voice synthesis, as noted below. The game is made by Sun Electronics, owners of Japanese game development house Sunsoft, with the original title of the game being Speak & Rescue. Sunsoft will further produce a number of hit classic games, such as Kangaroo (1982) and Arabian (1983) (both licensed by Atari), and maybe not such hit games like Fester’s Quest (1989) for the Nintendo Entertainment System…. among many, many more arcade and home video games over the years.
Logo for Sunsoft, 1985
The point of Stratovox is to try and prevent the abduction of planet colonists by marauding aliens, who for some reason have chosen the sombrero as their choice of ship design. Human speech in video games at the time requires massive amounts of memory to execute, so there is a lot of hardware under the hood (or inside the cabinet) of Stratovox: two Z-80 CPUs (one running game logic at 3.072 MHz, the other dedicated to sound running at half that speed), two sound chips (the General Instruments AY-3-8910 and Texas Instruments SN76477, both running at a 1.25 MHz clock speed), as well as stored voice samples running through a digital-analog converter to be played by the speakers. Even with all this silicon, the alien taunts and pleas from kidnapped colonists are still highly compressed, distorted and limited to four phrases. Cries of “Help me!” come when an alien grabs one of your men, who then congratulate you with a “Very good” if you manage to shoot his captor. Shouts of “Lucky!” accompany each colonist saved during the tally at the end of a screen, and a very Arnoldesque “We’ll be back!” is uttered when an alien is destroyed. I remembered playing this game at my local arcade as soon as I fired it up in MAME, and Stratovox appears to have been a particular success for Taito in North America. 
Killer sombreros in Stratovox
Sources (Click to view)
“Sunsoft|Logopedia|Fandom.” Fandom. Web:https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Sunsoft Retrieved 15 Dec. 2025. Corporate logos for SunSoft.
Associate-manuel-dennis. “Taito America Bows First Talking Video Game.” Cash Box, 6 Sept. 1980, p. 41. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/cashbox42unse_15/page/n43. With its new “Stratovox” model, Taito America introduces the first talking video game.
May, Greg. “Video Games: They’ve Come Long Way since Pong.” The Des Moines Register 18 Oct. 1999: 18B. Newspapers.com. Web. 6 July 2022. The first speech synthesizer was heard in Taito’s Stratovox and the feature would spread rapidly.
Hartlaub, Peter. “Sound Now as Vital as Graphics in Video Games.” Globe Gazette (San Francisco Chronicle News Wire) [Mason City, Iowa] 27 Apr. 2003: C1. Newspapers.com. Web. 6 July 2022. 1980: Stratovox becomes the first arcade game with a voice soundtrack. It is followed quickly by the much more famous Berzerk…
Associate-manuel-dennis, comp. “Chicago Chatter.” Cash Box 25 Oct. 1980: 47. Internet Archive. 26 Sept. 2016. Web. 9 Oct. 2019. <https://archive.org/details/cashbox42unse_22/page/46>. Mike Von Kennel, national sales manager at Taito America, happily items that the factory’s “Stratovox” video is doing superbly well – as expected.
Farmington Daily Times, “Pinball’s Electronic Wizardry”, by George Johnston, pg. 3, Jan. 1981
The Arcade Flyer Archive – flyers.arcade-museum.com/?page=home
Stratovox – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratovox
Looking Forward to It, by Stephen Elliot, pg. 106, macmillan 2004
I have one of these stratovox games wth cabinet and glass everything seems n working order sound coin slots work u can even play but the screen won’t come on..i. sure this is a original unit number plate on rear door matches the in side .. it who and how do I fix or diagnosis the screen problem. .my boys still play Iit but we’d love to see it..
It would be cool to get it going. Quite a conversation piece, so to speak.