The 13 Most Overheard Phrases in an '80s Arcade

By Rob Bricken in Daily Lists, Video Games
Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 7:51 am
By Teague Bohlen

Coin-ops were known for their sound effects--the boops, beeps, ba-da-DA-das, and wakka-wakka-wakkas.  But a few years into the coin-op boom of the early 80s came something new to add to the arcade soundtrack: voices.  This when digitized speech was something new and pretty amazing in gaming.  It's no coincidence that a lot of the early digital voicework in these games was devoted to getting you to give up your quarter; these voices worked, and well.  Games had already earned reputations for being quarter-eaters; with the advent of voice technology, the games could actually taunt you for it, too.

Here, a baker's dozen of the voices emanating from your coin-op arcade--the ones that haunted your dreams, called for your quarters...and eventually made arcade managers turn the damn things off.




13) "Blast Off!" - Bosconian


Ah, the cries of "Alart! Alart!" The voice for this classic 1981 game sounds sort of like Steven Hawking's speech synthesizer, if it was raised in Jersey. And was sort of pissed at you. I said Blast off, you fuckin' mook.

12) "Dragon's Lair! A fantasy adventure where you become a valiant knight on a quest to rescue the fair princess from the clutches of an evil dragon." - Dragon's Lair


Unlike most of the entries on this list, the bombastic voice of this 1983 game was not digitized but rather recorded on videodisc (hot on the heels of the first of its kind, Atari's Firefox, which was a fairly boring ad for the movie of the same name, and boasted only one thing worth your quarter--Clint Eastwood's semi-unrecognizable but still-cool voicework), but the cheesy announcer in the attract mode of this game was ubiquitous to any arcade worth its dim lighting. But the Disneyesque Don Bluth art was gorgeous, and even if the gameplay was a little (okay, completely) choreographed, any kid enamored with D&D or fantasy lit was enchanted by the come on: "Lead on, adventurer...your quest awaits."

11) "Prepare to Qualify." - Pole Position


Okay, so it was only one line, but if you spent an afternoon in 1982 dropping quarters at a Gold Mine arcade, you became well acquainted with this female voice. Despite the tone of relative disinterest that can be heard in the reading of that line, many video-gamers claimed that the girl sounded cute. Which is either a sign of an active imagination at work, or evidence that early 80s coin-op players had gotten used to cute girls speaking with tones of relative disinterest.

 

10) "Help Me!" - Stratovox


One of the first games with a speech synthesizer, this one wasn't nearly as well known as others on the list, probably because it wasn't a great game. But the novelty of the voice synthesizer (crude as it was) kept this in the arcades for longer than it might otherwise have lasted. It probably also helped that it took a while to actually figure out what the voice was saying--cutting through the thick haze of both accent and early digitizing took some time. But it was sort of fun that the alien voice had some attitude: in counting up the surviving spacemen at the end of a round, it would do so by saying, "Lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky...."

 

9) "Body blow! Body blow! Uppercut! Knock him out!" - Punch-Out!

          
By 1983, the voices were getting better and more completely used. This boxing game would have gone utterly nowhere without the ring announcer giving you a play-by-play of the punches that you're throwing. The two-monitor layout was something of a visual draw for the arcade stand-up, but it was the voice that brought the crowds around to watch the bouts.

8) "Warrior Needs Food Badly" - Gauntlet


Gauntlet is a veritable treasure chest of quotable quotes. So much so that many arcade operators turned off the voice due to its ever-present nature. The first Gauntlet was produced by Atari in 1985, right in the middle of the coin-op bust; to counter this it came up with a lot of inventive things to spur players into dropping not just one quarter but two on the experience. One of those things was the sonorous announcer giving a play-by-play: "Warrior is about to die!" or "Elf needs food badly!" The guy sounds like he's on Clorazapam (the side effects of which include drowsiness and irritability, which sound about right), especially when he says things like "Valkyrie has eaten most of the food lately." That's just the game going out of its way to sow discord between players. Which is sort of evil, and pretty damn cool.

Tags: Arcades, Retro Gaming

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