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Major League Baseball: The First Game With a Voice

Blow it up!
You might think this honor would go to an arcade game such as 1980's Berzerk ("Intruder alert!"; "Get the humanoid!"; "Chicken! Fight like a robot!") or Stratovox ("We'll be back"). But it was 1979's Major League Baseball for the Intellivision video game system that uttered the first words: "Yer out!"
Major League Baseball was a great sports game for its time. All nine players were represented on the field and could be controlled using the Intellivision's numeric keypad. Older kids and adults who could handle the relatively complicated controls appreciated the system's ability to act as a "simulator" and not just a game.

Major League Baseball was a great sports game for its time.

However, in a staggeringly stupid marketing move, Mattel put a stop to "talkies"; in other words, games that didn't depend on its 1982 voice module, the Intellivoice. Mattel correctly figured that the availability of games that could talk without using the Intellivoice would detract from sales of the Intellivoice. What ended up happening, however, was that Mattel's Intellivoice had to compete head-to-head with The Voice for the Odyssey2 and Texas Instruments' catchy Solid State Speech Synthesizer for the TI-99/4A. The end result? Sales of the Intellivoice were adversely affected.

I'm feeling bipolar--slip me a tragedy

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