The term "electronic game" is commonly understood as a synonym for the narrower concept of the "video game." This is understandable as both electronic games and video games have developed in parallel and the game market has always had a strong bias toward the visual. The first electronic game, in fact, is often cited to be
Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device (1947) a decidedly visual game. Despite the difficulties in creating a visual component to early electronic games imposed by crude graphics, small view-screens, and power consumption, video games remained the primary focus of the early electronic game market.
Arcade and one-off handheld audio gamesthe early years 's
Touch Meone of the earliest audio games
Atari released the first audio game,
Touch Me, in 1974. Housed in an
arcade cabinet,
Touch Me featured a series of lights which would flash with an accompanying tone. The player would reproduce the sequence by pressing a corresponding sequence of buttons and then the game would add another light/sound to the end of the growing sequence to continually test the player's eidetic memory in a
Pelmanism-style format. Although the game featured both a visual and an auditory component, the disconnect between the two enabled both the seeing and the visually impaired to equally enjoy the game. Based on the popularity of
Touch Me, in 1978
Milton Bradley Company released a handheld audio game entitled
Simon at
Studio 54 in
New York City. Whereas
Touch Me had been in competition with other visual-centric
video games and consequently remained only a minor success, the allure of a personal electronic game allowed
Simon to capture a much greater share of the market.
Simon became an immediate success eventually becoming a pop culture symbol of the 1980s. In the decades following the release of
Simon,
numerous clones and variations were produced including
Merlin among others. Beginning in 1996,
Milton Bradley and a number of other producers released the handheld
Bop It which featured a similar concept of a growing series of commands designed to test eidetic memory. Other related games soon followed including
Bop It Extreme (1998),
Bop It-Extreme 2 (2002–2003),
Zing-It,
Top-It, and
Loopz (2010)
TTS software and the PCthe second wave '' (1976), the earliest of a library initially spanning 8 years of
TTS-enabled video games, was first made widely available as an audio game through
MacInTalk in 1984. Before
graphical operating systems like
Windows, most
home computers used text-based operating systems such as
DOS. Being text-based meant that they were relatively accessible to visually impaired users, requiring only the additional use of
text-to-speech (TTS) software. For the same reason, following the development of TTS software, text-based games such as early text-only works of
interactive fiction were also equally accessible to users with or without a visual impairment. Since the availability of
such software was not commonly accessible until the inclusion of the
MacInTalk program on
Apple Computers in 1984, the library of games which became accessible to the vision impaired spanned everything from the earliest text adventure,
Colossal Cave Adventure (1976), to the comparatively advanced works of interactive fiction which had developed in the subsequent 8 years. Although the popularity of this genre has waned in the general market as video-centric games became the dominant form of electronic game, this library is still growing with the
freeware development by devoted enthusiasts of new interactive fiction titles each year. Tools such as the once popular Blastbay Game Toolkit engine that aided in the development of audio games are now obsolete, but current game engines like
Unity and
Unreal that can support audio game development are not specifically designed for doing so, creating an additional hurdle for audio game developers. In the field of
console gaming, there has been very little in the way of audio games. One notable exception are the strong audio elements present in several of the games produced by the Japanese video game developer
Warp, founded by musician and designer
Kenji Eno. In 1996, the company released
Enemy Zero, which was notable for the fact that most of its enemies are invisible, with the player needing to rely on an audio-based tracking system, wherein the frequency and pitch of a beeping sound is used to locate them in
3D space. A year later, Warp released
Real Sound: Kaze no Regret, an
adventure audio game. Structured similarly to a
visual novel, the game was designed to provide equal access to sighted and blind players, and as such features no visuals at all during gameplay, consisting purely of voice acting, sound effects, and music. Discussing
Real Sound's production, Eno stated: Audio-based gameplay elements are also present in Warp's
D2.
Nintendo, as part of its shift to alternative gameplay forms, has shown recent interest in audio games through its own development teams. In July 2006, Nintendo released a collection of audio games called
Soundvoyager as the newest member of its spare
Digiluxe series. The Digiluxe series for
Game Boy Advance consists of 7 games (in 2 series) that are characterized by simple yet compelling gameplay, minimal graphics, and the emphasis, in such titles as
Soundvoyager and
Dotstream, on music.
Soundvoyager contains 7 audio games (
Sound Slalom,
Sound Picker,
Sound Drive,
Sound Cock,
Sound Chase,
Sound Catcher, and
Sound Cannon). The Digiluxe series has been available in Japan since July 2006. In 2008,
MIT students collaborated with the government of
Singapore and a professor at the
National University of Singapore to create
AudiOdyssey, a game which allows both blind and sighted gamers to play together.
Apple's
iPhone platform has become home to a number of audio games, including
Papa Sangre. Other examples include Audiogame.it's
Flarestar (a space-themed exploration game that features combat against training drones and other spacecraft)
Android devices also feature a myriad of audio games. For example, the studio Blind Faith Games has developed various games for Android with the goal of
accessibility for the
visually impaired community. Examples include
Golf Accessible (a simulation of golfing) and
Zarodnik (a
strategy game where the user faces a monster in the depths of the ocean), which utilize screen vibrations and audio cues for the gameplay experience. With the rise in popularity of
voice assistants such as
Amazon Alexa came a new set of audio games. As of June 2021, 10,000 audio games were available as Alexa Skills for use with Amazon Alexa. Among them are games like Rain Labs'
Animal Sounds, which asks users to correctly identify the noises made by various animals. == TTS-enabling video games ==