Silent Steel: Menu Narration’s Earliest Example?

Introduction

If you’re like me, you might be familiar with the term FMV, standing for Full-Motion Video. This was a technology typically associated with the 1990s, with releases like The Seventh Guest, Phantasmagoria nd Night Trap (with that last one most famously technically giving rise to the Entertainment Software Rating Board or ESRB, alongside other titles associated with violence like Mortal Kombat).

However, FMV technology in terms of video games actually dates back to the early 1980s, with the seminal 1983 arcade game Dragon’s Lair or the arguably less well-known Astron Belt from the same time frame.

You might be wondering why I’m talking about FMV games now, given their use of video footage to convey information and the lack of accessibility considerations in general compared to modern practices, relatively speaking.

Silent Steel

In 1995, a game called Silent Steel released for Windows, developed by Tsunami Media and published, according to this list of game details from Kotaku, Ocean. In it, you take command of a fictional submarine, the USS Idaho and must choose between multiple options at various points in order to progress the narrative.

Why though, am I talking about a nearly 30 year old game (as of the time of writing)? What significance could this game have in terms of accessibility?

Even though text is commonly the medium used to convey information such as tutorials or allow you to navigate menus, Silent Steel does something different compared to other titles of the era; the choices you need to pick from are all narrated by a human voice. Couple that with the fact that you have to navigate up and down through a wrapping list and you have what I now believe could be the earliest example of menu/UI narration as we understand it today.

Defining menu/UI Narration

In this instance, for the sake of clarity, I’m defining menu/UI narration as:

The speaking of options (highlighted in a list presented vertically, horizontally or otherwise) or other information relevant to a player in a video game. Options are chosen via a button confirmation rather than being typed and other relevant information is conveyed automatically or via button combinations, rather than as responses to entered text strings. Said narration is supplied via a human or synthesised voice.

The above stipulations specifically rule out text games, which were ubiquitous throughout the 1980s (commonly associated with the term Interactive Fiction or IF), as though their menu systems such as they were could be narrated as seen in this footage of the iconic Adventureland, they did so as responses to text commands and not with navigable lists as seen in modern video games.

Silent Steel: My Thoughts

Whilst this niche game is a point of discussion, what did I think of it? Though the game is comparatively primitive by today’s standards, both in terms of sound quality and possibly the production as well (as could be witnessed in many other similar games of the time), the fact of the matter is that it is a different, intriguing narrative, additionally conjuring nostalgic feelings of using old computers even on modern hardware. Part of that does stem from seeing a video sequence to insert a second disk into the emulated machine I got the game running on, which thankfully was seemingly handled automatically by the version I’d uncovered, but it was entertaining nonetheless.

The game isn’t necessarily anything ground breaking in terms of gameplay either, very much feeling reminiscent of text-based, choice-driven adventures that are arguably relatively common in terms of gaming without sight. That being said, the novelty of being able to experience a title like this where sound and music exist natively, albeit with the audio description needed to fully flesh out the content being understandably missing, is not to be understated.

Conclusion

Silent Steel is an interesting novelty from a mostly lost era of gaming, showing just how a small design change can have a big impact in terms of how playable an experience is without the need for additional assistance.

Whilst Silent Steel is the earliest example I could think of for menu/UI narration, not only am I open to other suggestions from those who might think of ones that pre-date it, I’d also found an earlier game by the same team, Flash Traffic: City Of Angels that looks like it works on a similar if not identical framework, including narrated choices. Should I manage to get this up and running, I may write a follow-up article if there is interest.

I’ll leave you with a fun question to wrap up: What’s the earliest example of any modern accessibility feature you can think of?

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