The neglected history of video games for the blind,
from Kill Screen
by
ANDREW CAMPANA
@AndrewPCampana
The game starts with a black screen. A woman’s voice, speaking in
Japanese: “Real Sound. Kaze no Regret. This software brought to you by
WARP Inc.” A string
quartet, swelling and romantic, begins to play, press the start
button, and the music stops suddenly with the sound of a bell.
A light hiss of static. An acoustic guitar picking up the same theme
as before is quickly joined by a ticking clock. A deep male voice
starts to narrate:
“Every so often, when you meet someone else, you have a feeling that
it’s not for the first time.”
The screen remains black.
///
The 1997 Sega Saturn Japan-only release, Real Sound: Kaze no Regret,
is a fully-voiced interactive romance game with elements of mystery
and suspense, featuring
two elementary school students with plans to elope, a portentous clock
tower, and possible murders in the underground. With no visual
elements for its
entire runtime, it’s something like a choose-your-own-adventure radio
play. In other words, it’s not a videogame, but an audiogame: a game
in which graphics
are nonexistent or optional and can be played through sound alone.
Its creator, Kenji Eno, who died tragically in 2013, at only 42 years
old, was a game designer and composer, and one of the few figures
working in videogames
who had a consistent commitment to radical experimentation in
everything he was involved with. Before this point, he was best known
for D (1995) an anxious
and intense horror-puzzle game that forces the player to complete it
within two hours without any way to save or even pause, and Enemy Zero
(1996), an Alien-esque
space station survival thriller scored by Michael Nyman, in which the
enemies are invisible and only able to be located through the pitch
and volume of
the sounds they emit.
The instructions written in braille for Real Sound
The braille instructions shipped with copies of Real Sound
It’s this special attention paid to sound within gameplay that gained
Eno a following in Japan by those who were blind and of low-vision.
After several
of their fan letters, he met with many of these players in person, to
see firsthand the ways in which they engaged with videogame software
and hardware
not originally intended to be accessible to them. These encounters
served as the inspiration for Real Sound, Eno wanted not just to
create a game “for the
blind,” but rather a game in which a blind and a sighted person would
have the same experience of playing it. In exchange for it being a
Saturn-only release,
Sega agreed to donate a thousand consoles to blind players, Eno
himself included a copy of Real Sound with every console. At first
glance, the game’s case
looks like any other Sega Saturn game. But open the game’s packaging,
and you immediately encounter something that hasn’t been included in
any console
game before or since: a sheet of instructions in braille.
Playing Real Sound as a sighted player, it’s hard not to be
disoriented at first. Its dialogue, better acted than in any game I’ve
played, cannot be skipped
over or sped up by mashing a button repeatedly. We’re used to visual
distinctions between “gameplay” and “cutscene,” where the former
requires our active
attention and the latter for us to sit back and relax; in Real Sound,
the player must hang on every word, always listening for the next
chime that indicates
that you have to make an immediate decision as to how the story will
go. I wasn’t sure what to do with my body at first; whether to close
my eyes, look
at the blank screen, or vaguely stare into space (I chose the latter).
Small sonic details that I never would have noticed in a conventional
videogame, like
the moment-to-moment interactions between the musical score, the
actor’s voices, and the elaborate sound effects, suddenly came
together to form an entire
world in a way I had never experienced.
THE PLAYER MUST HANG ON EVERY WORD
Real Sound is far from the first or only audiogame, though it is one
of the very few ever released for major consoles. Soundvoyager (2006),
a set of diverse
and relaxing audio minigames within Bit Generations for the Game Boy
Advance, was the first audiogame released by a major studio since Real
Sound, though
the absence of voiceover in its menus keep it from being fully
accessible. Papa Sangre, a 2010 release for the iPhone/iPad, is a
marvelously creepy experiment
that makes full use of three-dimensional sound design (headphones are
vital) and is an excellent introduction to the audiogame genre. Much
more common
are amateur homebrew audiogames for the PC, Audiogames.net maintains a
list
of hundreds. Bokurano Daiboukenn and its two sequels, some of the
best examples of these, are free Japanese side-scrolling action RPGs
in the style of
Metroid or Castlevania, focused on exploring worlds, collecting
powerups, and defeating enemies, all through sound.
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