Patent US 5,358,259

Talking video games can provide simulated voice dialog between human players and animated characters on a TV screen. Two or more players can take turns responding to animated characters and two or more animated characters can respond to each player and to each other, thereby providing three-way or four-way conversations. Pictures and voices are generated from digital data separately stored on a laser-readable disk such as a CD-ROM in compressed form. As the game is played each animated character talks to the human game players and waits for a response. Each player has a hand-held controller that displays two or more phrases or sentences and a player responds by pressing a button next to a selected phrase. An animated character then responds to the selected phrase as if it had been spoken by the human player. Speech recognition is not required. Each scene branches to two or more subsequent scenes. But within each scene there are several branching dialog sequences, thereby providing a large variety of possible dialogs. Human game players are thus given an illusion of having dialogs with interesting people, either living, historical or imaginary and with animal-like characters on a TV screen as an active participant in adventures and dramas with these characters. Additionally, human game players can utilize the hand held controllers to select the voice dialog between game characters, thus controlling conversations held between game characters during the game.