Chessmaster Sound and Voice: How the Series Used Audio and Commentary

The series in brief

Chessmaster began in 1986 as The Chessmaster 2000, published first by Software Country and soon after by The Software Toolworks. It ran through numbered editions over the next two decades and is described as the best-selling chess video game series, with over five million units sold. The mascot on the box, a photograph of a costumed “chessmaster” figure, stayed in the series branding for seventeen years, with the same cover art used from Chessmaster 2000 to Chessmaster 9000.

Publishers changed along the way. Software Toolworks merged into Mindscape in 1994, The Learning Company bought the company in 1998 and Mattel took over later that year as Mattel Interactive. In 2000 the Game Studios unit was sold to Ubi Soft, and the series ran under Ubisoft to its end in 2008.

When the games started talking

Sound has a documented history in the series, but it is mostly a history of voice. The 1991 release, The Chessmaster 3000 for DOS, Windows 3.x and later Mac, is the first one the reference timeline credits with spoken explanations of moves.

The 1992 multimedia CD-ROM edition went further. Its box promised four hours of spoken commentary by former world champion Anatoly Karpov, and the Chessmaster character itself, as a narrator, read through classic games, gave expert advice and presented tutorials on the rules with audio and animation. The program also let players record voice notes on their own games with a microphone. It required Windows 3.0, a 386 processor, 4 MB of memory and 256-colour VGA graphics, and audio hardware was listed as required.

Online play

The 1993 Chessmaster 4000 Turbo, published by Mindscape, brought modem and LAN play to the series for the first time, and it introduced the engine called The King, written by Johan de Koning of the Netherlands, which stayed at the heart of the series until the 2007 edition. Reference sources say little about the early online service, and nothing about its sound files in particular, so anyone looking for those original effects has to work out first which edition they remember.

Personalities and show matches

The King engine allowed opponent “personalities” to be set up by adjusting king safety, pawn weakness, randomness and mobility settings. Chessmaster 9000 of 2002 shipped with over 150 of them, ranging from grandmaster strength down to Stanley, a chimpanzee playing random moves. In September 2002 the program, operated by project manager John Merlino, beat Grandmaster Larry Christiansen 2½ to 1½. The first personalities in the program were based on the grandmasters Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer and Mikhail Botvinnik, whose own computer work is covered in Lev Khariton and Botvinnik’s last decades.

The last release

Chessmaster 10th Edition arrived in 2004 with animated 3D sets, and Chessmaster XI followed in 2007. The final title was Chessmaster Live for the Xbox 360, released through Xbox Live Arcade on 30 January 2008 and developed by Ubisoft Sofia. It supported the Xbox Live Vision camera, local and online matches, and saved replays. It has since been removed from the Xbox Live Arcade store.

Finding old audio

The honest summary for someone chasing a particular sound is that the editions differ, the audio was bundled with each release, and the published record is stronger on voice features than on effects. More on how these programs fit into the bigger picture is on the computer chess hub, and the human side of the story is on chess history.

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