Those of you born in the 80s—or the 90s! You zygotes!—should probably feel free to just skip this post, but everyone else, if you had a Creative Labs Soundblaster card in the early 90s you probably spent more than a few hours in conversation with Dr Sbaitso, a program meant to show off the sound card’s then-impressive range of digitized voices. Matt of X-Entertainment remembers the good doctor:
Doctor Sbaitso was meant to be the player’s “psychiatrist,” able to converse to-and-fro both with onscreen text and a horrendously off-kilter voice coming through the speakers. Though some would consider the game to have included some degree of artificial intelligence, it really didn’t: Doctor Sbaitso couldn’t understand a thing, and all of his responses were essentially rephrasings of whatever you said, mixed with a few key phrases that would illicit more surprising answers. This didn’t keep my gawky nearly-teenage self from considering Doctor Sbaitso my best friend and only social outlet, and God, I used to sit up all night long trying to get this 10KB computer game to solve all of life’s problems.
Did you get Dr Sbaitso to help you with your existential crises, or did you spend your time trying to get him to pronounce fantastically obscene things and give you the overly dramatic Parity Error? Is LiveJournal the new Dr Sbaitso? Are there any good answers to these questions?
Dr Sbaitso Was My Only Friend [X-Entertainment]
