Q*bert · Arcade · 1982 · Voice · David Thiel
Gottlieb's sound engineer could not get a speech chip to say anything useful, so he fed it random numbers. The gibberish that came out, paired with a cartoon "@!#?@!", became the most famous swearing in arcade history.
Q*bert was released by Gottlieb on 18 October 1982, designed by Warren Davis and Jeff Lee, with audio by David Thiel. Speech was a selling point in arcades at the time, and Thiel worked with a Votrax speech synthesiser — a chip that built words from phonetic components and needed careful, laborious programming to produce intelligible English. Frustrated with the results, he tried something else: "What if I just stick random numbers in the chip instead of all this highly authored stuff, what happens?" What happened was gibberish — strings of garbled, vaguely vocal noise that sounded like someone muttering in a language nobody spoke. Paired with Q*bert's speech balloon, which shows a grawlix, "@!#?@!", when he is caught by an enemy — a string of symbols Jeff Lee originally presented as a joke — the effect is unmistakably a character swearing without ever saying a word. Gottlieb, a pinball manufacturer, added one more sound from its own trade. When Q*bert falls off the pyramid, a pinball "knocker" inside the cabinet strikes with a loud physical thump. The designers had planned to add foam padding to soften it, but that was too expensive, so the full knock stayed.
Q*bert's outburst works because it is never actually rude. The noise is not language, and the balloon is typographic punctuation, yet together they read instantly as cursing. It is the same trick cartoonists had used for decades, translated into sound — and it gave a small orange character without a mouth a personality players still remember.
The knocker adds the other half of the joke. It is a physical sound in the cabinet rather than a noise from the speaker, so a fall off the pyramid feels like something heavy has actually hit the floor. Between the gibberish and the thump, Q*bert's failures are funnier than most games' successes.