Rare Look at Karaoke Studio, the Nintendo Famicom Cartridge That Turned Consoles into Sing-Alongs

On July 30, 1987, Bandai launched Karaoke Studio in Japan, making it the first of its kind and a genuine pioneer in the area of karaoke games. TOSE manufactured and published this Nintendo Famicom bundle, which included much more than just a cartridge. It came with an additional piece of hardware, a large device that slips directly into your Famicom’s cartridge bay, as well as a special grey microphone that plugs right in. Guinness World Records has even labeled it the first karaoke video game, and it’s easy to understand why, with its super-accurate voice detection system and very excellent song collection.

The mid-1980s karaoke craze in Japan was ideal timing for Karaoke Studio. Karaoke bars were cropping up all over the place, and Nintendo’s Famicom already had a microphone integrated into its second controller, so all Bandai had to do was build on that by developing a high-quality mic peripheral capable of pitch detection. Players may pick up the lightweight microphone, which has A and B buttons, and sing into it while the game listens; don’t worry, it’s all handled by some seriously special Bandai processors within that unit, as well as a NEC chip and 8KB of RAM.

When you first turn on the Famicom, you’ll notice the bright, colorful title screen with entirely Japanese language. Then you have to enter your name, age, and gender using the D-pad and buttons, and the game will even adjust the pitch expectations based on that information. So there are approximately 25 tracks to chose from, the majority of which are Japanese children’s songs and pop music – but don’t worry, they’ve been transformed into synth audio chiptune bliss. You might even come across some recognizable tracks like “Jingle Bells” or “10 Little Indians,” but with some very cool katakana words scrolling along on screen. And the graphics? Absolutely excellent; depending on the mood of the song, you’ll get a backstage performance for cheerful songs or some miserable person pacing around and falling for slower ones.

There are four major modes to keep things interesting: lesson mode allows you to go over any song you like, with a bell ringing for each perfect pitch as the lyrics scroll up on screen. Starbirth mode compares your performance to the actual tune, allowing you to assess how you do overall. Then there’s an intro guessing game that plays the first few bars of a song and requires you to click the buttons as quickly as possible to select a track from a list before time runs out. If you have a lot of pals over, you can even get up to three people to sing at the same time – either by passing the mic around or having non-singing players use the controller.

Scoring is kept basic, but it works well: ring the appropriate notes and you get a constant bell sound; miss them and you get a little telling off like “Disappointment it was” or “Please come again.” It’s simply the normal “get it correctly and you win” game, but it’s still a lot of fun. And songs come at you at a range of tempos, beginning slowly for practice and then increasing in difficulty as you gain confidence.

Bandai intentionally made the thing last longer by including a little slot on the main unit, that lets you stick smaller expansion cartridges into it. (These, by the way, needed to be purchased separately). The first Karaoke Studio Senyou Cassette, Vol. 1, was released in October 1987, and Vol. 2 followed shortly thereafter in February 1988. A few months later, Top Hits 20 Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 were released, which had even more tunes – and the best part was that you could simply plug them in without having to replace the entire main unit. These expansion packs simply kept adding new songs to the mix, transforming a single purchase into a whole system that could be built upon.

Recent gameplay of the system revealed some footage of it in action on the ‘straight out of the box’ hardware, and it’s a true trip back in time. You can see how well the mic picks up vocals, which is fairly astounding given the technology of 1987, and how the song reverberates out of the TV speakers with that unmistakable toy-like vibe. By the way, you navigate menus with the controllers: A scrolls up the lists, B selects, and the D-pad moves through numbers. Although the menus are entirely in Japanese, the music animations and accompanying chimes do an excellent job of communicating what is going on. Even the packaging says that the synth renditions of the songs will sound somewhat different than the real thing, and also contains some of the most bizarre health cautions I’ve ever seen, such as “Don’t eat while walking.”