Regarding the amazing voice in the early 80's Bally games, especially Centaur and Elektra for example, I wanted to clarify this is almost certainly not Ken Nordine. I'm a huge fan of these games and of Ken Nordine, but I am about 99.99% certain the voice Bally used is the same guy they used in 1982 for Williams Sinistar - Mr. John Doremus. (He was a Chicago radio and voice talent that passed away in 1995, while by the way Ken Nordine is still alive and in his 90s).

They have similar voices, both deep. But Knordine has a more throaty voice while Doremus has a more nasal sound. Keep in mind the voices in the games are some times slowed down or otherwise modified. Especially in Centaur, you can really mess with the voice.

Here's a link of John Doremus doing a cheesy 80's promo video for a private school Fast forward about 1 minute into the video and then listen. It is clearly the Centaur guy's voice (without the reverb). It would be really cool if someone who knows how to make new roms sampled some of his words in this video and created new callout roms for Centaur!

And of course, here he is in Centaur:

And here he is (factually, as matter of record) as Sinistar:

I'm not aware of any digitally synthesized voice in the 1981 era that was human sounding. Black Hole by Gottlieb, Wizard of War and Gorf by Bally Midway, all had the same Votrax SC-01 synthesizer and they were almost unintelligible. (I own them). Centaur's voice would be an amazing synth voice even in 2016. Sega at the time was the only game company with synth voice somewhat human sounding, but still more like a Speak and Spell machine. I'm inclined to believe the Bally sound board just had more ROM space on it to accommodate additional recorded speech. Rom space got larger and cheaper by the year. Also we know Xenon ( a game several years earlier than Centaur) was recorded speech, so why would they not use recorded speech for the subsequent games? All Williams talking games from Gorgar, Black Knight, Space Shuttle, etc. through the decades were recorded speech.

Hello. A very belated update on the voice for games like Centaur. I asked Ken Nordine Jr. about this...here is what he said in answer to my question:

From: Ken Nordine, Jr
: Sunday, August 9, 2020 11:05 AM

As far as I know he did not. Doremus is a good possibility.

On Aug 9, 2020, at 9:47 AM, > wrote:
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I'm part of a large community that collects pinball machines. Several machines from the early 1980's included digital voice that was recorded with Chicago voice talent for Bally. (two machines in particular, called Centaur and Medusa, have really incredible voice work). Most people attribute the voice to Mr. Nordine but I'm personally thinking John Doremus, a local radio person of that time. By any chance would you know if Mr. Nordine did work for Bally games around 1980? It would clear up some confusion, but I realize knowing this would be a long shot among the thousands of projects.