LGR - Fin Fin, the 1996 Voice-Activated Virtual Pet (Patreon)

https://youtu.be/U0vm-BOKzlI

Time for a long-postponed LGR thing!

This one's all about Fujitsu's Fin Fin, a (sort of) voice-controlled virtual pet for Windows PCs from 1996. Specifically this is the US Deluxe Edition from 1997, which came packed with a plastic bird whistle and its own little microphone inside the package for $59.99. Fujitsu even made an optional Smartsensor add-on, which was apparently a repurposed alarm system motion detector that "gave Fin Fin eyes." The press seemed completely enamored with it for a time, but it seems to have disappeared almost entirely from the public consciousness in the years since.

And no surprise, it's about 10% fun and 90% gimmick. A charming, fascinating, and somewhat enjoyable one for a short time, but an absolute gimmick nonetheless. Hopefully it made for a fun video too! I've been putting off covering this for a number of years now because I actually wanted to cover the Maxis kids game Marty and the Trouble With Cheese first, since it's an even older voice-activated game that came with its own microphone in the box. But that project just kinda fell apart after a couple weeks, I never did anything with the footage, and I haven't felt like returning to it since it's even less impressive than ol' Fin Fin here. So yeah, felt the urge to cover this one first instead.

Enjoy this look at a weird alien dolphin bird from the 90s!

Ohh wait -- this is also the first video where I've recorded the voiceover using my new microphone setup. I'm still using the same Neumann TLM 102 mic in the same room as before, but now it's running through a DBX 286s preamp that's applying compression, expander/gate, de-esser, and some other light audio tweaks to the signal before I begin editing. It's all stuff that I normally do through software but now don't have to mess with, which should be a nice time saver. Ideally it's more of a backend thing no one notices except me and it shouldn't sound too much different but yep, thought I'd share.