ISS 64 Commentator Soundboard

I got a tip the other day from Andreas Grenasberg who released a new tool: the Internationa’ Superstar Soccer 64 Commentator Soundboard (try saying that three times real fast). It’s basically a rip of the assets from ISS 64 put into a fun interactive soundboard that you can mess around with to create your own quotes.

You can find it over at internationalsuperstar.soccer.

The main attraction here is the Soundboard (obviously). You can pick pretty much any quote from the game and have the soundboard play it back to you.

What’s even cooler is that you can concatenate any series of quotes to get the commenter to say anything you want him to. For example, you can add a team name plus “are victorious” to make him say those phrases one after the other in quick succession.

Once you’re happy with your sequence of quotes, you can export them to a .wav file to use at your leisure.

There’s even a coin flipper that lets you flip the ISS 64 Major A coin for a random result and a radio player for background music, in case you want to have the menu music playing in a loop for eternity.

Andreas was inspired to create the soundboard after discovering the ISS 64 Commentator Twitter account that I wrote about 12 years ago, which as since been suspended. He had this to say:

I’m not a developer by trade (my background is in media studies), but I’ve always loved games and the N64 in particular. Back in the 90s, I spent way too much time playing ISS64, and the commentator’s voice got permanently burned into my brain.

For the technical side of it, I had to dig into the game’s ROM file to extract the audio. I used N64 sound extraction tools to rip the compressed audio from the game to sound files. I did the ripping years ago, but the project sat in a drawer for over a decade. Every time a new Euro or World Cup approached, I thought about finishing it, but always tabled it. Until I finally pushed it over the line in time for this year’s kickoff.

My dream scenario with the ISS64 site is just for old fans of the game to send each other customized commentator combinations during and after the World Cup matches, but it’s been a bit hard to get the word out.

Andreas Grenasberg

He’s also worked on a translation of Link’s Awakening DX into Norwgian and on a Halo menu simulator.