Overview
A silent game, like a silent movie, has no audio component to accompany the graphics - it has no music, no voices, and no sound effects of any kind. Some silent games have had sound added to them in later re-releases or ports, but the term still applies to any versions without sound.
History
The very first video games that appeared in the 1950s and '60s were silent by necessity: for instance, OXO (1951) ran on a room-sized computer built for research purposes. This was also true of games made for early home computers with little or no built-in sound capability, such as the TRS-80. The first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, was also incapable of sound. However, as even the 1-bit onboard speakers of machines like the Apple II could produce recognizable sound effects and music, sound became a commonplace feature of computer, arcade, and home console games during the 1980s.
SkiFree
One of the most famous silent games is SkiFree, a simple but fondly remembered PC skiing game by Chris Pirih that was included in Microsoft Entertainment Pack 3 (1991). Although SkiFree 1.0 had no sound capability at all, version 1.03 - partially completed circa 1993, then finished and released in 2005 - was found more than a decade later to contain code for playing sound effects at appropriate times, despite including no audio files. While originally working on 1.03, Pirih had been planning to develop a version 2.0 that would have included features like network multiplayer, CPU opponents, and sound; this update was never finished, but some of the groundwork for it was included in 1.03. By slightly modifying the 1.03 executable, a fan was finally able to add sound to the game in 2017, using a set of WAV files provided by Pirih that had been created for SkiFree 2.0.
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