Karstadt sold them. But the publisher wasn’t Softgold, so that might be the reason why they weren’t advertised.
This means I really missed it.
Just looked at eBay and you get MI1 multilanguage CD version for 60€ or more. 
Don’t worry: Back in the 90s they were expensive too. I still own the receipt (yes, I was surprised too, but I found it in the box 
). Loom was sold for 60 DM = round about 30 Euros = round about 35 US-Dollars.
I own German Simon the Sorcerer 1 floppy version. According to the price tag it once was sold for 129DM, though I’m not sure, it was the original price or by some reseller. My German floppy box of Inherit the Earth doesn’t have any price tag AFAIR.
I bought everything as budget versions or later via eBay, so I usually missed all the original prices.
No, PC games were that expensive in Germany. As a comparison: Amiga and ST games cost half that price. Here is a German ad from -hm- 1992:
http://www.kultboy.com/pic/221/
And here from 1991:
http://www.kultboy.com/index.php?site=pic&id=3239&s=3
Wow, that’s something. But at least according to LeChuck the reason is
Scanned VGA art is very expensive.
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So we had the Amiga versions of Indy 3, Loom (no talkie), Monkey 1 & 2 and Fate Of Atlantis (no talkie). Starting with Day Of The Tentacle all games where talkies and that was also the first game not released for the Amiga. So I didn´t play that and all the others after that when they were new. Only in the late 90s when I got the 10 Adventures Compilation above. The versions on there are all close to the Amiga versions, but I don´t know the reason why Loom and Fate Of Atlantis are still no talkies. From what I´ve seen the Loom talkie looks very good, not so sure about Fate Of Atlantis though.
But inofficial.
The opposite is true: The games you mentioned were first released for the PC, the Amiga versions were conversions.
That’s simple: Softgold hadn’t the rights for the talkie versions. The Loom talkie and Monkey Island talkie were published by a different company (I can’t remember who it was). The Fate of Atlantis talkie is only available with English voices. So Softgold had the option to use the German version without voices or the English one with voices. As “all games in German” was an effective marketing term, they had chosen the German version. (Beside that I’m not sure if they had the publishing rights for the English talkie version.)
You can buy the Fate Of Atlantis talkie on Gog.com.
I know that. I meant the amiga conversions back then were probably closer to the VGA versions than the EGA ones like Monkey Island or Loom for instance. So when I played the CD rom versions on PC on the 10 Adventures disc they were closer to what I remembered the amiga versions to be like instead of using the more primitive earlier EGA versions.
So there is a Loom talkie with german voice acting that predates Day Of The Tentacle? I did not know that!
Oh that´s the talkie version they have on there? Nice, I wasn´t sure about that.
No, Loom was only available in English. So that’s another reason why it wasn’t included in the 10 best games box. (btw: There were rumors about a german Monkey Island talkie.)
Yes, at least in my Gog version they are talking. My favorite sentence: “Hello, Mr. Überman!”.
Oh, don’t get me started about Loom versions! (Don’t even get me started!)
I’ll just copy that from the blog I wrote some while ago:
The VGA version had great music but the PC port was completely messed up due to censoring and space constraints.
The best version in existence is the FM-Towns version, having only minor changes compared to the EGA version (or maybe do you prefer the (original) EGA version? But I don’t think its music was that good).Here are two interesting articles:
- Comparison EGA (original) vs. FM-Towns (quick read)
- Comparison VGA (CD) vs. FM-Towns (holy sh*t…)
I never understood why the put the voices as a normal track on the CD.
I’d say it’s because of the high quality of CD audio. I guess there weren’t many good audio codecs around at the time. MP3 wasn’t even invented yet (and maybe would have been too CPU intensive anyway).
If we take a look at DOTT: The sound in monster.sou was heavily compressed but not in a good way.
The CD version was released 1992 when some codecs already existed. And even if we assume that they had to use WAV files: With single files you avoid the synchronization issues, so more close-ups had been possible.
DOTT indeed doesn’t sound good, but it had more lines. So you can’t compare it with Loom.
Of course they had some codecs, but it seems like they had no good ones and none which could compete wth CD audio.
DOTT came out 1993. The monster.sou is only 256 MiB in size so they actually could have doubled the bitrate with ease without space issues.
Regarding Loom: I’m not aware of any synchronisation issues?
Btw. the Loom audio track is ~55 minutes long. I don’t know the actual length of DOTT’s monster.sou but I estimate it with 200 minutes (+/- 30min), it contains sound clips and voices.
If we go back to the beginning of the 90s: Does the voices have to compete with CD audio? How many parts/lines did they cut? AFAIR that weren’t that much. So they could for example record the voices in mono. That would halve the size of the WAV files.
Do you have played the version on a real CD or the Gog.com version? In the CD version the game has to move the laser at the correct position within the voice track, play x seconds and then pause the CD. Depending on the drive this takes a while and won’t work that perfect.
Do you know the audio format/codec of the Full Throttle monster.sou?
They decided to use CD audio and it’s not only used for voices but also for music and cutscenes with voices + music mixed.
No, my first version was EGA on floppy disks. Only later I played CD version but used ScummVM without any CDs.
Sure, there is seek time involved but unless auto-spindown is involved (multiple seconds) seeking is probably around 100ms and I don’t really know of differences regarding playing CD audio.
Did you encounter any such issues playing Loom?
I would have guessed synchronisation issues were more likely to occur during lengthy cutscenes when it drifts apart for some reason. But in such case I wouldn’t blame audio seeking or playing but more likely timing issues with other parts if the game.
It seems like both DOTT and FT use uncompressed audio.
While DOTT uses mostly single channel 8-bit audio with 22050Hz there are also other sample rates used, while FT exclusively uses single channel 8-bit audio with 22050Hz.
DOTT: ~203 minutes totals (audio clips from 24ms to 21.4s, avg: 2.69s, count: 4543)
FT: ~80 minutes totals (audio clips from 299ms to 19.7s, avg: 2.02s, count: 2374)
Yes, but for example the Full Throttle developer put the music in the monster.sou too (or a separate file - can’t remember at the moment). So the quality would be the same.
And even if the Loom developers wanted to have CD sound for the music, they just had to put the voices (for the dialog) as mono WAV files on the CD. With this approach they would have more space on the CD for more lines.
Yes, definitely. As far as I remember the game had issues in starting and stopping the correct sentences. The problems were acceptable, but irritating and sometimes annoying (for example if an important cut scene started and the drive stopped and produced some noises for a short time). I don’t know if the problems are still there with modern drives, but back then I had them with two different drives (from two generations).
That could be another problem. But that would be another reason not to use CD audio.
If you are interested in, I would replay Loom on CD. Unfortunately I do not own the EGA version (only the Amiga version), so I am not able to compare the two versions one by one.
The problem could be the seeking time: The game starts the scene, but the drive still seeks the current position. The game is only able to send the “play” command, but the drive won’t give a response that it is not playing already. So the game has to guess a seeking time (which differs from drive to drive).
Thanks. So it had been possible for the Loom developers to use the Full Throttle variant (that was acceptable for my ears :)).
Do you mean Fate Of Atlantis? Or was there an old Monkey Island talkie? 
Oh, sorry, no. I meant the Monkey Island VGA CD with the soundtrack. But indeed back then there were rumours about a Monkey Island 1 talkie.