Hard to say. The sound blaster 1.0 was compatible to Adlib and CMS, so what exactly is "sound blaster support"? The first game that actually used samples? Existing games supporting Adlib and/or CMS were already compatible to the sound blaster, even if they were older than the card.

First game that had a sound mode that required sound blaster and didn't work with earlier cards so that most likely means that it used sound effects too.

I could make the case that Space Quest III was likely the first DOS game that supported the Sound Blaster, which is rather curious because SQ3 was released in March of 1989 and the SB was not released until the end of 1989. SQ3 used digitized samples for speech and sound effects, but the only device which was available at the time and which Sierra wrote a driver for was the Tandy PSSJ PSG + DAC. However its next game using the SCI engine and digitized samples was the remake of King's Quest I in September, 1990. That game has a Sound Blaster driver compatible with SQ3, giving Sound Blaster owners an opportunity to hear digitized sounds with FM Synthesis music.

Was there no sound blaster games before September in 1990? I remember battletech having speech at least, but I don't remember if it was sound blaster specifically.

Yes, BattleTech : The Cresent Hawk's Revenge does use Sound Blaster for speech and sound effects. It appears to have been released in October of 1990.

Battletech used Adlib for speech.

I also remember Indy 500 and Lemmings were bundled with early sound blaster cards in 1990, with Indy 500 stating that it was even enhanced for sound blaster. Mine came with these as well and I still have both game disks.

Great Hierophant wrote:

I could make the case that Space Quest III was likely the first DOS game that supported the Sound Blaster, which is rather curious because SQ3 was released in March of 1989 and the SB was not released until the end of 1989. SQ3 used digitized samples for speech and sound effects, but the only device which was available at the time and which Sierra wrote a driver for was the Tandy PSSJ PSG + DAC. However its next game using the SCI engine and digitized samples was the remake of King's Quest I in September, 1990. That game has a Sound Blaster driver compatible with SQ3, giving Sound Blaster owners an opportunity to hear digitized sounds with FM Synthesis music.

Yes, I think that may be the problem with various games... I checked MobyGames for DOS games released in 1989 and 1990, to see if I could recognize any games I used to play with Sound Blaster and digital effects.
One of the games that caught my eye is A10 Tank Killer, but it seems that the original 1989 release did not have Sound Blaster support. There was a later v1.5 release in 1991 which added SB.

Another game that caught my eye is Prince of Persia. It's the sort of game I was looking for: games that are more or less direct ports from the Amiga are probably most likely to have digital sound effects, since the Amiga has an all-digital sound chip.
It was released in 1990, and as far as I can tell, even the earliest version has Sound Blaster support. So perhaps this one is earlier than the games already mentioned so far?
Another candidate I see is Links: The challenge of golf. Also released in 1990, can't tell when exactly.
Stellar 7 is also one I vaguely recall as having Sound Blaster sound and music (I know it had issues with an SB not configured for 220h/IRQ7).

Is there a site where you can find out when exactly each game was released? I only seem to be able to find out release year for those old games.

Baoran wrote:

Is there a site where you can find out when exactly each game was released? I only seem to be able to find out release year for those old games.

If you're lucky, the game has a Wikipedia entry that mentions it (the text for Prince of Persia implies that the DOS version was released before July 1990)... other than that, perhaps it can be deduced from reviews in game magazines.

First links game released in 1990 had sound blaster option in system menu. Again I could not find out when in 1990 it was released.

Links was an Oct 1990 game

I have Prince of Persia 1.0 with a file date of 03/28/1990.

Earliest Stellar 7 I found has file dates of 09/18/1990.
So Prince of Persia is the oldest so far.

Moby Games shows Hole-In-One Miniature Golf Deluxe as having Sound Blaster digitized sounds and it was released in 1989.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/hole-in-one … eCoverId,98264/

Found a quite extensive book on Googles books library called Games vs. Hardware. The History of PC video games: The 80's.
https://books.google.com/books?id=lB4PAwAAQBA … epage&q&f=false

It mentions these games as being released in 1989 with Sound Blaster support - Not sure if these games needed Sound Blaster for sound effects or not:
Space Quest III
Leisure Suite Larry III
A-10 Tank Killer
M1 Tank Platoon

cyclone3d wrote:

It mentions these games as being released in 1989 with Sound Blaster support - Not sure if these games needed Sound Blaster for […]
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It mentions these games as being released in 1989 with Sound Blaster support - Not sure if these games needed Sound Blaster for sound effects or not:
Space Quest III
Leisure Suite Larry III
A-10 Tank Killer
M1 Tank Platoon

I think that's the problem Great Hierophant already mentioned above: the Sierra games can be retro-fitted with a Sound Blaster driver, but the original 1989 release did not come with one.
Same with A10 Tank Killer: there was a later release with SB support... So that's the problem.
These two facts are true:
- A10 Tank Killer was first released in 1989
- A10 Tank Killer supports Sound Blaster

The catch is that the release of 1989 did not support Sound Blaster.

We'd have to look at Hole-In-One Miniature Golf and M1 Tank Platoon in more detail... but the 3 other games did certainly NOT have Sound Blaster support before Prince of Persia.

I have original big box of both leisure suit larry 3 and M1 Tank Platoon from 1989 and the Leisure suit larry 3 only lists roland mt-32, ad lib, game blaster and ibm music cards on the box and M1 Tank Platoon doesn't list any sound options on the box or the manual.
Kings Quest 5 box from 1990 lists sound blaster on the box.

Dynamix' Ghostbusters II, with executables dated 09/26/1989, includes latent, pre-release Sound Blaster PCM support. It's broken though. As shipped, the game will "lock-up" upon playback completion of the first speech sample. A patch to address this issue was made available in July, 1990.

I got a version of M1 Tank Platoon dated 9-1989, which only has PC speaker, Tandy/PCjr and AdLib sound options, no Sound Blaster.

Cloudschatze wrote:

Dynamix' Ghostbusters II, with executables dated 09/26/1989, includes latent, pre-release Sound Blaster PCM support. It's broken though. As shipped, the game will "lock-up" upon playback completion of the first speech sample. A patch to address this issue was made available in July, 1990.

Regarding the mentioned "patch," it apparently involves changing a single byte in both the GB.EXE and SHELL.EXE files:

GB.EXE
0xC6C2: FC -> F8

SHELL.EXE
0x9394: FC -> F8

Where Ghostbusters II uses Glyn Anderson's OmniMusic driver, it's probable that contemporaneous games leveraging the same sound system also have undocumented, and perhaps similarly broken, Sound Blaster PCM support.