TechStuff Classic: The Full Motion Video Era - The Arcade

two part series. The first part I talked about full motion video games as games that have actual live action video content incorporated into them, and this is obviously the arcade version of that. And this is one of those topics where I really feel like I need to bring a guest on for an update. I would love to get Justin McElroy of the McIlroy Brothers on because he is a full motion video fan through and through, and I think his ex pertise would be invaluable. But let's

listen in to this classic episode. So if you ever played the old Asteroids arcade game, everything with these these very simple shapes, Yeah you're talking about dots are lines? Yeah, exactly, That's that's what vector graphics are. They're based on geometry. You define end points and then you have little lines drawn between those end points, so it's kind of like think of it like, uh uh, you know, connect the dots.

That's essentially what you're talking about, but in a in a graphics format, so it's pixels instead of you know, a solid black line from a pencil or something. Sure, and all of that being less graphically impressive perhaps than things like in the case of Zork. You know, your rich imagination opening entire star fields for you, right, you could have any sort of description in a text based one, and technically the graphics are only limited by your imagination,

I guess. But vector graphics, you know, they have their their charms. The old old Star Wars arcade game where you had little vector graphics tie fighters coming at you still one of my favorite arcade games of all time. And it also had the benefit of not taking up too much processing power. It didn't require, you know, a chunky graphics card in order for it to produce these

pretty simple graphics. Well, that's the whole thing with graphics is that they take so much disk space and processing power, and that is a problem that some of these FMV games that we are going to start talking about ran into really hard, yeah, really really hard so so next we have sprites. So sprites, of course not a type of soft drink in this case. No, also not a whimsical mythological creature. No, though a sprite could be a whimsical mythological creature within the context of a video game.

But you could have a sprite of a sprite. Yes, exactly, you could have a sprite of a sprite. So it's a two dimensional animation that's integrated into a larger scene that can move around that larger scene completely independently, and it doesn't require you to re render that background. So I think of this kind of like a like a

play because I'm a theater geek. But if you think of a play, you know, like you have a play with a set, and the actors can move all around that set because that doesn't move the set, doesn't move the setually unless something kind of terrible it's gone on in that case that's an exception, But in an ideal situation when it's not supposed to move, it stays. But you can also think of it as maybe like a

magnet on a fridge or or a color form. Yeah, exactly, you can move this this one independent piece around without affecting everything else, and that meant that you only had to render the background the one time and then a little two D animated character that's the only thing you're

really concentrating on. So it didn't require too much processing power to develop once we started getting into that, although the early ones were limited as to the number of sprites that could be processed on screen at the same time, you haven't here. The Atari hundred only had five, yeah,

five moving graphical objects on screen at a time. So if you're thinking of like I don't know, Donkey Kong Jr. And you're playing as the main character, you know, in the Arcade version, you had all these little bitty uh platforms that could go up and down and things like that, or monsters that could grab you. And there really wasn't too much of a limit because the hardware there was just huge, Yeah, and it was just meant to play

that game right. On the Atari twenty six hundred, which had much more strict limitations on what the processor could do, you had at most five moving graphical objects on screen at any given time. One of the examples we could give of that, besides the one I just mentioned as Super Mario Brothers and Nintendo game. Now that that one had obviously a greater capacity for moving objects. It wasn't limited to the Attar twenty model. But that is another

example of a video game you sprites. Now, there is one other type that I can mentioned really quickly, which are video games that us three dimensional models. But that goes that's that's after full motion video. So three dimensional models very common today, but we're not going to talk about that because we're really focusing on fm vs. So what is it. It's when you have recorded up some sort of video. Whether it is live action, it can be animated, doesn't matter, um, but it is recorded and

plays back as part of the video game experience. Some people refer to games that were really really super heavy on fm V as interactive movies. Because here's the thing. If I record something ahead of time and then I present it to somebody, that person is not going to have a whole lot of say in what happens. Yeah, you've got a limited amount of interactivity that can happen

when right, it's already it's already gone. Yeah, exactly. So if I were to have a kind of a choose your own adventure game, let's say it that way, because that's a that's a perfect example of something I would work with this. But choose your own adventure books, same sort of thing. Right, You're limited to the choices that the book lays out, and you're limited to the to the consequences, which for me invariably involved dying. I had to hold my finger back on a previous page and say,

all right, I want to try a different way. Now. I have a whole series of bookmarks whenever I have a choose you an adventure. But I always resent resented the ones where you would get to the point where you either choice that you had presented to you would result in your death and you think, no, now I have to go back to spots. Oh no, that's my favorite.

It's it's the branching thing. But that's what a full motion video game, I mean, like a serious FMV video game was like all right, And I think that when most people think of full motion video games, they are thinking of live action video Yeah. But but some of them, as we will discuss, yeah, are actually in fact the earliest ones, well not the earliest, but some of the earliest ones really had a lot of animation involved. Yeah, and most of these games use optical disc technology, either

CDs or laser discs. And although I think that the production on laser discs, the research for today right went back to the nineteen fifties, they weren't really a commercial format until the nineteen seventies. Uh, and even then they weren't really very much of a commercial format. I mean, even even in the nineteen eighties when you started to really get into the home theater world, laser disc was one of those things that that cool person with way more money than you had, uh, they owned one, but

you did not. Um. I mean I remember going to parties with with my family. My parents would take me to some party with some other science fiction or fantasy authors, throwing a weird bash, and they happen to have a laser disc, and they would put on a laser disc of one of these full motion video games where it would just play out the game as if you were making all the right choices, so that you could actually see it from start to finish, and you really did

watch it like a movie. It wasn't even interactive at that point. It was just a movie. And then at the end it would show you all the wrong choices and all the consequences thereof. But anyway, the the effect of fm V was really impressive because it allowed for much much more intense, realistic graphics, sometimes, like we said, live action video, which was a huge difference from the state of the art in vector and sprite graphics. So you know, if you were to go into a video

game arcade, we used to have those back in the day. Kids, If you were to go into an arcade and you saw something like pac Man, which would look impressive next to something like Asteroids, but then you saw Dragon's Layer, you think this game must come from the future because look at it compared to these other games. I need to put my quarters in that thing, even though it's twice as many quarters as any of the other machines

in this room. So yeah, the but the idea here is that that not only did we have this incredible graphical interface, this this this gorgeous display of whether it was video or you know, live video or animation, it also meant that, like we said, you had that you had to give up some interactivity. And so there was this constant battle between what is what's the right balance where should we have an interactive element versus a you know,

a really dramatic element. We'll be talking about that throughout the rest of this show. Sure, And and creating game design around that sort of problem is probably tricky for the for the best of game designers. And I'm not going to say for the record that all of the best game designers were always working on these problems. It's a hard thing. And also game designers perhaps are not

known for their video production quality. Yes, it's also an important thing to remember that, you know, someone who can make a good game may not be someone who can direct a compelling sequence, right, So that's hard, y'all, Yeah, especially if you're talking about using live actors who you know, the nice thing about animated characters, if you don't like their performance, you can throw them away. That's what that's.

That's paraphrasing what Hitchcock said about Disney. The Disney was fortunate that if he was displeased with the performance, he could just crumple it up and throw it away, whereas Hitchcock was somewhat limited by the law on what he could do. It's I think he did a little bit of that here and there anyway, but certainly psychologically that's a totally different episode. We'll be back with more about full motion video in just a moment, but first let's

take a quick break. So we're going to talk Now that's a text stuff episode and probably not. We can talk about some actual examples, including the earliest one I could find. Now I'm not saying this is the first f m V. Let's call it video amusement, because that's what they refer to it as, or at least one of the historical sites I visited refers to it as

a video amusement. You wouldn't really call it a game necessarily, but it was came out towards the end of one or the beginning of nineteen eight two, and it's called quarter horse, quarter horror, quarter horse because you'd give it quarters, that'd be part of it, but it's also because it would be a quarter horse race, So it was a horse race game. So imagine that you walk up to

an arcade. It's got two screens on it. One screen has like the video betting stuff on it, and it gives you like the odds of all the different horses that are going to run next race, and so you

can choose which horse you want to bet on. You can put how many credits you bet on that particular horse, and then once you're ready to go, you place the bet, and then you hear that that all that that, and they show the video of an actual horse race that happened in the past, and then one of the horses wins, and you find out whether or not one of the horses you you bet on one, and if you did win,

you get more credits. I don't know that it actually paid out, so I don't know if you ever could really like win money off this thing, or if it was simply credits that you can play with. So in other words, you just keep playing the game until you're out of credits. I'm not sure if I amused is the correct word to attach to video in this case, it's a video something yeah something, I mean, maybe I'm

not maybe I share yeah exactly. So you might first say, well, wait a minute, if it's if it's video of an actual horse race, how do you not know which horse wins? And the way that works out is that they would assign different names to the horses that were in the race, so and it would change each time, so so you wouldn't know that, you know, the horse with the jockey on it that's you know, wearing the little red outfit.

You wouldn't know what his name was. So unless you're a very serious horse race afficionado, it wouldn't even matter. I mean, it would all be based on the odds, because what the way the scheme was supposed to work was it would actually look at the odds for any given horse, simulate a race, and then say, all right, here's who won. And sometimes the long shot wins. You know, that's the funny thing about statistics. Okay, alright, so so it's not it's not whoever won literally in the video.

It's okay, it's an algorithm in the yeah, exactly exactly, so that you know the horse's identities, where in fact the video was superfluous. The video doesn't matter. Really. What you're doing is you're betting on statistics. So you're sitting you're kind of betting on a on a random roll of the dice in a in a sense, and you say, I bet that the dice are going to come up like this, which you know sounds kind of crazy when you first described like that, except you realize that the

game craps is all about that concept. So at any rate, this was the first example I could find of a video amusement you seeing fm V. The next one is probably the most famous f m V. I've already referred to it once in this podcast. Yeah, it came out and it is Dragon's Layer. Yeah, Dragon's Layer from Cinematronics. Uh. Now, this was created with animation from Don Bluth, who was

a former Disney animator. I want to say Oliver and Company was one of his, but he also did the five Old movies, the five of those west Um and Secrets and them I think as well, So he he was the guy who did all the animation for this. You play as Dark the Daring a night in shining armor, and you're rescuing the Princess Daphne, who is in a teeny tiny little outfit. This, this game probably didn't do a whole lot for you know, the portrayals, portrayal of

women in video games. Yeah, I think several of the things on our list didn't do a whole lot. Yeah, we're gonna cover some more that are a little to varying degrees of being upsetting and nineties yeah and today. So anyway, Yeah, this this gameplay was limited to a joystick and button where you would have prompts on the screen and you would have to hit the joystick in the right direction or press the button at the right time in order for you to progress in the story.

So you can think of it in a sense as every little segment is a chapter break on like you know a DVD, and this is a laser disc game. It was on laser disc. And if you hit the right button on your on your remote control on your DVD player, you get to watch the next part of the movie. And if you hit the wrong button, it stops. That's essentially what this was, except that the you know, you had four buttons as in the four directions of

your joystick and then the actual button buttons. So five buttons. Total exciting stuff, right, And um, I've actually seen some versions of this where they had the prompts turned off, so you had to have memorized it. Yeah, totally not fair. I don't know how you can just watch something with no prompts and say, oh, I bet I'm supposed to hit left right now. Um. But anyway, that was the basics for dragons Layer. Uh. And again you could only do the actions when the prompts came up. You couldn't

swing your sword at any given time. You couldn't make Dirk run to the left or run to the right, because all of that had already been animated, So you can't you can't control something that's already been set down. However, it did allow those graphics, as you said before, to be very impressive for the time. Yeah, and the story itself was, you know, this kind of cute ce fantasy story.

So it had a lot of appeal. And it certainly was one of those things that if you saw someone who was really good at this, like they had memorized the sequence and they were they were able to get really far. It wasn't entertaining to watch. I. You know, I could never get past a single screen in this game, so I never really got into it. But then I was also fairly young back in nine three. It did happen once upon time, folks, now you being young. Yes,

Also in three Ballely, NFL football came out. Yep, same thing as uh in a sense as the horse racing game, and that they took footage from an actual football game, Raiders versus Chargers, And that was what you got to watch as plays were carried out and you played the part of a coach, So in other words, you're not controlling any football players, but based upon where your team is, like whether they're on offense or defense, you would pick

the plays that they would do next exactly. So you would say, all right, well, based upon this position and based upon the players I have, I want this play to come next, and then you choose the play, and then you'd get a little video of one of the plays being carried out, and then you have another choice to make afterwards, either either you continue or you know,

there might be a turnover whatever. But there was something like eight hundred different video combinations for the whole game, because they used all these different film segments that could be interchanged based upon whichever play you had selected, and then it would show you the right uh, the right

video play. And it was also supposed to really take into account statistics as well, so in other words, you couldn't just memorize a working strategy and play it and and impress all your friends, say watch this, and then you just do the exact because if you did the exact same pathway, you might have some time different. Yeah. Um. Also, these early ones were not on optical disc technology, were they.

This one in particular, was not The Dragonslayer was on a laser disc, but but bally nfl is on a video disc, also known as a capacitance electronic disc or CEED. Now these used a needle to read that they actually were grooved like a record, the vinyl record. Ask your parents, actually those are back, now, are they are? They are all the hipster kids like them? Yeah, all right, that's fair. I never stopped liking them. That makes me even more hipster.

Or them before they were cool. Yeah, but I like them when they were cool, and then when they weren't cool, and when they were cool again. But a capacitance electronic disc. I also had one of those, or my family did when I was a kid. Uh. We had one that was a video player. Wasn't a video game, just a video player. And I remember we had Singing in the Rain and Raiders Raiders of the Lost Arc as two

of the movies that would play on this thing. Um. Again, very similar to laser disc in the sense that whatever's on the disc obviously can't change it's read only, so it was it was a different way of achieving the same goal. Then we get Space Ace. That was another Don Bluth game, another cinematronic Don Bluth game. You played as Ace, who, at the beginning of the game, before anything bad happens, is a big, old, brawny you know,

Flash Gordon style space faring adventurer type uh. And then there's a bad guy named Commander Bof Bof who shoots him with a an infanto ray and turns him into a a adolescent as squeaky voiced, scrawny adolescent, and then he has to rescue his girlfriend. Yes, and occasionally he

could transform back, at least briefly, into Ace. This one actually had some interesting inner activity in the sense that you could choose to become Ace and then move through a level, or you could choose to remain the scrawny guy and move through a level. But depending upon whether you were a sort of the scrawny guy, you had very different strategies. Uh, strategies in the sense of you

know what prompts you hit when. But Ace obviously would charge headlong into danger, whereas the scrawny version of him going to figure out ways around. Yeah, exactly, But again you were limited to whatever had been pre recorded. Just like the other versions. It was faster paced than Dragon's Lair, so a lot of people said it was even more challenging since I never got anywhere with Dragon's Lair. I didn't even bother with spaces, but I I admired the animation.

And then, Uh, the next one I have is one I never saw. I didn't even know it existed until I looked into it on online and I tried watching a video of it, and it was baffling. It's called bad Lands. This one was from Konami yep, and it's Western themed, as you would imagine with that title. You played as Buck, who was a cowboy whose family had been murdered by bad guy, so you're on a revenge mission. And it was done in a style that looked very

much like um uh enemey you know. Uh. Back when I was when I would have played this, uh, it would have been an interesting experience at a science fiction convention because I could see this fitting right next to the anime room. It's so evocative of that style. But it had a single control, which was a giant button, just just one button, and you had to hit that button exactly when you needed to. And this one didn't have prompts and no, you just had to know when

to hit it. And if you hit it too early, you died, and if you hit it too late, you died. If you didn't hit it at all, you died. Yeah, So it was a weird you know, like like if you faced off against a gunfighter and the gunfighter hadn't started to draw yet and you fired your gun, you the game would you would lose a life because you had broken the law. You could only fire after they had to draw, but before they pull the trigger. So it was that really you know, delicate timing that you

had to have. And again it was just the one button, so no joystick or anything on this thing. I've watched some play throughs of it and I couldn't tell what was going on because it looked like there was no transition between one scene and the next. There was a moment literally the guy was in the street in an

old western town. He uh shoots just in time to avoid getting hit by a guy who's up on a on a like on a second story floor, shooting through a window, and then the next sequence he's riding through the desert on a horse and avoiding rattlesnakes, and there was no transition between the two, like there's no just shooting guy riding on a horse. Yeah, exactly, like, now the town is no longer there, He's just in the

middle of the desert. And I can't tell if that was just the way the video had been edited, or if that, in fact was surrealism exactly like, like, well, you know what, life is weird, and sometimes you can't blame their causality is not necessarily at at play in this universe. Sometimes towns turn into snakes. That's true. Sometimes they do. Warning for all of you, just words of wisdom to live by. Other games that came out in four You've got Ninja Hayatai, which I could be completely

wrong in the pronunciation of that uh. Eshes are ron Melia, Cobra Command that was way, and Thayer's Quest uh, and all of them were essentially interactive animated movies. Cobra Command was interesting. It was a helicopter game and it actually had vector graphics on top of the video that you were watching, where you have a little vector graphics cross hairs that you can actually move around the screen, which was way more interactive than some of these other games.

I mean, you were still like, you know, the enemies could only come at you from preordained uh spots. But I mean, I suppose technically it's not that different from it's not from an algorithm that's building it as you go. Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of a lot of video games, like especially classic video games, rely on patterns, and if you recognize the patterns, then you can be really good at those games, right Yeah, And Super Mario Brothers.

There's gumbas only come when does it gonna come? Exactly? They never come differently, Donkey Kong, same thing. You know, all those sort of things where you you once you recognize the pattern, you can start to uh Exploits probably the wrong word, but you can. You can anticipate and react and and make sure that you are in the right position all the time. Um. But it was interesting

that it had a little more interactivity. Then there was Casino Strip, which was a card game with the live action video segments of various quote unquote strippers who had shed clothing as you played. I don't know how far this game would go. And this is arcade game, folks, This is not I'm not talking about a computer game. This was a cabinet that had two monitors. One monitor is your card hand and the other monitor, which is abu of the first one. So it's yeah, yeah, so

you have the live action models up there. Um, I would imagine, since this would probably be in some stinny public venue, that maybe it didn't get any more racy than say underclothes, sure sure, or you know, possibly even that it was sold mostly to say casinos or some other adult entertainment venues. Yeah, I don't know if you, if you in fact have played casino strip or own one, you can let us know how far did this thing go.

I honestly did not want to research further because I was at work, and there's there are limitations that I have upon me that I placed upon myself. I should say. Yeah. Now, although if you look at any of our search histories, I'm sure that um yeah, I don't think any of us come out squeaky clean, just based upon the stuff we talked about. I mean, certainly Robert and Julie are probably in a lot of trouble somewhere. You know, they lead the way. So nine that was kind of like

the first rush of FMV games. But after that it started to die down a little bit, partly because these things are really hard to make. I mean, it's it's a lot of pre production to get all the different sequences and then to lay it out so that it actually becomes a game. It's you know, you would think that being able to build a video game with all those assets and not having to program in the to code in the animation for everything that needed to happen

would be a shortcut, but it's not. It's a lot of production. Anyone who's ever done any production animation obviously takes a really long time because it's a very arduous process. But Lauren and I can tell you from shooting video that a video you see online that may take to three minutes can sometimes be forty five minutes to an hour to to make, sometimes longer depending upon how how complex it is. Oh sure, the day that we dropped blood on me in the studio, fake blood. Nonetheless, I

had that videos. She took four hours for four and a half minute video. So how long were you covered in sticky fake blood? Basically the entire four hours. So yeah, if you guys don't know what we're talking about, you need to look at brain Stuff. Yeah, brain Stuff show dot com. It's a whole video series where lots of your favorite health stuff works, folks go on on video and explain different concepts. Yeah, this was blood for science. Yeah, so it was you know, we weren't just dumping blood

on her. That that was That was the excuse. I mean, we were talking. But anyway, anyway, we don't want to spoil everything. Go check it out. Yes, um so. So, yeah, we didn't see a lot more until the nineteen nineties, although for for perspective, here was the year that that

guidelines were laid out for the creation of data CDs. Previously, compact disc format was a solely audio data format and so, um so, that's when Phillips and the other kids who are working on developing that kind of thing started getting into full data, getting video in there and uh so, and began the very slow process of that being an

adopted as a commercial format. Right for the home consumer, if you wanted to do something like this, uh, and you're using an old PC, you'd be limited to uh floppy disks, and floppy disk could only hold a very tiny amount of video data. Video data is data hungry, which is why those optical laser discs were ideal for it. They could store a lot more information than say a hard coded processor, because that's what most arcade games are. They have a hard coded ROM chip, which is read

only memory. Most of them have one of those hard coded ROM chips as part of a uh an entire slide that goes right into the arcade machine. And some of them you can swap out for other games. Other times, you know, you've got a cabinet that's just dedicated to a game and that's all you've got. You know, you would have to essentially rebuild it if you wanted to put anything else in there. We're gonna take a quick break, but will be right back. So yeah, very much under

heavy limitations. And it wasn't until we started getting to this point where you could theoretically create a compact disc that would have video on it, and even then to take a few years. Meanwhile, we get up to and that's when full motion video games started to make kind of a comeback, mostly due to a company called American Laser Games, which were they released in game called mad Dog McCree, and this one was a live action video Yep, Cowboys, yep,

good old uh shooting bad guys. You had a gradually o prospector who was mostly the narrator, which by the way, if you were not fast enough, he would get shot and you would lose the benefit of having the grizzly old narrator help you along the way. It was one of those games where if you did well, you got hints on how to progress, and if you didn't have those hints, it would make the game much more difficult

to to go through. But the concept was that you are playing a cowboy known only as Strange and you have to rescue the mayor's daughter, which standard issue right once again, the damsel in distress. You're the big, brawny

hero going to rescue her. You had a gun controllers. Yes, it was a light gun, so in fact that this one was a little different from the ones that was just a button or a button in a in a joystick, and this one you had a light gun, so it would detect when you were pointing the gun at the screen when you pull the trigger, and whether or not it was pointing at the right position on the screen for it to count as a hit. So the interactivity was a little bit better in the sense that you're

actually doing stuff right. If you if you don't shoot the right spun on the screen, you don't progress as opposed to you know, just hit a direction and watch her. So not that much different from other light gun games that would follow things like House of the Dead or Time Cops or any of those other light games that would follow in the arcade um. And again, this is one of those games where it differentiated self from the home video game market, one by using live action and

two by the light gun. Uh. These are the things that our kades were investing in because it was getting harder and harder to compete against home video games systems like the Nintendo system and the rising, the rising marketing computer games. So how do you set yourself apart? Well, let's get some hokey actors to play some live action cowboys. The best actor in this, by the way, in my opinion,

was the guy who played the Undertaker. That that's the character you would see every time you either got shot or you shot a citizen um, you would either of those things counted as the loss of a life, and you would then have a little visit with the Undertaker, who would say some sort of vaguely creepy and condescending thing about your performance, and then you would continue on

then the game until you ran out of lives. Um, vaguely creepy and condescending commentary from digital characters is one of my favorite things about video games. You have to say, so that's pretty quality. But yeah, American Laser Games made a whole bunch of other stuff in the in the relatively recent future from exactly um they did? They did? Who shot Johnny Rock? Gangster? That was a gangster game, an old style like gangster style game. Oh, none of

these new styles. No, not not gangsta. It wasn't gang star. It was Gangster. Okay, Space Pirates, oddly enough, it was about Home Shopping Network. It was actually sci Fi Pirates. It was about Space Pirates. Okay. And and this and this one cracks me up. Gallagher's gallery. Yeah, Now, are you familiar with the comedic genius known as Gallagher? Not the comedic genius known as Gallagher, but I'm aware of a comedian known as Gallagher. I have had the pleasure

of meeting Gallagher. Yeah at ces because he's now like gadgets commentator guy, did he smash anything in your presence? He did not have the sledge oomatic with him, which is probably for the best for everyone who was at CEES. He may have had it in his room, he just didn't bring it out on the show floor. It seems like a bad place for it. But Gallagher, if you do not know, he's a guy, he's known for two things.

Kind of silly sort of stream of consciousness, absurd humor, like like just weird jokes about things like language, that kind of stuff. And then also the sledge oomatic where he would, uh, he would pitch a gigantic sledgehammer as if it were a new consumer product that was only good for destroying whatever it was put in front of it. And usually it was end with a watermelon that was the big one. And so Gallagher's gallery took advantage of

the stratospheric comedic genius of Gallagher. And you were playing as a someone who was holding a toy gun it wasn't supposed to be an actual gun um and firing at various things that Gallagher wanted you to shoot. He would actually prompt you, and you know, you'd see a scene with a lot of stuff in it and you were only supposed to shoot whatever it was Gallagher wanted you to shoot and leave everything else alone. Ah makes

perfect sense. I really hope they do make a sequel for the what I consider to be the spiritual successor to Gallagher Carrot top Um. That would be probably. I probably shouldn't even mention that it's probably. Yeah. If you say his name three times, I think you're right. I think you're right. I never I never look into the mirror and say it um, so yeah again. All of those games used a light gun as the controller. You would have to reload your gun by aiming off screen

and pulling the trigger. I hear, by the way, if you ever do encounter one of these old of games from this company, that if you hold the light controller gun upside down, I'm talking about the actual arcade games, it will automatically reload whenever you pull the trigger, so you don't have to aim off screen. Let us know about this that that sounds important. One go try this and write us in. So if you can just just remember to hold the gun upside down the entire time

while firing. I have not tried this. I didn't know that. I used to play this game, the Mad Dog McCree game, all the time in the arcades, and I was pretty good at it. I mean I could get about halfway through. Uh, pretty good for me. I can get about halfway through the game before I would have to continue. And once I got about the halfway point, uh, it got the difficulty wrapped up so quickly that I just said, hope. Yeah. I've seen people play through it though, and it's probably

not that hard. It was just harder than I could handle. Uh. These A bunch of these were also released for the three d OH home game system when it did come out in at the incredibly low price of six hundred and nine nine dollars. Yeah, it was really expensive. I think we might have mentioned it in one of our console episodes. The three d O was an incredibly ambitious

game console. You can think of it as a predecessor for things like the Xbox three sixty in the PlayStation three and now the current generation of consoles as well. And it was supposed to be an entertainment center as well as a video game console. But it was also so expensive and the games were not considered terribly um compelling or or what's another word good, So it didn't do so well. But yes, three d O was the

other market besides arcade machines. At this time. We see another game called Time Traveler, and I played this one too. I played a lot of crappy video games when I was a kid. Um Time Traveler was a little bit you know how I was talking about how the light gun games set it apart from the home market Time Traveler they also tried to set apart their their Arcade Machine from what you could get from a home Mark home computer game set up by having a quote unquote

holographic display. Now it wasn't a real holographic display. They had a curved mirror and they used projection so that it looked from your respective like the Yeah, they looked like three dimensional holographic figures, kind of like the chess pieces in Star Wars. So it looked like that was what was going on, but it was really all trickery. And because you know, you had to stand in a certain place because that's where the controls were, they knew where the player was going to be, so it made

it easier to design this game around that. It was released by Sega. It was designed by Rick Dyer, who was the guy who also designed Dragon's lair Um And uh, yeah, it was you know, basic shoot him up game. You played another Cowboy because that was really popular apparently, Yeah, I don't remember cowboys paying that huge in the early nineties, but I think for one thing, it just made a compelling kind of protagonist to follow. His character was the

Marshall Graham. I don't think he was a Marshall does His name was Marshall. His name was Marshall, and he was fighting the evil scientist volcre Vocal, which is you know, typic call of a Western Sorry it's Almos. It's almost as good as Commander Um. But yeah. You had to fight him through time, and time would be seven different levels that were uh, dating all the way back to

prehistoric times to the future. You had some choice about which era you would visit next um, and you could get some interesting other elements to it, like time reversal cubes, which would be something that we would see used in

in other formats and other games. The idea being that you could actually reverse a small segment of time and try a failed action again, rather than having to waste an entire life and start the level over, like in like in BioShock there's chambers there, yeah, or like in a Prince of Persia Sends of Time, where you could you could reverse the last few seconds the The goal here was that, you know, you would have a whole sequence of events that would unfold in video, and you

couldn't really just PLoP the player down in the middle of it. You essentially you would have divided it up times, just again like DVD chapters, and you couldn't just go into the middle of a DVD chapter, You had to go to the beginning. So this way it could rewind it to a specific point within that little segment, as

opposed to having you play the whole segment over. Yeah. No, especially since saved games were not a huge part of the industry at this point in time, and this one was an arcade game, so you were just stuck with, you know, feeding more and more coins into this machine. That's it for this classic episode of tech Stuff. I hope you enjoyed it. We will have another one following up next week where we talk about home gaming and full motion video because man, what a special sub genre

of games. So if you have suggestions for topics you would like me the cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me. The best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again. Really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.