The Full Motion Video Era - Home Gaming

we sure do. So we had a lot to say about the various games we're going to concentrate in this episode, about the home video game market and how fm V played a role in that. So we now return you

to our podcast already in progress. Was also the year when we see, at least from what I could tell, the first home video game to feature full motion video Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective, and it had live action video segments where you would play as a detective you're trying to solve a specific mystery, and most of the gameplay was done on kind of a cartoonish h view. You just had the screen of like a map and you

could do things like investigate clues. You could get the the irregulars, you know, Sherlock Holmes's network of pickpockets to all go out and look for clues. You could interview suspects that kind of stuff. But all of that was just done in text and cartoons, and it was only in sort of cut scenes that you really got the full FMV live action stuff. Um, it was actually the

performances were actually pretty good. I was watching some of the video and they they were you know, kind of the stuff you would expect to see in a Sherlock Holmes uh television movie or something. So you know, one of the one set during actual Victorian era, not the modern not not not not balderdash Cumberbuns version. Um. I love Sherlock and I love Ben Thedict cumber Batch. I just love, also love how British his name is. It's pretty ludicrous, it is. So anyway, this was actually pretty

good one. I mean again, you had I think you had like three different mysteries you could play on that first game. Um, and you would get points, which was bad. You didn't want to get points. You wanted to be able to solve the mystery with as few points as possible, and you would actually be compared against Sherlock Holmes at the end of the mystery and see how well you did. And the example, I saw the end score with something like two fifty points and Sherlock Holmes's score was twenty six.

So it was one of those are like, Okay, I guess uh, I guess we we pew, poor puny mortals have no chance against the supreme intelligence of Sherlock Holmes, which I guess is the point that is, Yeah, then we get one of the more infamous FMVs. We're not covering every single FMV title because oh no, certainly not. There were. There were definitely a lot of them, and

many of them honestly not worth our time. And some of them were you know, kind of never really heard or seen from again, like stuff that either got released but barely was was adopted at all. So we're just really concentrating on the really famous ones, particularly some that some of our listeners have asked about, including this one

from Sewer Shark. Sewer Shark, Yes, uh, this this was for the three d O eventually like a CD which had come out, I believe in that was what we decided and uh, yeah, one of the earliest console games to use fm V, maybe the first one. Uh. And you're you're flying as a You're playing as a pilot

who flies a ship that flies through sewers. Uh. It's set in a post apocalyptic future where everybody's moved underground, but there are rumors that there are some places above ground that could still be habitable, but the government is very much about, you know, keeping those rumors under under check. And you play a pilot who's trying to find um, well one, trying to fight this kind of totalitarian government

and to trying to get to the surface. And so that you had all these sequences where you were flying through pipes and that was all full motion video stuff, and you really uh kind of had sprites on top of the video that represented monsters that you had to shoot. So and so in a way, it was kind of similar to that previous game where you had the vector graphics crosshairs on top of the yeah, Cobra command. So it's similar to that in that sense, except this time

they were sprites, not vector graphics and yep. And you also had lots of full motion video with your your your compatriots as well. As the villain, and they were all ridiculous, over the top hammy actors kind of kind of awesome. Yeah, we're both actually big fans at that school of acting, I think. Yeah, I mean, if it's if it's done knowingly, it can be it can be a real blast, but even unknowingly it can be kind

of a sort of a charming train wreck. Yes, yes, oh, I mean, and so much so that Sega decided to ship it along with their Sega CD system. Yeah. So this was one of those games that actually was pretty popular, only in the sense that people who bought the Sega c D system also got a copy of Sewer Shark. A listeners DJ and Daniel, both on Facebook asked us to mention this one. Yeah, so thanks very thanks for

writing in guys. Now here's another game that I played a little bit, The Seventh Guest, which was a kind of a mystery game. It had a lot of puzzles that were sort of missed like in nature. Like, uh, I remember one specific puzzle. You're you are presented with a cake and the cake has tombstones and skulls on it, and some piece is that the cake don't have either tombstones or skulls, and you have to remove five pieces of cake at a time. They have to be consecutive.

They had to touch each other, and each time you remove them. They have to have two tombstones, two skulls, and one piece of plain cake. So you had to figure out exactly how did you remove those so that you would get all the cake removed, you wouldn't be stuck. It's kind of like those puzzles you would see where you'd have you know, uh, like in a do you know what you're just shaking your head over now, I'm just I'm just that sounds like the worst puzzle ever.

I that that sounds like the kind of puzzle that I happened upon sometimes in video games and just go maybe I would like to go read a book. I I think of the puzzles that you would find in Uh, this is gonna be a regional reference for some of you guys out there. A cracker barrel, Yeah, that's sort of thing. Yeah, the little wooden triangle where you have the pegs and you have to try and make the pegs jump each other until you're only left with one peg. Yeah,

it's kind of like that. They had other puzzles to not just that one, but they also had all these live video segments where they were other it was supposed to be people who had attended a party at this house years ago, and you are encountering the remnants. They're they're kind of psychological imprints. Okay, Yeah, so sort of like a murder mystery dinner party, except everyone is already dead. Yeah, and you're you're the one solving the mystery. Um and

and the acting was pretty pretty spectacularly awful. If you have ever attended a like cringe worthy murder mystery dinner theater type thing, that's what this was in video game form. Uh. Still kind of charming, but definitely I'll show you some video after this podcast is over so you can appreciate it. But we'll try to. We'll try, by the way, to put video of as many of these as we can up on social media. The ones that are the ones

that are socially acceptable. They found they sound very charming. Yeah, this this next one not so much night trash. Uh that This one was also mentioned by a couple of our listeners on Facebook. Paul and Daniel, thank you guys for writing in about this one. Uh, it was it was a multi platform game. It was big enough that it was all over the places on Sega, C, D, three D, O, MAC and PC. And it was a

survival horror title, right yep. And it got got some attention from a little group called the United States Government. So this is right around the time when the US government was starting to get concerned about video games and the content inside them. Yeah, and what they were doing to our children. Um, which I I just dramatically overstated, because I think that it's a very dramatic overstatement that yeah, okay,

I do believe in the rating system. And this is actually one of the games that helped create the ratings in a roundabout way, because people started saying, hey, uh, there's some slightly scandalous content on this. You're just selling it to any kid who walks in. That's kind of weird us. You know, Mortal Kombat and Doom and stuff that we're along those to Doom, Mortal Kombat and Night Trap, we're held up as examples of won't someone please think

of the children? So here's the thing, Uh, they the video game industry elected to create the s r B rating system because it meant that it kept the government out of doing it for them because that was essentially what the government said was you need to create a waiting or we will and they're like, well, whoa, we will totally do that because we don't want to have too much regulation in our industry because that hurts innovation, it hurts the developers. So here's the question, what exactly

was going on with this game to make it so scandalous. Well, it was kind of creepy, you uh. The basis of the game was that there were these monsters called Augers that are kind of like vampires, right, and you are trying to capture them, and you're you're trying to view them remotely and secretly by using hidden cameras that are placed throughout a house. Coincidentally, that house is also playing host to a slumber party of young ladies, so a lot of the video involves you looking in on rooms

that young ladies are in. There was no nudity in this game, by the way, the way it sounds like it sounds like it it got really pretty like Porky's esque really quickly. It wasn't. It wasn't that. It didn't go that far. So there's no nudity in the game, but there were moments where you know, clearly it was trying to appeal to a more base level in people's nature. It was it was sexualized, and some parents realized that their kids had it, and then they had not really

signed off on it. Yeah. I heard one of the game developers, UH defend this game by saying, look, you you're trying to save people here, that it's the option of the game is to capture the bad guys, not to peep on people, and that you think, yeah, but the game mechanic is pretty much peeing on people. So I mean, I don't know how much you can defend it. But again, it wasn't like the most It seems tame in comparison now, especially when you look at the content

that's in some games. You also have to keep in mind that by we're talking about folks who had been growing up with video games since the late seventies early eighties, and this is something we've seen in the industry overall. As gamers have aged, the content inside games has become more and more quote unquote mature. So yeah, and it makes sense because these are the people who are remaining

customers of video games even as they get older. So I think that was also what we were seeing by by ninety three, we're talking about a lot of people who were in their teenage years who had grown up playing video games like you know me, although at this point I was only going to be a teenager for a very short time. But there were some decidedly squeaky clean video games that included f m V out around that time. Let Us not forget about missed a very

popular games, incredibly popular game. It was the best selling PC game for nine years running. Um. It also came out and it wasn't a a heavily FMV based video game, but it did have that FMV element. It had some live action video that characters would interact with you through these these books that you would open and and you know, it was like talking through a portal, but the portal was a person video. Yeah, um, and yeah it was. It was a darling in the market. It was a

darling of reviewers. It is kind of credited with driving personal CD ROM sales and had sequels coming out for the next ten years plus. Uh. They started in with Riven and continued using FMV elements up through the fourth game in the series, Revelation, which was released all the

way out in two thousand four. After two thousand four, I think that's when we started seeing graphics engines improving to the point where the luster was really taken off of f m V. It was a lot cheaper and easier and more beautiful to create animation for stuff like this. You would go with like a CG type thing that was procedurally generated. This, you know, depending upon the game, but you know, you could have games where you would have a CG scene and your character can move around

and actually view it from different angles. Cut scenes are still largely fm V to some extent. But um, but yeah, I agree that by that time we were starting to see the sophistication of the game engines themselves take over, where some of the less um appealing aspects of FMV were no longer a concern because you could you could work around it, you could do something else instead. Um you Missed was also one of those games that very

quickly appealed to female gamers. Um. One of the reasons why it was so popular and non gamers in general, people who wouldn't pick up normal video games because they were perhaps too fast paced or too violent or too difficult on a learning curve kind of way to get you to the controls. Missed was. It was a very basically controlled adventure, point and click sort of thing where all you had to do was was moved through an environment and solve puzzles, and it was a little bit

less intimidating I think for your average human person. It was also really visually appealing and had great sounds, great soundscape. So it was one of those games where it appealed to people on a level that that basic, you know, standard video games didn't like they weren't. It wasn't twitch based, you know, it was it could be intimidating if you ran into a puzzle and you had literally had no idea how to even start. There were there were a couple of puzzles and in Missed, I did play and

I do still love Missed. It's got a very dear place in my heart. Well, the next one has a dear place in my heart. Frankenstein through the Eyes of the Monster, and you play as Frankenstein's monster, who has a woman's hand. By the way, that's a big dramatic reveal in the very early part of the game. Goodness, this hand belongs to a open I'm not okay, I'm not sure how gendered hands are precisely, but you can

tell or because his other hand very different. Uh. So you were playing as the monster, so you're seeing everything from the monster's perspective, so you only see any part of the monster if the monster puts it out in front of his face. Um. And you are trying to regain your lost memories. You have no memory of what you were before the experiment that brings you to life. Uh. Dr Frankenstein is played by Dr franken Further himself, Tim Curry. He choose scenery so hard in this in this game,

he's one of my favorite scenery. Yeah, he's he's bonkers. Dr Frankenstein is the first time you see him is when your your character's eyes open on the on the medical table and he's going on and about how he created life and then he celebrates by injecting himself in the neck with something you assume more but you don't know.

Um and uh yeah, it's a it's if you do anything wrong, or you do enough wrong things, he shows up and kills you and then says something you know, like you have very snarky and very British, so Tim Curry will appear again on this list because Tim Curry not a man to turn down a job. As it turns out. Um, I would not say that Frankenstein Through the Eyes of the Monster is a particularly good game.

It was another puzzle game, another point and click puzzle game, very much like Missed, but with a very different you know, theme and tone to it. By point and click, we mean that you could just use a mouse to point. It's something that you wanted to either move towards or interact with, and then just click to do that thing right and so you It's one of those games where you had to figure out which thing is needed for

whatever situation you were in. Uh, And depending upon the way the game was designed, you would either end up with the right result, no result, or with Frankenstein you know, Tim Curry would kill you. Um. There was a game called Ripper, which I first thought when I started watching the video that I owned the game, but then I realized I didn't own the game. I owned a CD that had Ripper as a preview, and it might have even been Frankenstein Through the Eyes of the Monster now

that I think of it. So this was another point and click game set in twenty forty and you are trying to solve a series of murders that mirror the Jack the Ripper murders Victorian England. But this one had some really all star actors in it. And we've We've got Christopher Walkin, John Frees, Davies, Karen Allen and just Meredith.

You're gonna rip Lightning and corrap thunder. Yeah. Uh, you guys should be thankful I did Burgess Meredith and not Christopher Walkin because my walking impression is the worst thing in the world. But uh, and I love doing it. But you played, you know, this game, and you had to try and solve these murders. The the preview to this is phenomenal. You guys. If you learned nothing from this podcast other than this, it'll still be worth it.

Go to YouTube and look for the Ripper video game preview because also it features the music of one of the best bands in the world, Blue Oyster Cult, and uh and their song Don't Fear the Reaper, which I also remember from that preview that I got on the c D where the Don't Fear the Reaper came on and I was immediately impressed. Then we have a game that I believe you played, Lauren. Yes, this was the X Files game. Yeah, we were mentioned this. I remember you.

You brought this one up in the Worst video Games I think, And yeah, it's pretty high on my list. It was another point and click adventure. It came out for the PSX, the PlayStation one as some people might

call it, and also the PC. And you you played as this FBI agent character that was invented Holly for the game, who had to find Molder and Scully as far as I can tell, because it was really expensive and time consuming to get David to Covney and Jillian ander Sin to actually come shoot um, and a bunch of the other characters from the show. Um, Mitch Pledge I never learned how to say is excellent as a

d skinner. William B. Davis, who played the cigarette smoking Man, Stephen Williams who was Mr X and the whole smoking gun nerd trio for Hickey, Buyers and Langley all had small roles in this thing. This tells me where where in the X Files Lord happened. Yes, it was actually in the Lord. It was set specifically, I believe in season three, sometime in nineteen six. Don't make sense for Mr X, right, Yes, so it was actually shortly yeah,

o MG, spoilers um. And that's this is partially because the development took four years and six million dollars um. It was all prompted by Fox's specific interest in having Italie in game for the X Files when they ordered it the shows in season two and was really starting to roll. Yeah, they were as one of those shows that was getting kind of runaway popularity despite Fox's best efforts to keep moving it, moving the X Files to different time slots. Yeah, and in f m V terms,

this game was an absolute blockbuster. I mean, it had this Hollywood talent involved, and it's sold about a million copies, which they at least made their money back. At that time, that was a really impressive. You also have to remember that the video game industry at that time wasn't the giant beheam with that it is today, right. You know. However, the reviews and the player responses to it weren't spectacular. Not all of them were as negative as I was,

but but I have very strong feelings about it. It took up like seven PC c d s or four PlayStation CDs. There's nothing that really keeps you immersed in a game, like having to change out one disc for another continually. Yeah, I personally, I just like it so much because I got stuck in a in an action sequence bug that I never could get around, and I was like, well, I guess I'm not playing this game anymore.

And this game is and it's done, and we still are seeing lots of FMV used and cut scenes and support roles. The Command and Conquered games are really well known for that. Tim Curry reappears. He um, he was in Rent Alert three as a a Russian type character, and uh, if you can just imagine what Tim Curry would sound like doing his best horrible, over the top Russian accent, then you're you're n the way there. Civilization

Too had him as your members of your council. I love that because, as I recall, the person who was in charge of telling you how happy or unhappy your people were was essentially an Elvis impersonator. And yeah, and you're the way the game worked, you would go through different eras, right, You would go through the ancient era, so there's Elvis in a toga. You go to a medieval era, so there's Elvis in a doublet uh. In the Moderneil era, you'd have you know, Elvis, So it

was it was, it was a blast. And then you had other the super dorky science nerd guy, the gung ho h military dude. It was those performances I actually really really love. I wouldn't say that they were all nuanced or anything like that, but they were entertaining. Other games that our listeners have suggested that we talk about where the Wing Commander series from origin, A lawnmower Man,

Corpse Killer, Ground Zero Texas. So many of the game companies that made fm V based games, especially the ones that were solely FMV, no longer exist. They either went out of business or they got acquired by another company and folded into them. Uh. It's just one of those games that, again the pre production was really expensive and time consuming, and ultimately we began to learn that players seem to prefer gameplay and interaction over the visual qualities

of the exactly perhaps questionable visual qualities. So again, using it as like a cut scene is one thing, but to use as the base this for your gameplay really limits you. I've got a quote here that I wanted to read out from one Jason Vandenberg, who was one of the programmers on the X Files game. This was a quote from Edge magazine, I believe, back in the late nineties when the game came out, and he said working on the x Files proved to me that interactivity

and drama directly oppose each other. Thus interactive cinema is limited at best and doomed at worst. That was a devastating realization. Drama is all about being a helpless witness to events. The moment you give the viewer agency, the emotional spectrum shifts from tension to curiosity. We could never get past that fundamental thing. Curiosity kills tension, and you end up with a puzzle game with a rich, detailed background behind it which sounds like missed, which sounds like

missed what you know? And I and I wanted to read it out because I thought it was a really interesting and very strong perspective, especially coming from a programmer of one of these games. However, I'm not positive. I mean, when you really get down to it, all video games are interactive to some extent. Yeah, And then, and I don't think that curiosity always kills tension. You can have

very tense, very excellently crafted moments. However, perhaps with video it's so pre planned and predetermined that it is starting to kill off a little bit of that spontaneity that you get. Well, yeah, when you have no control over what someone you're watching does, I can see where the tension comes in, because you know what you would want that person to do in that situation, traumatic irony. Yeah, so you've got you've got that moment where you're like,

don't go, don't open the door. You know, but if you're and if you're the player and you are playing a game, you don't have to open the door. So I think that's what he's saying, is that or you're just curious to find out what happens if you do open the door, And so that's where he's going in

with that tension thing. Well, I mean, I mean I definitely played most through most of again, for example, Silent Hill my my favorite thing to reference on this show apparently you know, like knowing that I had to open the door and just looking at it. Yeah, see, I'm with you there. I think that you can totally have interactivity and tension if you if you structure the game properly. I think you can have both curiosity and drama. I

think both things can coexist. I think of games like The Last of Us, which had amazing moments of drama. And you know, I don't I can't speak for everybody, but I really cared about these characters and I got to control them quite a bit, so it wasn't like I was just watching a movie. So I'm not sure I entirely I see what he's saying, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with it. Well, you know, I

don't know. I think that there's a point in there about trying to balance something inherently interactive, like a video game, with something inherently uninteractive. Yeah, like a like a film, like a regular film or television show, right, because you're you're mixing the types of tension that the viewer or

the player is experiencing, and it gets awkward. Well, and you know, when you're making a video or an animated film or whatever, you can really craft that to evoke a specific emotion and be fairly certain that most of your audience is going to feel it if you have done your job correctly, right, because you you have forced

them into that perspective, they can't change. They can't they can't make the camera look away, they can't focus on something else, you know, without themselves physically doing it within the theater. Sure, but when you suddenly take away control of someone who is used to having control in the scene,

I think that's where the frustration of FMV enters. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's certainly an interesting balance here that that uh and again we see this played out today in video games, where you will see innovative gameplay introduced to try and differentiate a game from others, and people react in a very dramatic way to that. Either they love

it or they hate it. But it's it's one of those things where I think we see that that interactivity is what gamers, and I you know, not all gamers, but I think the majority of gamers really are eager for. Whereas if they want to watch a really cool movie, they'll go watch a really cool movie. So anyway, this was fun to talk about their Obviously, like we said, tons of other fm V games out there, um ranging from the amusing to the terrible to the terribly amusing.

UM way too. There are some websites that are devoted just to categorizing F and V games, although one of them did not include Frankenstein and I was deeply disappointed. Um, but you should go and check out those as well and it Meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, maybe there's a topic you've always wanted to learn more about and you would like us to to take a shot, let us know. Send us a message. Our email address is text stuff at how

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