August 4, 2014 • 28 mins
How was full motion video used in early computer and console games? And why is it so hilariously bad?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in touch with technology with text stuff from stuff
dot com either and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Strickland and I'm Lauren folc Obama. And now we're going
to present to you something that we've already talked about. FMV.
Are fm V that's full motion video video games, yep,
(00:25):
and you may if you've listened to our last episode,
you heard us talk about how it turned out to
be a lot longer than we had anticipated. So, as
it turns out, we enjoy shotten Fred here on the show,
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:22):
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
(03:45):
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
(04:05):
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,
(04:25):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:10):
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.
(05:33):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:58):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:02):
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.
(08:23):
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
(08:45):
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
(09:08):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:52):
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
(10:14):
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
(10:37):
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
(11:00):
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.
(11:21):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:03):
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.
(12:27):
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
(12:47):
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.
(13:08):
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,
(13:30):
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
(13:54):
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
(14:15):
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
(14:35):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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,
(15:39):
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.
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:44):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:10):
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.
(18:33):
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
(18:55):
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
(19:16):
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,
(19:38):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:21):
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
(20:45):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:53):
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
(22:14):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:57):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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,
(24:00):
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
(24:20):
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
(24:40):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:22):
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,
(25:44):
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
(26:06):
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,
(26:30):
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
(26:50):
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
(27:14):
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
(27:35):
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
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or tumbler text tof hs W there too, and we
(27:55):
will talk to you again really soon. For moralness and
thousands of other topics, isn't how stuff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with text stuff from stuff
dot com either and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan
Strickland and I'm Lauren folc Obama. And now we're going
to present to you something that we've already talked about. FMV.
Are fm V that's full motion video video games, yep,
(00:25):
and you may if you've listened to our last episode,
you heard us talk about how it turned out to
be a lot longer than we had anticipated. So, as
it turns out, we enjoy shotten Fred here on the show,
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
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:53):
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
(02:15):
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
(02:37):
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
(02:59):
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
(03:22):
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
(03:45):
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
(04:05):
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,
(04:25):
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
(04:50):
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
(05:10):
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.
(05:33):
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
(05:55):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:38):
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
(06:58):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:41):
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
(08:02):
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.
(08:23):
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
(08:45):
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
(09:08):
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
(09:29):
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
(09:52):
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
(10:14):
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
(10:37):
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
(11:00):
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.
(11:21):
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
(11:42):
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
(12:03):
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.
(12:27):
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
(12:47):
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.
(13:08):
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,
(13:30):
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
(13:54):
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
(14:15):
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
(14:35):
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
(14:55):
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
(15:16):
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,
(15:39):
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.
(16:01):
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
(16:24):
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
(16:44):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:10):
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.
(18:33):
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
(18:55):
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
(19:16):
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,
(19:38):
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
(19:58):
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
(20:21):
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
(20:45):
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
(21:07):
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
(21:31):
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
(21:53):
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
(22:14):
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
(22:35):
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
(22:57):
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
(23:17):
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
(23:37):
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,
(24:00):
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
(24:20):
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
(24:40):
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
(25:02):
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
(25:22):
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,
(25:44):
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
(26:06):
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,
(26:30):
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
(26:50):
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
(27:14):
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
(27:35):
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
stuff works dot com. Trop us a line on Facebook
or Twitter or handled there is tech stuff hs W
or tumbler text tof hs W there too, and we
(27:55):
will talk to you again really soon. For moralness and
thousands of other topics, isn't how stuff works dot com
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