Full Motion Video
Live action in games
Full motion video played filmed actors from CD. Sega called Night Trap the first interactive movie in 1992, The 7th Guest shipped 36 minutes of it, Wing Commander III put Mark Hamill on four CDs, and by 1998 Computer Gaming World was writing its obituary.
Full motion video (FMV) is filmed footage — real actors, real sets or actors composited onto rendered ones — compressed onto a CD and played back inside a game. The CD’s capacity made it possible; the promise was Hollywood production values; the recurring complaint was that the player was watching more than playing.
Fast facts
- First promised: before any CD console had shipped. In January 1991 ACE reported that CD experts considered FMV “an essential specification” for the machines of the next decade.
- Sega’s launch claim: Night Trap (Sega CD, 1992), “the first game that can truly be called an interactive movie”.
- Peak on the PC: The 7th Guest (36 minutes of video, 1993) and Wing Commander III (Mark Hamill, four CDs, 1994).
- Obituary: Computer Gaming World, April 1998 — “we are nearing the last days of Full Motion Video as a viable gaming medium.”
How it works
Footage is shot, digitised and compressed, then streamed from the disc while the game runs. Consoles built for it decoded MPEG in hardware: the Philips CD-i’s Digital Video cartridge held an MPEG-1 chipset and, Edge reported in 1994, fitted “74 minutes of VHS-quality video and CD-DA audio” on one disc, drawn on the machine’s background plane so sprites could be laid over it. PCs decoded in software, which is why FMV games raised the minimum processor and drive speed with each release. Encoding was the slow part — Edge put it at “between 20 to 200 times real-time” in early 1994.
Interactivity came from branch points: the game plays a clip, waits for a choice or a reaction, and plays the clip that follows. Everything that could happen had to have been filmed.
The promise
ACE was writing about FMV in January 1991, when Commodore’s CDTV had slipped to the spring and Philips’ CD-i was a year away: “many CD experts feel that FMV (full frame, full motion video) is an essential specification for the systems that will dominate the home for the next ten years.” Asked whether CDTV would get it, Nolan Bushnell, then running CDTV development at Commodore, said he “wouldn’t be surprised if we had a software system that could give us FMV capability by the end of 1991.”
By March 1994 Edge was running a feature on the MPEG standard under the standfirst “Full-motion video gives you games and movies on 5inch CDs, and it looks likely to be the future of all video-based entertainment.” It ended: “Welcome to the age of FMV.”
Sega CD
Sega’s own magazine introduced the Sega CD launch line-up in November 1992 with Night Trap — “the first game that can truly be called an interactive movie — a movie where you are the star, and you control the action” — and Sewer Shark, under the heading “A growing trend in CD games is the use of live actors and digitized video.”
Fourteen months later Night Trap was off the shelves. Senators Lieberman and Kohl held hearings on video-game violence in December 1993; Computer Gaming World’s editor reported that they had “warned the video game industry to create a viable and consistent ratings system or be ready to have the government intervene.” Sega’s vice president of marketing, Bill White, told Sega Visions readers the game “was developed as a parody of vampire melodramas. It became clear in December that the parody was misunderstood… For these reasons Night Trap was withdrawn from the market in January.”
On the PC
The 7th Guest (Trilobyte, 1993) put 36 minutes of live actors, shot against a green screen, into a rendered 22-room mansion that had taken two years to build. Bill Gates had shown it at a 1992 multimedia convention as “the new standard in multimedia entertainment”.
Wing Commander III (Origin, 1994) was the form’s big-budget peak: Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell composited onto “computer-generated virtual sets”, eight-foot animatronic Kilrathi, and four CDs — “tying it with KILLING MOON for the title of ‘largest game ever produced’”. Chris Roberts told the press that “the game shouldn’t make decisions about what happens next. You should make the decisions.”
Sierra’s Phantasmagoria (1995), designed by Roberta Williams, drew the reaction the form kept drawing: “The video sequences are excellent, and there are hours of them” — and the gameplay was “exceedingly simple, designed to be as easy and unobtrusive as possible.”
CD-i
For Philips the cartridge was the machine’s case for existing. Ian Hadley of Gremlin Graphics told Edge in 1994: “The advent of the FMV cartridge turned it around. If I were Philips, I would just put that chipset into every box I shipped.” Peter Jones of Mirage saw only two roads for CD games — “using FMV or using pre-generated, raytraced images like those in Rise Of The Robots” — and thought CD-i fit for both.
The reaction
The “interactive movie” label wore out within two years. Edge’s November 1994 preview of Burn:Cycle opened “The interactive movie is dead; long live the interactive movie” and said the phrase had been “applied indiscriminately to any game with a vaguely movie-like plot and a token amount of FMV”, naming Voyeur, Ground Zero Texas, The 7th Guest and Return to Zork as games that “weren’t interactive enough.” Its own designer, David Collier, said most such products were “only superficially interactive”.
By April 1998 Computer Gaming World was writing the obituary. Martin Cirulis: “Video just cannot provide the freedom that coded graphics can (and do) provide. And, in reality, all FMV does is reduce your gaming rig to a very expensive and precise VCR.” Ken Williams, he noted, had said the year before that FMV “was just not working out for Sierra.”