Full motion video (FMV) is pre-recorded film played back inside a game: at first animation or footage of space, then real actors, filmed on a set or in front of a green screen and composited onto computer-drawn rooms. For about fifteen years it looked like the future. Arcade machines played it from laserdiscs in 1983; in 1991 ACE was telling readers it was “an essential specification” for the home machines of the coming decade; by 1994 Edge was welcoming readers to “the age of FMV”. It gave games real faces and Hollywood actors, and it kept running into the same problem: everything the player could do had to be filmed in advance, so there was never very much the player could do.
Fast facts
- First laserdisc game: Sega’s Astron Belt, shown at the AMOA arcade show in America in autumn 1982, with filmed space footage behind computer-drawn ships.
- The arcade hit: Dragon’s Lair (1983), animated by Don Bluth’s studio and played from a laserdisc.
- Live actors: Mad Dog McCree, a Wild West shooting game, was in arcade tests in 1990, running on an Amiga 500 connected to a laserdisc player.
- CD era: Night Trap and Sewer Shark on the Sega CD (1992), The 7th Guest (1993), Wing Commander III (1994) and Phantasmagoria (1995).
- Obituary: Computer Gaming World, April 1998: “we are nearing the last days of Full Motion Video as a viable gaming medium.”
- Revival: Sam Barlow’s Her Story (2015) and the independent games that followed it.
How it works
A laserdisc stores tens of thousands of video frames, and the player can jump to any one of them. Electronic Fun explained the idea in July 1983: connect the disc player to a computer and “your responses would direct the computer to call up the appropriate frames on the videodisc.” The game plays a clip, waits for the player to act, and then plays the clip for whatever happened. The jump was not instant. Video Games described the moments “when the laserdisc makes the screen turn blank” on Dragon’s Lair while the player searched for the next scene.
Because only the scenes on the disc can ever appear, the designers had to steer the player towards them. Don Bluth estimated that Dragon’s Lair asked for 200 to 250 decisions, with danger every second and a half, and said his animators had to “throw in blatant clues for the player” so people knew when to move.
CD brought FMV into the home, but a CD stores video as digital data, and the footage had to be heavily compressed to fit on the disc and to be read back fast enough. Philips sold a £150 Digital Video cartridge for its CD-i with an MPEG-1 decoder chip. Edge reported that it fitted “74 minutes of VHS-quality video and CD-DA audio” on one disc and drew the video on the machine’s background plane, so sprites could be laid on top. PC games could not count on a decoder board, so many decoded the video in software. Trilobyte’s Graeme Devine wrote his own wavelet-based system for The 11th Hour, the sequel to The 7th Guest, so that it would run without an MPEG board; even so, its 65 minutes of video needed two CDs. Compressing the footage was slow as well. Edge put MPEG encoding in early 1994 at “between 20 to 200 times real-time”.
Laserdiscs in the arcade
Sega got there first. At the AMOA show, the American arcade trade’s big exhibition, in autumn 1982, Electronic Fun found Astron Belt “the hottest new game technology exhibited”: “part laserdisc and part computer graphics”, with “actual photographic footage of space and spaceships, planets and meteors” flying past behind the player’s ship. By August 1983 it had reached London’s Crystal Rooms arcade in Leicester Square.
Dragon’s Lair was the one people queued for. It came from Rick Dyer of Advanced Microcomputer Systems, the arcade maker Cinematronics and the animator Don Bluth, who had left Disney in 1979. It was unveiled at the spring 1983 Amusement Operators Expo and reached arcades that July. It was an animated cartoon rather than live action, and Video Games credited it with putting arcade games “back at the top of the list” after a slump. Every manufacturer rushed to show a disc game at that autumn’s show.
Filmed actors came later. In December 1990 Amazing Computing described TTR Development’s Mad Dog McCree, a live-video laserdisc game “in which players take aim at videotaped images of actors in an ol’ West scenario”, running on an Amiga 500 connected to a laserdisc player. RAZE reported in 1991 that American Laser Games, which was renting out its laserdisc titles, was spending the cost of a low-budget film, over $250,000, on each title, with a cast of actors, stunt people and explosives experts.
The promise of CD
By January 1991, with Commodore’s CDTV put back to the spring and Philips’ CD-i not expected before autumn 1991, ACE reported that “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 introducing the MPEG standard to its readers under the headline “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.”
Night Trap and the Sega CD
The best-known FMV game had been filmed years before there was a machine to play it. Rob Fulop, the programmer of the Atari VCS game Demon Attack, spent 1986 to 1988 at the toy company Hasbro designing and producing two feature-length interactive movies. Mark Turmell, who worked there with Fulop and David Crane, called it the NEMO project, “best remembered for spawning the infamous game Night Trap”; the project was cancelled. The two films became Night Trap and Sewer Shark. Digital Pictures brought them to Sega’s CD add-on for the Mega Drive, where both were in the 1992 launch line-up, and they became Digital Pictures’ two best-selling CD titles.
Sega’s own magazine sold Night Trap in November 1992 as “the first game that can truly be called an interactive movie — a movie where you are the star, and you control the action”, and “the first game to give you interactive game play with digitized film footage and a live sound track”. The arcade games above had used filmed footage years earlier. The player joins S.C.A.T., the “Sega Control Attack Team”, which has patched into the security system of a house where five people have disappeared. Through its cameras the player watches eight rooms and springs the house’s traps on the intruders in trench coats and ski masks who come for the young women staying there. The cast included the television actress Dana Plato, and Sega said the budget ran “into millions of dollars”.
That premise brought it to the Senate hearings on video-game violence at the end of 1993, alongside Mortal Kombat. Computer Gaming World’s editor reported that Senators Lieberman and Kohl had “warned the video game industry to create a viable and consistent ratings system or be ready to have the government intervene.” Ken Williams of Sierra wrote that “a Sega representative was told by a Congressman, in no uncertain terms, that Sega should clean up its act or Congress would do it for them.” Sega’s vice president of marketing, Bill White, gave its answer in Sega Visions: 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 video of live actors, shot against a green screen, into a rendered 22-room mansion that had taken two years to build, each room taking at least a month. Bill Gates had shown it at the 1992 Multimedia Convention in San Francisco and called it “the new standard in multimedia entertainment”. By August 1994 Edge called it “the game that put multimedia PCs on the map” and reported that it had just reached its one millionth sale.
Wing Commander III (Origin, 1994) was the form’s big-budget peak. Mark Hamill, Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies were composited onto “computer-generated virtual sets”, the alien Kilrathi were eight-foot animatronic puppets, and the game came on four CDs, “tying it with KILLING MOON for the title of ‘largest game ever produced’”. At its New York launch Chris Roberts explained his idea of an interactive story: “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 response the form kept drawing. Computer Gaming World found that “the video sequences are excellent, and there are hours of them”, and that the gameplay was “exceedingly simple, designed to be as easy and unobtrusive as possible.”
CD-i
For Philips the video cartridge was the machine’s best argument. 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 two ways forward for CD games, “using FMV or using pre-generated, raytraced images like those in Rise Of The Robots”, and thought “CD-i comes up trumps” on both. The first video games for the cartridge included a version of Space Ace, Don Bluth’s laserdisc follow-up to Dragon’s Lair.
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 complained that the phrase had been “applied indiscriminately to any game with a vaguely movie-like plot and a token amount of FMV”. It named Voyeur, Ground Zero Texas, The 7th Guest and Return to Zork as games that “weren’t interactive enough”. Burn:Cycle’s 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”.
The revival
FMV came back in the 2010s as a small independent genre. Cheap high-definition cameras had made filming affordable, and Sam Barlow’s Her Story (2015) showed that a game could be built from one room and a few characters: the player searches a database of a woman’s police interviews for clips and pieces the story together in any order. Wireframe credited it with bringing “FMV back into respectability”. Barlow followed it with Telling Lies (2019). Tim Follin, the composer, made Contradiction (2015) almost single-handed, a murder mystery in which the player looks for the contradictions in the suspects’ filmed statements.
Night Trap returned too, in a 25th anniversary edition in 2017. One writer found its content “incredibly tame”. Fulop told Wireframe in 2019 that the hearings had caused him real personal and professional trouble. Looking back, he called the game a “failed experiment”: “When people come to the movies, they want a story, and it just seemed like the game got in the way of the story.”
Sources
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, February 1983, p. 26: AMOA show report, Astron Belt.
- Computer and Video Games, Book of Video Games supplement (issue 20), June 1983: Astron Belt as the first laserdisc game and Dragon’s Lair the second. Issue 22, August 1983: Astron Belt at the Crystal Rooms, Leicester Square.
- Electronic Fun with Computers & Games, July 1983, p. 6, editorial, “Laser in the lair”: how a laserdisc game calls up frames.
- Video Games vol. 2 no. 3, December 1983, editorial and pp. 33–34, Mary Claire Blakeman, “The Laserdisc Age Begins”: Dragon’s Lair at the spring AOE and in arcades in July; Rick Dyer, Cinematronics, Starcom; Bluth’s decisions and clues; the blank screen; Astron Belt.
- Amazing Computing vol. 5 no. 12, December 1990: Mad Dog McCree in test, on an Amiga 500 and laserdisc.
- RAZE issue 8, June 1991: American Laser Games’ budgets and casts.
- ACE issue 40, January 1991, news and pp. 29–31: FMV as “an essential specification”; CDTV and CD-i timing; Nolan Bushnell at Intertainment ’90.
- Edge issue 6, March 1994, “featureview: FMV”: MPEG, encoding times and the standfirst.
- Edge issue 11, August 1994, pp. 24–26, The 11th Hour prescreen: The 7th Guest’s millionth sale; 65 minutes of video on two discs; Graeme Devine’s wavelet system. p. 50, CD-i feature: the Digital Video cartridge, 74 minutes, the background plane; Ian Hadley and Peter Jones; Space Ace.
- Digital Press issue 41, September 1999, p. 8: Rob Fulop’s biography; the Hasbro interactive movies, 1986–1988, Sewer Shark and Night Trap, and Digital Pictures’ two best-selling CD titles.
- Retro Gamer issue 114, May 2013, p. 93: Mark Turmell on the NEMO project, Night Trap and its cancellation; Demon Attack.
- Sega Visions, November/December 1992: Night Trap and Sewer Shark in the Sega CD launch line-up; S.C.A.T., the traps and the budget. April/May 1994, pp. 11–12: Bill White on the withdrawal; Ken Williams’s guest editorial.
- Computer Gaming World issue 115, February 1994, p. 8: Johnny L. Wilson’s editorial on the hearings. Issue 108, July 1993, p. 54: The 7th Guest, 36 minutes, green screen, Bill Gates. Issue 125, December 1994, p. 248: Charles Ardai, Wing Commander III launch and preview. Issue 136, November 1995, pp. 62–64: Arinn Dembo, Phantasmagoria review. Issue 165, April 1998: Martin Cirulis, “What’s the Deal With… The Death of FMV?”
- Edge issue 14, November 1994, p. 34: Burn:Cycle prescreen and David Collier.
- Wireframe issue 13, May 2019, pp. 19–20: Sam Barlow and Her Story. Issue 19, July 2019, p. 12: Her Story and Telling Lies. Issue 21, August 2019, pp. 18–22, Steven T. Wright, “FMV’s unlikely revival”: Night Trap’s 25th anniversary edition, Rob Fulop, Contradiction, The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker, cheap HD cameras.
- Wireframe issue 24, October 2019, pp. 59–60: Telling Lies review.