The format of full -screen video games was fashionable for a miniature period in the 90s. High quality video playback – video! – It was revolutionary on the home computer.
But FMV games were quickly forgetful. It was partly caused by the development of 3D graphics on more powerful home consoles, such as PlayStation 2, but also the quality of games: of course visually impressive, but many of them were not as interactive as anyone who wanted, for example, actually play a video game so that I would like .
However, as Barlow and Justin Mcelroy discuss in this fragment of the interview, having really high quality video material does not necessarily make the game seem more interactive. And older FMV found frosty ways of working as part of their limitations.
The interview was conducted in September 2024 as part of the issue our document Great game: Creating SpycraftAbout one of the most ambitious FMV games of the 90s. You can watch the whole interview above.
Justin Mcelroy: Sam, let me ask you when you talk about games you have recently created, do you like the term “FMV game”? Do you consider it useful? Have you learned to live with it?
Mcelroy: Night trap Playing in it can generate tension even now. He still hits. As if you enter the room and see that someone is dying because you didn’t catch Auger on time … I mean, it works.
For the first time I was thrown the term “FMV game” and it was the only time I showed it Her story publicly. Because when I created Her storyI had no money, and my ambitions were very tiny and I knew that I was doing this strange little thing. I will just do it and I think it’s fun, and we’ll see what the world will think about it. And I didn’t have money for a game of game showers. But there was one program, it was a resident in London, with a strange, independent thread in the basement – now I erasure the name – where if they chose your game, you didn’t have to pay. You usually have to pay a lot of money to have a stand or anything else. So I took Her story To this, when he was basically finished. So I wasn’t going to get any useful players of players. If people didn’t like it, I was screwed. And I was like that too I don’t think this is a game that works on the dance floor! Games that people love on the dance floor are fun games for viewers, multiplayer games or fun action games …
Mcelroy: It’s like imagine trying to shout out someone else: “You must adjust the logical value! This is a logical value! You must adjust the taxonomy! “
But a journalist from PC Gamer came to me, it seems who watched the game and said: “Oh, it’s really interesting.” They told me: “What made you decide to resurrect the FMV species?” And it was really the first time I thought: Oh, damn it, that’s what I’m doing. Immediately after that I returned home and thought: I really have to find out about FMV games. People asked me about it and-because when they left, I didn’t have a CD-ROM drive at the peak of the FMV game boom. And I’ve always thought they looked amazing. I was looking at the pages of my magazines about computer games, I saw these screenshots and said: Oh! Yes, I remember such an era when 7. Guest He was a hit, and Bill Gates said it was the future of video games. It was like It’s amazing.
Mcelroy: You mentioned what consists of the FMV game, and you came across – in several different games – for this player awareness or awareness that the player is watching what is happening on the screen. And it is strange; I wonder why it seems that FMV games generate much more traffic. But when I think about the older classic Canal shark, night trapEven such things Wire head And the like, it is largely about the characters on the screen talking to the player. And I feel that this is a substantial change. This is something that distinguishes FMV games, i.e. a tendency to be aware of the player’s presence.
The guy who ran this company – an extremely passionate, excited guy, loves video games – he played in the venerable days in many FMV games and often came to things from the perspective “interactive story story is so magical.” If I go and play Telltale, play The Walking corpsePeople are very involved. When I play in Call of Duty, I feel much more in action than in a movie. So he said: “An ordinary video game is so addictive and gives the impression of magical. Imagine How It will be magical if it looks like reality.
And my amendment was: “This is a problem.” When I play Telltale’s The Walking corpseAnd I see these somewhat nervous 3D characters moving, doing different things, I click the user interface and everything, by nature, I know that this is a mechanical toy. And when a mechanical toy does something cool, I say: Oh, a mechanical toy did a really nice thing! It’s more complicated than I thoughtOr It’s more surprising than I thought. Or Wow, I was emotional related to this toy. This is cool. When you showed people interactive video – and they conducted some cool internal experiments that were quite clever – because people are used to sitting and watching live actions constantly. Movies, television, whatever. Part of their brain that is playing with it does not realize that it is a clever toy, and if you do it correctly, if you make it cut smoothly and do not look like a bad TV, I am not even … You know, you know, I don’t realize It is a thing that what I do brings that there is some reactivity in it. And indeed, being a great live actor was a problem. We know that if you play Telltale, every thing I click on has immediate consequences in the narrative. A large part is smoke and mirrors. There is a kind of weave of history trees and other things. So if we consider a little coarse game interface – if we consider the fact that when I see an animated 3D character, I know that it works in real time – if we remove it and replace it and replace a neat, smoothly assembled video, even if it is incredibly reactive and clever , I don’t realize it so much.
So I think that probably all this issue of being aware of the player, I don’t know if people have just discovered it, right? And I know it Night trapThere were many research and development work behind it, right? There were several iterations of this technology. So I think that at some point they realized that we must strongly put the first plan and overshadow this thing and think: Hey, you, player, you have control. Welcome to Channel shark! Normal?
Mcelroy: I wonder if the games like Her storyAnd I suppose that several other people have used a similar structure in which you navigate between scenes when you make decisions, instead of trying to maintain the illusion of being immersed in something. I think that many FMV games encounter this problem: if you don’t interact with them, what are they doing with you? Because I think that every time you delve into it, for example – you will see them especially in older games – this one -second looped animation that a person … When you are in a room with a FMV character, and she just walking and I can barely wait for You click anything at all.
Every weekend we will publish more fragments of the conversation by Barlow and Justin Mcelroy. You can read the first of them, how Netflix killed interactive entertainment here.
