The full movement video game format was the last anger for a short period of time in the nineties. The ability to play high-quality video to play video! – was revolutionary on a home computer.
But FMV games went quickly on the track. This was partly due to the increase in 3D graphics on more powerful home consoles such as the PlayStation 2 would want a video game.
But as Sam Barlow and Justin Mcelroy discuss in this interview extract, a game does not necessarily feel more interactive. And the older FMVs found cool paths to work within their restrictions.
This interview was carried out in September 2024 as part of the publication of Our documentary The great game: the production of SpycraftAbout one of the most ambitious FMV games of the 90s. You can see the full interview above.
Justin Mcelroy: Sam, let me ask when you talk about the kind of games you have made recently, do you like the term “FMV games”? Do you find it useful? Did you learn to live with it?
Sam Barlow: I don't like it in the sense of a game history and I care about it – and I don't like to have to explain it to people not Do you know what FMV is. So if someone else imagines someone who is not connected to games and they say: “Oh, Sam makes FMV games”, it is like: “What is it? What does that mean? “And you have to explain, yes, there was a time when you played video when you played video. Cool digital videoAnd it was like eight frames. Yes, there was this moment when the ability to actually play video at full speed was a magical new technology. Obviously this is a specific technological point. […] I think before I do it Their storyI was like An FMV game is expressly a game that was made in this phase. Many of them fall into a similar bracket. And there are some that I think is cool than the general consensus – I think Night trap – You actually thought about it, right?
Mcelroy: Night trap Can create tension that she still plays now. It still hits. For example, when you go to a room and be killed someone because you didn't catch the snail in time … I mean it works.
Barlow: I think a lot of what we think about FMV games “badly” is that you choose more of your own adventure, which looks like. Hey, that's a film and you can choose A or B. I think the biggest sin of classic FMV games is when they are how Hey, this is a video game, we should have some, like … life or death, real-time gameplay. And then it gets bad, right because they have neither the simulation nor the analog nature. Night trapAnd another game that I think is probably not objective, something like voyeurAt least these games go Hey, video is about seeing. Is there a kind of game mechanic or an idea that we can come up with that recognizes the observation? When Night trap Was nearby [in] Most games embody an avatar, they move in the room, they are very closed. Then Night trap is how, Oh, no, no, no, you look through cameras, you can ping, ping, ping, ping [from camera to camera]. This is a cool idea. We will see something like that Five nights at Freddy's A little later. This is the FMV game period. And I know that they are things like things like Myst in, but in my head … supposedly Myst – and especially Riven – is an FMV game, it is a game that consists of several video clips that are lined up. I don't keep that in my head in the same place.
The first time that the expression “FMV game” was thrown on me, it was the only time I've ever shown Their story public. Because when I did Their storyI had no money and my ambitions were very small and I knew that I would do this strange little thing. I will just make it and I think it's cool and we will see what the world thinks. And I didn't have the money to travel to game shows. But there was a show that was opened in London, had a strange little indie -cellar -I had the name in the name -where they didn't have to pay if they had to choose their game. Usually you have to pay a lot of money to have a stand or whatever. So I took Their story to this when it was essentially finished. So I wouldn't get a useful player feedback. If people didn't like it, I was screwed. And I was like I don't think this is a game that works in a show floor! The games that people love on the exhibition floor are the funny spectators or the multiplayer mode or the fun action.
Mcelroy: Imagine trying to look for someone else: “You have to adapt the Boolean! It is the Boolesche! You have to adjust the taxonomy! “
Barlow: So I took Their storyAnd actually it was very comforting because I immediately remember that a man sat down and we had to get started because he played with headphones, and 40 minutes later we said: “Hey age, there are some other people there [waiting to] Play. “So that was cool.
But I let a PC Gamer journalist come to me who had seen the game, and they said: “Oh, that's really interesting.” They said to me: “Why did you get the FMV genre to revive? ” And that was really the first time when I thought Oh, shit, yes, I do that. And immediately afterwards I went home and I thought I actually have to learn about FMV games. People asked me about it and-when they came out, I had no CD-ROM drive at the height of the FMV game boom. And I always thought they looked fantastic. I would go through the pages of my PC game magazines and they would see and go these screenshots, Whoa! I remember this kind of era when 7. Guest I did and Bill Gates said it was the future of the video game. It was like Whoa, that's incredible.
Mcelroy: You mentioned what an FMV game is, and in some different games you have stimulated this awareness of the player or the awareness that the player happens on the screen. And it's strange; I wonder why it looks like FMV games to pass so much more. But when I think older about the classic Kanalhai, night trapeven things like Wirkopf And something like that, it's very about the characters on the screen that speak to the player. And I have the feeling that this is a big shift. It is something that distinguishes FMV games, the tendency to be aware of the presence of the player.
Barlow: I think there is also a reason for this. When I worked with [production company] Eko, I remember that I was in so many meetings where I had to explain to people: “What is a video game? Why is that cool? “But I also had to be the negative voice in the room.
The guy who led this company – extremely passionate, excitedly a guy, loves video games – played many FMV games in the old days, and he often came from the perspective of “interactive storytelling is so magical”. When I play a treacherous game, they play The Walk deadPeople are so committed. When I play Call of Duty, I feel so much more in action than in a film. So he came out: “A normal video game is so involved and feels so magical. Introduce How It will feel magical when it looks like reality. ”
And my correction was to go: “Here is the problem.” When I play Telltale The Walk deadAnd I see these slightly rejuvenating 3D characters moving around, and I click through the user interface and everything, I know by nature that this is a mechanical toy. And if the mechanical toy makes something cool, I am like Oh wow, the mechanical toy did a really cool thing! It's more complicated than I thoughtor It is more surprising than I thought. Or Wow, they felt feelings about this toy. This is cool. When they show people interactive video -and they had some cool internal experiments that were pretty smooth -because people are used to sitting down all the time and looking live action. Films, television, whatever. The part of your brain who enjoys it does not realize that it is a clever toy, and if you do it right if you do it so that it cuts it smoothly and does not look like bad television, I'm not even – even – You know I do not recognize that the things I do have an effect that there is reactivity there. In fact, it was a beautiful live action to be a problem. We know that if you play a treacherous game, to what extent every single thing I click on has an immediate consequence in the story. Much of it is smoke and mirror. There is a kind of knot of stories trees and things. So if you take some of these chunky game surfaces -if you assume the fact that when I see an animated 3D character, I know that it is carried out in real time -if you take it away and smoothly edited by smooth, Replace video even if it is incredibly reactive and smart, I don't notice it so much.
So I think that I am probably aware of the whole thing with the player. I don't know if this was something that people just discovered, right? And I know that Night trapThere was a lot of research and development behind it, right? There were several iterations of the technology. I think at some point they somehow recognized, we have to have this thing very much and how to have lamp shadows and how Hey, you, the player, you have control. Welcome to Channel shark! Right?
Mcelroy: I wonder if games like Their storyAnd I think a couple of their others have used a similar structure in which they navigate between scenes instead of trying to maintain an illusion, to be immersed in these moments of decision. I think that many FMV games fight against this thing if they don't actively interact with them, what do they do with them? Because I think that at any time when you respond to how you will see in older games diese with a second that a person … if you are in the room with an FMV character and she was waiting Just a kind of ambulation and hardly wait for you to click on anything at all.
Barlow: That was one of the great innovations. I don't know if you played Erica, That came out on Playstation, I think that was one of her great technical innovations […] You could have several video layers. So if you had a character loop, you could have the character loop on a five-second loop or a 10-second loop, but then you could have the background construction connection on a 20-second loop and then the cigarette smoke in the ashtray on a different loop. So you would have more ability to cheat this thing. Because we are so well recognized, right? In the second, in which you see the Loop Hologram, you are how, Wait a minute, I'm in the matrixOr whatever. It directs to itself.
Every weekend we will carry out more excerpts from this conversation between Sam Barlow and Justin Mcelroy. You can read the first how Netflix killed interactive entertainment here.
