Full motion video
Encyclopedia
Full motion video based games are video games that rely upon pre-recorded TV
-quality movie
or animation
rather than sprites, vectors
, or 3D models to display action in the game. In the early 1990s a diverse set of games utilized this format. Most games' mechanics resemble those of modern music/dance games
, where the player timely presses buttons according to a screen instruction. Other games were early rail shooters such as Tomcat Alley
, Surgical Strike
and Sewer Shark
. Full motion video also allowed the creation of several interactive movie
adventure game
s, such as The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
, and Phantasmagoria. Some games, like the Command and Conquer series, use Full Motion Video to drive the storyline, but not to play the game.
as CD-ROM
s and Laserdisc
s made their way into the living rooms, providing an alternative to the low-capacity cartridges of most consoles
. Although many games did manage to look better than most sprite-based games, they were a niche market—a vast majority of FMV games were panned at the time of their release, and most gamers dislike the lack of interaction inherent of these games. This format became a well-known failure in video gaming. The popularity of FMV games declined after around 1995, as more advanced consoles were released.
Cost was also an issue, as these games were often very expensive to produce: Ground Zero: Texas
cost Sega
around US$3 million, about the same as a low-budget movie would cost in 1994. Others attracted Hollywood
stars such as Isaac Hayes
, noted R&B
singer/songwriter and performer (Shaft
), who appeared in Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, Dana Plato
(Diff'rent Strokes
, cast for Night Trap
), Debbie Harry
(lead singer of Blondie
hired for Double Switch), and Ron Stein
(fight coordinator of Rocky
and Raging Bull, who was hired as director for Sega's boxing game Prize Fighter).
Another issue that drew criticism was the quality of the video itself. While the video was often relatively smooth, it was not actually "full motion" as it was not of 24 frames per second or higher. In addition to this, the hardware it was displayed on, particularly in the case of the Sega CD, had a limited color palette (of which a maximum of 64 colors were displayable simultaneously), resulting in notably inferior image quality due to the requirement of dithering. The content was also a point of some criticism, as many FMV games featured real actors and dialogue, which was problematic if the acting itself was poor.
As the first CD-based consoles capable of displaying smooth and textured 3D graphics appeared, the full-FMV game fad vanished from the mainstream circles around 1995, although it remained an option for PC adventure games for a couple more years. One of the last titles released was the 1998 PC and PlayStation adventure The X-Files: The Game
, packed in 7 CDs.
to use full motion video was Nintendo
's 1974 light gun shooter
Wild Gunman
, which used video projection from 16 mm film
to display live-action cowboy
opponents on a projection screen
. The earliest known video game to use full motion video was The Driver, an action
-racing game released by Kasco (Kansai Seiki Seisakusho Co.) in the 1970s that also used 16 mm film. It required the player to match their steering wheel
, gas pedal and brakes with the movements shown on screen, presenting dangerous situations
much like those seen in the laserdisc video games that appeared the following decade.
The first laserdisc video game
to utilize full-motion video was Astron Belt
by Sega
. It was soon followed by the more successful Dragon's Lair
by Cinematronics
featuring animation by Don Bluth
. While laserdisc games were usually either shooter game
s with full-motion video backdrops like Astron Belt or interactive movie
s like Dragon's Lair, Data East
's 1983 game Bega's Battle introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cut scenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Years later, this would become the standard approach to video game storytelling. Bega's Battle also featured a branching storyline. Another early instance of FMV was Hasbro
's unreleased video game system
named NEMO, which had begun production in 1985. The NEMO home system created games with VHS
tapes rather than ROM
cartridges or floppy disks.
In the early 1990s when PCs
and consoles moved to creating games on a CD
, they became technically capable of utilizing more than a few minutes' worth of movies in a game. This gave rise to a slew of FMV-based computer games such as Night Trap
(1992), The 7th Guest
(1992), Voyeur (1993), Phantasmagoria
(1995), and Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT
(1995). These FMV game
s frequently used D-list (or worse) movie and TV actor
s and promised to create the experience of playing an interactive movie. However, production values were quite low with amateurish sets, lighting, costumes, and special effects. In addition, the video quality in these early games was low, and the gameplay frequently did not live up to the hype
becoming well-known failures in video gaming. At this time, consoles like 3DO
, CD-i
, and Sega CD borrowed this concept for several low-quality interactive games.
Also, the "multimedia
" phenomenon that was exploding in popularity at the time increased the popularity of FMV because consumers were excited by this new emerging interactive technology. The personal computer was rapidly evolving during the early-mid 1990s from a simple text-based productivity device into a home entertainment machine. Gaming itself was also emerging from its niche market into the mainstream with the release of easier-to-use and more powerful operating systems, such as Microsoft's Windows 95
, that leveraged continually evolving processing capabilities.
Video game consoles too saw incredible gains in presentation quality and contributed to the mass market's growth in awareness of gaming. It was during the 1990s that the video/computer game industry first beat Hollywood in earnings. Sony
made its debut in the console market with the release of the 32-bit
PlayStation
. The PlayStation was probably the first console to popularize FMVs (as opposed to earlier usage of FMV which was seen as a passing fad). A part of the machine's hardware was a dedicated M-JPEG
processing unit which enabled far superior quality relative to other platforms of the time. The FMVs in Final Fantasy VIII
, for example, were marketed as movie-quality at the time.
FMV in games today consists of high quality pre-rendered video sequences (CGI
). These sequences are created in similar ways as computer generated effects in movies. Use of FMV as a selling point or focus has diminished in modern times. This is primarily due to graphical advancements in modern video game systems making it possible for in-game cinematics to have just as impressive visual quality. Digitized video footage of real actors in games generally ended for mainstream games in the early '00s with a few exceptions such as Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
, released in 2007.
until the fastest 486 and Pentium CPUs arrived. Consoles, on the other hand, either used a third-party codec (e.g. Cinepak
for Sega CD games) or used their own proprietary format (e.g. the Philips CD-i
). Video quality steadily increased as CPUs became more powerful to support higher quality video compression and decompression. The 7th Guest
, one of the first megahit multiple-CD-ROM games, was one of the first games to feature transparent
quality 640x320 FMV at 15 frames per second in a custom format designed by programmer Graeme Devine
.
Other examples of this would be Sierra
's VMD (Video and Music Data) format, used in games like Gabriel Knight 2
and Phantasmagoria, or Westwood Studios
' VQA
format, used in most Westwood games made from the mid-1990s up until 2000's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Firestorm
. These video formats initially offered very limited video quality, due to the limitations of the machines the games needed to run on. Ghosting and distortion of high-motion scenes, heavy pixelization, and limited color palettes were prominent visual problems. However, each game pushed the technological envelope and was typically seen as impressive even with quality issues.
Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, was the first FMV title made by a Hollywood Studio. Sony Imagesoft spent over US$ 3 Million on the title. Instead of piecing together the title with filmed assets from their movie (directed by Robert Longo
) of the same name, Sony hired Propaganda Code director Douglas Gayeton to write and film an entirely new storyline for the property. The CD-ROM's interactivity was made possible with the Cine-Active engine, based on the Quicktime
2.0 codec.
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
was one of the most significant FMV titles made in 1994, featuring big-name Hollywood actors. The video quality in the game suffered significantly from the aforementioned problems and was almost visually indecipherable in parts; however, this did not stop the title from earning significant praise for its innovative gameplay/FMV combination. Its sequel, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom
, used a similar custom movie codec in its CD-ROM release, but a later limited-volume DVD-ROM release saw MPEG-2
DVD-quality movies that far exceeded the original CD release in quality. A hardware decoder card was required at the time to play back the DVD-quality video on a PC. Wing Commander IV was also the first game to have used actual film (rather than video tape) to record the FMV scenes which attributed to the ability to create a DVD-quality transfer.
An exception to the rule was The 11th Hour
, the sequel to The 7th Guest
. 11th Hour featured 640x480 FMV at 30 frames-per-second on 4 CDs. The development team had worked for three years on developing a format that could handle the video, as the director of the live-action sequences had not shot the FMV sequences in a way that could be easily compressed. However, this proved to be the game's downfall, as most computers of the day could not play the full-resolution video. Users were usually forced to select an option which played the videos at a quarter-size resolution in black-and-white.
As FMV established itself in the market as a growing game technology, a small company called RAD Game Tools
appeared on the market with their 256-color FMV format Smacker
. Developers took to the format, and the format ended up being used in over 3,000 games.
As the popularity of games loaded with live-action and FMV faded out in the late 1990s, and with Smacker becoming outdated in the world of 16-bit color games, RAD introduced a new true-color format, Bink video
. Developers quickly took to the format because of its high compression ratios and videogame-tailored features. The format is still one of the most popular FMV formats used in games today. 4,000 games have used Bink, and the number is still growing.
Windows Media Video
, DivX
, and Theora
are also becoming major players in the market. DivX
is used in several Nintendo GameCube
titles, including Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike
.
Television
Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...
-quality movie
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...
or animation
Animation
Animation is the rapid display of a sequence of images of 2-D or 3-D artwork or model positions in order to create an illusion of movement. The effect is an optical illusion of motion due to the phenomenon of persistence of vision, and can be created and demonstrated in several ways...
rather than sprites, vectors
Vector graphics
Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon, which are all based on mathematical expressions, to represent images in computer graphics...
, or 3D models to display action in the game. In the early 1990s a diverse set of games utilized this format. Most games' mechanics resemble those of modern music/dance games
Music video game
A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, is a video game where the gameplay is meaningfully and often almost entirely oriented around the player's interactions with a musical score or individual songs...
, where the player timely presses buttons according to a screen instruction. Other games were early rail shooters such as Tomcat Alley
Tomcat Alley
Tomcat Alley is an interactive movie FMV video game developed by The Code Monkeys for Mega-CD. It was the first, and only, Mega-CD game to feature extensive full screen, full motion video...
, Surgical Strike
Surgical Strike (video game)
Surgical Strike is a full motion video based video game developed by The Code Monkeys and published by Sega of America. It was released on November 16, 1993, although some sources suggest that it was first sold in 1994 or 1995. It is best known as Joe Flanigan's filmographic debut.A 32X CD version...
and Sewer Shark
Sewer Shark
Sewer Shark is a first-person rail shooter game, the first video game for a game console to use full-motion video for its primary gameplay. It was originally slated to be the flagship product in Hasbro's NEMO video game system, which would use VHS tapes as its medium. However, Hasbro cancelled the...
. Full motion video also allowed the creation of several interactive movie
Interactive movie
An interactive movie is a video game that features highly cinematic presentation and heavy use of scripting, often through the use of full-motion video of either animated or live-action footage.-Philosophy:...
adventure game
Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving instead of physical challenge. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media such as literature and film,...
s, such as The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery
The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery is a computer adventure game released by Sierra On-Line in 1995. Unlike the first Gabriel Knight game, released in 1993, The Beast Within was produced entirely in full motion video...
, and Phantasmagoria. Some games, like the Command and Conquer series, use Full Motion Video to drive the storyline, but not to play the game.
Description
FMV-based games were popular during the early 1990s1990s
File:1990s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: The Hubble Space Telescope floats in space after it was taken up in 1990; American F-16s and F-15s fly over burning oil fields and the USA Lexie in Operation Desert Storm, also known as the 1991 Gulf War; The signing of the Oslo Accords on...
as CD-ROM
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM is a pre-pressed compact disc that contains data accessible to, but not writable by, a computer for data storage and music playback. The 1985 “Yellow Book” standard developed by Sony and Philips adapted the format to hold any form of binary data....
s and Laserdisc
Laserdisc
LaserDisc was a home video format and the first commercial optical disc storage medium. Initially licensed, sold, and marketed as MCA DiscoVision in North America in 1978, the technology was previously referred to interally as Optical Videodisc System, Reflective Optical Videodisc, Laser Optical...
s made their way into the living rooms, providing an alternative to the low-capacity cartridges of most consoles
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
. Although many games did manage to look better than most sprite-based games, they were a niche market—a vast majority of FMV games were panned at the time of their release, and most gamers dislike the lack of interaction inherent of these games. This format became a well-known failure in video gaming. The popularity of FMV games declined after around 1995, as more advanced consoles were released.
Cost was also an issue, as these games were often very expensive to produce: Ground Zero: Texas
Ground Zero: Texas
Ground Zero: Texas is a full motion video game, released for the Sega Mega-CD in November 1993. The game relies heavily on video footage, with which the player interacts. It contains 110 minutes of interactive footage from four different cameras. It was directed by Dwight H...
cost Sega
Sega
, usually styled as SEGA, is a multinational video game software developer and an arcade software and hardware development company headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan, with various offices around the world...
around US$3 million, about the same as a low-budget movie would cost in 1994. Others attracted Hollywood
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Hollywood is a famous district in Los Angeles, California, United States situated west-northwest of downtown Los Angeles. Due to its fame and cultural identity as the historical center of movie studios and movie stars, the word Hollywood is often used as a metonym of American cinema...
stars such as Isaac Hayes
Isaac Hayes
Isaac Lee Hayes, Jr. was an American songwriter, musician, singer and actor. Hayes was one of the creative influences behind the southern soul music label Stax Records, where he served both as an in-house songwriter and as a record producer, teaming with his partner David Porter during the...
, noted R&B
Rhythm and blues
Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a...
singer/songwriter and performer (Shaft
Shaft (1971 film)
Shaft is a 1971 American blaxploitation film directed by Gordon Parks, released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. An action film with elements of film noir, Shaft tells the story of a black private detective, John Shaft, who travels through Harlem and to the Italian mob neighborhoods in order to find the...
), who appeared in Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, Dana Plato
Dana Plato
Dana Michelle Plato was an American actress notable for playing the role of Kimberly Drummond in the U.S. television sitcom Diff'rent Strokes.Plato appeared in over 100 television commercials as a young girl...
(Diff'rent Strokes
Diff'rent Strokes
Diff'rent Strokes is an American television sitcom that aired on NBC from November 3, 1978 to May 4, 1985, and on ABC from September 27, 1985 to March 7, 1986...
, cast for Night Trap
Night Trap
Night Trap is a video game that was released in North America on October 15, 1992 originally for the Sega Mega-CD. It was filmed over a three week period in 1987 for an unreleased game entitled "Scene of the Crime"...
), Debbie Harry
Debbie Harry
Deborah Ann "Debbie" Harry is an American singer-songwriter and actress, best known for being the lead singer of the punk rock and new wave band Blondie. She has also had success as a solo artist, and in the mid-1990s she performed and recorded as part of The Jazz Passengers...
(lead singer of Blondie
Blondie (band)
Blondie is an American rock band, founded by singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein. The band was a pioneer in the early American New Wave and punk scenes of the mid-1970s...
hired for Double Switch), and Ron Stein
Ron Stein
Ronald Arthur "Ron" Stein was an American athlete who competed at the inaugural Summer Paralympic Games held in Rome in 1960.-Early life:...
(fight coordinator of Rocky
Rocky
Rocky is a 1976 American sports drama film directed by John G. Avildsen and both written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. It tells the rags to riches American Dream story of Rocky Balboa, an uneducated but kind-hearted debt collector for a loan shark in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...
and Raging Bull, who was hired as director for Sega's boxing game Prize Fighter).
Another issue that drew criticism was the quality of the video itself. While the video was often relatively smooth, it was not actually "full motion" as it was not of 24 frames per second or higher. In addition to this, the hardware it was displayed on, particularly in the case of the Sega CD, had a limited color palette (of which a maximum of 64 colors were displayable simultaneously), resulting in notably inferior image quality due to the requirement of dithering. The content was also a point of some criticism, as many FMV games featured real actors and dialogue, which was problematic if the acting itself was poor.
As the first CD-based consoles capable of displaying smooth and textured 3D graphics appeared, the full-FMV game fad vanished from the mainstream circles around 1995, although it remained an option for PC adventure games for a couple more years. One of the last titles released was the 1998 PC and PlayStation adventure The X-Files: The Game
The X-Files: The Game
Reviews of the game were mixed, with many critics complaining about the large number of discs required to load the game...
, packed in 7 CDs.
Origins
The earliest known electro-mechanical arcade gameArcade game
An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, and merchandisers...
to use full motion video was Nintendo
Nintendo
is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel....
's 1974 light gun shooter
Light gun shooter
Light gun shooter, also called light gun game or simply gun game, is a shooter video game genre in which the primary design element is aiming and shooting with a gun-shaped controller. Light gun shooters revolve around the protagonist shooting targets, either antagonists or inanimate objects...
Wild Gunman
Wild Gunman
is a light gun shooter game created by Nintendo.-Early version:The original version of Wild Gunman was one of Nintendo's electro-mechanical arcade games created by Gunpei Yokoi and released in 1974. It consisted of a light gun connected to a 16mm projection screen...
, which used video projection from 16 mm film
16 mm film
16 mm film refers to a popular, economical gauge of film used for motion pictures and non-theatrical film making. 16 mm refers to the width of the film...
to display live-action cowboy
Cowboy
A cowboy is an animal herder who tends cattle on ranches in North America, traditionally on horseback, and often performs a multitude of other ranch-related tasks. The historic American cowboy of the late 19th century arose from the vaquero traditions of northern Mexico and became a figure of...
opponents on a projection screen
Projection screen
A projection screen is an installation consisting of a surface and a support structure used for displaying a projected image for the view of an audience. Projection screens may be permanently installed, as in a movie theater; painted on the wall; or semi-permanent or mobile, as in a conference room...
. The earliest known video game to use full motion video was The Driver, an action
Action game
Action game is a video game genre that emphasizes physical challenges, including hand–eye coordination and reaction-time. The genre includes diverse subgenres such as fighting games, shooter games, and platform games, which are widely considered the most important action games, though some...
-racing game released by Kasco (Kansai Seiki Seisakusho Co.) in the 1970s that also used 16 mm film. It required the player to match their steering wheel
Racing wheel
A racing wheel is the preferred method of control for use in racing video games, racing simulators, and driving simulators. They are usually packaged with a large paddle styled as a steering wheel, along with a set of pedals for gas, brake, and sometimes clutch actuation, as well as various shifter...
, gas pedal and brakes with the movements shown on screen, presenting dangerous situations
Quick Time Event
In video games, a Quick Time Event is a method of context-sensitive gameplay in which the player performs actions on the control device shortly after the appearance of an on-screen prompt. It allows for limited control of the game character during cut scenes or cinematic sequences in the game...
much like those seen in the laserdisc video games that appeared the following decade.
The first laserdisc video game
Laserdisc video game
A laserdisc video game is an arcade game that uses pre-recorded video played from a laserdisc, either as the entirety of the graphics, or as part of the graphics.-History:...
to utilize full-motion video was Astron Belt
Astron Belt
Astron Belt is an early laserdisc video game and third-person space combat rail shooter, released in 1983 by Sega in Japan and licensed to Bally Midway for release in the United States. Developed in 1982, it is commonly cited as the first laserdisc game...
by Sega
Sega
, usually styled as SEGA, is a multinational video game software developer and an arcade software and hardware development company headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, Japan, with various offices around the world...
. It was soon followed by the more successful Dragon's Lair
Dragon's Lair
Dragon's Lair is a laserdisc video game published by Cinematronics in 1983. It featured animation created by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth....
by Cinematronics
Cinematronics
Cinematronics Incorporated was a pioneering arcade game developer that had its heyday in the era of vector display games. While other companies released games based on raster displays, early in their history, Cinematronics and Atari released vector-display games, which offered a distinctive look...
featuring animation by Don Bluth
Don Bluth
Donald Virgil "Don" Bluth is an American animator and independent studio owner. He is best known for his departure from The Walt Disney Company in 1979 and his subsequent directing of animated films such as The Secret of NIMH , An American Tail ,The Land Before Time , and All Dogs Go to Heaven ,...
. While laserdisc games were usually either shooter game
Shooter game
Shooter games are a sub-genre of action game, which often test the player's speed and reaction time. It includes many subgenres that have the commonality of focusing "on the actions of the avatar using some sort of weapon. Usually this weapon is a gun, or some other long-range weapon". A common...
s with full-motion video backdrops like Astron Belt or interactive movie
Interactive movie
An interactive movie is a video game that features highly cinematic presentation and heavy use of scripting, often through the use of full-motion video of either animated or live-action footage.-Philosophy:...
s like Dragon's Lair, Data East
Data East
also abbreviated as DECO, was a Japanese video game developer and publisher. The company was in operation from 1976 to 2003, when it declared bankruptcy...
's 1983 game Bega's Battle introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cut scenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Years later, this would become the standard approach to video game storytelling. Bega's Battle also featured a branching storyline. Another early instance of FMV was Hasbro
Hasbro
Hasbro is a multinational toy and boardgame company from the United States of America. It is one of the largest toy makers in the world. The corporate headquarters is located in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, United States...
's unreleased video game system
Video game console
A video game console is an interactive entertainment computer or customized computer system that produces a video display signal which can be used with a display device to display a video game...
named NEMO, which had begun production in 1985. The NEMO home system created games with VHS
VHS
The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
tapes rather than ROM
Read-only memory
Read-only memory is a class of storage medium used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM cannot be modified, or can be modified only slowly or with difficulty, so it is mainly used to distribute firmware .In its strictest sense, ROM refers only...
cartridges or floppy disks.
In the early 1990s when PCs
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
and consoles moved to creating games on a CD
Compact Disc
The Compact Disc is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store and playback sound recordings exclusively, but later expanded to encompass data storage , write-once audio and data storage , rewritable media , Video Compact Discs , Super Video Compact Discs ,...
, they became technically capable of utilizing more than a few minutes' worth of movies in a game. This gave rise to a slew of FMV-based computer games such as Night Trap
Night Trap
Night Trap is a video game that was released in North America on October 15, 1992 originally for the Sega Mega-CD. It was filmed over a three week period in 1987 for an unreleased game entitled "Scene of the Crime"...
(1992), The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest, produced by Trilobyte and released by Virgin Games in 1993, is an FMV-based puzzle video game. It was one of the first computer video games to be released only on CD-ROM. The 7th Guest is a horror story told from the unfolding perspective of the player, as an amnesiac...
(1992), Voyeur (1993), Phantasmagoria
Phantasmagoria (computer game)
Phantasmagoria was a notable outing for designer Roberta Williams, best known for her family games like the King's Quest series. Featuring graphic gore, violence, and a rape scene, the game stirred controversy over age restrictions and target audiences in the maturing game industry. It was banned...
(1995), and Daryl F. Gates' Police Quest: SWAT
SWAT series
The SWAT series are the follow-up of Sierra's classic adventure game series Police Quest. The adventure game decreased in popularity by the mid-nineties and Jim Walls, the former series designer, left Sierra and was replaced by real-life SWAT founder Daryl F. Gates. After Gates released Open...
(1995). These FMV game
FMV game
- 1983 :* Astron Belt* Cliff Hanger* Dragon's Lair* Firefox- 1984 :* Cobra Command* Ninja Hayate* Space Ace* Thayer's Quest- 1991 :* Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp* Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective* Time Traveler* Who Shot Johnny Rock?- 1992 :...
s frequently used D-list (or worse) movie and TV actor
Actor
An actor is a person who acts in a dramatic production and who works in film, television, theatre, or radio in that capacity...
s and promised to create the experience of playing an interactive movie. However, production values were quite low with amateurish sets, lighting, costumes, and special effects. In addition, the video quality in these early games was low, and the gameplay frequently did not live up to the hype
Hype
Hype may refer to:*A media circus*Hype , 1981 album by Robert Calvert*Hype , American comedy television series*Hype!, documentary about the popularity of grunge rock in the early to mid 1990...
becoming well-known failures in video gaming. At this time, consoles like 3DO
3DO Interactive Multiplayer
The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer is a video game console originally produced by Panasonic in 1993. Further renditions of the hardware were released in 1994 by Sanyo and Goldstar. The consoles were manufactured according to specifications created by The 3DO Company, and were originally designed by...
, CD-i
CD-i
CD-i, or Compact Disc Interactive, is the name of an interactive multimedia CD player developed and marketed by Royal Philips Electronics N.V. CD-i also refers to the multimedia Compact Disc standard used by the CD-i console, also known as Green Book, which was developed by Philips and Sony...
, and Sega CD borrowed this concept for several low-quality interactive games.
Also, the "multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
" phenomenon that was exploding in popularity at the time increased the popularity of FMV because consumers were excited by this new emerging interactive technology. The personal computer was rapidly evolving during the early-mid 1990s from a simple text-based productivity device into a home entertainment machine. Gaming itself was also emerging from its niche market into the mainstream with the release of easier-to-use and more powerful operating systems, such as Microsoft's Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
, that leveraged continually evolving processing capabilities.
Video game consoles too saw incredible gains in presentation quality and contributed to the mass market's growth in awareness of gaming. It was during the 1990s that the video/computer game industry first beat Hollywood in earnings. Sony
Sony Computer Entertainment
Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. is a major video game company specializing in a variety of areas in the video game industry, and is a wholly owned subsidiary and part of the Consumer Products & Services Group of Sony...
made its debut in the console market with the release of the 32-bit
32-bit
The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB of byte-addressable memory....
PlayStation
PlayStation
The is a 32-bit fifth-generation video game console first released by Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan on December 3, .The PlayStation was the first of the PlayStation series of consoles and handheld game devices. The PlayStation 2 was the console's successor in 2000...
. The PlayStation was probably the first console to popularize FMVs (as opposed to earlier usage of FMV which was seen as a passing fad). A part of the machine's hardware was a dedicated M-JPEG
MJPEG
In multimedia, Motion JPEG is an informal name for a class of video formats where each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is separately compressed as a JPEG image...
processing unit which enabled far superior quality relative to other platforms of the time. The FMVs in Final Fantasy VIII
Final Fantasy VIII
is a role-playing video game released for the PlayStation in 1999 and for Windows-based personal computers in 2000. It was developed and published by Square as the Final Fantasy series' eighth title, removing magic point-based spell-casting and the first title to consistently use realistically...
, for example, were marketed as movie-quality at the time.
FMV in games today consists of high quality pre-rendered video sequences (CGI
Computer-generated imagery
Computer-generated imagery is the application of the field of computer graphics or, more specifically, 3D computer graphics to special effects in art, video games, films, television programs, commercials, simulators and simulation generally, and printed media...
). These sequences are created in similar ways as computer generated effects in movies. Use of FMV as a selling point or focus has diminished in modern times. This is primarily due to graphical advancements in modern video game systems making it possible for in-game cinematics to have just as impressive visual quality. Digitized video footage of real actors in games generally ended for mainstream games in the early '00s with a few exceptions such as Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed and published by Electronic Arts for the Windows, Mac OS X and Xbox 360 platforms, and released internationally in March 2007...
, released in 2007.
Formats
With the popularization of FMV games in the early 1990s following the advent of CD-ROM, higher-end developers usually created their own custom FMV formats to suit their needs. Early FMV titles used game-specific proprietary video renderers optimized for the content of the video (e.g. live-action vs. animated), because CPUs of the day were incapable of playing back real-time MPEG-1MPEG-1
MPEG-1 is a standard for lossy compression of video and audio. It is designed to compress VHS-quality raw digital video and CD audio down to 1.5 Mbit/s without excessive quality loss, making video CDs, digital cable/satellite TV and digital audio broadcasting possible.Today, MPEG-1 has become...
until the fastest 486 and Pentium CPUs arrived. Consoles, on the other hand, either used a third-party codec (e.g. Cinepak
Cinepak
Cinepak is a video codec developed by Peter Barrett at SuperMac Technologies, and released in 1991 with the Video Spigot, and then in 1992 as part of Apple Computer's QuickTime video suite. It was designed to encode 320x240 resolution video at 1x CD-ROM transfer rates. The codec was ported to the...
for Sega CD games) or used their own proprietary format (e.g. the Philips CD-i
CD-i
CD-i, or Compact Disc Interactive, is the name of an interactive multimedia CD player developed and marketed by Royal Philips Electronics N.V. CD-i also refers to the multimedia Compact Disc standard used by the CD-i console, also known as Green Book, which was developed by Philips and Sony...
). Video quality steadily increased as CPUs became more powerful to support higher quality video compression and decompression. The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest, produced by Trilobyte and released by Virgin Games in 1993, is an FMV-based puzzle video game. It was one of the first computer video games to be released only on CD-ROM. The 7th Guest is a horror story told from the unfolding perspective of the player, as an amnesiac...
, one of the first megahit multiple-CD-ROM games, was one of the first games to feature transparent
Transparency (data compression)
In data compression or psychoacoustics, transparency is the ideal result of lossy data compression. If a lossy compressed result is perceptually indistinguishable from the uncompressed input, then the compression can be declared to be transparent...
quality 640x320 FMV at 15 frames per second in a custom format designed by programmer Graeme Devine
Graeme Devine
Graeme Devine is a computer game designer and programmer who co-founded Trilobyte, created bestselling games The 7th Guest and The 11th Hour, and designed id Software's Quake III Arena. He was also Chairman of the International Game Developers Association from 2002-2003...
.
Other examples of this would be Sierra
Sierra Entertainment
Sierra Entertainment Inc. was an American video-game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams...
's VMD (Video and Music Data) format, used in games like Gabriel Knight 2
Gabriel Knight
Gabriel Knight is a series of adventure games produced by Sierra On-Line in the 1990s. Three games were released in the series: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery and Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.One compilation was...
and Phantasmagoria, or Westwood Studios
Westwood Studios
Westwood Studios was a computer and video game developer, based in Las Vegas, Nevada. It was founded by Brett Sperry and Louis Castle in as Westwood Associates, and renamed to Westwood Studios when it merged with Virgin Interactive in...
' VQA
.VQA
Vector Quantized Animation, known by its acronym VQA is a file format originally developed by Westwood Studios for video encoding in their game The Legend of Kyrandia and monopoly.- Description :...
format, used in most Westwood games made from the mid-1990s up until 2000's Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun Firestorm
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun is a real-time strategy video game developed by Westwood Studios and released in . The main storyline follows the second major war between the Global Defense Initiative of the United Nations, and the global terrorist organization known as the Brotherhood of Nod who...
. These video formats initially offered very limited video quality, due to the limitations of the machines the games needed to run on. Ghosting and distortion of high-motion scenes, heavy pixelization, and limited color palettes were prominent visual problems. However, each game pushed the technological envelope and was typically seen as impressive even with quality issues.
Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie, was the first FMV title made by a Hollywood Studio. Sony Imagesoft spent over US$ 3 Million on the title. Instead of piecing together the title with filmed assets from their movie (directed by Robert Longo
Robert Longo
Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which depicted sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted emotion.-Early life and education:...
) of the same name, Sony hired Propaganda Code director Douglas Gayeton to write and film an entirely new storyline for the property. The CD-ROM's interactivity was made possible with the Cine-Active engine, based on the Quicktime
QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible proprietary multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc., capable of handling various formats of digital video, picture, sound, panoramic images, and interactivity. The classic version of QuickTime is available for Windows XP and later, as well as Mac OS X Leopard and...
2.0 codec.
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger
Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger is the third main game in Chris Roberts' Wing Commander science fiction space combat simulation video game series, developed and released by Origin Systems...
was one of the most significant FMV titles made in 1994, featuring big-name Hollywood actors. The video quality in the game suffered significantly from the aforementioned problems and was almost visually indecipherable in parts; however, this did not stop the title from earning significant praise for its innovative gameplay/FMV combination. Its sequel, Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom is the fourth main game in Chris Roberts' Wing Commander science fiction space combat simulator video game series, produced by Origin Systems and released by Electronic Arts for the PC in 1995 and the Sony PlayStation in 1997...
, used a similar custom movie codec in its CD-ROM release, but a later limited-volume DVD-ROM release saw MPEG-2
MPEG-2
MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...
DVD-quality movies that far exceeded the original CD release in quality. A hardware decoder card was required at the time to play back the DVD-quality video on a PC. Wing Commander IV was also the first game to have used actual film (rather than video tape) to record the FMV scenes which attributed to the ability to create a DVD-quality transfer.
An exception to the rule was The 11th Hour
The 11th Hour (computer game)
The 11th Hour is a 1995 puzzle computer game with a horror setting. It is the sequel to the 1992 game The 7th Guest. It was developed by Trilobyte and used a later version of the "Groovie" graphic engine than that used by The 7th Guest...
, the sequel to The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest
The 7th Guest, produced by Trilobyte and released by Virgin Games in 1993, is an FMV-based puzzle video game. It was one of the first computer video games to be released only on CD-ROM. The 7th Guest is a horror story told from the unfolding perspective of the player, as an amnesiac...
. 11th Hour featured 640x480 FMV at 30 frames-per-second on 4 CDs. The development team had worked for three years on developing a format that could handle the video, as the director of the live-action sequences had not shot the FMV sequences in a way that could be easily compressed. However, this proved to be the game's downfall, as most computers of the day could not play the full-resolution video. Users were usually forced to select an option which played the videos at a quarter-size resolution in black-and-white.
As FMV established itself in the market as a growing game technology, a small company called RAD Game Tools
RAD Game Tools
RAD Game Tools is privately held company owned by Jeff Roberts and Mitch Soule based in Kirkland, Washington that develops video and computer game software technologies which are licensed primarily by video game companies. RAD Game Tools is somewhat unusual among middleware companies as they...
appeared on the market with their 256-color FMV format Smacker
Smacker video
Smacker video is a video file format developed by RAD Game Tools and has been used in computer games. Smacker video supports 256 colors, and includes transparency support...
. Developers took to the format, and the format ended up being used in over 3,000 games.
As the popularity of games loaded with live-action and FMV faded out in the late 1990s, and with Smacker becoming outdated in the world of 16-bit color games, RAD introduced a new true-color format, Bink video
Bink video
Bink is a proprietary video file format developed by RAD Game Tools and used primarily in computer games. It has been used in many games for Windows, Mac OS, Xbox 360, Xbox, GameCube, Wii, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, Nintendo DS, and Sony PSP...
. Developers quickly took to the format because of its high compression ratios and videogame-tailored features. The format is still one of the most popular FMV formats used in games today. 4,000 games have used Bink, and the number is still growing.
Windows Media Video
Windows Media Video
'Windows Media Video is a video compression format for several proprietary codecs developed by Microsoft. The original video format, known as WMV, was originally designed for Internet streaming applications, as a competitor to RealVideo. The other formats, such as WMV Screen and WMV Image, cater...
, DivX
DivX
DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. , including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality.There are two DivX codecs; the regular MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec and the...
, and Theora
Theora
Theora is a free lossy video compression format. It is developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation and distributed without licensing fees alongside their other free and open media projects, including the Vorbis audio format and the Ogg container....
are also becoming major players in the market. DivX
DivX
DivX is a brand name of products created by DivX, Inc. , including the DivX Codec which has become popular due to its ability to compress lengthy video segments into small sizes while maintaining relatively high visual quality.There are two DivX codecs; the regular MPEG-4 Part 2 DivX codec and the...
is used in several Nintendo GameCube
Nintendo GameCube
The , officially abbreviated to NGC in Japan and GCN in other regions, is a sixth generation video game console released by Nintendo on September 15, 2001 in Japan, November 18, 2001 in North America, May 3, 2002 in Europe, and May 17, 2002 in Australia...
titles, including Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike
Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike
Star Wars Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike is a Star Wars video game developed by Factor 5 and published by LucasArts exclusively for the Nintendo GameCube. The game follows Rogue Squadron, which, under the command of Luke Skywalker and Wedge Antilles, uses starfighters to engage and defeat the...
.
External links
- The Interactive Movies Archive
- FMV WORLD - The Home of Full-Motion Video Games
- The Rise & Fall of Full-Motion Video - Retrospective on the genre and why it failed