history of fmv technology in games
The unification of the process took place at the turn of the century. The prologue to this was laid in advance: back in 1994, a small, little-known company RAD Game Tools introduced the 256-color FMV Smacker format.
In 1999, they released their proprietary full-color codec Bink Video, which turned out to be such a successful solution that it became a new universal format for the gaming industry: since then, this format has been used in thousands and thousands of PC games (almost all known ones).
Features of game aesthetics
I think it's pretty hard to explain now how FMV games were perceived aesthetically 25-30 years ago. Still, I think even a child could, if not formulate, then at least feel the interesting and unique combination of different things in the virtual environment on the screen.
It is very interesting in my opinion that the vast majority of games from the “golden age” of FMV were horrors – at worst thrillers or noir detectives. This is probably not least due to the fact that it was very difficult to create a decent horror with the graphic means of that time. But the participation of live actors in the action immediately helped to identify with them, empathize, and in general made the situation better.
Plus – but this is already the optics of today's perception – the peculiarities of using ancient codecs, the looping of the same video pieces and the way FMV figures in inactive mode “interacted” with the rendered environment – all this in itself created the effect of the “uncanny valley”, which greatly helped to horrify the impressionable player.
As the Cracked website once put it so well:
[FMV были] games in which real people were digitized and turned into spasmodically twitching androids.
The cult duology apparently holds the palm in terms of all kinds of horror films Phantasmagoria (1995, 1996) and Harvester (1996).
There had never been such a quantity of on-screen violence in any game before them, and there wasn’t one after that, until the mid-2000s.
The first Phantasmagoria took up a record seven (!) discs, the second one – “only” five.
It's hard to verify now, but there was a rumor that one or even two discs were given over exclusively to videos with various brutal deaths of the main character.
“Reaper” managed to fit on three discs, but in terms of brutality it even surpassed its older comrade – the scene with the cannibal children alone is never forgotten (especially if you played it yourself at a tender age).
There was a time in game development, though.
Other types of FMV games
In general, besides quests, horrors and horror quests, there were several other (less popular) types of FMV games:
Interactive movie: The earliest type of FMV games and, oddly enough, the only one that has survived and thrived to this day (more on that later). Games of this type are specially made films or cartoons that at certain points offer the player a choice of several options. The plot can branch.
Interactive shooting gallery: Mostly found in arcades, but some of these games were also present on PC. The gameplay boils down to shooting at various objects using a scope or a light gun. One of the funniest examples: the above-mentioned Crime Patrol.
Race. There are quite a few examples here: MegaRace, MegaRace 2 and that seemed to be it. The cutscenes used “live video”, the circuit itself was a video, and the cars were sprites in the first game and polygonal models with interactive lighting (in 1996!) in the second.
Other. These were mostly isolated experiments: one action game on the Sega CD (Bram Stoker's Dracula), a couple of sports action movies (Quarterback Attack And Slam City from Digital Pictures), space combat simulators such as Silpheedwhere, again, FMV was used as a dynamic background.
The end of an era and FMV today
The era of full motion video naturally faded as 3D technology developed. And even though videos made with the graphics engine of those times (starting, say, with The Longest Journey in 1999) look ridiculous now, I remember it very well, back then it felt like the cutting edge of technology.
Who needs low-quality video with live actors overacting when you have TRI-D? That's it. Especially since live video was eating up an incredible amount of useful disk space (what was an advantage a few years ago became a burden!) – and the Internet hadn't been brought to every home yet.
For a while at the turn of the century, technology was still kept alive by strategy games: memes rollers between missions in Command & Conquer And Emperor: Battle For The Dune probably many remember, especially popular was the actor Joseph Kukan, who played Kane. But already in 2001, the number of games released with FMV could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and then a completely different era began.
Oddly enough, in the 2010s, FMV games experienced a rebirth, albeit in a very specific form. The forgotten technologies of the ancients for integrating live video with computer graphics are apparently too complex to use today, so FMV 2.0 is, in essence, an interactive high-definition movie that can be rotated in different directions.
The main enthusiast of this direction is Sam Barlow, who since 2015 has released three large interesting games built entirely on FMV – Her Story, Telling Lies And ImmortalityAll of them (especially the last one) are worth attention and are exceptionally well done.
In 2018, FMV even made its way onto Netflix—essentially, Bandersnatcha special episode of the series “Black Mirror”, was just such an interactive game, unique for each viewer.
Other projects in the “live” FMV genre, using modern high-quality video, also continue to be released – their list is maintained at fan portal Here.
And yet, yet… there is a feeling that along with the nineties and antediluvian technologies, some magic in games has gone. Or maybe it's just age and grumbling that it was better before… Thank you for your attention!
