Hollywood envy: Adopting film production and storytelling in the FMV games of the 1990s

Abstract

The widespread appearance of Full Motion Video (FMV) games of the 1990s represents a significant development in the history of videogames. This study explores the FMV games of the 1990s, aiming to identify and examine common narratological traits borrowed from film production found across the variety of FMV game types of the 1990s. The overall aim of this exploration is to address the question of how the narrative form of the FMV game was influenced by film form and technique, and whether this influence was more prominent than in other games in this critical period in videogame history. However, how does one measure the impact of a particular technology, when it is impossible to compare against the counterfactual situation where the technology in question is absent? To stress the importance of a technology like FMV in games is always, to some extent, an exercise in alternative history, as one must effectively imagine the outcomes for an entire industry had the technology been absent. This is largely impossible, but there are several ways that such impact can be approximated. In the present paper, three such ways will be used. The first, is to illustrate the context in which FMV technology was applied within pre-existing game series, to see how FMV changed the form and style of the given series. Secondly, by examining the key traits of FMV games in their 1990s heyday, the divergence between FMV games and non-FMV games can be observed. Finally, the lasting impact of FMV can be observed by examining what FMV game features stayed behind after this game genre effectively (though never completely) disappeared at the end of the 1990s.

Introduction

The widespread appearance of Full Motion Video (FMV) games of the 1990s represents a significant development in the history of videogames (Russell, 2012). This group of games, of which the defining characteristic is the inclusion of recorded video with live actors featured in cutscenes (c.f. Howells, 2002; Klevjer, 2002; Tong and Tan, 2002; Perron and Arsenault, 2008; Therrien et al., 2020) sits at the very epicentre of the intersection of film and videogames. These games exhibited a variety of forms – FMV-based adventure games, like the Tex Murphy series (1989-2014), space shooters like the Wing Commander series (1990-2007) (Majewski and Knight, 2017; Poremba, 2022), strategy games like Command & Conquer (1995–2020), point-and-click adventure games like The X-Files Game (1998), puzzle games such as Myst (1993) (Wolf, 2011), horror games such as Phantasmagoria (1995) (Ndalianis, 1999), and interactive movies (Perron, 2014) like The 7th Guest (1993) as well as exploitation games such as the infamous Night Trap (1992). The emergence of FMV was enabled by technology: while earlier games were distributed on 1.44 MB floppy disks, the CD-ROM could store up to 640 MB, providing the spatial capacity needed for video (see Donovan, 2010).

So diverse are the works using FMV, that few have considered the FMV game as an actual game genre (Therrien, 2008), though as has been argued elsewhere (Majewski and Knight, forthcoming), there indeed is a case to be made for the FMV game as an actual genre. Unlike other genres, built around a set of narrative or gameplay mechanics, FMV games are bound together by their usage of live-action video, and by the way these non-interactive video sequences are spliced together with interactive gameplay. It can further be argued FMV games, while always a minor genre with comparatively few titles, have had an oversized impact on the broader medium of narrative-based games. Conversely, few other game genres have been as controversial as FMV games, not in the sense of generating public disquiet – albeit some FMV-based games, especially Night Trap, did contribute to broader controversies around videogame violence – but in the sense of being seen by critics as an inappropriate and unwelcome intrusion by the film medium into games. Indeed, despite the variety of game types, FMV games do tend to share particular narratological characteristics effectively imported from classical film storytelling (Bateman, 2007; Therrien et al., 2020), amplified of course by the use of actual film production techniques needed for live-action sequences.

The use of film storytelling and production techniques in FMV games across many genres during the 1990s has been ascribed to a kind of ‘Hollywood envy’ (Brookey, 2010), a desire to elevate the still-nascent videogame medium to a cultural status closer to that of film – at the cost of abandoning some elements of interactivity in order to incorporate necessarily linear film sequences (Juul, 2005). However, the affordances of the FMV genre also allowed for a fascinating adoption of narrative strategies not possible in other types of games of this period (Murray, 1997). An example of this can be found in the audiovisual qualities of the FMV cutscene; while later examinations of the FMV genre (e.g. Brookey, 2010) are critical of the intrusion of live action into otherwise digitally depicted worlds, FMV games in fact skilfully employed cutscenes as a reward for players. They also attempted – albeit often unsuccessfully due to their frequently low production values – to include greater depth of characterisation through the use of Hollywood cinematic techniques. Conversely, FMV games do not represent a mere intrusion of Hollywood techniques into digital games, as from the outset, these games intended to combine FMV with interactivity, pushing the traditionally linear film medium into more game-like structures, such as branching narratives, where player actions could push the narrative in differing, albeit pre-defined, directions (e.g. Majewski and Knight, forthcoming).

The present article explores the FMV games of the 1990s, aiming to identify and examine common narratological traits borrowed from film production found across the variety of FMV game types of the 1990s. The overall aim of this exploration is to address the question of how the narrative form of the FMV game was influenced by film form and technique, and whether this influence was more prominent than in other games in this critical period in videogame history. However, how does one measure the impact of a particular technology, when it is impossible to compare against the counterfactual situation where the technology in question is absent? To stress the importance of a technology like FMV in games is always, to some extent, an exercise in alternative history, as one must effectively imagine the outcomes for an entire industry had the technology been absent. This is largely impossible, but there are several ways that such impact can be approximated. In the present paper, three such ways will be used. The first, is to illustrate the context in which FMV technology was applied within pre-existing game series, to see how FMV changed the form and style of the given series. Secondly, by examining the key traits of FMV games in their 1990s heyday, the divergence between FMV games and non-FMV games can be observed. Finally, the lasting impact of FMV can be observed by examining what FMV game features stayed behind after this game genre effectively (though never completely) disappeared at the end of the 1990s.

Context: Game storytelling in the early 1990s

The history of technology as it affects the game industry is surprisingly underdeveloped. There are many studies of specific hardware platforms (e.g. Altice, 2015; Maher, 2012; Montfort and Bogost, 2009). Likewise, there are many studies of individual game series or development companies (e.g. Contato, 2019, 2021; King and Borland, 2003; Mills, 2020; Smith, 2008) where hardware progression necessarily plays a role; finally, there are of course broader histories of games (e.g. Donovan, 2010; Williams, 2012) which also hint at hardware progression. However, there is a striking absence of hardware-specific history studies, which would, for example, examine the challenges posed by hardware limitations at a given point in time, how game designers responded to these limitations, and their response when or if the given limitation disappeared.

Even without strong hardware-oriented studies, however, it can be asserted that at the outset of the 1990s, game developers increasingly sought to incorporate greater narrative depth and complexity in their games, and found themselves at once empowered and challenged by the popularisation of 16-bit (256 colour) graphic hardware platforms and the near-simultaneous introduction of the CD-ROM (c.f. Donovan, 2010). Indeed, what had arguably been the most narrative complex game genre, the text adventure, disappeared by this point, replaced by graphical adventure games, much more streamlined in terms of gameplay affordances and smaller in scope due to the use of graphical user interfaces and the general production challenge posed by graphics. Where previously adding a new location and a new character interaction to a text adventure game required simply the writing of a few paragraphs of text, in a graphic adventure adding a new location required significant effort on the part of a graphic artist, as well as greatly increasing storage space and potentially distribution costs, as each additional floppy disk in the game box cut into the profit margins. This problem affected game scope both in terms of game world dimensions and narrative, and it was not unknown for games to excise animated sequences from the narrative with the aim of reducing the number of floppies in the box (c.f. Contato, 2021).

The emergence of the CD-ROM allowed games to increase in storage space tenfold, or even a hundredfold, and thus resolved the problem of distribution (c.f. Donovan, 2010; Williams, 2020; Majewski and Knight, forthcoming). Simultaneously, however, this increase in available space put pressure on developers to produce more content, so as to demonstrate to the audience the value of the new CD-ROM. This was crucial, as the CD-ROM drive was not a standard accessory in either PC or consoles, and consumers needed to be persuaded to adopt the new technology. A common way of thinking about technology adoption in computing highlighted the need for a ‘killer app’, a high-quality software package or game that relied on, and in so doing, demonstrated the utility of the new technology. Such a package of course had to be so high quality and attractive, that customers would choose to buy the hardware specifically to experience it at its fullest (c.f. Contato, 2021; Majewski and Knight, forthcoming).

Overall, it can be argued developers working within more narrative-centric genres both desired, and felt pressured to introduce more narrative content at a higher graphical quality level, while struggling with the limitations of having to either hand-draw digital backgrounds and sprites, or pre-render them using still-highly limited 3D modelling and animation packages. It is in this context that developers began to experiment with FMV storytelling, with the CD-ROM serving both as the hardware that enabled these experiments, and as a motor to encourage and justify them (c.f. Salter, 2017).

Most FMV experiments necessarily involved the injection of film or television expertise into game development, as they not only involved film shoots for which few game developers had the requisite skills, but also demanded a different approach to narrative design and screenwriting (c.f. Williams, 2020). Concurrently to the introduction of FMV, the game industry also saw an influx of technology platforms that enabled the storage and playback of voice audio, triggering the introduction of voice acting in games; aptly, some game developers likened this era to the introduction of ‘talkies’ in the film industry (Harrison, 1991). However, while many early ‘talkie’ games featured simply the voices of their developers, FMV games demanded a more professional approach to acting, which again had to be imported from the film industry. For example, while the non-FMV Wing Commander II: Vengeance of the Kilrathi (1991) had programmers, artists and designers credited for voice acting, its FMV-based sequels Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger (1994) and Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom (1996) featured a cast of Hollywood stars including Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, acting out dialogue written by Hollywood screenwriters Terry Borst and Frank De Palma (c.f. Russell, 2012). The use of known Hollywood actors in Wing Commander was not a one-off case, with most FMV titles clearly using recognisable, though usually not A-list actors to connect their output to Hollywood, and making sure their names and faces featured prominently in the marketing materials. This is especially notable in the corpus of FMV games on the 3DO console, which featured Dana Plato in Night Trap, Tracy Scoggins in Snow Job (1995), and Tia Carrere in The Daedalus Encounter (1995), to name only a few examples.

The Wing Commander series is possibly the most prominent example of a game series making a very strongly publicised transition to FMV in the early 1990s, only to eventually move away from FMV towards the end of the decade – a sequence observable not only in Wing Commander, but also across other game series and standalone titles developed at the same company, Origin Systems, in that period (c.f. Majewski and Knight 2017; Majewski and Knight, forthcoming). The same transition, likewise, could be observed in the body of work of several other major companies in that time period, either for the purposes of developing entirely new properties, or in the context of an existing series. For example, another early adopter was the adventure game developer Sierra On-Line. The company became interested in FMV when developing the horror game Phantasmagoria, with the game’s designer arguing live actors are a necessity in order for players to properly empathise with characters in a horror context (Williams, 2020). Developing Phantasmagoria proved to be an expensive ordeal, requiring the employment of professional Hollywood staff, including a film director, but also experimentation with still-novel technologies such as bluescreens in order to ensure that the recorded actors could be placed on differing backgrounds in an interactive game. The result was a title that could withstand aesthetic and thematic comparisons to more traditional horror films (c.f. Ndalianis, 1999).

The same technology was then applied within the existing Gabriel Knight series for The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Adventure (1995) (Maher, 2021; Salter, 2017). Crucially, these titles, like Wing Commander III and its sequels, did not merely adopt the technology of film, but also its language and narrative structures. In her biographical analysis of Gabriel Knight designer Jane Jensen, Anastasia Salter (2017) draws the connection between games like Gabriel Knight and much later non-FMV games like Heavy Rain (2010) and L.A. Noire (2011), claiming these titles as being in some sense a part of Gabriel Knight’s legacy. Conversely, Salter also highlights the non-malleability of film – while an actor can be filmed against a blue/greenscreen and then pasted on different backgrounds, generally when a sequence is recorded with lighting, props and other actors, this sequence cannot be dynamically altered based on the player’s actions in an interactive context. This non-malleability meant that some aspects of the game had to be simplified compared to its predecessor in the series – cinematic storytelling required the loss of some interactive elements.

The Gabriel Knight series is a particularly striking example illustrating the rapid onset and decline of FMV – as well as of the fact that its impact was lasting – a relationship further explored in Majewski & Knight (Forthcoming). When, shortly after shipping The Beast Within, Sierra On-Line began work on its sequel, ultimately published as Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Damned (1998), management quickly decided that ‘FMV was dead and 3D was the future’ (Jensen, cited in Salter, 2017: p. 55) – however, in an internal magazine article explaining the affordances of the new 3D game engine to be used in the game, the company claimed the result would be like ‘controlling the cameras and main character in a movie’ (Twelker, cited in Salter, 2017: p. 56), highlighting the lasting nature of the connection between games and movies.

Numerous other examples of game developers transitioning into and then out of FMV could be discussed here, for example, Westwood Studios’ body of work including the Command & Conquer (1995-2020) and Lands of Lore (1993-1999) series, or Access Software with the Tex Murphy (1989-2014) series. The phenomenon was primarily American, but not exclusively so – FMV titles were also developed in Europe, Japan, and even in Australia, with Beam Software’s The Dame Was Loaded (1996) providing a rare example from this continent. Somewhat ironically, comparatively less needs to be said about those game developers most strongly associated with FMV, who produced probably most FMV titles, but who can be perceived as cases of movement between film and games in the other direction – that is, filmmakers or technological entrepreneurs seeking to create interactive film formats. An early and prominent example was Night Trap (1992), initially developed in the late 1980s for a cancelled, VHS-based console, before finally seeing release as a premiere title for Sega’s 1992 Sega CD console. Night Trap’s developers, Digital Pictures, released a slew of other interactive movies over the course of a few years, including among others Sewer Shark (1993) and Ground Zero Texas (1993), never attempting to step outside the FMV game, or rather – the interactive movie. Yet, while Night Trap generated tremendous controversies, and for some time remained one of the key targets of derision for opponents of FMV (Parish, 2018; Russell, 2012), the influence of Digital Pictures’ games on the rest of the game industry seems close to zero. Rather than serving as a conduit for the import of Hollywood techniques into games through filmmaking, Digital Pictures’ products arguably discouraged some game developers from using such techniques for fear of being associated with the negativity that FMV games gradually acquired for their mediocre reviews and lack of interactivity (c.f. Horowitz, 2008; Wrestling with Games, 2018). It would be difficult to point to a company or a line-up of products that more vividly represented what would retroactively be derided as ‘Hollywood envy’ (Brookey, 2010). This derision was more than just purism, however, referring also to quality – as noted by one of the developers for the FMV-based Under a Killing Moon (1994), ‘FMV, blue screen, acting, even story became synonymous with “bad”’ (Connors, cited in Fahs, 2008). Perhaps also notable was the fact that FMV was often linked to controversy, with games like Night Trap, Voyeur (1993) and its 1996 sequel Voyeur II, and Phantasmagoria drawing media attention for their sexualised content – attention that on the one hand, actually generated sales (Horowitz, 2008), but on the other was at times perceived as tarnishing and risky by company management (c.f. Williams, 2020).

Yet, even though the FMV game had a remarkably brief lifespan, becoming a wider phenomenon around 1993, and almost completely dissipating by 1997, it provided a vital ‘crutch’ for narrative techniques in videogames at a period when neither the earlier 2D sprite-based visuals, nor the still immature 3D technology was able to progress videogame storytelling in a manner comparable to FMV. Indeed, while the demise of FMV games could be blamed partially on the low quality of many such titles, and partially on the difficulty of fully leveraging digital interactivity in games reliant on linear, pre-recorded video, undoubtedly a crucial factor was precisely the fact that by 1997, with the advent of 3D hardware acceleration, 3D graphics reached a point where they could now adequately tell a story in real-time rendered cinematic cutscenes of the kind that previously would have best been accomplished using FMV (c.f. Majewski and Knight, 2017; Forthcoming).

Key traits of FMV games

Looking back on the FMV titles of the 1990s, it is remarkable just how broad was the span of the narrative and gameplay genres for which this technology was applied, ranging from deeply narrative-focused adventures, to intensively action-oriented titles in the first-person shooter genre, as well as racing and flight games. Admittedly many of the most remarkable experiments can be traced back to a single company, the aforementioned Digital Pictures, whose very existence was built on faith in the FMV technology (c.f. Horowitz, 2008), a fact that undoubtedly pushed its staff to explore innovative ways to apply the technology. Nonetheless, the technology was enthusiastically embraced by well-known game developers ranging from Origin Systems with Wing Commander and Westwood Studios with Command & Conquer (1995–2020), to Bethesda Softworks in early Elder Scrolls games, Sierra On-Line in a range of adventure titles (c.f. Williams, 2020; Mills, 2020), and LucasArts in the action-oriented Rebel Assault series. Looking over the output of the companies highlighted above, a set of commonalities can be identified for the way the FMV technology was used (c.f. Majewski & Knight, Forthcoming).

Outside of a narrow range of more experimental games that can be attributed to Digital Pictures, and which did not inspire any subsequent continuation, most FMV games sought to devise a structure that allowed non-interactive FMV cutscenes to be separated visually from the core interactive gameplay. The gameplay tended to be reliant on more typical game technologies, albeit in some cases using hand-edited images extracted or rotoscoped from FMV to create sets of animated sprites, but with key emphasis on interactivity rather than narrative. The sharp division between FMV sequences and gameplay was arguably jarring, and certainly contributed to the general critiques of any cutscenes as intrusive in games (for a broad review of the discussion on cutscenes, see Klevjer, 2008), However, the unavoidability of this division resulted in a highly characteristic, staccato rhythm of live-action narrative sequences interweaved with dynamic gameplay; nor was this division impermeable, as frequently gameplay impacted on the narrative, with games sometimes having multiple sequences to play back depending on the player’s performance and choices. Indeed, in some cases, FMV cutscenes would be paused to offer the player a choice in media res, and then continuing in one of two or more separate video clips depending on the player’s decision. In general, it can be argued that precisely because of the way the FMV-based narrative was separated from the gameplay, developers greatly emphasised the player’s ability to influence the story via narrative branching (c.f. Majewski & Knight, Forthcoming).

A key feature for FMV games was an affinity for photorealism – while this might be attributed to the obvious marketing advantage where FMV games, with live-action sequences, necessarily could claim to be more photorealistic than any other titles, this photorealism was also used to support highly personal, character-driven stories, impossible to achieve without the facial expressions guaranteed by live-action video – a fact strongly highlighted by Phantasmagoria designer Roberta Williams (Salter, 2017). It was the possibilities afforded by photorealism, primarily the visible clarity of acting performances, that encouraged developers to concentrate their games’ narrative in FMV cutscenes, and to focus on character-driven stories even when developing otherwise highly impersonal strategy games such as the Command & Conquer series.

Even within the games industry, FMV games cannot claim to have invented any of the structural features that characterised them. Cutscenes certainly pre-date FMV games, and the division between narrative-focused cutscenes and action-focused gameplay is one that has been repeatedly discussed throughout the history of the medium (c.f. Poole, 2000). Likewise, many earlier games also attempted to convey personal, character-driven stories. However, this was always done within the limitations of available technology, and development of these aspects of the videogame as a medium was indeed stunted by these limitations. For example, while a sprite-based animated sequence such as that used in Wing Commander II could allow scenes with visually interesting, moderately expressive faces, these faces were limited to only a few very short sequences conveying the most basic emotions, and using them repetitively throughout the narrative. The advent of the CD-ROM along with FMV provided a chance for game developers to circumvent these limitations and push interactive storytelling forward by leveraging the rapid expansion of encyclopaedic capacity, a trait Janet Murray (1997) identifies as a core affordance of the interactive medium.

Given the gameplay constraints imposed by the use of linear video sequences, it is unsurprising FMV would soon decline as a mainstream technology, as its core weaknesses were insurmountable, while the onset of 3D hardware acceleration would gradually but visibility undercut FMV’s competitive advantage in visual photorealism. In 1995, Tom Zito, founder of Digital Pictures, argued that it would take 3D games at least a decade to match the photorealism of FMV games (Horowitz, 2008). While this prediction was perhaps overtly optimistic for 3D games, Zito did correctly predict that within a decade, 3D games would at least achieve a ‘good enough’ visual level to render FMV’s competitive advantages obsolete. However, apart perhaps from the case of Digital Pictures, the demise of FMV was not a ‘hard stop’ – developers who had worked on FMV games took the lessons from FMV and continued to apply them in post-FMV titles using 3D technologies.

What stays behind: The game medium after FMV

In the years immediately after the demise of the FMV game, several factors contributed to an initial disappearance of its influence. Firstly, the previously mentioned stigma attached to FMV and narrative, along with enthusiasm for more directly integrated narrative, such as in Half-Life (1998), where the narrative was told entirely without cutscenes (Fahs, 2008), meant that even aside from the technology, storytelling in the style of FMV games was out of fashion. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the debate about narrative and especially about cutscenes in games that echoed across early game studies publications of that exact period, perhaps best summarised in Rune Klevier’s aptly titled paper In Defense of Cutscenes (2002). While the academic debate was – well, academic – it nonetheless seems to have reflected a broader mood among the critics, the industry and the audiences, exemplified specifically by the praise and success of fast-paced, storytelling-lean titles like Half-Life, and the subsequent emergence of non-narrative FPS multiplayer shooters like Counter-Strike (2000). This change of mood was compounded by the second previously noted factor, the rise of 3D hardware acceleration and the resulting rapid improvement in visual quality of real-time rendered 3D graphics, both on PC, and across a new generation of consoles. The third factor was the coincidental decline of the two genres most closely associated with FMV – the adventure game (c.f. Williams, 2020; Mills 2020), and the Wing Commander-style space combat game, overshadowed by the meteoric rise of first-person shooters, with the series’ last major release of the 90s, Wing Commander: Secret Ops (1998) excising FMV in favour of simple, real-time rendered cutscenes integrated with gameplay (c.f. Majewski and Knight, 2017). Even at this time, however, the lasting influence of FMV and its style of storytelling could still be observed.

Perhaps the most telling example of the lasting influence of FMV technology can be found in the career of Chris Roberts, the creative responsible for most of the Wing Commander series. Initially, Roberts introduced FMV into the series as a way of breaking out of the unsatisfactory limitations of 2D sprite-based sequences in Wing Commander II. Having become one of the most prominent proponents of FMV in the years that followed, and even taking a break to direct a Wing Commander film, Chris Roberts ultimately abandoned FMV much like the rest of the game industry, and approximately at the same time in the late 1990s, switching to 3D models and animations in his next opus, Freelancer (2003) – a decision undoubtedly also encouraged by the need to work on a lower budget than previous games. Nonetheless, Freelancer still relied on the cutscenes Roberts had used in the FMV-based Wing Commander games, and still utilised Hollywood professionals, especially screenwriters and actors. Effectively, Freelancer was an FMV game without FMV – its narrative style and form was unchanged, only the technology changed (c.f. Majewski and Knight, 2017). Subsequently, Roberts devoted several years to working as a film producer, before coming back into games to develop the still formally unreleased open-world game Star Citizen and its also yet-to-be-released narrative-driven offshoot Squadron 42. The latter is characterised by strong call-backs to the narrative style of the Wing Commander games, and the story format along with motion-scanned actor performances make clear the line of progression in Roberts’ body of work from the early Wing Commander titles to the present.

The injection of cinematic storytelling – the film-inspired construction of cutscenes, the importation of film industry techniques such as motion and later facial capture can be observed across numerous titles from the early 2000s onwards. This is perhaps less an indication of FMV’s lasting influence, and more an inevitability of the transposition of such techniques from one visual medium to another – though nonetheless, the acceleration of this process thanks to the FMV game must not be underestimated. A more significant element of FMV’s influence can be observed in the oftentimes conscious reuse of classic FMV game storytelling structures, as well as in the re-emergence of the interactive movie concept, initially closely intertwined with FMV (c.f. Majewski & Knight, Forthcoming), and now coming to mean simply a specific form of gameplay-narrative balance. This sort of impact became observable about a decade after the demise of the FMV game, at a point when the stigma attached to FMV had more or less worn off.

The FMV-inspired idea of the interactive movie (c.f. Perron and Arsenault, 2008; Lessard, 2009; Majewski & Knight, Forthcoming), thus re-emerged with Heavy Rain (2010), a connection clearly present in the minds of critics and scholars both at the time of its development (c.f. Fahs, 2008), and post-hoc (c.f. Salter, 2017). Likewise, the real-time strategy game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty (2010) and its sequels, while not claiming the interactive movie mantle, imitated Wing Commander’s rhythm of storytelling. Like in the Wing Commander games, lengthy, mostly devoid of narrative gameplay sections would be followed by pseudo-gameplay interspersed with cutscenes: the player used a simplified mouse-click control scheme to move around an environment, activating cutscene conversations by clicking on characters within that environment. Again following the example of Wing Commander, StarCraft II also provided narrative branching via player choices. While other games at the time employed similar methods, the case of StarCraft II is notable for the fact that the game’s developers publicly acknowledged that Wing Commander was indeed the core point of reference, making the influence of the FMV game explicit (e.g. Kollar, 2010).

Conclusion

While FMV games still exist today and indeed have now attracted a veneer of new respect as a form of indie game (c.f. Majewski & Knight, Forthcoming), certainly their mainstream existence, at times even (almost) dominance, is a phenomenon distinct to the mid-1990s. Most FMV games can be placed in the four-year timespan between 1993 and 1997, making this technology a flash-in-the-pan in the broader context of the game industry’s more than 50 year-long history. As an attempt to leverage live-action videos, FMV was made and destroyed by technology. Its rise was made possible by the advent of the CD-ROM technology that allowed lengthy videos to be efficiently stored, and its demise in turn was a result of the development of 3D hardware acceleration, which allowed a rapid increase in visual detail for real-time-rendered 3D models and animations. If FMV was indeed an unwelcome intrusion of film into games, then we can say Hollywood’s invasion in its most literal form was stopped dead by the end of the 1990s. ‘Hollywood envy’, however, remained. In the same way that film once inherited the storytelling techniques drawn from theatre and the novel, so narrative games in turn ended up using film-based techniques pioneered in Hollywood. And while this transmission of techniques was inevitable given the nature of the videogame medium, while it would have undoubtedly still happened eventually even without FMV technologies, the fact remains that the FMV game did exist, and played an oversized role in the accelerated transmission and adaptation of Hollywood techniques into games. The line from Night Trap, through Wing Commander III and Freelancer (2003), runs on straight to Heavy Rain (2010), and on to The Last of Us series (2013-2020). FMV was never the technological dead-end it had at times been derisively described as. Instead, it was a vital stop along the way to the development of the modern narrative videogame.