FMV game

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Mega CD Tomcat Alley (1994)

FMV games, also known as interactive movies, are a particular video game genre that was popular during the early nineties as CD-ROMs and Laserdiscs made their way into the living rooms, providing an alternative to the low-capacity cartridges of most consoles. The popularity of FMV games declined after around 1995, as more advanced consoles were released. The latter of these games became well-known failures in video gaming.

These games rely on full motion video rather than sprites, vectors or 3D models to display action in the game. Due to the limits set by the 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 and Sewer Shark and adventure games like Gabriel Knight II - The Beast Within. Although most 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.

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 a low-budget movie would cost in 1994. Others attracted Hollywood stars such as Dana Plato (Diff'rent Strokes, cast for Night Trap) 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, the hardware it was displayed on, particulalrly in the case of the Sega CD, had limited color palettes, which resulted in notably inferior image quality. 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.

1 Unfulfilled Potential
2 List of FMV games
- 2.1 1983
- 2.2 1984
- 2.3 1990
- 2.4 1991
- 2.5 1992
- 2.6 1993
- 2.7 1994
- 2.8 1995
- 2.9 1996
- 2.10 1997
- 2.11 1998
- 2.12 2000
3 External links

[edit] Unfulfilled Potential

Certain video game critics see the full motion video genre as never have fulfilling its potential-or more specifically the full motion video technique. Games like Killer Instinct and Dracula Unleashed proved that a sprite-based foreground could be applied to a full motion video background, causing the overall look to be arguably better than if the whole thing was rendered in real time, and other games such as Time Commando (1996) went even further and combined FMV backgrounds with polygon characters. These critics lament that many modern games such as certain RPG's feature limited interactivity and would be potential users of high quality FMV, but instead use real time generated 3D graphics which they claim do not look as good as high quality pre-rendered movies, although the quality gap between pre and real-time rendered scenes decreases as the processing power of consoles and computers evolves.