Her Story screenshot courtesy of Sam Barlow.
Barlow was keenly playing video games when, in the early to mid-1990s, FMV briefly threatened to change the way the medium told its stories, and deepen immersion in interactive experiences through the use of real actors, rather than computer-drawn avatars with voice-overs. But he never truly engaged with titles like Digital Pictures' Night Trap, Cyberdreams' Dark Seed II and Trilobyte's The 7th Guest, considering his move into the genre with Her Story more of an accidental one, than a by-design decision."I honestly missed that wave when it happened," he recalls. "I was vaguely aware of Night Trap, and Sewer Shark, and I saw light gun FMV games in arcades, and was excited for the digitized Police Quest; but I never spent any time with those titles. But when I realized Her Story was accidentally an 'FMV game', I went back and tried to learn up on the genre."What stood out were the titles that were sensible about how they used video, acknowledging the inherent properties of it, rather than using it in place of more dynamic game elements. So, despite their actual execution, I now think titles like Night Trap and Voyeur are great ideas. They play on the idea of looking as a mechanic, and encourage a kind of pacing and interaction that feels natural around video. But then they ruin it by throwing in trial and error, and more 'challenging' game elements on top.""I missed the FMV wave when it happened, but when I realized Her Story was accidentally an 'FMV game', I went back to learn up on the genre." — Sam Barlow
"I think now is the perfect time to bring it back," Hogle says. "I'm a firm believer that the technology just wasn't ready at the time. Today is a different story, and FMV is starting to make a small comeback. The idea of controlling a movie at 12 frames per second sounds horrible, and those 1990s games haven't aged well in terms of how they look. A lot of gamers will say that graphics don't matter, but in the case of FMV, they really did.""I think now is the perfect time to bring FMV back." — Tyler Hogle
The Infectious Madness of Doctor Dekker screenshot courtesy of D'Avekki Studios.
Late Shift screenshot courtesy of Wales Interactive.
"We had a very limited time to film, just 15 days, and we had to do it in December 2015, because the actors were all booked to do other things—Sarah (Greene) was filming Penny Dreadful in January, and Adam had some pick ups on Dead Men Tell No Tales," he continues. "All the time, we were hoping that Unity could handle what we needed it to. We didn't have much time for R&D, to test everything and get it done calmly—we storyboarded the entire game in one block, shot it and stuck to it. Once we had those elements, we couldn't go back."Which goes some way to explaining why The Bunker is as, I think, pleasingly imperfect as it is. It's a single sit-down experience, movie length, and fun enough for that time frame. "It was a massive, and complicated task," Plenderleith says. "We said, 'Let's do something mature and deep and narratively complex.' And see if we could pull it off. Because a lot of this is about the technology—can Unity do this? And that's always been the case with us."Like Barlow and Her Story, Plenderleith says that he never really regarded The Bunker as an FMV game, specifically. "We never thought of it that way," he tells me, adding that Splendy isn't set exclusively on producing interactive experiences shot entirely on film."We filmed The Bunker first, before we began to build the game. All the time, we were hoping that Unity could handle what we needed it to." — Allan Plenderleith
The Bunker screenshot courtesy of Splendy Games/Wales Interactive.
"Those old FMV games definitely felt gimmicky," says Plenderleith. "Though I thought they were awesome. I remember playing a game with Tia Carrera on the Mac (that'll be The Daedalus Encounter), and she was running around a spaceship, telling me how it was going to explode—and then you had to do a puzzle. I loved it! I played the whole thing. But if I look back at it now… Yeah, it's not so great. So it's nice now to explore the possibility of doing something more serious, and dramatic."Sierra Online's co-founder Ken Williams might have been on better lines when he said, in a 1994 interview, that the studio—responsible for FMV titles Phantasmagoria and Police Quest: SWAT—had the goal to "prove to the world that this truly is a different medium, not just movies with a computer or something". Different enough that it went down after the boom years without taking video games en masse with it—but Barlow looks back on the years of Sierra and Digital Pictures, and many more besides, as a massively important period for game development, for progression in the field.Above: Phantasmagoria trailer from 1995"That era is fascinating, because it created such an influx of genres, and characters," he says. "We'd not seen them before, and rarely have since. These games that felt more human to me, and more widely encompassing of the kinds of stories we tell in other entertainment media. There were legal thrillers, murder mysteries, spy stories, and psychological horror—genres where having a real person on screen helped, or was necessary."Barlow is following Her Story with two more FMV-based projects. One is a direct-enough sequel, following a new, original story, that, the director says, "expands on the ambition of that format, and the types of story we're used to seeing interactively". The other is WarGames, which he's making with Eko, based on the Matthew Broderick-starring 1983 movie. (Which I loved. You know the one: "Shall we play a game?") Obviously its presentation, its tech, will be modernized—but the concept, that you're playing a "war game" on a computer which has consequences for the real world, remains intact."I'm going to keep running with this," Barlow says. "I want to keep pushing in this direction, and see how much we can grow the audience. I think that production values and acting talent is one way of signalling to the wider world that these new FMV games are important, interesting projects. Her Story opened a lot of doors, and I'm excited to see how much further we can blow them open!"Follow Mike on Twitter."The old FMV era is fascinating, because it created such an influx of genres, and characters. We'd not seen them before, and rarely have since." — Sam Barlow
