Hacker Cinema
Night Trap
1992 · Film · 48 min
Directed by Randy Field, James W. Riley
For the first time ever, the cult classic game Night Trap is available as a 48-minute motion picture on videocassette. Experience the terror like never before. You better be good, you better beware...
1 negative2 neutralfrom 3 commenters
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From YouTube links in the comments below. Most are clips and trailers; “Full” means the uploader says so.
3 comments on Hacker News
How did they miss Night Trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Trap from the list? It was "so terrifying" that Congress had a hearing to ban it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJVnL484jbk
Years later that game was turned into a DVD film by choosing specific story paths. You can find it online at ok.ru, but don't click that link without a really, really strong adblocker. The Russian site tries to install malware. https://ok.ru/video/3334939150907
Indeed, he's references the 3DO console, and a similar statement could be made about SegaCD. The prevailing type of game enabled by that hardware was the Full Motion Video (FMV) genre with titles like Sewer Shark and Night Trap. They focused on the video over the gameplay, and the result was often a choose-your-own schlocky B-movie. They generally had poor reviews.
Id started out as a shareware outfit which was the indie of it's day, instead of marketing games through app stores they distributed demos on floppy disk through intermediaries who advertised in the back of computing magazines and encouraged people to share demo versions by copying the disks with their friends. They used the shareware model for every game they released up until Doom 2. The original doom had a full 1/3 of the game available for free. I don't think early id games like Commander keen were even available in retail stores until much later.
Even in the 90s there were quite a few attempts to create movie like games, where live movie footage was mixed into gameplay. Night Trap and Rebel Assault are early examples of this. The problem they had was that there was too jarring a difference in realism between game sprites and movie footage.