Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with text Stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm La and uh I see
Speaker 1: on the book of Faces that are a good friend.
Speaker 1: Justin has left us suggestion. Yes, he said, you mentioned
Speaker 1: them in your Predictions episode, but could you do an
Speaker 1: episode on f m V games. I think it would
Speaker 1: be a lot of fun. So fm V that stands
Speaker 1: for full motion video right right, Those games fantastic Well,
Speaker 1: in order to understand what full motion video is all
Speaker 1: about and the role that they played in video games,
Speaker 1: it probably benefit us to just do a quick overview
Speaker 1: of the different types of graphics we saw, particularly in
Speaker 1: early video games. So if you were talking about the
Speaker 1: earliest of computer games, you were limited to either text
Speaker 1: adventures like Zorke that kind of thing, or vector graphics
Speaker 1: two D vector graphics games, which would be more like Asteroids.
Speaker 1: So if you ever played the old Asteroids arcade game,
Speaker 1: everything with these these very simple shapes, Yeah you're talking
Speaker 1: about dots are lines? Yeah, exactly, That's that's what vector
Speaker 1: graphics are. They're based on geometry. You define end points
Speaker 1: and then you have little lines drawn between those end points.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like think of it like, uh uh,
Speaker 1: you know, connect the dots. That's essentially what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: but in a in a graphics format, so it's pixels
Speaker 1: instead of you know, a solid black line from a
Speaker 1: pencil or something. Sure, and all of that being less
Speaker 1: graphically impressive perhaps than things like in the case of Zork,
Speaker 1: you know, your rich imagination opening entire star fields for you, right,
Speaker 1: you could have any sort of description in a text
Speaker 1: based one, and technically the graphics are only limited by
Speaker 1: your imagination, I guess. But vector graphics, you know, they
Speaker 1: have their their charms. The old old Star Wars arcade
Speaker 1: game where you had a little vector graphics tie fighters
Speaker 1: coming at you still one of my favorite arcade games
Speaker 1: of all time. And it also had the benefit of
Speaker 1: not taking up too much processing power. It didn't require
Speaker 1: you know, a chunky graphics card in order for it
Speaker 1: to produce these pretty simple graphics. Well, that's the whole
Speaker 1: thing with graphics is that they take so much disk
Speaker 1: space and processing power, and that is a problem that
Speaker 1: some of these FMV games that we are going to
Speaker 1: start talking about ran into really hard, yeah, really really hard.
Speaker 1: So so next we have sprites. So sprites, of course
Speaker 1: not a type of soft drink in this case. No,
Speaker 1: also not a whimsical mythological creature. No, though a sprite
Speaker 1: could be a whimsical mythological creature within the context of
Speaker 1: a video game. But you could have a sprite of
Speaker 1: a sprite. Yes, exactly, you could have a sprite of
Speaker 1: a sprite. So it's a two dimensional animation that's integrated
Speaker 1: into a larger scene, that can move around that larger
Speaker 1: scene completely independently, and it doesn't require you to re
Speaker 1: render that background. So I think of this kind of
Speaker 1: like a like a play because I'm a theater gee.
Speaker 1: But if you think of a play, you know, like
Speaker 1: you have a play with a set, and the actors
Speaker 1: can move all around that set that doesn't move. The
Speaker 1: set doesn't move the sexually unless something kind of terrible
Speaker 1: it's going on. In that case, that's an exception, But
Speaker 1: in an ideal situation, when it's not supposed to move,
Speaker 1: it stays. But you can also think of it as
Speaker 1: maybe like a magnet on a fridge or or a
Speaker 1: color form. Yeah, exactly, you can move this this one
Speaker 1: independent piece around without affecting everything else, and that meant
Speaker 1: that you only had to render the background the one
Speaker 1: time and then a little two D animated character. That's
Speaker 1: the only thing it really concentrating on. So it didn't
Speaker 1: require too much processing power to develop once we started
Speaker 1: getting into that. Although the early ones were limited as
Speaker 1: to the number of sprites that could be processed on
Speaker 1: screen at the same time, you have an here. The
Speaker 1: Atari hundred only had five, yeah, five moving graphical objects
Speaker 1: on screen at a time. So if you're thinking of
Speaker 1: like I don't know, Donkey Kong Jr. And you're playing
Speaker 1: as the main character, you know, in the Arcade version
Speaker 1: you had all these little bitty uh platforms that could
Speaker 1: go up and down and things like that, or monsters
Speaker 1: that could grab you, And there really wasn't too much
Speaker 1: of a limit because the hardware there was just huge, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was just meant to play that game right.
Speaker 1: On the Atari twenty hundred, which had much more strict
Speaker 1: limitations on what the processor could do, you had at
Speaker 1: most five moving graphical objects on screen at any given time.
Speaker 1: One of the examples we could give of that, besides
Speaker 1: the one I just mentioned, a Super Mario Brothers and
Speaker 1: Nintendo game. Now that that one had obviously a greater
Speaker 1: capacity for moving objects. It wasn't limited to the attary model.
Speaker 1: But that is another example of a video game you sprites. Now,
Speaker 1: there is one other type that I'm I can mention
Speaker 1: really quickly, which are video games that use three dimensional models.
Speaker 1: But that goes that's that's after full motion video. So
Speaker 1: three dimensional models very common today, but we're not going
Speaker 1: to talk about that because we're really focusing on fm vs.
Speaker 1: So what is it. It's when you have recorded up
Speaker 1: some sort of video. Whether it is live action, it
Speaker 1: can be animated, doesn't matter, um, but it is recorded
Speaker 1: and plays back as part of the video game experience.
Speaker 1: Some people refer to games that were really really super
Speaker 1: heavy on fm V as interactive movies, because here's the thing.
Speaker 1: If I record something ahead of time and then I
Speaker 1: present it to somebody, that person is not going to
Speaker 1: have a whole lot of say in what happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got a limited amount of interactivity that can happen
Speaker 1: when right, it's already it's already gone. Yeah exactly. So
Speaker 1: if I were to have a kind of a choose
Speaker 1: your own adventure game, let's say it that way, because
Speaker 1: that's a that's a perfect example something I would work
Speaker 1: with this, But choose your own adventure books, same sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Right, You're limited to the choices that the
Speaker 1: book lays out, and you're limited to the to the consequences,
Speaker 1: which for me invariably involved dying to hold my finger
Speaker 1: back on a previous page and say, all right, I
Speaker 1: want to try a different way. Now. I have a
Speaker 1: whole series of bookmarks whenever I have a choose you
Speaker 1: an adventure, but I always I resented the ones where
Speaker 1: you would get to the point where you either choice
Speaker 1: that you had presented to you would result in your
Speaker 1: death and think, no, now I have to go back
Speaker 1: to spots. Oh no, that's my favorite. It's it's the
Speaker 1: branching thing. But that's what a full motion video game,
Speaker 1: I mean, like a serious FMV video game was, like
Speaker 1: all right, And I think that when most people think
Speaker 1: of full motion video games, they are thinking of live
Speaker 1: action video Yeah. But but some of them, as we
Speaker 1: will discuss, yeah, are actually in fact the earliest ones,
Speaker 1: well not the earliest, but some of the earliest ones
Speaker 1: really had a lot of animation involved. Yeah, And most
Speaker 1: of these games use optical disc technology, either CDs or
Speaker 1: laser discs and uh. And although I think that the
Speaker 1: production on laser discs, the research for it today right
Speaker 1: went back to the nineteen fifties, they weren't really a
Speaker 1: commercial format until the nineteen seventies. Uh. And even then
Speaker 1: they weren't really very much of a commercial format. I mean,
Speaker 1: even even in the nineteen eighties when you started to
Speaker 1: really get into the home theater world, laser disc was
Speaker 1: one of those things that that cool person with way
Speaker 1: more money than you had, uh, they owned one, but
Speaker 1: you did not. Um. I mean I remember going to
Speaker 1: parties with with my family. My parents would take me
Speaker 1: to some party with some other science fiction or fantasy
Speaker 1: authors throwing a weird bash, and they happen to have
Speaker 1: a laser disc and they would put on a laser
Speaker 1: disc of one of these full motion video games where
Speaker 1: it would just play out the game as if you
Speaker 1: were making all the right choices, so that you could
Speaker 1: actually see it from start to finish, and you really
Speaker 1: did watch it like a movie. It wasn't even interactive
Speaker 1: at that point. It was just a movie. And then
Speaker 1: at the end it would show you all the wrong
Speaker 1: choices and all the consequences thereof. But anyway, the the
Speaker 1: effect of fm V was really impressive because it allowed
Speaker 1: for much much more intense, realistic graphics, sometimes, like we said,
Speaker 1: live action video, which was a huge difference from the
Speaker 1: state of the art in vector and sprite graphics. So
Speaker 1: you know, if you were to go into a video
Speaker 1: game arcade we used to have those back in the day. Kids,
Speaker 1: If you were to go into an arcade and you
Speaker 1: saw something like pac Man, which would look impressive next
Speaker 1: to something like Asteroids, but then you saw dragons Layer,
Speaker 1: you think this game must come from the future, because
Speaker 1: look at it compared to these other games. I need
Speaker 1: to put my quarters in that thing, even though it's
Speaker 1: twice as many quarters as any of the other machines
Speaker 1: in this room. So yeah, the but the idea here
Speaker 1: is that that not only did we have this incredible
Speaker 1: graphical uh interface, this this this gorgeous display of whether
Speaker 1: it was video or an you know, live video or animation,
Speaker 1: it also meant that, like we said, you had that
Speaker 1: you had to give up some interactivity. And so there
Speaker 1: was this constant battle between what is what's the right
Speaker 1: balance where should we have an interactive element versus a
Speaker 1: you know, a really dramatic element. We'll be talking about
Speaker 1: that throughout the rest of this sure, and and creating
Speaker 1: game design around that sort of problem is probably tricky
Speaker 1: for the for the best of game designers. And I'm
Speaker 1: not going to say for the record that all of
Speaker 1: the best game designers were always working on these problems.
Speaker 1: It's a hard thing. And also game designers perhaps are
Speaker 1: not known for their video production quality. Yes, it's also
Speaker 1: an important thing to remember that, you know, someone who
Speaker 1: can make a good game may not be someone who
Speaker 1: can direct a compelling sequence, right, So that's hard, y'all, Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially if you're talking about using live actors who you know.
Speaker 1: The nice thing about animated characters, if you don't like
Speaker 1: their performance, you can throw them away. That's what that's.
Speaker 1: That's pair phrasing what Hitchcock said about Disney. The Disney
Speaker 1: was fortunate that if he was displeased with the performance,
Speaker 1: he could just crumple it up and throw it away,
Speaker 1: whereas Hitchcock was somewhat limited by the law on what
Speaker 1: he could do. It's I think he did a little
Speaker 1: bit of that here and there anyway, but certainly psychologically
Speaker 1: that's a totally different episode. So we're going to talk
Speaker 1: now that's a tech stuff episode and probably not. We
Speaker 1: can talk about some actual examples, including the earliest one
Speaker 1: I could find. I'm not saying this is the first
Speaker 1: f m V. Let's call it video amusement, because that's
Speaker 1: what they referred to it as, or at least one
Speaker 1: of the historical sites I visited refers to it as
Speaker 1: a video amusement. You wouldn't really call it a game necessarily,
Speaker 1: but it was came out towards the end of nineteen
Speaker 1: eight one or the beginning of nineteen eighty two, and
Speaker 1: it's called quarter horse quarter horse, quarter horse because he'd
Speaker 1: give it quarters. That'd be part of it, but it's
Speaker 1: also because it would be a quarter horse race, so
Speaker 1: it was a horse race game. So imagine that you
Speaker 1: walk up to an arcade. It's got two screens on it.
Speaker 1: One screen has like the video betting stuff on it,
Speaker 1: and it gives you like the odds of all the
Speaker 1: different horses that are going to run next race, and
Speaker 1: so you can choose which horse you want to bet on.
Speaker 1: You can put how many credits you bet on that
Speaker 1: particular horse, and then once you're ready to go, you
Speaker 1: place the bet, and then you hear that that all
Speaker 1: that and they show the video of an actual horse
Speaker 1: race that happened in the past, and then one of
Speaker 1: the horses wins, and you find out whether or not
Speaker 1: one of the horses you you bet on one, and
Speaker 1: if you did win, you get more credits. I don't
Speaker 1: know that it actually paid out, so I don't know
Speaker 1: if you ever could really like win money off this thing,
Speaker 1: or if it was simply credits that you can play with.
Speaker 1: So in other words, you just keep playing the game
Speaker 1: until you're out of credits. I'm not sure if amusement
Speaker 1: is the correct word to attach to video in this case.
Speaker 1: It's a video something yeah, something, I mean, maybe I'm
Speaker 1: not maybe I share yeah exactly. So you might first say, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, if it's if it's video of an
Speaker 1: actual horse race, how do you not know which horse wins?
Speaker 1: And the way that works out is that they would
Speaker 1: assign different names to the horses that were in the race,
Speaker 1: so and it would change each time. So so you
Speaker 1: wouldn't know that, you know, the horse with the jockey
Speaker 1: on it that's, you know, wearing the little red outfit,
Speaker 1: you wouldn't know what his name was unless you're a
Speaker 1: very serious horse race afficionado. It wouldn't even matter. I mean,
Speaker 1: it would all be based on the odds, because what
Speaker 1: the way this scheme was supposed to work was it
Speaker 1: would actually look at the odds for any given horse,
Speaker 1: simulate a race, and then say, all right, here's who won.
Speaker 1: And sometimes the long shot wins. You know, that's the
Speaker 1: funny thing about statistics. Okay, alright, so so it's not
Speaker 1: it's not whoever won literally in the video. It's okay,
Speaker 1: it's an algorithm and the yeah, exactly exactly, so that like,
Speaker 1: you know, the horse's identities were in fact, the video
Speaker 1: was superfluous. The video doesn't matter. Really. What you're doing
Speaker 1: is you're betting on statistics. So you're sitting you're kind
Speaker 1: of betting on a on a random roll of the
Speaker 1: dice in a in a sense, and you say, I
Speaker 1: bet that the dice are going to come up like this,
Speaker 1: which you know sounds kind of crazy when you first
Speaker 1: described like that, except you realize that the game Craps
Speaker 1: is all about that concept. So at any rate, this
Speaker 1: was the first example I could find of a video
Speaker 1: amusement using fm V. The next one is probably the
Speaker 1: most famous f m V. I've already referred to it
Speaker 1: once in this podcast. Yeah, it came out and it
Speaker 1: is Dragon's Layer. Yeah, Dragon's Layer from Cinematronics. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: this was created with animation from Don Bluth, who was
Speaker 1: a former Disney animator. I want to say Oliver and
Speaker 1: Company was one of his, but he also did the
Speaker 1: Five Old Movies, the Five West um and Secrets and
Speaker 1: them I think as well. So he he was the
Speaker 1: guy who did all the animation for this. You play
Speaker 1: as Dark the Daring a night in shining armor. Uh,
Speaker 1: and you're rescuing the Princess Daphne, who is in a
Speaker 1: teeny tiny little outfit. This this game probably didn't do
Speaker 1: a whole lot for you know, the portrayals, portrayal of
Speaker 1: women in video games. Yeah, I think several of the
Speaker 1: things on our list didn't do a whole lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna cover some more that are a little to
Speaker 1: varying degrees of being upsetting and nineties yeah and today.
Speaker 1: So anyway, Yeah, this this gameplay was limited to a
Speaker 1: joystick and button where you would have prompts on the
Speaker 1: screen and you would have to hit the joystick in
Speaker 1: the right direction or press the button at the right
Speaker 1: time in order for you to progress in the story.
Speaker 1: So you can think of it in a sense as
Speaker 1: every little segment is a chapter break on like you
Speaker 1: know a DVD, and this is a laser disc game.
Speaker 1: It was on laser disc. And if you hit the
Speaker 1: right button on your on your remote control on your
Speaker 1: DVD player, you get to watch the next part of
Speaker 1: the movie, and if you hit the wrong button, it stops.
Speaker 1: That's essentially what this was, except that the you know,
Speaker 1: you had four buttons as in the four directions of
Speaker 1: your joystick, and then the actual button buttons, So five buttons.
Speaker 1: Total exciting stuff, right, And um, I've actually seen some
Speaker 1: versions of this where they had the prompts turned off,
Speaker 1: so you had to have memorized it. Totally not fair.
Speaker 1: I don't know how you can just watch something with
Speaker 1: no prompts and say, oh, I bet I'm supposed to
Speaker 1: hit left right now. Um. But anyway, that was the
Speaker 1: basics for dragons Layer. Uh. And again, you could only
Speaker 1: do the actions when the prompts came up. You couldn't
Speaker 1: swing your sword at any given time. You couldn't make
Speaker 1: Dirk run to the left or run to the right
Speaker 1: because all of that had already been animated. So you can't.
Speaker 1: You can't control something that's already been set down. However,
Speaker 1: it did allow those graphics, as you said before, to
Speaker 1: be very impressive for the time. Yeah, and the story
Speaker 1: itself was, you know, this kind of cute ce fantasy story.
Speaker 1: So it had a lot of appeal. And it certainly
Speaker 1: was one of those things that if you saw someone
Speaker 1: who was really good at this, like they had memorized
Speaker 1: the sequence and they were they were able to get
Speaker 1: really far, was entertaining to watch. I. You know, I
Speaker 1: could never get past a single screen in this game,
Speaker 1: so I never really got into it. But then I
Speaker 1: was also fairly young back in nineteen eight three. It
Speaker 1: did happen once upon time, folks, now you being young. Yes,
Speaker 1: Also in bally NFL football came out yep, same thing
Speaker 1: as uh in a in a sense as the horse
Speaker 1: racing game, and that they took footage from an actual
Speaker 1: football game Raiders versus Chargers, and that was what you
Speaker 1: got to watch as plays were carried out, and you
Speaker 1: played the part of a coach. So in other words,
Speaker 1: you're not controlling any football players, but based upon where
Speaker 1: your team is, like whether they're on offense or defense,
Speaker 1: you would pick the plays that they would do next exactly,
Speaker 1: so you would say, all right, well, based upon this
Speaker 1: position and based upon the players I have, I want
Speaker 1: this play to come next, and then you choose the play,
Speaker 1: and then you'd get a little video of one of
Speaker 1: the plays being carried out, and then you have another
Speaker 1: choice to make afterwards, but either either you continue or
Speaker 1: you know, there might be a turnover whatever. But there
Speaker 1: was something like eight hundred different video combinations for the
Speaker 1: whole game, because they used all these different film segments
Speaker 1: that could be interchanged based upon whichever play you had selected,
Speaker 1: and then it would show you the right uh, the
Speaker 1: right video play. And it was also supposed to really
Speaker 1: take into account statistics as well, so in other words,
Speaker 1: you couldn't just memorize a working strategy and play it
Speaker 1: and and impress all your friends, say watch this, and
Speaker 1: then you just do the exact because if you did
Speaker 1: the exact same pathway, you might have yeah. Um. Also,
Speaker 1: these early ones were not on optical disc technology, were they?
Speaker 1: This one in particular was not. The Dragonslayer was on
Speaker 1: the laser disc, but but bally NFL was on a
Speaker 1: video disc also known as a capacitance electronic disc or ceed.
Speaker 1: Now these used a needle to read that they actually
Speaker 1: were grooved, like the vinyl record. Ask your parents, actually
Speaker 1: those are back, now, are they are? They are all
Speaker 1: the hipster kids like them. Yeah, all right, that's fair.
Speaker 1: I never stopped liking them. That makes me even more
Speaker 1: hipster or cool. Yeah, but I like them when they
Speaker 1: were cool, and then when they weren't cool, and when
Speaker 1: they were cool again. But a capacitance electronic disc. I
Speaker 1: also had one of those, or my family did when
Speaker 1: I was a kid. Uh. We had one that was
Speaker 1: a video player. Wasn't a video game, just a video player,
Speaker 1: and I remember we had Singing in the Rain and
Speaker 1: Raiders Raiders of the Lost arc as two of the
Speaker 1: movies that would play on this thing. Um. Again, very
Speaker 1: similar to laser disc in the sense that whatever's on
Speaker 1: the disc obviously can't change. It's read only, so it
Speaker 1: was it was a different way of achieving the same goal.
Speaker 1: Then we get Space Ace. That was another Don Bluth game,
Speaker 1: another cinematronic Don Bluth game. You played as Ace, who,
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the game, before anything bad happens,
Speaker 1: is a big, old, brawny you know, Flash Gordon style
Speaker 1: space faring adventurer type uh. And then there's a bad
Speaker 1: guy named Commander Bof Bof who shoots him with a
Speaker 1: an infanto ray and turns him into a a adolescent
Speaker 1: as squeaky voiced, scrawny adolescent, and then he has to
Speaker 1: rescue his girlfriend. Yes, and occasionally he could transform back,
Speaker 1: at least briefly, into Ace. This one actually had some
Speaker 1: interesting inner activity in the sense that you could choose
Speaker 1: to become Ace and then move through a level, or
Speaker 1: you could choose to remain the scrawny guy and move
Speaker 1: through a level. But depending upon whether you were a
Speaker 1: sort of the scrawny guy, you had very different strategies. Uh,
Speaker 1: strategies in the sense of, you know what prompts you
Speaker 1: hit when. But Ace obviously would charge headlong into danger,
Speaker 1: whereas the scrawny version of him going around Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: But again you were limited to whatever had been prerecorded,
Speaker 1: just like the other versions. It was faster paced than
Speaker 1: Dragon's Lair, so a lot of people said it was
Speaker 1: even more challenging since I never got anywhere with Dragon's Lair.
Speaker 1: I didn't even bother with Spaces, but I admired the animation,
Speaker 1: and then uh, the next one, I have is one
Speaker 1: I never saw. I didn't even know it existed until
Speaker 1: I looked into it on online and I tried watching
Speaker 1: a video of it, and it was baffling. It's called
Speaker 1: bad Lands. This one was from Konami yep, and it's
Speaker 1: Western themed, as you would imagine with that title. You
Speaker 1: played as Buck, who was a cowboy whose family had
Speaker 1: been murdered by bad guys, so you're on a revenge mission.
Speaker 1: And it was done in a style that looked very
Speaker 1: much like um uh eneme you know. Uh. Back when
Speaker 1: I was when I would have played this, uh, it
Speaker 1: would have been an interesting experience at a science fiction
Speaker 1: convention because I could see this fitting right next to
Speaker 1: the anime room. It is so evocative of that style.
Speaker 1: But it had a single control, which was a giant button,
Speaker 1: just just one button, and you had to hit that
Speaker 1: button exactly when you needed to. And this one didn't
Speaker 1: have prompts and no, you just had to know when
Speaker 1: to hit it and if you hit it too early,
Speaker 1: you died, and if you hit it too late, you died.
Speaker 1: If you didn't hit it at all, you died. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it was a weird you know, like like if
Speaker 1: you faced off against a gunfighter and the gunfighter hadn't
Speaker 1: started to draw yet and you fired your gun, you
Speaker 1: the game would you would lose a life because you
Speaker 1: had broken the law. You could only fire after they
Speaker 1: had started to draw, but before they pull the trigger.
Speaker 1: So it was that really you know, delicate timing that
Speaker 1: you had to have. And again it was just the
Speaker 1: one button, so no joystick or anything on this thing.
Speaker 1: I've watch the play throughs of it, and I couldn't
Speaker 1: tell what was going on because it looked like there
Speaker 1: was no transition between one scene in the next. There
Speaker 1: was a moment literally the guy was in the street
Speaker 1: in an old western town. He uh shoots just in
Speaker 1: time to avoid getting hit by a guy who's up
Speaker 1: on a on a like on a second story floor,
Speaker 1: shooting through a window. And then the next sequence he's
Speaker 1: riding through the desert on a horse and avoiding rattlesnakes,
Speaker 1: and there was no transition between the two, like there's
Speaker 1: no just shoot a guy riding on a horse. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: Like now the town is no longer there, He's just
Speaker 1: in the middle of the desert. And I can't tell
Speaker 1: if that was just the way the video had been edited,
Speaker 1: or if that in fact was into surrealism exactly, like like, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, life is weird and sometimes you can't
Speaker 1: explain their causality is not necessarily at at play in
Speaker 1: this universe. Sometimes towns turn into snakes, That's true. Sometimes
Speaker 1: they do. Warning for all of you, just words of
Speaker 1: wisdom to live by. Other games that came out in
Speaker 1: four You've got Ninja Hayatai, which I could be completely
Speaker 1: wrong in the pronunciation of that uh. Eshes are ron Melia,
Speaker 1: Cobra Command, That One's Way, and Thayer's Quest uh, and
Speaker 1: all of them were essentially interactive animated movies. Cobra Command
Speaker 1: was interesting. It was a helicopter game and it actually
Speaker 1: had vector graphics on top of the video that you
Speaker 1: were watching, where you have a little vector graphics cross
Speaker 1: hairs that you can actually move around the screen, which
Speaker 1: was way more interactive than some of these other games.
Speaker 1: I mean, you were still like, you know, the enemies
Speaker 1: could only come at you from preordained uh spots. But
Speaker 1: I mean I suppose technically it's not that different from
Speaker 1: it's from algorithm that's building it as you go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, there are a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: video games like especially classic video games, rely on patterns,
Speaker 1: and if you recognize the patterns, then you can be
Speaker 1: really good at those games. Yeah, and Super Mario Brothers.
Speaker 1: There's Gumbas only come when does are going to come exactly?
Speaker 1: They never come differently, Donkey Kong, same thing, you know,
Speaker 1: all those sort of things where you you once you
Speaker 1: recognize the pattern, you can start to uh Exploits probably
Speaker 1: the wrong word that you can. You can anticipate and
Speaker 1: react and and make sure that you are in the
Speaker 1: right position all the time. Um. But it was interesting
Speaker 1: that it had a little more interactivity. Then there was
Speaker 1: Casino Strip, which was a card game with the live
Speaker 1: action video segments of various quote unquote strippers who had
Speaker 1: shed clothing as you played. I don't know how far
Speaker 1: this game would go. And this is arcade game, folks,
Speaker 1: this is not I'm not talking about a computer game.
Speaker 1: This was a cabinet that had two monitors. One monitor
Speaker 1: is your card hand and the other monitor which is
Speaker 1: above the first one. So it's yeah, yeah, so you
Speaker 1: have the live action models up there. Um. I would
Speaker 1: imagine since this would probably be in some stinny public
Speaker 1: venue that maybe it didn't get any more racy than
Speaker 1: say underclothes, sure, sure, or you know, possibly even that
Speaker 1: it was sold mostly to say casinos or some other
Speaker 1: adult entertainment venues. Yeah, I don't know if you if
Speaker 1: you in fact have played casino strip or own one,
Speaker 1: you can let us know how far did this thing go.
Speaker 1: I honestly did not want to research further because I
Speaker 1: was at work, and there's there are limitations that I
Speaker 1: have upon me that I placed upon myself. I should say. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: although if you look at any of our search histories,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that, um yeah, I don't think any of
Speaker 1: us come out squeaky clean just based upon the stuff
Speaker 1: we talk about. I mean, certainly Robert and Julie are
Speaker 1: probably in a lot of trouble somewhere. You know, they
Speaker 1: lead the way. So four that was kind of like
Speaker 1: the first rush of FMV games, But after that it
Speaker 1: started to die down a little bit, partly because these
Speaker 1: things are really hard to make. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: a lot of pre pre action to get all the
Speaker 1: different sequences and then to lay it out so that
Speaker 1: it actually becomes a game. It's you know, you would
Speaker 1: think that being able to build a video game with
Speaker 1: all those assets and not having to program in the
Speaker 1: to code in the animation for everything that needed to
Speaker 1: happen would be a shortcut, but it's not. It's a
Speaker 1: lot of production. Anyone who's ever done any production animation
Speaker 1: obviously takes a really long time because it's a very
Speaker 1: arduous process. But Lauren and I can tell you from
Speaker 1: shooting video that a video you see online that may
Speaker 1: take to three minutes can sometimes be forty five minutes
Speaker 1: to an hour to to make, sometimes longer depending upon
Speaker 1: how how complex it is. Oh sure, the day that
Speaker 1: we dropped blood on me in the studio, fake blood. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: that videos she took four hours for four and a
Speaker 1: half minute video. How long were you covered in sticky
Speaker 1: fake blood? Basically the entire four hours? So yeah, if
Speaker 1: you guys don't know what we're talking about, you need
Speaker 1: to look at brain Stuff. Yeah, brain Stuff show dot com.
Speaker 1: It's a whole video series where lots of your favorite
Speaker 1: health stuff works folks go on on video and explain
Speaker 1: different concepts. Yeah, this was blood for science. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it was you know, we weren't just dumping blood on her,
Speaker 1: that was that was the excuse. I mean, we were talking.
Speaker 1: But anyway, anyway, we don't want to spoil everything, go
Speaker 1: check it out. Yes, um so, so yeah, we didn't
Speaker 1: see a lot more until the nineteen nineties, although for
Speaker 1: for perspective, here was the year that that guidelines were
Speaker 1: laid out for the creation of data CDs. Previously, compact
Speaker 1: disc format was a solely audio data format and so
Speaker 1: um so, that's when Phillips and the other kids who
Speaker 1: were working on developing that kind of thing started getting
Speaker 1: into full data, getting video in there and uh so,
Speaker 1: and began the very slow process of that being adopted
Speaker 1: as a commercial format for the home consumer. If you
Speaker 1: wanted to do something like this, uh and you were
Speaker 1: using an old PC, you'd be limited to uh the
Speaker 1: discs and flappy disk could only hold a very tiny
Speaker 1: amount of video data. Video data is data hungry, which
Speaker 1: is why those optical laser discs were ideal for it.
Speaker 1: They could store a lot more information than say a
Speaker 1: hard coded processor, because that's what most arcade games are.
Speaker 1: They have a hard coded ROM chip, which is read
Speaker 1: only memory. Most of them have one of those hard
Speaker 1: coded ROM chips as part of a uh, an entire
Speaker 1: slide that goes right into the arcade machine. And some
Speaker 1: of them you can swap out for other games. Other times,
Speaker 1: you know, you've got a cabinet that's just dedicated to
Speaker 1: a game and that's all you've got. You know, you
Speaker 1: would have to essentially rebuild it if you want to
Speaker 1: put anything else in there. So yeah, very much under
Speaker 1: heavy limitations. And it wasn't until we started getting to
Speaker 1: this point where you could theoretically create a compact disc
Speaker 1: that would have video on it, and even then it
Speaker 1: would take a few years. Meanwhile, we get up to
Speaker 1: and that's when full motion video games started to make
Speaker 1: kind of a comeback, mostly due to a company called
Speaker 1: American Laser Games, which were they really game called Mad
Speaker 1: Dog McCree, and this one was a live action video
Speaker 1: Yep Cowboys, yep, good old uh shooting bad guys. You
Speaker 1: had a gradually o prospector who was mostly the narrator, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, if you were not fast enough, he
Speaker 1: would get shot and you would lose the benefit of
Speaker 1: having the grizzly old narrator help you along the way.
Speaker 1: It was one of those games where if you did well,
Speaker 1: you got hints on how to progress, and if you
Speaker 1: didn't have those hints, it would make the game much
Speaker 1: more difficult to go through. But the concept was that
Speaker 1: you are playing a cowboy known only as a stranger,
Speaker 1: and you have to rescue the mayor's daughter, which standard
Speaker 1: issue right once again, the damsel in distress. You're the big,
Speaker 1: brawny hero going to rescue her. You had a gun controllers. Yes,
Speaker 1: it was a light gun, so in fact that this
Speaker 1: one was a little different from the ones that was
Speaker 1: just a button or a button and a and a joystick,
Speaker 1: and this one you had a light gun, so it
Speaker 1: would detect when you were pointing the gun at the
Speaker 1: screen when you pull the trigger, and whether or not
Speaker 1: it was pointing at the right position on the screen
Speaker 1: for it to count as a hit. So the interactivity
Speaker 1: was a little bit better in the sense that you're
Speaker 1: actually doing stuff right if you if you don't shoot
Speaker 1: the right spun the screen, you don't progress um as
Speaker 1: opposed to you know, just hit a direction and watch then.
Speaker 1: So not that much different from other light gun games
Speaker 1: that would follow things like House of the Dead or
Speaker 1: Time Cops or any of those other light games that
Speaker 1: would follow in the arcade um. And again this is
Speaker 1: one of those games where it differentiated itself from the
Speaker 1: home video game market, one by using live action and
Speaker 1: two by the light gun. Uh. These are the things
Speaker 1: that arcades were investing in because it was getting harder
Speaker 1: and harder to compete against home video games systems like
Speaker 1: the Nintendo system and the rising, the rising marketing computer games.
Speaker 1: So how do you set yourself apart? Well, let's get
Speaker 1: some hokey actors to play some live action cowboys. The
Speaker 1: best actor in this, by the way, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: was the guy who played the Undertaker. That that's the
Speaker 1: character you would see every time you either got shot
Speaker 1: or you shot a citizen. Um, you would either of
Speaker 1: those things counted as the loss of a life, and
Speaker 1: you would then have a little visit with the Undertaker,
Speaker 1: who would say some sort of vaguely creepy and condescending
Speaker 1: thing about your performance, and then you would continue on
Speaker 1: then the game until you ran out lives. Um, vaguely
Speaker 1: creepy and condescending commentary from digital characters is one of
Speaker 1: my favorite things about video games. You have to say,
Speaker 1: so that's pretty quality. But yeah, American laser games made
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of other stuff in the In the
Speaker 1: relatively recent feature from exactly, um they did they did?
Speaker 1: Who shot Johnny Rock Gangster. That was a gangster game,
Speaker 1: made an old style like gangster style game. Oh, none
Speaker 1: of these new styles. Not not gangsta. It wasn't gangster.
Speaker 1: It was gangster. Space Pirates, oddly enough, it was about
Speaker 1: Home Shopping Network. It was actually sci fi pirates. And
Speaker 1: it was about space Pirates. Okay, And and this and
Speaker 1: this one cracks me up. Gallagher's gallery. Yeah, Now, are
Speaker 1: you familiar with the comedic genius known as Gallagher? Not
Speaker 1: the comedic genius known as Gallagher, But I'm aware of
Speaker 1: a comedian as Gallagher. I have had the pleasure of
Speaker 1: meeting Gallagher yea at c e S because he's now
Speaker 1: a gadgets commentator. Guy, did he smash anything in your presence?
Speaker 1: He did not have the sledge oomatic with him, which
Speaker 1: is probably for the best for everyone who was at
Speaker 1: ce S. He may have had it in his room,
Speaker 1: he just didn't bring it out on the show floor.
Speaker 1: It seems like a bad place for it. Yeah. But Gallagher,
Speaker 1: if you do not know, he's a guy, he's known
Speaker 1: for two things. Kind of silly sort of stream of consciousness,
Speaker 1: absurd humor, like like just weird jokes about things like
Speaker 1: language that kind of stuff. And then also the sledge oomatic,
Speaker 1: where he would, uh, he would pitch a gigantic sledgehammer
Speaker 1: as if it were a new consumer product that was
Speaker 1: only good for destroying whatever it was put in front
Speaker 1: of it, and usually it but end with a watermelon.
Speaker 1: That was the big one. And so Gallagher's gallery took
Speaker 1: advantage of the stratospheric comedic genius of Gallagher. And you
Speaker 1: were playing as a someone who was holding a toy
Speaker 1: gun it wasn't supposed to be an actual gun um
Speaker 1: and firing at various things that Gallagher wanted you to shoot.
Speaker 1: He would actually prompt you, and you know, you'd see
Speaker 1: a scene with a lot of stuff in it, and
Speaker 1: you were only supposed to shoot whatever it was Gallagher
Speaker 1: wanted you to shoot and leave everything else alone. Uh,
Speaker 1: makes perfect sense. I really hope they do make a
Speaker 1: sequel for the what I consider to be the spiritual
Speaker 1: successor to Gallagher, Carrot top Um. That would be probably
Speaker 1: I probably shouldn't even mention that. It's probably. If you
Speaker 1: say his name three times, I think you're right. I
Speaker 1: think you're right. I never I never look into the
Speaker 1: mirror and say it um. So yeah again, all of
Speaker 1: those games used a light gun as the controller. You
Speaker 1: would have to reload your gun by aiming off screen
Speaker 1: and pulling the trigger. I hear, by the way, if
Speaker 1: you ever do encounter one of these old of games
Speaker 1: from this company, that if you hold the light controller
Speaker 1: gun upside down, I'm talking about the actual arcade games,
Speaker 1: it will automatically reload whenever you pull the trigger, so
Speaker 1: you don't have to aim off screen. But let us
Speaker 1: know about this that that sounds important. Yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to go try this and write us in. So if
Speaker 1: you can just just remember to hold the gun upside
Speaker 1: down the entire time while firing. I have not tried this.
Speaker 1: I didn't know that. I used to play this game,
Speaker 1: the Mad Dog McCrea game, all the time in the arcades,
Speaker 1: and I was pretty good at it. I mean I
Speaker 1: could get about halfway through. Uh, pretty good for me.
Speaker 1: I could get about halfway through the game before I
Speaker 1: would have to continue. And once I got about the
Speaker 1: halfway point, uh, it got the difficulty wrapped up so
Speaker 1: quickly that I just don't know how. Yeah. I've seen
Speaker 1: people play through it though, and it's probably not that hard.
Speaker 1: It was just harder than I could handle. Uh. These
Speaker 1: A bunch of these were also released for the three
Speaker 1: d O home game system when it did come out
Speaker 1: at the incredibly low price of six hundred and nine dollars. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was really expensive. I think we might have mentioned
Speaker 1: it in one of our console episodes. The three d
Speaker 1: O was an incredibly ambitious game console. You can think
Speaker 1: of it as a predecessor for things like the Xbox
Speaker 1: three sixty in the PlayStation three and now the current
Speaker 1: generation of consoles as well, and that it was supposed
Speaker 1: to be an entertainment center as well as a video
Speaker 1: game console. But it was also so expensive and the
Speaker 1: games were not considered terribly um compelling or or what's
Speaker 1: another word good, So it didn't do so well. But yes,
Speaker 1: three d O was the other market beside it's arcade machines.
Speaker 1: At this time, we see another game called Time Traveler,
Speaker 1: and I played this one too. I played a lot
Speaker 1: of crappy video games when I was a kid. Um,
Speaker 1: time Traveler was a little bit uh you know how
Speaker 1: I was talking about how the light gun games set
Speaker 1: it apart from the home market. Time Traveler they also
Speaker 1: tried to set apart their their arcade machine from what
Speaker 1: you could get from a home Mark home computer game
Speaker 1: set up by having a quote unquote holographic display. Now
Speaker 1: it wasn't a real holographic display. They had a curved
Speaker 1: mirror and they used projection so that it looked from
Speaker 1: your perspective like the Yeah, they looked like three dimensional
Speaker 1: holographic figures, kind of like the chess pieces in Star Wars.
Speaker 1: So it looked like that was what was going on,
Speaker 1: but it was really all trickery. And because you know,
Speaker 1: you had to stand in a certain place because that's
Speaker 1: where the controls were, they knew where the player was
Speaker 1: gonna be, so it made it easier to design this
Speaker 1: game around that. It was released by Sega. It was
Speaker 1: designed by Rick Dyer, who was the guy who also
Speaker 1: designed Dragon's lair Um And uh yeah, it was you know,
Speaker 1: basic shooting him up game. You played another Cowboy because
Speaker 1: that was really popular apparently. Yeah, I don't remember cowboys
Speaker 1: paying that huge in the early nineties, but I think
Speaker 1: for one thing, it just made a compelling kind of
Speaker 1: protagonist to follow. His character was the Marshall Graham. I
Speaker 1: don't think he was a Marshall, No, just his name
Speaker 1: was Marshall. His name was Marshall and he was fighting
Speaker 1: the evil scientist volcre Vocal, which is you know, typical
Speaker 1: of a Western val Sorry it's Almos. It's almost as
Speaker 1: good as Commander Um. But yeah. You had to fight
Speaker 1: him through time, and time would be seven different levels
Speaker 1: that were uh, dating all the way back to prehistoric
Speaker 1: times to the future. You had some choice about which
Speaker 1: era you would visit next um and you could get
Speaker 1: some interest sting other elements to it, like time reversal cubes,
Speaker 1: which would be something that we would see used in
Speaker 1: in other formats and other games. The idea being that
Speaker 1: you could actually reverse a small segment of time and
Speaker 1: try a failed action again, rather than having to waste
Speaker 1: an entire life and start the level over like in
Speaker 1: like in BioShock there's chambers there, yeah, or like in
Speaker 1: a Prince of Persia sense of Time, where you could
Speaker 1: you could reverse the last few seconds. The the goal
Speaker 1: here was that, you know, you would have a whole
Speaker 1: sequence of events that would unfold in video, and you
Speaker 1: couldn't really just PLoP the player down in the middle
Speaker 1: of it. You essentially you would have divided up times
Speaker 1: just again like DVD chapters, and you couldn't just go
Speaker 1: into the middle of a DVD chapter, you had to
Speaker 1: go to the beginning. So this way it could rewind
Speaker 1: it to a specific point within that little segment, as
Speaker 1: opposed to having you play the whole segment over. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: especially since saved games were not a huge part of
Speaker 1: the industry at this point in time, and this one
Speaker 1: was an arcade games, so you were just stuck with,
Speaker 1: you know, feeding more and more coins into this machine,
Speaker 1: which I did because I was dumb, you know, Lauren,
Speaker 1: when we started this podcast, I had no idea that
Speaker 1: we'd still be talking an hour and nine minutes later.
Speaker 1: Me neither, because I don't see the future. Yeah, very well, anyway,
Speaker 1: my future glasses are broken. So we decided after we
Speaker 1: recorded an epic episode of Epic Nous that it makes
Speaker 1: sense for us to end here where we're talking about
Speaker 1: kind of the end of the arcade era for full
Speaker 1: motion video, and then we can transition into the era
Speaker 1: of the home video game networked for our next episode
Speaker 1: and talk about all new levels of terrible F and B.
Speaker 1: So listeners, stick with us. We're going to in our
Speaker 1: next episode talk about home video games, and you know,
Speaker 1: you sewer shark fans out there. Don't worry, We're going
Speaker 1: to get you covered. And if you guys have suggestions
Speaker 1: for any other topics you would like to hear us
Speaker 1: talk about in the future, send us an email our
Speaker 1: addresses tex stuff at how stuff works dot com, or
Speaker 1: drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or Tumbler or
Speaker 1: handle it. All three is tech stuff hs W. We'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again really soon for more on this
Speaker 1: and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com.