Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan strick Lind. I'm an executive producer with I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and I love all things tech. It is time
Speaker 1: for a classic episode. This episode originally published on July
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen. It is titled The Full Motion Video
Speaker 1: Era The Arcade. So this is part one of a
Speaker 1: two part series. The first part I talked about full
Speaker 1: motion video games as games that have actual live action
Speaker 1: video content incorporated into them, and this is obviously the
Speaker 1: arcade version of that. And this is one of those
Speaker 1: topics where I really feel like I need to bring
Speaker 1: a guest on for an update. I would love to
Speaker 1: get Justin McElroy of the McIlroy Brothers on because he
Speaker 1: is a full motion video fan through and through, and
Speaker 1: I think his ex pertise would be invaluable. But let's
Speaker 1: listen in to this classic episode. So if you ever
Speaker 1: played the old Asteroids arcade game, everything with these these
Speaker 1: very simple shapes, Yeah you're talking about dots are lines? Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: That's that's what vector graphics are. They're based on geometry.
Speaker 1: You define end points and then you have little lines
Speaker 1: drawn between those end points, so it's kind of like
Speaker 1: think of it like, uh uh, you know, connect the dots.
Speaker 1: That's essentially what you're talking about, but in a in
Speaker 1: a graphics format, so it's pixels instead of you know,
Speaker 1: a solid black line from a pencil or something. Sure,
Speaker 1: and all of that being less graphically impressive perhaps than
Speaker 1: things like in the case of Zork. You know, your
Speaker 1: rich imagination opening entire star fields for you, right, you
Speaker 1: could have any sort of description in a text based one,
Speaker 1: and technically the graphics are only limited by your imagination,
Speaker 1: I guess. But vector graphics, you know, they have their
Speaker 1: their charms. The old old Star Wars arcade game where
Speaker 1: you had little vector graphics tie fighters coming at you
Speaker 1: still one of my favorite arcade games of all time.
Speaker 1: And it also had the benefit of not taking up
Speaker 1: too much processing power. It didn't require, you know, a
Speaker 1: chunky graphics card in order for it to produce these
Speaker 1: pretty simple graphics. Well, that's the whole thing with graphics
Speaker 1: is that they take so much disk space and processing power,
Speaker 1: and that is a problem that some of these FMV
Speaker 1: games that we are going to start talking about ran
Speaker 1: into really hard, yeah, really really hard so so next
Speaker 1: we have sprites. So sprites, of course not a type
Speaker 1: of soft drink in this case. No, also not a
Speaker 1: whimsical mythological creature. No, though a sprite could be a
Speaker 1: whimsical mythological creature within the context of a video game.
Speaker 1: But you could have a sprite of a sprite. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: you could have a sprite of a sprite. So it's
Speaker 1: a two dimensional animation that's integrated into a larger scene
Speaker 1: that can move around that larger scene completely independently, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't require you to re render that background. So
Speaker 1: I think of this kind of like a like a
Speaker 1: play because I'm a theater geek. But if you think
Speaker 1: of a play, you know, like you have a play
Speaker 1: with a set, and the actors can move all around
Speaker 1: that set because that doesn't move the set, doesn't move
Speaker 1: the setually unless something kind of terrible it's gone on
Speaker 1: in that case that's an exception, But in an ideal
Speaker 1: situation when it's not supposed to move, it stays. But
Speaker 1: you can also think of it as maybe like a
Speaker 1: magnet on a fridge or or a color form. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: you can move this this one independent piece around without
Speaker 1: affecting everything else, and that meant that you only had
Speaker 1: to render the background the one time and then a
Speaker 1: little two D animated character that's the only thing you're
Speaker 1: really concentrating on. So it didn't require too much processing
Speaker 1: power to develop once we started getting into that, although
Speaker 1: the early ones were limited as to the number of
Speaker 1: sprites that could be processed on screen at the same time,
Speaker 1: you haven't here. The Atari hundred only had five, yeah,
Speaker 1: five moving graphical objects on screen at a time. So
Speaker 1: if you're thinking of like I don't know, Donkey Kong Jr.
Speaker 1: And you're playing as the main character, you know, in
Speaker 1: the Arcade version, you had all these little bitty uh
Speaker 1: platforms that could go up and down and things like that,
Speaker 1: or monsters that could grab you. And there really wasn't
Speaker 1: too much of a limit because the hardware there was
Speaker 1: just huge, Yeah, and it was just meant to play
Speaker 1: that game right. On the Atari twenty six hundred, which
Speaker 1: had much more strict limitations on what the processor could do,
Speaker 1: you had at most five moving graphical objects on screen
Speaker 1: at any given time. One of the examples we could
Speaker 1: give of that, besides the one I just mentioned as
Speaker 1: Super Mario Brothers and Nintendo game. Now that that one
Speaker 1: had obviously a greater capacity for moving objects. It wasn't
Speaker 1: limited to the Attar twenty model. But that is another
Speaker 1: example of a video game you sprites. Now, there is
Speaker 1: one other type that I can mentioned really quickly, which
Speaker 1: are video games that us three dimensional models. But that
Speaker 1: goes that's that's after full motion video. So three dimensional
Speaker 1: models very common today, but we're not going to talk
Speaker 1: about that because we're really focusing on fm vs. So
Speaker 1: what is it. It's when you have recorded up some
Speaker 1: sort of video. Whether it is live action, it can
Speaker 1: be animated, doesn't matter, um, but it is recorded and
Speaker 1: plays back as part of the video game experience. Some
Speaker 1: people refer to games that were really really super heavy
Speaker 1: 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 of something I would
Speaker 1: work with this. But choose your own adventure books, same
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Right, You're limited to the choices that
Speaker 1: the book lays out, and you're limited to the to
Speaker 1: the consequences, which for me invariably involved dying. I had
Speaker 1: to hold my finger back on a previous page and say,
Speaker 1: all right, I want to try a different way. Now.
Speaker 1: I have a whole series of bookmarks whenever I have
Speaker 1: a choose you an adventure. But I always resent resented
Speaker 1: the ones where you would get to the point where
Speaker 1: you either choice that you had presented to you would
Speaker 1: result in your death and you think, no, now I
Speaker 1: have to go back to spots. Oh no, that's my favorite.
Speaker 1: It's it's the branching thing. But that's what a full
Speaker 1: motion video game, I mean, like a serious FMV video
Speaker 1: game was like all right, And I think that when
Speaker 1: most people think of full motion video games, they are
Speaker 1: thinking of live action video Yeah. But but some of them,
Speaker 1: as we will discuss, yeah, are actually in fact the
Speaker 1: earliest ones, well not the earliest, but some of the
Speaker 1: earliest ones really had a lot of animation involved. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and most of these games use optical disc technology, either
Speaker 1: CDs or laser discs. And although I think that the
Speaker 1: production on laser discs, the research for today right went
Speaker 1: back to the nineteen fifties, they weren't really a commercial
Speaker 1: format until the nineteen seventies. Uh, and even then they
Speaker 1: 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 authors,
Speaker 1: throwing a weird bash, and they happen to have a
Speaker 1: laser disc, and they would put on a laser disc
Speaker 1: of one of these full motion video games where it
Speaker 1: would just play out the game as if you were
Speaker 1: making all the right choices, so that you could actually
Speaker 1: see it from start to finish, and you really did
Speaker 1: watch it like a movie. It wasn't even interactive at
Speaker 1: that point. It was just a movie. And then at
Speaker 1: the end it would show you all the wrong choices
Speaker 1: and all the consequences thereof. But anyway, the the effect
Speaker 1: of fm V was really impressive because it allowed for
Speaker 1: 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 Dragon's 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 interface, this this this gorgeous display of whether it
Speaker 1: was video or you know, live video or animation, it
Speaker 1: also meant that, like we said, you had that you
Speaker 1: had to give up some interactivity. And so there was
Speaker 1: this constant battle between what is what's the right balance
Speaker 1: where should we have an interactive element versus a you know,
Speaker 1: a really dramatic element. We'll be talking about that throughout
Speaker 1: the rest of this show. Sure, And and creating game
Speaker 1: design around that sort of problem is probably tricky for
Speaker 1: the for the best of game designers. And I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say for the record that all of the
Speaker 1: best game designers were always working on these problems. It's
Speaker 1: a hard thing. And also game designers perhaps are not
Speaker 1: known for their video production quality. Yes, it's also an
Speaker 1: important thing to remember that, you know, someone who can
Speaker 1: make a good game may not be someone who can
Speaker 1: 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 paraphrasing what Hitchcock said about Disney. The Disney was
Speaker 1: fortunate that if he was displeased with the performance, he
Speaker 1: could just crumple it up and throw it away, whereas
Speaker 1: Hitchcock was somewhat limited by the law on what he
Speaker 1: could do. It's I think he did a little bit
Speaker 1: of that here and there anyway, but certainly psychologically that's
Speaker 1: a totally different episode. We'll be back with more about
Speaker 1: full motion video in just a moment, but first let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break. So we're going to talk Now
Speaker 1: that's a text stuff episode and probably not. We can
Speaker 1: talk about some actual examples, including the earliest one I
Speaker 1: could find. Now 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 refer 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 one
Speaker 1: or the beginning of nineteen eight two, and it's called
Speaker 1: quarter horse, quarter horror, quarter horse because you'd give it quarters,
Speaker 1: that'd be part of it, but it's also because it
Speaker 1: would be a quarter horse race, So it was a
Speaker 1: horse race game. So imagine that you walk up to
Speaker 1: an arcade. It's got two screens on it. One screen
Speaker 1: has like the video betting stuff on it, and it
Speaker 1: gives you like the odds of all the different horses
Speaker 1: that are going to run next race, and so you
Speaker 1: can choose which horse you want to bet on. You
Speaker 1: can put how many credits you bet on that particular horse,
Speaker 1: and then once you're ready to go, you place the bet,
Speaker 1: and then you hear that that all that that, and
Speaker 1: they show the video of an actual horse race that
Speaker 1: happened in the past, and then one of the horses wins,
Speaker 1: and you find out whether or not one of the
Speaker 1: horses you you bet on one, and if you did win,
Speaker 1: you get more credits. I don't know that it actually
Speaker 1: paid out, so I don't know if you ever could
Speaker 1: really like win money off this thing, or if it
Speaker 1: was simply credits that you can play with. So in
Speaker 1: other words, you just keep playing the game until you're
Speaker 1: out of credits. I'm not sure if I amused is
Speaker 1: 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. So unless you're
Speaker 1: a very serious horse race afficionado, it wouldn't even matter.
Speaker 1: I mean, it would all be based on the odds,
Speaker 1: because what the way the scheme was supposed to work
Speaker 1: was it would actually look at the odds for any
Speaker 1: given horse, simulate a race, and then say, all right,
Speaker 1: here's who won. And sometimes the long shot wins. You know,
Speaker 1: that's the funny thing about statistics. Okay, alright, so so
Speaker 1: it's not it's not whoever won literally in the video.
Speaker 1: It's okay, it's an algorithm in the yeah, exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: so that you know the horse's identities, where in fact
Speaker 1: the video was superfluous. The video doesn't matter. Really. What
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're betting on statistics. So you're sitting
Speaker 1: you're kind of betting on a on a random roll
Speaker 1: of the dice in a in a sense, and you say,
Speaker 1: I bet that the dice are going to come up
Speaker 1: like this, which you know sounds kind of crazy when
Speaker 1: you first described like that, except you realize that the
Speaker 1: game craps is all about that concept. So at any rate,
Speaker 1: this was the first example I could find of a
Speaker 1: video amusement you seeing fm V. The next one is
Speaker 1: probably the most famous f m V. I've already referred
Speaker 1: to it once in this podcast. Yeah, it came out
Speaker 1: and it 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 of those west Um and
Speaker 1: Secrets and them I think as well, So he he
Speaker 1: was the guy who did all the animation for this.
Speaker 1: You play as Dark the Daring a night in shining armor,
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. Yeah, 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
Speaker 1: can't 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. It wasn't entertaining to watch. I. You know,
Speaker 1: I 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 nine three. It did
Speaker 1: happen once upon time, folks, now you being young. Yes,
Speaker 1: Also in three Ballely, NFL football came out. Yep, same
Speaker 1: thing as uh in a sense as the horse racing game,
Speaker 1: and that they took footage from an actual football game,
Speaker 1: Raiders versus Chargers, And that was what you got to
Speaker 1: watch as plays were carried out and you played the
Speaker 1: part of a coach, So in other words, you're not
Speaker 1: controlling any football players, but based upon where your team is,
Speaker 1: like whether they're on offense or defense, you would pick
Speaker 1: the plays that they would do next exactly. So you
Speaker 1: would say, all right, well, based upon this position and
Speaker 1: based upon the players I have, I want this play
Speaker 1: to come next, and then you choose the play, and
Speaker 1: then you'd get a little video of one of the
Speaker 1: plays being carried out, and then you have another choice
Speaker 1: to make afterwards, either either you continue or you know,
Speaker 1: there might be a turnover whatever. But there was something
Speaker 1: like eight hundred different video combinations for the whole game,
Speaker 1: because they used all these different film segments that could
Speaker 1: be interchanged based upon whichever play you had selected, and
Speaker 1: then it would show you the right uh, the right
Speaker 1: video play. And it was also supposed to really take
Speaker 1: into account statistics as well, so in other words, you
Speaker 1: couldn't just memorize a working strategy and play it and
Speaker 1: and impress all your friends, say watch this, and then
Speaker 1: you just do the exact because if you did the
Speaker 1: exact same pathway, you might have some time different. 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: a laser disc, but but bally nfl is 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 a record, the vinyl record. Ask your parents,
Speaker 1: actually those are back, now, are they are? They are
Speaker 1: all the hipster kids like them? Yeah, all right, that's fair.
Speaker 1: I never stopped liking them. That makes me even more hipster.
Speaker 1: Or them before they were cool. Yeah, but I like
Speaker 1: them when they were cool, and then when they weren't cool,
Speaker 1: and when they were cool again. But a capacitance electronic disc.
Speaker 1: I also had one of those, or my family did
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. Uh. We had one that
Speaker 1: was a video player. Wasn't a video game, just a
Speaker 1: video player. And I remember we had Singing in the
Speaker 1: Rain and Raiders Raiders of the Lost Arc as two
Speaker 1: of the movies that would play on this thing. Um. Again,
Speaker 1: very similar to laser disc in the sense that whatever's
Speaker 1: on the disc obviously can't change it's read only, so
Speaker 1: it was it was a different way of achieving the
Speaker 1: same goal. Then we get Space Ace. That was another
Speaker 1: Don Bluth game, another cinematronic Don Bluth game. You played
Speaker 1: as Ace, who, at the beginning of the game, before
Speaker 1: anything bad happens, is a big, old, brawny you know,
Speaker 1: Flash Gordon style space faring adventurer type uh. And then
Speaker 1: there's a bad guy named Commander Bof Bof who shoots
Speaker 1: him with a an infanto ray and turns him into
Speaker 1: a a adolescent as squeaky voiced, scrawny adolescent, and then
Speaker 1: he has to rescue his girlfriend. Yes, and occasionally he
Speaker 1: could transform back, at least briefly, into Ace. This one
Speaker 1: actually had some interesting inner activity in the sense that
Speaker 1: you could choose to become Ace and then move through
Speaker 1: a level, or you could choose to remain the scrawny
Speaker 1: guy and move through a level. But depending upon whether
Speaker 1: you were a sort of the scrawny guy, you had
Speaker 1: very different strategies. Uh, strategies in the sense of you
Speaker 1: know what prompts you hit when. But Ace obviously would
Speaker 1: charge headlong into danger, whereas the scrawny version of him
Speaker 1: going to figure out ways around. Yeah, exactly, But again
Speaker 1: you were limited to whatever had been pre recorded. Just
Speaker 1: like the other versions. It was faster paced than Dragon's Lair,
Speaker 1: so a lot of people said it was even more
Speaker 1: challenging since I never got anywhere with Dragon's Lair. I
Speaker 1: didn't even bother with spaces, but I 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 guy, 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 enemey 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's so evocative of that style. But
Speaker 1: 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 to draw, but before they pull the trigger. So
Speaker 1: it was that really you know, delicate timing that you
Speaker 1: had to have. And again it was just the one button,
Speaker 1: so no joystick or anything on this thing. I've watched
Speaker 1: some play throughs of it and I couldn't tell what
Speaker 1: was going on because it looked like there was no
Speaker 1: transition between one scene and the next. There was a
Speaker 1: moment literally the guy was in the street in an
Speaker 1: old western town. He uh shoots just in time to
Speaker 1: avoid getting hit by a guy who's up on a
Speaker 1: on a like on a second story floor, shooting through
Speaker 1: a window, and then the next sequence he's riding through
Speaker 1: the desert on a horse and avoiding rattlesnakes, and there
Speaker 1: was no transition between the two, like there's no just
Speaker 1: shooting guy riding on a horse. Yeah, exactly, like, now
Speaker 1: the town is no longer there, He's just in the
Speaker 1: middle of the desert. And I can't tell if that
Speaker 1: was just the way the video had been edited, or
Speaker 1: if that, in fact was surrealism exactly like, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know what, life is weird, and sometimes you can't
Speaker 1: blame 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 was 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 not from an 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, right Yeah, And Super Mario Brothers.
Speaker 1: There's gumbas only come when does it gonna 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, but 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: abu of the first one. So it's yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: you have the live action models up there. Um, I
Speaker 1: would imagine, since this would probably be in some stinny
Speaker 1: public venue, that maybe it didn't get any more racy
Speaker 1: than say underclothes, sure sure, or you know, possibly even
Speaker 1: that it was sold mostly to say casinos or some
Speaker 1: other adult entertainment venues. Yeah, I don't know if you,
Speaker 1: if 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 talked 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 nine 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 production to get all the different
Speaker 1: sequences and then to lay it out so that it
Speaker 1: actually becomes a game. It's you know, you would think
Speaker 1: that being able to build a video game with all
Speaker 1: those assets and not having to program in the to
Speaker 1: code in the animation for everything that needed to happen
Speaker 1: would be a shortcut, but it's not. It's a lot
Speaker 1: of production. Anyone who's ever done any production animation obviously
Speaker 1: takes a really long time because it's a very arduous process.
Speaker 1: But Lauren and I can tell you from shooting video
Speaker 1: that a video you see online that may take to
Speaker 1: three minutes can sometimes be forty five minutes to an
Speaker 1: hour to to make, sometimes longer depending upon how how
Speaker 1: complex it is. Oh sure, the day that we dropped
Speaker 1: blood on me in the studio, fake blood. Nonetheless, I
Speaker 1: had that videos. She took four hours for four and
Speaker 1: a half minute video. So how long were you covered
Speaker 1: in sticky fake blood? Basically the entire four hours. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if you guys don't know what we're talking about, you
Speaker 1: need to look at brain Stuff. Yeah, brain Stuff show
Speaker 1: dot com. It's a whole video series where lots of
Speaker 1: your favorite health stuff works, folks go on on video
Speaker 1: and explain different concepts. Yeah, this was blood for science. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it was you know, we weren't just dumping blood
Speaker 1: on her. That that was That was the excuse. I mean,
Speaker 1: we were talking. But anyway, anyway, we don't want to
Speaker 1: spoil everything. Go check it out. Yes, um so. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: we didn't see a lot more until the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: although for for perspective, here was the year that that
Speaker 1: guidelines were laid out for the creation of data CDs. Previously,
Speaker 1: compact 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: are 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 an
Speaker 1: adopted as a commercial format. Right for the home consumer,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to do something like this, uh, and
Speaker 1: you're using an old PC, you'd be limited to uh
Speaker 1: floppy disks, and floppy disk could only hold a very
Speaker 1: tiny amount of video data. Video data is data hungry,
Speaker 1: which 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 wanted to
Speaker 1: put anything else in there. We're gonna take a quick break,
Speaker 1: but will be right back. 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 to
Speaker 1: take a few years. Meanwhile, we get up to and
Speaker 1: that's when full motion video games started to make kind
Speaker 1: of a comeback, mostly due to a company called American
Speaker 1: Laser Games, which were they released in game called mad
Speaker 1: Dog McCree, and this one was a live action video Yep, Cowboys, yep,
Speaker 1: good old uh shooting bad guys. You had a gradually
Speaker 1: o prospector who was mostly the narrator, which by the way,
Speaker 1: if you were not fast enough, he would get shot
Speaker 1: and you would lose the benefit of having the grizzly
Speaker 1: old narrator help you along the way. It was one
Speaker 1: of those games where if you did well, you got
Speaker 1: hints on how to progress, and if you didn't have
Speaker 1: those hints, it would make the game much more difficult
Speaker 1: to to go through. But the concept was that you
Speaker 1: are playing a cowboy known only as Strange and you
Speaker 1: have to rescue the mayor's daughter, which standard issue right
Speaker 1: once again, the damsel in distress. You're the big, brawny
Speaker 1: 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 in a in 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 on the screen, you don't progress as
Speaker 1: opposed to you know, just hit a direction and watch her.
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 self 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 our kades were investing in because it was getting
Speaker 1: harder and harder to compete against home video games systems
Speaker 1: like the Nintendo system and the rising, the rising marketing
Speaker 1: computer games. So how do you set yourself apart? Well,
Speaker 1: let's get some hokey actors to play some live action cowboys.
Speaker 1: The 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 of lives. Um,
Speaker 1: vaguely creepy and condescending commentary from digital characters is one
Speaker 1: of 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 future from exactly um they did? They did?
Speaker 1: Who shot Johnny Rock? Gangster? That was a gangster game,
Speaker 1: an old style like gangster style game. Oh, none of
Speaker 1: these new styles. No, not not gangsta. It wasn't gang star.
Speaker 1: It was Gangster. Okay, Space Pirates, oddly enough, it was
Speaker 1: about Home Shopping Network. It was actually sci Fi Pirates.
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 known as Gallagher. I have had the pleasure
Speaker 1: of meeting Gallagher. Yeah at ces because he's now like
Speaker 1: 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 CEES.
Speaker 1: He may have had it in his room, he just
Speaker 1: didn't bring it out on the show floor. It seems
Speaker 1: like a bad place for it. But Gallagher, if you
Speaker 1: do not know, he's a guy, he's known for two things.
Speaker 1: Kind of silly sort of stream of consciousness, absurd humor,
Speaker 1: like like just weird jokes about things like language, that
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. And then also the sledge oomatic where
Speaker 1: he would, uh, he would pitch a gigantic sledgehammer as
Speaker 1: if it were a new consumer product that was only
Speaker 1: good for destroying whatever it was put in front of it.
Speaker 1: And usually it was end with a watermelon that was
Speaker 1: the big one. And so Gallagher's gallery took advantage of
Speaker 1: the stratospheric comedic genius of Gallagher. And you were playing
Speaker 1: as a someone who was holding a toy gun it
Speaker 1: wasn't supposed to be an actual gun um and firing
Speaker 1: at various things that Gallagher wanted you to shoot. He
Speaker 1: would actually prompt you, and you know, you'd see a
Speaker 1: scene with a lot of stuff in it and you
Speaker 1: were only supposed to shoot whatever it was Gallagher wanted
Speaker 1: you to shoot and leave everything else alone. Ah makes
Speaker 1: perfect sense. I really hope they do make a sequel
Speaker 1: for the what I consider to be the spiritual successor
Speaker 1: to Gallagher Carrot top Um. That would be probably. I
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't even mention that it's probably. Yeah. 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. Let us know
Speaker 1: about this that that sounds important. One go try this
Speaker 1: and write us in. So if you can just just
Speaker 1: remember to hold the gun upside down the entire time
Speaker 1: while firing. I have not tried this. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: I used to play this game, the Mad Dog McCree game,
Speaker 1: all the time in the arcades, and I was pretty
Speaker 1: good at it. I mean I could get about halfway through. Uh,
Speaker 1: pretty good for me. I can get about halfway through
Speaker 1: the game before I would have to continue. And once
Speaker 1: I got about the halfway point, uh, it got the
Speaker 1: difficulty wrapped up so quickly that I just said, hope. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've seen people play through it though, and it's probably
Speaker 1: not that hard. It was just harder than I could handle. Uh.
Speaker 1: These A bunch of these were also released for the
Speaker 1: three d OH home game system when it did come
Speaker 1: out in at the incredibly low price of six hundred
Speaker 1: and nine nine dollars. Yeah, it was really expensive. I
Speaker 1: think we might have mentioned it in one of our
Speaker 1: console episodes. The three d O was an incredibly ambitious
Speaker 1: game console. You can think of it as a predecessor
Speaker 1: for things like the Xbox three sixty in the PlayStation
Speaker 1: three and now the current generation of consoles as well.
Speaker 1: And it was supposed to be an entertainment center as
Speaker 1: well as a video game console. But it was also
Speaker 1: so expensive and the games were not considered terribly um
Speaker 1: compelling or or what's another word good, So it didn't
Speaker 1: do so well. But yes, three d O was the
Speaker 1: other market besides arcade machines. At this time. We see
Speaker 1: another game called Time Traveler, and I played this one too.
Speaker 1: I played a lot of crappy video games when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. Um Time Traveler was a little bit
Speaker 1: you know how I was talking about how the light
Speaker 1: gun games set it apart from the home market Time
Speaker 1: Traveler they also tried to set apart their their Arcade
Speaker 1: Machine from what you could get from a home Mark
Speaker 1: home computer game set up by having a quote unquote
Speaker 1: holographic display. Now it wasn't a real holographic display. They
Speaker 1: had a curved mirror and they used projection so that
Speaker 1: it looked from your respective like the Yeah, they looked
Speaker 1: like three dimensional holographic figures, kind of like the chess
Speaker 1: pieces in Star Wars. So it looked like that was
Speaker 1: what was going on, but it was really all trickery.
Speaker 1: And because you know, you had to stand in a
Speaker 1: certain place because that's where the controls were, they knew
Speaker 1: where the player was going to be, so it made
Speaker 1: it easier to design this game around that. It was
Speaker 1: released by Sega. It was designed by Rick Dyer, who
Speaker 1: was the guy who also designed Dragon's lair Um And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was you know, basic shoot him up game. You
Speaker 1: played another Cowboy because that was really popular apparently, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't remember cowboys paying that huge in the early nineties,
Speaker 1: but I think for one thing, it just made a
Speaker 1: compelling kind of protagonist to follow. His character was the
Speaker 1: Marshall Graham. I don't think he was a Marshall does
Speaker 1: His name was Marshall. His name was Marshall, and he
Speaker 1: was fighting the evil scientist volcre Vocal, which is you know,
Speaker 1: typic call of a Western Sorry it's Almos. It's almost
Speaker 1: as good as Commander Um. But yeah. You had to
Speaker 1: fight him through time, and time would be seven different
Speaker 1: levels that were uh, dating all the way back to
Speaker 1: prehistoric times to the future. You had some choice about
Speaker 1: which era you would visit next um, and you could
Speaker 1: get some interesting 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 Sends 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 it 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 game, so you were just stuck with,
Speaker 1: you know, feeding more and more coins into this machine.
Speaker 1: That's it for this classic episode of tech Stuff. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed it. We will have another one following
Speaker 1: up next week where we talk about home gaming and
Speaker 1: full motion video because man, what a special sub genre
Speaker 1: of games. So if you have suggestions for topics you
Speaker 1: would like me the cover in future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: reach out to me. The best way to do that
Speaker 1: is on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again.
Speaker 1: Really soon. Text Stuff is an I heart Radio production.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i
Speaker 1: heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.