Full Motion Video

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    CD-ROMs were a major technological leap back in the early nineties. All of a sudden our portable storage capacity jumped from the three-and-a-half megabyte floppies you mean 1.44MB? Thought so. we were using, to over seven hundred megabytes crammed on this little disk, and it didn't take long for game designers to stop and think: Hey, these things are like little Laserdiscs, we could put movies and stuff on 'em! And we could make kickass games out of that!
    —Noah "The Spoony One" Antwiler, The Spoony Experiment, on the origin of Full Motion Video games

    A type of video game based around video clips, much reviled nowadays for having little interactivity. Gameplay consisted mostly of pressing buttons at the right time, choosing correct sequences of clips, or playing other games that just used the video as a backdrop.

    Note: There was a period in The Nineties during which Cutscenes in normal games exclusively used pre-rendered or live-action video and were sometimes referred to as "FMVs".

    In arcades, the genre really began in 1983 with the release of Dragon's Lair, a laserdisc-based game with animation by Don Bluth. The game typically cost twice as much to play as any other game, and gameplay consisted of pressing a button or direction at the appropriate point, but it was very popular, and inspired countless imitators. The fad died after a year or so because of the sameness of the gameplay and the difficulty in maintaining expensive laserdisc players, though arcade laserdisc games were sporadically produced even through the 1990s. There were also attempts to bring laserdisc games into the home in the 1980s with the Palcom PX-7 MSX computer and the incredibly obscure RDI Halcyon console, and in the 1990s with the Pioneer LaserActive. Many old laserdisc games were simple enough that they can be played nowadays on an ordinary DVD player.

    Full motion video games really became popular on home computers with the introduction of CD-ROM drives in The Nineties, and CD-equipped console systems like the Sega CD, 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and Philips CD-i rushed to exploit the trend. Gameplay on home systems was no better than in the arcade, with the extra problem that early CD-based home systems, especially the Sega CD, weren't powerful enough to produce good quality video.

    While pretty much a dead genre, as the video game industry has moved onto other ways of making games with nice graphics and bad gameplay, some newer titles have taken on to using this medium as part of their marketing campaign, perhaps giving it a niche to hold on to.

    Not every FMV game was bad, though. Some, especially the Tex Murphy series, are considered classics of the adventure genre. It's just that for every Tex Murphy, Phantasmagoria, or Gabriel Knight, there were 10 Double Switch or Johnny Mnemonic-level games, and at $60+ a pop, the audience quickly became bored. Of course, many people still enjoy the lesser-quality games for the camp value.

    Examples of Full Motion Video include:

    Arcade games

    Home games

    • 428: Fusa Sareta Shibuya de was created by Chunsoft in 2008. It is a rare hybrid of live action FMV and Visual Novel.
    • Bad Mojo
    • Brain Dead 13
    • Burn:Cycle
    • Corpse Killer, an attempt at marrying this genre to the Rail Shooter. It fails on both fronts. The developers of this game later tried to take the same concept and apply it to Wuxia, clearly riding the Mortal Kombat wave.
    • Critical Path, essentially a So Bad It's Good B-Movie.
    • Cyberflix made a number of these, ranging from their gimmicky but still advanced and fun early efforts (Lunicus, Jump Raven, Dust) to their later genuinely stunning masterpieces (Titanic, Redjack.)
    • D
    • The Daedalus Encounter, a Spiritual Successor to Critical Path.
    • Double Switch, another FMV game similar to Night Trap, only instead of monsters, you're trapping mobsters and crooks after a treasure in a huge mansion. Notable for starring Corey Haim
    • Dracula Unleashed
    • Fate By Numbers (link), a freeware game produced as a graduation project by a group of students in the Netherlands, filmed in classic Film Noir style.
    • Fox Hunt
    • The second Gabriel Knight game
    • Ground Zero Texas
    • The Horde
    • Hysteria Project
    • The Journeyman Project (rough around the edges, but grew into the genre to become pretty good)
    • The Lawnmower Man (not the cartridge-based console game) used Dragon's Lair-style Press X to Not Die gameplay minus the on-screen prompts (thereby requiring trial and error) interspersed with time-limited puzzle solving. (This kind of gameplay combined with limited lives makes for extreme Fake Difficulty.) It had 3D graphics (like in the film) that were pre-rendered to fit the limits of the Sega Genesis color palette (64 onscreen, 512 total), even in the PC version despite the hardware allowing for more colors (256 onscreen, 2^24 total).
    • Maabus (1994), a first-person adventure game with some action elements, used pre-rendered 3D video clips to depict in-game actions, such as transitions between places (whereas some of its contemporaries, most notably the original Myst, would instead just jump from one still image to another). This game had so much video data that it needed 3 CDs to hold it all.
    • The Make My Video series on Sega CD, a set of utilities released at the height of the multimedia boom that let players edit their own versions of music videos from artists such as Marky Mark & The Funky Bunch, Kriss Kross, INXS and C+ C Music Factory. Especially notable for their terrible cutscenes and being generally considered some of the worst "games" ever made.
    • Metron. Can beat Make My Video example above in that nomination without any effort.
    • Night Trap (notoriously a target of Moral Guardians)
    • Phantasmagoria
    • Phantasmagoria 2
    • The first "S.W.A.T" title in the Police Quest series, which was also the beginning of a Gameplay Roulette. It's basically a First-Person Shooter with Full Motion Video instead of 3D graphics. It came on three CDs, and unfortunately was not worth the trouble.
    • Sewer Shark
    • Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective and Volume 2
    • Star Strike
    • Rebel Assault (it was actually quite fun, its sequel contained the first good live-action SW material since RotJ)
    • Street Fighter II: (The Interactive) Movie: A Japan-only Street Fighter game released for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn that combined footage from The Animated Movie with new animation made specifically for the game. Oddly enough, instead of controlling Ryu or one of the canon characters, the player character was a Shadowlaw Monitor Cyborg, who develops his abilities by watching said FMV footage and "analyzing" the characters' techniques.
    • Super Adventure Rockman: Remember those FMV scenes in Mega Man 8? Well this is pretty much what would happen if someone made an entire game with those scenes. Like the Street Fighter game above, it came out only in Japan for the PS and Saturn. Keiji Inafune is not exactly fond of this game.
    • The Tex Murphy series
    • Plumbers Don't Wear Ties is a ridiculous subversion. It looks like an Interactive Movie which was originally shot in live-action but for technical reasons most of the video had to be reduced to an odd selection of still frames.
    • Wirehead: One of the more amusing entries in FMV games that flew under the rader. You play a mild mannered family man that got a wireless device put into his brain and is now being tracked by a mad scientist and his goons. You control the man's every movement and try to steer him out of harm's way.
    • The 7th Guest brought this to the PC, pioneering video compressing in the process. In fact, the whole game is in full motion video; all the animations of moving about the mansion are prerendered 3D video (they had originally planned to use a real mansion), and the cutscenes are live-action full motion video.
    • In the 1st Degree.
    • Asura's Wrath is something of a unique example. While there is actual gameplay in it like most other Beat'Em Up's and Action Games, a lot of the gameplay focuses on cutscene based QTE's, but usually each one synchronizes with every action taken on screen, and some of the presses synchronize with attacks similar to a Rhythm Game. Episodes 11.5 and 15.5 are even straighter examples that still use the same synchronic attack principles, as it's based on button inputs that mimic all the hits on the screen of an Anime-like stage that acts as a stand in for Full Motion Video, and they are arguably even better examples of this than the main game.
      • Also, unlike the other examples on this list, there's no actual Full Motion Video involved, but it instead uses the main graphics engine to simulate Full Motion Video, and instead of being more of an interactive movie, it's plot sturcture, episodic nature and running time of most of the episodes, it's more of an Interactive Anime than an interactive movie.
    • Voyeur


    Regular games with "FMV cutscenes"

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