All language subtitles for gh-terrorbytesepisodethreenarrativenightmares-1080

FMV games, they really
hold a special place in my heart.

Mostly because as a kid, I'm sure a lot
of you watching this will agree with me.

They seemed dangerous.

“Let’s kick some butt!”

-“What brings you here?”
-”Well, it's an unusual story, really.”

When you watch a horror film and I love
horror films, it's a very passive experience.

And it's a linear experience, right?
So any kind of linear storytelling,

you're kind of at the mercy
and the whim of the director.

But with FMV’s in most cases
you are part of the action.

“Control, check out the house.”

You're in control in the story.
You're never going to know what happens

if you don't just push
through that nope moment.

If you looked at it from now,
you could see that what it enabled

was an explosion of different genres

that was like legal thrillers, erotic thrillers,
psychological horror, mysteries, detective things.

“I should have busted you when you ran that first
letter without letting us know about it.”

It was all these genres
that previously games hadn't

really done a good job of,
or even attempted

all these genres are kind of
about people and the nuance of people

and interactions between other people.

It has to have real people because
we have to empathize with the character.

If you're watching somebody and you
just don't care about them, doesn't matter

how scary the horror
is, it doesn't matter.

You have no real kind of link
to their horror and their fear.

FMV’s especially because
there are real humans involved,

and they're not just sprites. The action
feels very real. It feels like you're taking part

in a real life experience.

That's the main challenge for making an FMV game.

How do you without filming a billion
different versions of everything?

How do you gamify film footage?
So I always had that kind of excitement

about it, that it was
different than other games.

And because the first FMV game
that people knew about was Night Trap,

and that game was horror,
that game was marketed as sexy,

all of the FMV games after that had
that kind of similar reputation

that it was slightly, like you shouldn’t
be watching it, it was “Skinemax”, basically.

It's a fascinating period of history,

and particularly if you look into like
Night Trap, which started with Hasbro,

“Your part is to unravel the
many mysteries of Tamara,

and it begins when you
walk through the front door.”

“It is a fascinating thing. It's like a bunch
of little cameras around you all the time.”

“Okay. Who did it?”

“Night Trap!”

Night trap follows a group of
girls having a sleepover.

It's very Halloween-esque.

Your mission? Protect those girls from
whatever happened to the last ones.

These evil forces coming in
and trying to kidnap them.

“Our agent spliced and override
into the security system,

allowing you to have control of
the cameras and the traps.”

It's almost like these
really early quick time event

things that you'd have to
do in order to keep them all safe.

It was a neat concept back then.
I mean, you're basically just

switching across different camera views.

And trying to catch these, like, vampires?
Some kind of bloodsucking creatures.

“Well, they're called augers
or augs, and they're like a vampire.”

-“You mean they suck blood?”
-“Yeah.”

“It's nothing personal. It's the
only way they can keep alive.”

The augers in that game are
probably among the best characters

because they're just so simultaneously
threatening and non-threatening at the same time.

I think the device is inspired.

“Yeah, right.”

Because it kind of throws vampire
tropes out the window a little bit.

I don't know if I had a favorite trap
in the game, but I just remember that

when you see the traps
activate and happen,

it's like watching
a game show from the 80s

where someone comes around
from behind a secret door.

And you're like, is this a trap? It's just
a rotating cupboard or like, the floor falls out.

With the controversy surrounding the game, you'd
expect it to be this blood-laden,

you know, massacre,
and it's just not.

“This isn't going to work.
You're not scaring me. Wait.”

I thought the way that the cameras
felt like they were live cameras,

it was very impressive, and,
you know, while making Ghosts,

because it's a similar concept,
I looked to Night Trap to figure out,

did they film this all at the
same time? Or did they film one camera

one day and another another day?

I don't think a lot of people
appreciate how seamless all that is.

“I just wanted to…”

“Is everybody all right?”

“I don't like it at all.”

“Has anybody seen my chamois bag?”

It might have been too ahead of its time.

-“What can we do?”
-“Fight back.”

Obviously the game's extremely dated,
questionable horror questionable action,

“This is my attack squad.”

You can see why it was received
way it was, for better or worse.

“I don't believe what I just saw.”

I can see why people love it.
I can see why people hate it.

But the energy and the love for horror

“Tha tastes like blood!”

The production is amazing!

“Point and shoot.”

They tried to do things that swung for the fences,
and I think in a lot of cases it achieved it.

And although that game has, it has
a pretty bad reputation like people

just instantly think it's terrible.

-“Come on Megan, it’s not that bad.”
-”Yes it is!”

I love that game.

It was a very important game. There is
a lot of love for that game now as well.

And I think that love
is just growing year by year.

Everybody wants a laugh, and if you go back and you
see this overacting that happens like Night Trap or,

you know, in The 7th Guest as well,

“What's going on?”

that's a reason
to revisit these games.

“He’s ours Dutton!”

they're of their time, at the time,
maybe the people thought

this is going to be my finest work.

-”Action.”
-”I will surely win.”

as a gamer and as an adventure
game fan, I am so glad that they did it

the way that they did.

“You have been summoned on the journey by
Trilobyte and Virgin Games

to a place where mysteries will unfold. Questions
will be answered and unthinkable acts committed.

Rob and I started to take
an interest in new technology

because we still want
to make games for the PC.

“It was a big new medium out
there which involved CD-Rom.”

CD-Rom was revolutionary in the sense of
it allowed the medium to step forward

in such a way that we could tell
way better stories, instead of having these

just endless boxes of text that
no one was going to read.

We could do, you know, actual, real music
and sound effects and animation,

and it just allowed us
to really bring games

much more to life than on a floppy disk.

So we were in New York at a
multimedia conference promoting

a format called the multimedia PC,

and so Rob and I started to think…

“Hey maybe we really can do this.”

We got back into the office and
spent the entire weekend coming up

with a game outline
for a game called “Guest”.

We had to ask Virgin to
buy us this 500 megabyte

hard drive so we could have more
than one room at a time.

And it was like $2,000. Virgin was like, do you
really need this? This is really expensive.

“Rooms such as the foyer and
hallway system in the seventh guest

take up to 20 to 40 minutes
per frame to render.”

We’re like “We really need it!”

We weren't meant to do
a demo yet in 1992.

We went out with a with a CD and a
CD-Rom drive to show Martin,

And he's like,
“we got to put this on the show floor!”

And we're like, there's no way
you put this on the show floor.

And slowly in the end, it got to be so
many people trying to get into the booth

to see this thing,
I just couldn't believe it.

And I remember Rob and I getting back
onto the airplane to go back home and

sitting there and we
were scared to death.

Now we were like,
we really got to finish this thing.

It was one of the most cinematic experiences
that you could get in gaming at the time.

I think that the FMV footage of, you know, live
action actors and stuff really did the game a service

because you could be moving through a hallway
after doing a really stressful puzzle

and suddenly, you know, Stauf might just appear

“That old man Stauf is waiting there.”

It was like the early form of a jump scare,
when he'd jump out and be really angry at you

because you're figuring out more about his
past, and I think that worked really well.

“Yes! Oh, yes! Keep going this way.”

It was one of the most impressive games
that I played at that time,

because it felt like,
you were really wandering

around this mansion solving
a mystery, seeing ghosts pop up.

-“The last guest.”
-“No.No! He's here already! I've seen him”

And I think the realization of those
ghosts were really, really good.

“It's just an illusion.”

We didn't know much about blue screen.

So we bought our blue screen at, basically
Home Depot, and it was not really blue.

It was more purple-ish, and I
assured everyone, hey, no problem,

I can write the code to take
this blue out. It's easy.

Don't worry about the clothes
you're wearing or anything. We're all good.

It wasn't easy because
purple actually contains red,

and it was just very hard to put the outlines of
the people back in accurately.

So it was just easier to leave this
aura around them that became the ghostly aura.

“Oh, it's so beautiful.”

So originally we were telling the
story of how they all died,

and then it shifted to they're all dead,
this is them telling their story.

I think it just has a lot of different
styles going on. You know, it's very gothic.

You know, there's everything from the clown
from “It” is in there with the balloons.

You know, “do you want a baloon sonny?”
Child, sacrifice with Stauf at the end

there taking Ego and doing the bad thing.

“A final sacrifice.”

I pulled one way towards Scooby Doo, and Rob
pulled the other way towards horror,

and we landed in the middle, crazy sick.

“Crazy, sick and mean!”

And that is a unique space to be in.

You know, the mansion itself
is just amazing to explore.

You've got cool cursors. You've got these real
brain bending puzzles that I was never any good at.

It was mostly trial and error for me, but I
had to get past it to see what was next.

“Your wits have brought you this far, but
will you have the patience to go any further?”

I've got a theory why FMV games are hard.

There was only a certain amount of film footage
you can have on a cartridge or a disc.

So they try and make the game as hard as
possible so it doesn't end too quickly.

You have to remember that
you can get out of every puzzle,

in 7th Guest by visiting the library three times,
and it will go complete the puzzle for you.

The game soundtrack is actually on the
second CD, and, that became actually something

of a collector's edition because
everyone loves that soundtrack so much.

I was very fond of the music of Nightmare
Before Christmas. So when I first called The Fat Man,

Here I am. This is my team.
I'm The Fat Man, 7th Guest.

“Dave Govett, Wing Commander,
lots of stuff.”

“Joe McDermott, baseball,
lots of other stuff.”

I said, can you make the
music like Danny Elfman?

He sent me back two bits of music
and I played music number one,

and it's the theme from the dining room,
which sounds very much like Danny Elfman.

And I said, that's awesome! And he’s
like, “Graeme, Don't you ever tell me

to sound like another musician again. You never,
ever do that to a musician. Never do that.”

And then he said,
“play a piece of music. Number two.”

And it was the…

It was the theme to 7th Guest.

He was like, “there’s your theme.”

I didn’t think I was gonna
get choked up about this.

And then he came up at the
end and said, “I've got this song

that a friend of mine wrote
called Skeletons in My closet”

I want to record it for 7th Guest.

And I remember watching it with the end
credits and going “This is incredible.”

This is, we’d made something that hadn't been
seen before. Someone was singing a real song

in written recorded audio over a game, over credits.

“Got skeletons in my closet
and they’re rattlin’ tonight.”

And we were finally done.

That was a big moment.

The 7th Guest was a technical
marvel for its time.

Unfortunately, the thing
with a technical marvel

is that new tech will eventually
come along and overshadow it.

Whereas on the other hand, when we look
at something like Gabriel Knight,

albeit an older game, the writing in that is
exceptional, and brilliant writing is timeless.

Gabriel Knight is celebrated as especially,
you know, some of the most standout

adventure games that we have because it
takes a lot of what worked from its genre.

I grew up on horror novels. I mean, my
brother-in-law handed me Carrie when I was 12,

and I never looked back. All through
the 80s, I had all those black,

shiny books
like Peter Straub and Stephen King.

I just was really interested
in the paranormal,

so I wanted to do
something in that vein.

I was working for Hewlett Packard
and I bought a company, PC,

which was $10,000, and that was a
half off employee purchase price.

And I went to a computer store and picked up
Manhunter: San Francisco and King's Quest IV.

And I became absolutely obsessed.

I ended up buying every game in
the Sierra catalog and playing them,

and I wrote to them and asked them if they would
have a position, and I sent a short story.

Roberta and Ken Williams and Sierra took that to heart
as, okay, if you can write, if you have good ideas,

we can teach you everything you
need to know about making games.

We can support you. We can help
you make what you want to make.

So I was hired into the writer's block.
It was like being discovered by Steven Spielberg.

I was just so thrilled to be able
to work in gaming. I loved it.

After King's Quest VI, I had
the opportunity to propose a new game

series that I would be chief designer on.

And when I proposed Gabriel Knight at Sierra,
I wrote 20 page proposal and

gave it to Ken and Roberta.
And Ken's response was,

“I wish you had brought me something else,
but I'm going to let you do it.”

He really had the opinion that adventure games
should entertain and make people laugh

and be family oriented, and he was not
into the idea of horror at all,

which gave me second doubts
because I'm thinking, oh my gosh,

he probably knows better
than I do, you know?

Oh, God. Well, I mean, that is me.
I can't believe, though, that I thought

adventure games should be funny.

Yeah, a lot of them weren’t, Manhunter
certainly wasn't, Gabriel Knight wasn't.

Police Quest, I mean,
I fought for Police Quest.

I'm surprised I said that,
but I'm sure Jane's right.

“Once again, Sierra is breaking new
ground with one of the most captivating,

challenging and intense
interactive stories ever created.”

“Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers is a
psychological suspense story of one man's desperate

search to safeguard his
future by unraveling his past.”

There's a little bit of pulp to it,
there's a little bit of camp to it,

but the characters are so memorable.
They're just trying to get through this.

They're just trying to solve a mystery.

“Oh, God. Not again.”

And then, as in good horror
stories and good mystery stories,

this is so much more than I
realized it was going to be.

“A generations old voodoo curse haunts
Gabriel’s sleep and threatens his very life.

I think the way that I tried to
infuse horror in Gabriel Knight

was more about following
my gut and my instinct.

What causes me to feel that thrill
or that fear or that dread or that, light.

Compared to, the LucasArts games
around, it was far more adult

and even to prior Sierra games,
I suppose it was a lot more cinematic,

than what I'd seen before.

I think the most memorable moment
for me with the whole series

was just hearing the voice
acting for the first time.

“Hollywood Reporter proclaimed, that Gabriel
Knight is the first time an all Hollywood

cast of name actors has been
assembled for an interactive movie.”

The voiceover cast that we had for
Gabriel Knight one was absolutely amazing.

We had hired a director, his name
was Stu Rosen, and he had done,

you know, hundreds of cartoons
and animated features.

So he knew all the voiceover people in LA.

We had Michael Dorn and
Leah Remini and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

We had Mark Hamill.
We just had a fabulous cast.

“Give me back my badge, now Knight!”

Then you had Tim Curry
as Gabriel Knight, right?

Which is just the icing on the cake.
I mean that's amazing.

“Gabriel Knight is very, very cool and
impossibly handsome. And of course, they came to me”

“About Detective Mosley…”

All the characters, they're unforgettable.
And I think that's what you need in a story

like this is I need to be able to, if not
completely relate to, enjoy playing as this character.

“Oh shit.”

But they also weren't afraid to shake it up.
So each of the three games looks vastly different.

I think I had mostly written the story level when
Ken Williams said that the game would be FMV,

and I was excited about FMV,

what we pulled off in GK2 just
kind of boggles the mind.

First of all, was a huge script.
The script was about a thousand pages,

and it also had things like
wolves and horses and dream sequences

in the snow and all kinds of crazy things.

I mean, we were literally a tiny
little studio in the hills of California

with basically no experience in making movies.

But it was such a pleasure to work with live
actors and to see them embody my characters.

“We have come for the Schattenjäger.”

“I see. what makes you think
you need a Schattenjäger?”

It was just really thrilling and
I loved that aspect of it.

It has this similar feeling of adventure and
kind of being thrown into a world that's

very like ours, but also has just enough
abnormalities to make you feel kind of uneasy.

Then I can buy all of the
crazy stuff that's happening to me.

All all of the magic and all of
the horror and all of these things,

because I have this character who
kind of grounds me in this world.

Gabriel struggles in the games
with this history of his family,

which is like, really,
if you think about it,

who wants to be descended from inquisitors?
I mean, you know, it's awful.

Obviously that's not a great legacy.

Someone having to confront their past
is always going to be the hardest thing.

And then the idea of inheriting something that
you have no control over and having to deal with

that is one of the best
storytelling devices that you can use.

And that's actually the whole theme of
Gabriel Knight one is that he has to reverse

those decisions that his ancestors made.
He has to reverse that black and white point of view.

I had an interesting insight about
Gabriel Knight not too long ago, actually.

I realized that I am Gabriel Knight,
that his story is my story,

and it's about having grown up in this
really conservative black and white

Uber Christian household.

And then rebelling from that,
but still having those underpinnings

in my subconscious mind trying to struggle between,
you know what? What really is good and evil.

I think Jane Jensen did a beautiful job of creating
a really memorable place, and then also creating

memorable characters who I wanted
to stick with throughout a series.

I really don't want to be dead.
Can we try that again?

Gabriel Knight wasn't Sierra's
only mid-nineties horror adventure.

We also actually had the extraordinarily
ambitious and expensive Phantasmagoria.

Phantasmagoria is such an interesting
game to me, because it was so different

from anything that Sierra had done before.

I think coming off of the success of Sierra's earlier
games, a lot of which were more family friendly,

it would have been really easy to say,
okay, we got to stay in our lane.

This is what sells.
This is what people like.

I was starting to feel
a little bit, typecast.

I wanted to see what I could
do with suspense and horror.

And my main question that I asked
myself was, can a computer game scare?

Can it really scare a person?

In some of my research, I had come across
the term phantasmagoria, and I loved it.

She pitched it to her husband, Ken.
She pitched it to everybody else.

“This is what I want to make.”
It required such different technology.

It required new studios to be built.

“We've installed a big, entirely brand
new facility from the ground up,

to upgrade the capability of
our in-house video production.”

It required such an upfront investment
that was going to be hard to earn back.

We spent way more money on creating phantasmagoria
than any other game we ever did. By a lot.

“There's nothing out there like this.
This is really true horror.”

If it really failed and fell on its face, we could
have brought down Sierra online just like that.

So again, this is her confidence as a game
developer really being pushed and tested.

It's also her coming back to her roots.

I already had ideas about where I wanted to go,
and I thought in terms of a a magician from the past.

“You know, I bet the guy that built
this place must have been really bizarre.”

“Connor was in his prime in the 1880s and 90s,

but I've heard that his magic acts
tend to be a bit on the darker side.”

And it kind of almost took me
back to a mystery house.

So it's her coming back to that,
but with new technology,

with her own lessons she has learned as
a game developer and a writer.

And she did something that nobody
else had ever done that time,

which is make a coherent horror FMV game.

“One of the real pioneers in the
computer game business is Roberta Williams.”

“She and her husband Ken wrote their
first game. I guess it was 15 years ago now,

and they keep on pushing the edge with every new game.
Roberta's newest game is called Phantasmagoria.”

Up until that point,
being able to identify with a character

or have some degree of empathy with themwasn't
there. Whereas in phantasmagoria, it was there.

“You play the role of Adrian Delaney.”

“Her and her husband have just
moved into this kind of old haunted house.”

“It was owned by a magician
over 100 years before.”

It takes a fear that is not uncommon.

It's I married someone who I expected to be kind
and gentle, and my friend and my partner.

“I'll always be here to protect you.”

And instead, they're my monster.
They are the person terrorizing me.

And you're putting that through
the horror lens, dialing it up to 11.

I took pains to show that at the beginning of
the game. Don is a nice guy. So that, you know

that she loves him and he loves her.
But once she releases this entity, this evil.

-“Don?”
-he begins to show irritability

-and she doesn't quite get it.
-“Don.”

-And it gets worse and worse.
-“I’m not finished with you yet!”

Watching someone devolve or
degrade right in front of your eyes

is just one of the most
terrifying things you can ever see.

The person closest to you becoming
someone you can't trust.

Is so viscerally terrifying.
I think she did a beautiful job.

The player knows that they were a
loving couple. He was a good guy.

She's getting ready to go to bed and he comes in
and he's very sweet and he says he's sorry

and he gets her in a romantic mood.
And at first it seems fine.

But then it gets harsher and harsher.

When it's over, he kind of pushes her
against the wall and stomps out the door.

Watching something horrible happen
to a character on a TV show

or in a movie, or even reading about
it in a book where you're still in their head

is a much different feeling than when you
have been in control of this character.

Regardless of the the camera being
third person, the emotional plane

that you have is a first
person emotional response,

and that first person emotion
is a massively strong thing.

That's what I wanted to leave the player with.
Something had to be done to show her and the player,

there is something really wrong with Don, and so
after that the game gets much more intense.

“You like my work?”

The frantic chase through the mansion,
all I remember is the terror.

That affected me a lot, I think seeing
decapitation, seeing heads exploding on screen

in not just a cartoon way
in a very violent way.

It's shocking, and it's still is.

It's action packed versus
everything that you had done before,

which is really kind of investigative.

I love the pace of it, the fear of it, the unknown

of where he's going to come from
or how you're going to out,

can you go back the same way you did?
Can you return to the same path?

I think it really you do get the
sense when you're playing it that,

this is what Roberta Williams always wanted
to do. This was her crowning achievement.

This is when she set out to make video
games this is what she wanted to make.

It was what I set out to do and from everything
that I've heard and all through the years,

it accomplished that.

I think it's a memorable game.
I think it's a dark game.

“Here’s to you!”

“No. Here’s to you, Victoria.”

I think that even today you would find a
lot of publishers, a lot of developers

who would hesitate to make this game.

It has its relevance, as distressing
as it might be for people.

But that's what you do with horror.
You know, you make people uncomfortable.

There was a time where those like
point and click FMV games

were the most cinematic thing
possible in video games.

From the beginning when Sierra started,
I believed that computers

were kind of a, superset of the record industry
and the, TV industry and book industry.

Yeah, I just knew that a computer could
do everything all of those mediums could do.

That there was more to the
gaming industry than just pong.

“You're watching the most exciting
game you will ever see on your TV set.”

And that was considered kind of
a bizarre view at the time.

“The 7th Guest, the breakthrough murder mystery game
in 3D, combines the best of interactive gameplay

with the dramatic illusions of filmmaking.”

Even when 7th Guest came out there was pushback
amongst the gamer community about FMV games.

“Hold it right there!”

immediately you hit the problem,
which is repetition, right?

If I fail Night Trap and I start again,
now watching the same things over again

and suddenly, you know, the experience become
diminished and the repetition becomes a problem.

People just didn't have a handle
on how to make this work.

That's what I love about so
many of those old FMV games.

This was a way for people who were just
into game development to make movies,

and they are frequently as silly
and insane as you would kind of hope.

“Harvester.”

Another game that I think is worth
noting from that era is called Harvester.

It's a really graphically
violent serial killer

supernatural adventure
game, and it's quite notorious.

-“Is that what I think it is?”
-“Yep, it's a spinal cord.”

They built their completely insane horror
video game about just the most insane shit,

and they were able to
bring it to life through FMV.

“The story is not your average everyday story.
It's dark, disturbing in a lot of ways.”

Corpse killer had a lot of, full motion
video in it as well. It was mostly just,

a point and shoot kind of game.
It was totally bizarre.

-“You were totally hot.”
-“Radical dude, radical.”

Why did FMV fade? The simple answer
is 3D shooters. Those games just exploded

and they were so popular and they made so
much money for the companies that published them.

So they only wanted
to do those kinds of games.

They really weren't interested
in doing adventure games anymore

and particularly FMV,
which is quite expensive.

“It is late 1992. The 7th Guest is near
completion. during a series of team discussions,

the idea of a sequel is
raised but quickly dismissed.”

Initially, we didn't want to make a sequel to 7th
Guest we were going to make this game called Egypt,

which was based around a
mystery on the Egyptian pyramids.

“Market forces, you know, dictated that we
should take a second to look at that opinion.”

Marcin called up and said, “you think I'm so
stupid that I'm going to accept that?”

“Of course you're doing a sequel to 7th
Guest. We'd be stupid not to do it!”

“And you'd be stupid to say no!”

There was disagreements initially over
how we were going to shoot the sequel.

“The 11th Hour contains a 64 minute
movie shot in southern Oregon.”

I basically said, here are our rules around,
our video format that we have in 7th Guest.

You have to not move the camera, not shoot
outside because we always need a still background,

and we always need to have just a
quarter of the screen moving at most.

And when David shot the video for it,
it had a lot of outdoor shots.

“Deadlines make it necessary to shoot
the entire movie in just ten days.”

“And unpredictable may skies
create more headaches.”

None of this is going to work
with the 7th Guest systems.

“So we had to reinvent a lot
of our own technology again.”

That’s when Rob and I’s relationship started to go in
not such great direction. We lost that middle ground.

“The summer of 1993 arrives as
Trilobyte moves into bigger quarters.”

This all seemed like a… like a a nightmare.

“Over the next year, many technical
hurdles will be overcome.”

And one day I was sitting at my desk
and I got up and I'd been working

You know, 80 hour weeks for six months.

And I remember seeing my couch,
and I remember seeing the corner of my couch

and hitting my head on it,
and then being on the floor.

And then I remember waking up in the ambulance,

and then I remember being in hospital,
and then I remember being at home.

Those memories are very quick little blips, blip-blip-blip.

“We did not mean to do a sequel.
We didn't even want to do a sequel.”

I take medicine to this day to stop
migraines coming into my life because of that.

So I take medication every
day because of The 11th Hour.

“We felt that not only did we have to keep ahead
of the competition, we had to best ourselves.”

Rob is not blameless. I am not blameless.
We both destroyed our company.

“What else is happening John? A high tech shut down
in the high country. A company closes its doors”

“and a big employer in Madera County, disappears.
Our Marc Cotta explains why Sierra Online”

“has decided to pull out of the local economy.”

When Ken Roberta sold Sierra. You know,
I don't think you ever anticipate

how much something like
that is going to change because

everyone says it's going to be fine,
but it's not fine. It really wasn't fine.

It's a computer ghost town,
empty hallways and locked doors

where computer operators once
manufactured high tech, sophisticated games.

It was just horrible, it was a bloodbath.

We you know, we got an offer
that we literally couldn't refuse.

I mean, even legally,
we couldn't refuse it.

I talked to the guy, Dave Grenewetzki
who, took over the Sierra business

and asked him why he did
such horrible things.

He said it was his marching orders,
that he was brought in to basically,

shut down development,
fatten the cow for sale.

“About 150 employees are affected by the decision.”

“Of course, I didn't know, but, I had a sort of a
gut instinct that something was going to go.”

People went to jail over this. There was fraud,
and there was a lot of bad things.

Roberta’s and my goal from the beginning,
we always talked about we wanted to build a company

that our grandkids would be able to know about,
like Disney. I mean, our role model was Disney,

“A cutting edge, well known,
established business goes dark.”

It was really sad to me when
we could no longer work in FMV

because I, I really valued what
the actors brought to those roles

“It’ll get easier.
Don’t think you think Gracie?”

It kind of became like a lost format of game,
because for a long time it just completely went away.

And now you're seeing it come back because
now it's fallen into the nostalgia zone.

“The winner takes all!”

“Who needs proper entertainment. When you got
‘youchewed’ and ‘myface’ and whatever.”

“It's [censored] solitaire!”

I think that's kind of beautiful. Like,
I think I think it's it's really great

to see people
kind of return to that genre.

I remember the first moment a
journalist came up to me and said,

“Why have you made an FMV game in 2015?”

My road into it was with Her Story, was
this idea that the assumed authenticity

and the base level of
what is reality had changed.

And then I was aware that this was a thing that
was happening and it was to do with video.

Now we live a lot of our lives online.

It's a normal part of our life to
speak to people through video screens.

So playing an FMV game, it just
feels like an everyday thing.

It feels like you're just speaking
to people through a through a screen.

So in the context of Her Story, we're only
seeing this woman talking in a police room

and we don't know what's happening
outside of it. Is the thing she's saying true?

What is going on in her head
when this is happening?

I think her story is one of the
best games of the last ten, fifteen years.

What her story does, is it scares
me in a way I don't even understand.

By using FMV, which is still pretty rare
it helps ground you in this story

that it feels like, I can't believe this could be
happening to anybody, but these are real actors.

Her Story takes the sort of
horror ideas of what games can be,

but actually puts them in
a different genre entirely.

I think from the start, what my subconscious
was interested in was having this

kind of true crime aesthetic that
is very boring and prosaic, right?

It’s very real world and grounded,

and using that as a misdirection.

I think it makes the experience a lot more scary.

-I'm a really big fan of the first Howling.
-“The Howling.”

So at the end of The Howling,
the protagonist who you think has escaped,

goes on television and you see this
shot of the evening news or whatever,

and she announces to the world that
werewolves are real and that she's a werewolf.

“But I have proof and tonight
I'm going to show you something.”

And it's like such a shocking
moment because it's not nighttime.

It's not expressionistic shadows.
It's outside of that kind of horror thing.

And it's just that sense of the supernatural,
of the horror invading the real world.

The sense of doom you get from scrolling
through a bunch of file names,

just saying it out loud it sounds extraordinary
that I'd be scared of it, but I really was.

The more something pushes back against you,
the more it forces you to kind of lean back in

and then push back yourself. Right?
It's like Newtonian physics of storytelling.

And you can sort of see signs of this earlier
in Shattered Memories with the psychologist.

“It's amazing what people will admit to on paper.”

And then you sort of take that to the extreme in, in
this space of Her Story, where you have to just think,

you even decide yourself
when to end the game,

which also I think is fantastic,
it’s like, have you played enough?

It's so detailed in how you have
to use the mechanics to unravel the story.

I like, I think most people who played
this game, had a notepad next to me where

I'm taking all these notes and trying to
track the story. It's completely out of order.

You have to really buy in
and pay attention.

The twist that comes of how
could all of this have happened?

It's scary and that's worse
than I thought it was going to be.

The way he puts his stories together. It's not
like a path that you have to go through.

It's like, I'll try this bit. You don't
know which bit you're going to look at,

You don't know how that's
going to fit together.

I think there's a really nice way of discovering
a story. It's more like being a detective.

I wanted to treat the story like
you would treat space in a game.

So like you think of Zelda, they drop
you in the middle of the world,

giant map you can explore
and you can go in any direction.

It's very freeform, but it's driven by, you know,
there are destinations, there are landmarks.

that they’re kind of attracted to so we
try and think of the story like that.

And so for us it's creating
that breadth where people can have

their own personal curiosities
that drives them.

It's unique to every player.
It just really sinks in

in a way that, that it wouldn't if you were reading
as a book, if you're watching as a movie

and at points in Her Story, when lights
go past, you see the reflection

in the computer screen of the person
who in the story is sat at the computer.

The flash of the character's face.
There's just this very violent reminder

this is not you, right?
There is a whole different character,

a whole different universe
inside the reflection of this screen

“Game Innovation: Her Story.”

We often come up against
each other on awards,

and he keeps winning bloody awards
every time it comes up.

-“Her Story!”
-He's found a niche there that's really cutting edge.

It's very, very, specific I think in a way
that it pushes the boundaries of storytelling.

“The big innovation in Her Story was, was me saying,
can I make a game that is just about a human story,

just about subtext, just about
performance and nothing else?”

Oh my God. When I saw that, I saw that as
kind of that's what we should have done next.

“And you can, so be great if lots of people copied
me, and we had more games like that. Thank you.”

It just didn't strike me at the time of like,
this is a game design that needed to happen.

And then when you see it, you're like,
oh, well, that's obvious. That's really, really good.

Another horror game that
I really enjoyed playing.

Not just solo, but I actually played it with
my whole family was Supermassive’s Until Dawn.

It's both got the, like,
campiness of kind of a slasher film

-“Don’t you guys think this is a little bit--”
-“Oh, come on, she deserves it.”

But it's also genuinely scary.
-“Hellow Samantha.”

Especially when you're playing through it,
when you're trying to keep these people alive.

Until Dawn is incredible.
I mean, it's the first modern experience

that players get with,
almost like an FMV game.

I remember, I think within
the first half an hour

or 40 minutes of the game,
I probably had let someone die.

And I was like, oh, I can just go back and
load this again, you know, and keep going,

and then I was like, hang
on, this game is continuing now.

This was really important to us that
you couldn't go back and change it.

You couldn't save the game there and go,

actually, I'm just going to go back a
step and change my choice on that.

You had to live with the choice that you had.

There's I think, eight main characters,
and you could have all eight die,

or you could have all eight live,
or you can have five live.

-“You see that?”
-“Yeah.”

Your choices really do matter in the long run.

And so the whole time you're holding
the controller for that game, you know,

everything that you do is impacting who's
going to survive that night and who's not.

It's moving forward like real life.
You do something, you think, oh, I don’t want to…

that feels wrong.
I'll go back and change it.

If you could do that, you pretty
much everyone would end up with the same story.

And we wanted people
to have different stories.

We wanted people to kind of go down
journeys that only they'd had.

And there's so many different
ways that characters can be

depending on how you
choose to play them.

You can make the characters kind
of distant and retreat into themselves

with the horror like Ashley.
Or you can make them really empathetic

and try and help
everybody else out.

“We use the radio to call for help,
but somebody's got to pick up the signals.”

And so that really raises the
stakes there in a way that again,

no other genre
or format can really do.

When we first started making the
prototypes for it, we hid all of those things.

We just thought, actually, this is gonna be really
exciting is if the player doesn't even really notice

they're making things that ultimately
change everything for them.

When we started to get to testing,
that became fairly apparent that

that just felt like a very linear game, because
you could only ever see the path you took.

You have no concept of the hours and hours
and hours of other content that you didn't see.

Because you didn't see it. And so we had
to look at a bunch of different things.

And the most kind of appropriate thing
we thought of was the butterfly effect.

It's like I've made a choice.
It feels like a normal choice I've just made,

But actually the knock
ons from this are huge.

So for instance, in Until
Dawn, there's a scene where

there's a big kind of circular saw thing
dropping down gradually on top of you,

and you tied to the chairs
and there's a gun on the table.

And the choice you have to make is you
have to shoot Ashley or shoot yourself.

“The choice is yours.”

And if you do neither, the saw
will come down and kill you both.

If you shoot Ashley, nothing happens
because it's a blank in the gun.

“But you've heard of blanks before.”

But everything's changed.
Nothing happens from that point onwards.

Until maybe an hour and a half to
two hours later in the game,

where Ashley will lock
you out and you get killed.

“Let me in! Ash, what are you doing?”

That's the butterfly effect. From that
one choice, you shoot a blank and actually

you will die two hours later.

And it's because Ashley
realizes what a dick you are.

The thing that I love about Until Dawn, is that
it really nails feeling like it's a teen slasher

movie that you are in
charge of in a lot of ways.

-“We like in a movie right now?”
“If we are, I hope it's a rom-com.”

I love the tropes of characters.

-“You made it.”
Just for how each one fits into a specific trope.

It plays with the line of, is something supernatural
actually happening right now or not?

-“You're freaked out
because of what happened with Josh”

“You’re not paying attention! I saw it,
I saw ghost, and it looked like Hannah!

-“Looked like Hannah!”
-“Wait, wait wait wait, wait.”

One of the things we did with
Until Dawn and actually The Quarry as well,

very, very similar, was we
tried very much to use

what was absolutely understood
by an entire film-going audience

of what the rules of horror were.

-“Don't you know the rules?”
-“What rules?”

-“You don't?”
So rules like don't split up.

“You can never have sex.”

“Give me a break!”

-“Big. No, no!”
And those were kind of explicitly called out

in Scream and post-modern
self realizing horrors.

It's comforting for people who grew up with
those movies because, you know, you know,

stupid decisions are going to happen.

But it suddenly turns out to be such
a smarter story than it appeared to be.

It's like, oh, no, it's not
actually a slasher story at all.

It was a total red herring head fake.

It turns out to be a creature feature,

and that was done very much on purpose.

In order to be able to go, we're
going to subvert your expectations.

I think when people look back at Until Dawn now
and they see the entire cast that it had,

and these really great actors and actresses,
Rami Malek and Hayden Panettiere,

I think they're really surprised by it.

Being in a video game is uniquely
challenging, for many reasons.

When you're on a motion capture shoot they're fairly
intense. I mean, we shoot about 50 pages a day.

There are the multiple story
branches they have to keep track of too.

The actors have to keep that in their
head in just the way that writers do,

and have to reconcile that with who is this person?
What do I bring to this performance?

It's a very odd set because it's quite stark.
It's a big open space, often quite light.

And when you're shooting a horror,
it doesn't really give over feelings of horror.

Often when I was on the set,
we were trying to dial down

all the lights,
kind of get darkness for the actors

to be able to feel as if they
were in a kind of a dark area.

It's difficult to act on a motion capture stage.
You got the suit, you've got the dots on your face,

you've got a giant camera like inches from your face,
and you are still expected to give this emotional,

beautiful personal performance.

The performance captures that they got out of
Rami Malek and other people in the game

were spot on, and really good.

“And after all, you've been through good.”

It was kind of before he was famous,
and he had a scene where he'd been found out,

as he was, he'd been kind of trying to
get his revenge on these people that he blamed

for killing his sisters.

“All those emotions that my sisters
got to feel once, one year ago…”

And there's a bit where he becomes
more and more hysterical and unhinged

“Only guess what? They didn't get to laugh it up!
No! Nope! No no no, they're gone!”

But he was extraordinary. It was
the most unbelievable thing I've ever seen.

He went from kind of normal
to completely hysterical

and deranged over this period of
maybe 2 or 3 minutes, all the

the cast and all the crew were just transfixed
and stood there and suddenly there was an entire

round of applause
as he kind of finished it.

We don't give enough credit to
horror actors, for how good of a job

they have to do to really sell
it and to sell the the tone.

It's no question that graphics have
obviously gotten better over the years,

but now we've gotten to the point where we can have

these really realistic looking, like true to
life actual actors and actresses in these games.

I think that Until Dawn was a great
example of how you craft a story

and you give people agency and
therefore they are much, much more involved.

They have empathy for the character,
and then when you apply pressure,

when you put tension, when you put stress on
those characters, the intensity of the reaction

on the part of the player
is that much more intense.

“It was one of the scariest games
I've played in a long while.”

I think there's a very good reason
that Until Dawn was such a game changer.

And such kind of a staple now of the genre,
it instills a fear in you

that you just can't get
anywhere else except video games.

I think the most interesting thing about
making an interactive movie is just marrying,

you know, filmmaking with
video game development.

I think that films are a really
good medium for entertainment,

but games, they put you
in that film essentially

“Looks like we have a choice on our hands.
Do we snoop through someone else's belongings?

Or do we open the spooky trap door
and die a horrible, painful death?”

Which is why games like The Quarry, are so popular.
I think the reason why there aren't more games

made like that, I just
think it'just too hard.

Honestly, making a video game at the level that we
try to do is incredibly hard. It's incredibly complex.

We cast it in, you know, usually
in Hollywood we go to America,

we used Digital Domain on The Quarry,
which is where Spielberg shoots and everything.

So, they’re big budget shoots, we scan, all their
faces, we scan all the expressions of those faces.

So we deconstruct it, put it all into CG,
reconstruct it, and then light it.

And that's like the most inefficient way of
making a a piece of film ever, it seems,

you know, almost deliberately, difficult.

But, you know, when you think the average script for
something like The Quarry is a thousand pages long.

To shoot a thousand pages at the rate the film does,
it would take us over a year.

There's a whole bunch of variables that can happen
in CG, because it's been rendered in real time

that if you were to do it in film, would add
literally it would double the cost of the production.

So, for instance, there's a scene in
The Quarry where you get a choice…

-“What you want me to do? What you want me to do?”
-“It’s fucking spreading you have to cut it off!”

“Okay, okay, okay! Just,
just hang on, hang on.”

If we had that choice in the film, what would happen
is every single subsequent shot of that actor,

we'd have to do some special effects to take the
hand away. If it's CG, we just turn the hand off.

Prior to the 20th century, you know,
storytelling was much more self-contained, right?

There was oral storytelling where people would
pass stories along in very intimate settings.

There was theater where there was a live
crowd and things were a bit more organic,

but it was also very localized.
So this incredible game changer

of suddenly stories being able
to address audiences of millions

and have cultural moments
attached to those.

But the limitation was that, you know,
in order to broadcast a television program

in order to distribute a movie, it's fixed.

There's one version of this movie,
and you take some of the life out of it.

So for me, the really cool
thing about the 21st century,

-“What is your name?”
-“Marissa Marcel.”

is we're into this era of digital storytelling
where we have the ability to inject,

-“Action”
-some of that reactivity,

and that life back into things.

I love that Netflix started to do video games
and experimented with interactive films.

“You're not in control.”

You have things like Bandersnatch,
where you're going on Netflix

and you're kind of having a
horror video game on Netflix now.

And I thought the Bandersnatch
experiment went really, really well.

I'm surprised there wasn't more films like that.

Bandersnatch really condenses
the choice element to it,

in a way that I think is really
palatable to the general public.

You're not walking around as a character. You're
not exploring the environment as a character.

It's just really simplifying it. It's just making it.
You can choose this thing or another thing,

and that's, we're going to branch off from there.

I think that we're going to
see a shift because of that.

I think we're going to pivot really
more towards this element of choice soon.

You can choose how you want to be on social media.
You can curate your playlist however you want.

I think that horror gaming is going to
start to cater to that need so much more,

and we're really going to start to
embrace that in really unique ways.

“You try the hang up thingy?”

What we ultimately wanted
to get to was that

if somebody came in and saw what
was somebody playing the game on TV is

they would sit down
thinking it was a movie.

-“What are you doing?”
-“I don't know, it's what they do in movies.

-When the phone does that tap on the little thingy.”
-“We’re not in a movie.”

that marrying of film and game is
getting tighter and tighter and tighter.

And if you look at Netflix
and you look at streaming shows,

you know they disrupted the business model,
but the act of watching a TV series is still the same.

And what I've been trying to do with the
games is show that we can make things

more expressive, more personal, more intimate.
I feel like there's going to come a point

where someone gets to have
that cultural moment where everyone's

watching the same TV show,
and then people realize it's different,

or they realize that something
they’re doing is somehow changing the show.

Like, I think that will be the the kind of War of
the Worlds moment for for digital television.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt
our program of dance music

to bring you a special bulletin from
the Intercontinental Radio News.

It's that kind of creativity that's going
to show us where video games in general

are going to go from here, because we
have to start thinking outside the box,

because that's what the people in the 80s did.
That's how we got where we are.

I'm excited for the future
of game design right now.

I think when we were doing it,
we were just trying to replicate

what we thought was making FMV,
what we thought was making a TV show,

what we thought was doing these things.

Everyone in the industry
thought this was the future,

that it was going to be a
merging of Hollywood and interactivity.

And, you know, in five years,
ten years, we'd be basically major

Hollywood movies and big actors would be
in them. And this was the wave of the future.

Years later, I reflect on it more of,
what we were really doing

was making a stage production. These games
were, at the time, stage plays.

We really didn't know enough
about how it really worked.

“Devine and Landero expressed
no regrets for undertaking

this highly anticipated
multimedia endeavor.”

You know, there's not too many people
out there who've made FMV games.

Successful FMV games. It's difficult. It's extremely
difficult. But I would say the learning process

has been so much fun, and I hope
that there's a world where FMV games

have even more of a renaissance
than what's happening now.