Original subtitles

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 an 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 the 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

"That 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 in 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 their 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 balloon 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 Elf man?

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 Elf man.

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 Garrie 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 voice over cast that we had for Gabriel Knight I 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 voice over 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 Schattenjager."

"I see. what makes you think you need a Schattenjager?"

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 1 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 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 them wasn'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 get 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 game play

with the dramatic illusions of film making."

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."

Martin 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.

" 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 'you chewed' and 'my face' 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 free form, 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 it'd 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. - "Hello 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 at Ashley

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.

"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 is, 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, film making 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 think it's 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 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.