Full-Motion Video

Footage is shot on a set with a cast and crew, compressed, and stored as clips that branch. Player input usually amounts to selecting a camera, a room or a moment of intervention, and the engine's job is to reach the next clip without a visible seam. Because every possible outcome must be filmed in advance, the design space is fixed on the shooting day and cannot be revised in code afterwards.

Digital Pictures released Night Trap in 1992, once CD-ROM drives gave home machines enough storage to hold video at all. Its material had been shot years earlier for a cartridge system that never shipped, which is part of why the credit is contested: laserdisc arcade cabinets had been playing branching filmed and animated sequences since the early 1980s, and several CD-ROM titles were in production simultaneously. What 1992 added was a mass-market console format.

Commercially the genre collapsed within about five years, killed by grainy compression, thin interaction and the arrival of convincing real-time 3D. Its residue is permanent, though: production values became a competitive axis, studios started hiring casting directors and composers, and the expectation that a game contains cinema outlived the technique that introduced it. Video also survived as a framing device, used for briefings, archive footage and deliberately artificial texture.