Digital Pictures

» see digitalpictures.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In the late eighties Hasbro funded a project called NEMO, run out of an internal division named Isix. The plan was a console that played ordinary VHS tapes, with the video streams laid down in parallel so that a player's input switched between them in real time. It was a way to put filmed actors into a game a decade before any home machine could render a face, and it worked well enough that Hasbro shot actual productions for it, including a piece called Night Trap directed by James Riley.

Hasbro's executives looked at the cost and cancelled it. Tom Zito, a former Washington Post music critic who had ended up running the thing, bought the software assets back and founded Digital Pictures in 1991 with five colleagues from the same division. The tapes went in a drawer until Sega shipped the Sega CD, a disc add-on with enough storage to hold compressed video, at which point a dead VHS console's back catalog became a launch library.

Night Trap and Sewer Shark both arrived on the Sega CD in 1992, Sewer Shark as a pack-in with the hardware. Night Trap sold about two hundred thousand copies in six weeks. Individual titles were costing between one and a half and four million dollars to produce, which was extraordinary money for a game in 1993 and entirely ordinary money for something with a film crew on it, and the company shipped close to twenty of them in five years.

The Sega CD never had a route into Turkey worth speaking of. Mega Drives were around, but a disc add-on that cost as much again as the console was a device you read about rather than a device anyone had, and all of this happened before I had an internet connection to read about it with. Night Trap reached me as a story about American politics, years after everybody involved had stopped arguing.

~ the case file ~

~ nemo ~

The technical trick behind NEMO deserves its own paragraph because it is genuinely strange. Consumer VHS could hold multiple video tracks, so the system stored several versions of the same scene side by side and switched tracks according to what the player did. No loading and no seeking, since the tape was already rolling. The limit was equally absolute: whatever had been filmed was all there would ever be, and the game could only offer branches a director had physically shot months earlier.

That constraint defines every game Digital Pictures ever made. Night Trap is a set of surveillance cameras in a house, and the whole game is choosing which room to watch and when to hit a trap. The acting is what it is and the video is a smear of early compression. It still holds a specific fascination, because nothing else on a console at the time looked remotely like it.

~ the hearing ~

On 9 December 1993 a US Senate subcommittee held hearings on violence in video games, chaired by Joseph Lieberman with Herb Kohl alongside him. Mortal Kombat was the other exhibit. Night Trap was played on camera for the senators in a heavily edited clip, presented as a game about attacking women, which is close to the opposite of what the game asks the player to do.

Tom Zito was in the room. He has said since that he announced himself and was ignored, and that the hearing made better television without his side of it. The commercial result was the one nobody planned: Night Trap sold fifty thousand copies a week afterward, roughly one for every five Sega CDs in existence. Toys R Us pulled it from shelves and Sega withdrew it, which only made it more findable. The hearings produced the Entertainment Software Rating Board in 1994, and the ratings on every game box since trace back to that afternoon.

~ what the format cost ~

By 1995 the appeal had drained out of filmed games completely. The PlayStation and the Saturn were in stores and consoles had learned to draw polygons, which removed the entire reason a genre built on filmed actors had existed in the first place. Digital Pictures was spending film budgets on products that reviewers were now calling interactive movies as an insult.

The company was finished by 1996. Its last production, Maximum Surge, was shot with Yasmine Bleeth and Walter Koenig and never shipped as a game; Zito sold the rights on, and the footage was cut into a straight-to-video film called Game Over in 2003. Cyber Cinema Interactive picked up the remaining assets and announced DVD rereleases that never materialized. Night Trap itself came back in 2017 as a twenty-fifth anniversary edition on modern consoles, and it was rated M, which is a quieter ending to the argument than anyone was having in 1993.

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