Controversial FMV game Night Trap deserves more credit

Nintendo said Night Trap had "no place in our society." 33 years later, it's still proving them wrong.

I'm a big fan of the FMV games of yore — there's just something I find oddly charming about them. Using video footage of real people as opposed to animated cutscenes allowed developers to tell stories with complex (and admittedly, often hilarious) narratives, even if they didn't have the skills, funds, or time to create and animate character models. Full-motion video also allowed for more realism at a time when the photorealistic graphics we take for granted today were still decades out of reach.

One title that inevitably comes up when I talk about FMV games is Night Trap, a 1992 FMV horror title developed by Digital Pictures and published by Sega as a launch title for the Sega CD system. The game follows a group of teenage girls who are staying at an estate and being terrorized by strange, vampire-like beings. The player, a member of the Special Control Attack Team (called the Sega Control Attack Team in the original release), is directed to protect the girls by monitoring an in-home camera system and springing traps on the creatures of the night who are terrorizing them, hence the name Night Trap.

When I bring Night Trap up to friends and colleagues, the conversation usually shifts to the 1993 congressional hearings that eventually led to the formation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in 1994. Along with Doom and Mortal Kombat, Night Trap was cited in the hearings as an example of a violent game that could potentially harm children. Although the goal of the game is for players to protect the girls from the vampires, failing to spring a trap at the right time generally leads to FMV cutscenes of them dying because the player goofed up. These scenes are fairly tame, but Nintendo — which was beefing with Sega at the time — was especially critical of the game.

"In the past year, some very violent and offensive games have reached the market, and of course I'm speaking about Mortal Kombat and Night Trap," former Nintendo of America chairman Howard Lincoln testified in 1993. "And let me say that, for the record, I want to state that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system. Obviously, it would not pass our guidelines."

Lincoln added that the game "simply has no place in our society." But in 2017, the Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition was released for PlayStation 4 and PC (via Steam). A year later, in 2018, it launched on the PS Vita… and the Nintendo Switch. (So much for "having no place in our society.") It's rated T for Teen due to the fact that it contains blood, "suggestive themes," and violence.

But the game's legacy stretches much further than the controversy that surrounded its release in the early '90s. From where I'm standing, Night Trap walked so games like Five Nights at Freddy's — and even Telltale's The Walking Dead — could run. Obviously, Five Nights at Freddy's is not an FMV game. But it is a cheesy horror game in which the player is stuck in a chair, monitoring cameras and operating a security system to try and keep the game's "quirky" animatronics from killing them. At a time where most games responded to player goof-ups with a "Game Over" screen and the option to start over or reload a previous save, Night Trap offered a different way to play. If a character dies, the game keeps going, forcing players to live with their mistakes in much the same way as modern titles like The Walking Dead, Detroit: Become Human, Until Dawn, and even Baldur's Gate 3.

Rather than punishing players with a "Game Over," Night Trap allows the story to continue, and features a variety of endings based on which characters are still alive at the end of the game. Multiple endings are all but expected of today's narrative-based games, but at the time of its release, the concept of letting a player live with the consequences of their failures wasn't nearly as common.

Playing Night Trap today, it's difficult to see what all the fuss was about. It's still a lot of fun to play, and I definitely recommend taking it for a spin — if only to note all the ways it's influenced modern horror and choice-based narrative games. If you're looking for an uber-gory, terrifying experience, you'll likely be a little disappointed. But Night Trap still holds a special place in my heart, due in part to its decades of influence on gaming. The public controversy over the game's content influenced brilliantly weird works of satire (like 1996's FMV fever dream, Harvester) and laid the groundwork for many of the games I hold near and dear today. Plus, it stars Diff'rent Strokes' Dana Plato in what is arguably one of the most underrated performances of her tragically short career. The FMV sequences were filmed in 1987, so every scene is tinged with a comforting touch of '80s nostalgia, and the game can be surprisingly challenging at times.

Like many games of the '90s, Night Trap is also downright hilarious at times. From working for a task force with an acronym that spells "SCAT" to some truly unhinged traps to watching Dana Plato's character casually scold the player after watching one of her friends die, Night Trap is a very weird gaming experience. But it's definitely an experience that's worth having at least once.