Night Trap: The Twisted Tale of the Game that Helped Launch the ESRB | Bad Ideas #49

Bad Ideas Podcast

In 1985, engineers at Nolan Bushnells Axlon company started development on a new type of video game console codenamed NEMO. Bushnell, the creator of Chuck E. Cheese, and founder of Atari had a vision for a new kind of video game console. At this point nearly all consoles used cartridges to store the games. This meant the games could be highly interactive, but lacked realism due to the limitations of computers at the time. NEMO would be different. Inspired by games like Dragon's Lair that used pre-animated footage recorded on a LaserDisc, Axlon began developing a game console that would run on VHS tapes.

The idea was that the tape could be encoded with multiple video tracks that would run simultaneously alongside each other. The player could choose which track to switch to, and that choice could relay information to the game system. Eventually the console was renamed to Control Vision.

Axlon realized it didn't have the resources to develop the Control Vision to its fullest potential so they went looking for partners. They settled on Hasbro. The toy company was dominant in media and merchandising in the 1980's and they seemed like a natural fit for something like the control vision.

It's important to understand exactly what kind of "video games" you could play on the Control Vision. The prototype game created to pitch the idea was called Scene of the Crime, a game where you switched between different video surveillance footage feeds and tried to catch a thief. The "game" was only four minutes long, but it made use of live action video, something no video game had ever done before.

With Hasbro on board, production went ahead on the first game for the system, Night Trap.

Night Trap was originally conceived as a game where killer ninjas break into a billionaire's mansion, and it was the player's responsibility to use his state of the art security system to stop the baddies from killing the gaggle of college girls partying there.

However Hasbro had objections to this idea. Ninja violence was imitatable which meant that Hasbro could be accused of encouraging kids to karate chop their siblings.

So the ninjas were changed to vampires. BUT because biting was also an imitatable act they couldn't have teeth. Hasbro was even concerned about the vampires moving too quickly.

So the game designer, James Riley came up with a workaround. The vampires were sick and toothless, hence the slow movement and lack of biting, but they still needed blood, so they carried around a device that would clamp around their victims neck and drill into their neck with a needle draining them of blood. These vampires were called Augurs.

Despite the fact that this was arguably a FAR more disturbing concept than ninjas karate chopping people to death, it was NOT imitatable, which meant it got the pass from Hasbro.

So Night Trap went into production. It was tricky going because no one had made a game like this before. It was like shooting a movie except the script had to accommodate everything that was going on in each room simultaneously, and the actors had to time their actions perfectly so if they left one room they would appear in the next room at the same moment. There were also challenges with how the film would be shot. James Riley originally envisioned a visually darker game, but because they weren't yet sure how much the video would have to be compressed, he decided to shoot everything brightly lit to make it easier to see even if the video ended up being highly pixelated.

The originals though were shot on 35mm film by cinematographer Don Burgess who would go on to be nominated for an Oscar for his work in Forest Gump.

As Night Trap went into production Hasbro started to get nervous. They had signed on to the project in hopes of developing games, but now they seemed to be in the movie business, and they weren't ready to put in that kind of investment. They pulled out of the deal to make the Control-Vision console shortly after the shooting had been completed leaving Night Trap without a console.

It seemed like Night Trap was dead in the water. But then a new possibility emerged. Sega, home of the Sassy Hedgehog and dedicated to doing what Nintendon't was about to release a peripheral to their smash hit Sega Genesis console called Sega CD.

At a time when floppy disks held 1.44 Mb of data and an entire computers hard drive might not be bigger than a couple gigabytes, CD-Roms with their wopping 800 megabytes of storage were the wave of the future. A game system that used CD Rom could include full motion video, and Night Trap seemed like a natural fit. The footage had to be compressed somewhat, but it could all fit on a single disc.

On October 15, 1992, five years after the footage in the game had been filmed Night Trap was released was the Sega CD.

Initial reviews for the game skewed mostly negative. Although the full motion video elements were seen as revolutionary, the gameplay elements didn't pass muster with most player. Night Trap was stuck conceptually in between being a movie and a game and it represented the worst of both worlds.

Night Trap might have simply fizzled out and died as a largely forgotten footnote in the history of gaming. But the early 90's were a time when video games were using more and more graphic violence and the moral panic about what this kind of content might be doing to the children of America made its way straight to the halls of Congress.

The Sentate held a hearing into the dangers of video game violence. Featured were the games Mortal Combat and Night Trap.

Night Trap was singled out because of a scene in which a woman in a nightgown was captured and killed by the Augurs. The senators at the hearing argued that this and other elements in the game promoted violence against women.

Sega, responded to the controversy by creating the Video Game Rating Council to judge whether games contained objectionable content and marking the box with a clear indication of their rating. This would later be replaced by the industry wide Entertainment Software Rating Board.

The other result of the hearing was that sales of Night Trap went through the roof.

Night Trap went on to be released for a variety of other consoles with increasing quality of video as storage quality expanded.

And that should have been the end of the story.

But in 2014, the Night Trap team put together a Kickstarter, trying to raise the money to re-release the game. The kickstarter saw initial enthusiasm, but eventually fizzled out without reaching it's goal. But the idea was out there. Night Trap. In HIGH DEFINITION. It was possible with the original footage recorded.

So in 2016, a programmer named Tyler Hogle created a mobile version of Night Trap just for fun, and released footage of the game anonymously. Excitement about the footage led to Hogle getting in touch with James Riley. Riley gave Hogle the HD master footage he had, and together they put together an HD Re-release of Night Trap.