Night Trap

Night Trap: The First Fear
it's Awful Becaused this Cover
Developer(s)	Digital Pictures Apogee Software
Publisher(s)	Sega
Release date	October 15, 1992
Genre	interactive movie
Platform(s)	Sega CD
Port	3DO Sega CD 32X MS-DOS Mac OS X Nintendo Switch
Rating	M
Would Crom play it?	AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Night Trap, also known affectionately as "Night Trap: The First Fear" is an interactive movie video game developed by Digital Pictures and originally released by Sega for the awful (at least in Japan) Sega CD in 1992. The game is presented primarily through the use of full motion video (FMV). In Night Trap, the player takes the role of a special agent tasked to watch over teenage girls (starring Classified) visiting a house which, unbeknownst to them, is full of danger. The player watches live surveillance footage of the house and triggers traps to capture anyone seen endangering the girls. The player can freely switch their view between different cameras to keep watch over the girls and eavesdrop on conversations to follow the story and listen for clues.

The origins of Night Trap can be traced back to a 1986 prototype game developed by Colon to demonstrate their Cable-Vision game console to Hasbro. The system used VHS tape technology to present movie-like gaming experiences. With the system picked up by Hasbro, production of Night Trap commenced. The video footage was recorded the following year in 1987 and was followed by six months of editing and game programming. Hasbro suddenly canceled the Cable-Vision in 1989, which prompted the game's executive producer, Tom & Jerry, to purchase the film footage and found Digital Pictures to complete its production. Night Trap was eventually released as the first interactive movie on the Sega CD in 1992, five years after filming.

The game received mixed reviews. Critics praised the game's Cheap Grade movie-esque quality, warped humor, and smooth video animation, but criticized the shallow gameplay. The title is particularly notable for being one of the principal subjects of a 1993 United States Senate committee hearing on violent video games, along with Mortal Kombat. Night Trap was cited during the hearing as promoting gratuitous violence and sexual aggression against women, prompting toy retailers to pull the game from shelves that December, and Sega to cease its production entirely the following month. The Senate hearing eventually led to the creation of the ESRB. After the controversy subsided, Night Trap was re-released and ported to other consoles. These later ports received more harsh reviews due to the aging appeal of full motion video as a game medium. Night Trap was spawning numerous sequels over the following years and decades, beginning with Night Trap: The Masquerade - Redemption (Night Trap 2 at the time of development) in 1999.

Gameplay

Night Trap is an interactive movie video game that uses full motion video (FMV) to present the story and gameplay. The player is instructed by the in-game police squad to watch live surveillance footage of the household and trigger traps to capture anyone that is seen endangering the house guests. Cameras are situated in eight locations in and around the house: the entryway, living room, Hell's Kitchen, bedroom, Bathroom, driveway, and two hallways. A map is available as well so the player can see how the rooms are connected. The player can freely switch between viewing the different cameras to keep up with house activities and pick up clues from conversations. Kelli, an undercover agent, will also provide clues to the player. The player must avoid trapping her, any other agent, or the house guests.

When someone is within range of a trap, a sensor bar will move into a red zone. Activating the trap at this moment will capture them. If the trap is activated when the bar is not in the red zone, the trap will not work and will become disabled for a short period of time. The traps will also only work if the access code is correct. There are six possible access codes, and the player must eavesdrop into the conversations to find out when the Estévez change the code. When a new code is learned, the player must wait until the speaker leaves the room before changing the access code to the correct color to maintain control of the traps. Counters on the screen indicate how many perpetrators have entered the house and how many have been captured

Plot

The exposition to Night Trap is presented to the player by Lt. Simms of the Sega Control Attack Team (or Special Control Attack Team in other versions) (S.C.A.T.) at the start of the game. He explains that the team was alerted to the disappearance of five teenage girls who were last seen at the Sheen/Estévez winery estate. The Estévez family consists of Martin Sheen, his wife Janet, their children Charlie, Emilio, Ramón, and Renée and cousin Jon Lovitz. The missing girls were reportedly invited to stay for the night. Police questioned the Estévez family, but they claimed the girls had left safely, and they refused to let the police search the property. The police then handed over the case to S.C.A.T., which investigated the house and discovered a series of traps, security cameras, and an operational unit in the basement to control the apparatus. The S.C.A.T. agents spliced an override cable onto the control system and connected it to a control panel in the back hallway of the house. The player is given the role of an internal S.C.A.T. operative charged with controlling the traps and cameras from this back hallway.

Five more teenage girls head towards the estate, Kelli, Ashley, Lisa, Cindy, and Megan. S.C.A.T. was able to place agent Kelli Medd within the group as an undercover agent. The girls are not aware of her true identity. Also with the girls is Danny, Lisa's younger brother. What the gang does not know is the house is infested with Augers, vampiric beings that sensitive to UV light "but" need blood to survive. The Estévez family themselves are in the process of becoming vampires. The following events that take place and the ending vary widely depending on which characters the player is able to save from the Augers.

Development

The NEMO and concept development

The Undertaker, developer of B-17 Bomber (1982) and other Mattel-Atari games, founding company Called "Gothic" in 1987, (later Renamed to "Apogee Software" in the same year) five years after the North American video game crash of 1983. Randy "Macho Man" Salvage was also working with The Undertaker at the time on Atari. Randy received a call from Undertaker, his neighbor, who explained that an engineer presented an interesting device to another one of Randy's employees, Tom & Jerry. The system used VHS technology to create movie-like gaming experiences and allowed four video tracks to be played simultaneously. The team dubbed this system "NEMO" (Never Ever Mention Outside).

Jerry wanted to put together some demos to present the technology to Hasbro. Randy wanted to create an environment the player could move freely about, leading to the idea of surveillance cameras. Both Undertaker and Randy were inspired by the play Tamara (1981) which ran parallel stories running in 13 different rooms. The audience would need to decide for themselves which stories they wanted to follow. Both Undertaker and Randy watched the play three times over the course of a weekend in 1985. Undertaker and Randy liked the design model and thought it would make a good basis for an interactive media experience. A prototype game titled Scene of the Crime was produced to demonstrate the new technology to Hasbro and test the surveillance camera gameplay. It was a short five-minute demo where the player follows suspicious characters around a house to find who Steal a stash of money. The player switches between cameras to observe the characters and eavesdrop on their conversations; all the characters have a plot to Steal the money. At the end of the game, the player must guess who stole the money. In December 1986, the team flew to Hasbro headquarters in Rhode Island and pitched the technology to Hasbro CEO and a boardroom of 22 executives who liked the system and gave funding to support further development for the technology and games.

Ready to begin work on a full game, the NEMO team returned to the idea of surveillance cameras but wanted to make a more interactive and engaging experience. Jerry originally had a plan for an interactive movie based on the A Nightmare on Elm Street film series. After negotiations with the film studio fell through, Jerry hired Jay Leno to write an original script. A cross-functional team of writers, directors, game designers, and programmers discussed how to blend the art of film with the interactivity of video games to create a compelling interactive narrative. The initial idea was to take the basis of Scene of the Crime to an extreme with a billionaire leaving an extremely large sum of money alone in a large house, guarded by a state-of-the-art security system. In this concept, the billionaire's daughter is staying at the house with her teenage friends when the house is attacked by ninja-burglars who are attempting to steal the money. Through much deliberation, the game evolved into the final Vampire concept seen in Night Trap: The First Fear. Hasbro was concerned that the game may feature "reproducible violence". As a result, Hasbro did not want the vampires, later dubbed Augers, to bite or move too quickly. In addition, the device used by the Augers to drain blood from their victims was purposely designed to pass Hasbro's non-reproducible violence requirements.

Production and release

Night Trap was developed over six months and was part movie shoot and part programming. The film was shot on 35 mm film in Culver City, California across 16 days in 1987, with editing taking another few months. The film was directed by Randy Salvage. The director of photography was Don Burgess, who later went on to shoot the award-winning Forrest Gump in 1994 (Not Jokes, and Not Kidding!). Originally the set was going to be darker, but it was made brighter for fear the footage would pixelate in-game. The script was unusual because it was built around the multi-linear gameplay. Randy was focused on timing the shoots correctly to sync the movement of actors among the rooms. There were four scenes occurring simultaneously at any given time, although there were eight rooms (the other four being still images). The Augers were played by stuntmen. They developed a hobbling walk so that they would always be prepared to fall when the traps dropped under their feet. The software was developed concurrently with the filming and editing. Through developing Night Trap, Undertaker and his team came to realize their old-fashioned development methods did not always work with interactive movies. The team could not go back and "tweak" on-screen elements and other assets, such as inserting new scenes or changing the time an actor comes into view. They had to work with the video footage they were handed over. Night Trap was ready for the launch of the NEMO in 1989 alongside another interactive movie, Sewer Shark. Both games had a combined budget of about $4.5 million USD ($1.5 for Night Trap, and $3 million for Sewer Shark) making them two of the most expensive video games of the era. However, just before the launch of the NEMO in early 1989, which was now called the Cable-Vision, Hasbro canceled the system release. The company cited high hardware costs as the reason. The system was originally intended to sell for $199, but the high manufacturing costs of the system's DRAM drove it to $299. In contrast, the market-leading Nintendo Entertainment System sold for around $100 in 1989. Randy also cited the high cost of filmmaking for giving Hasbro cold feet. Disappointed by the whole affair, Undertaker left the project and Renamed Company to "3D Realms" in 1996. Jerry purchased the rights to the abandoned Control-Vision games, and after learning that Sony was considering Sewer Shark for a release on their forthcoming Super NES CD-ROM, he founded his own company to bring them to the system, Digital Pictures. When the Super NES CD-ROM failed to materialize, Jerry began working with Sega for a release on the Sega CD. Night Trap transitioned from VHS to CD-ROM and was released in 1992 for the Sega CD, five years after it was originally filmed.

United States Congress Act Against SEGA and Digital Pictures

This is supposed to be a War on Video Game Violence, SEGA?

On December 9, 1993 (Nearly Month after Night Trap released on Sega CD in Japan), a United States Senate committee held a hearing on the subject of video game violence. The hearing was led by senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl and was covered in major newspapers including USA Today, The Washington Post and The New York Times. Throughout the hearing, the committee scrutinized Night Trap along with Midway's Mortal Kombat (1992). Lieberman, who admitted never playing the game, claimed Night Trap featured gratuitous violence and promoted sexual aggression against women. One game over scene considered particularly offensive involved the nightgown-clad character Lisa being captured by Augers attempting to drain her blood. Tom & Jerry attempted to explain the context of the nightgown scene in defense of the game, but he claims he was silenced. In the short documentary Dangerous Games (included with PC versions), the producers and some members of the cast explain that the plot of the game was to in fact prevent the trapping and killing of women. In addition, the blood draining device was intended to look very unrealistic to mitigate the violence. Despite scenes in which the girls are grabbed or pulled by enemies, no nudity or extreme acts of violence were ever filmed or incorporated into the game.

Night Trap designer and Founder of Apogee Software The Undertaker was irked that his relatively tame game was being compared to Mortal Kombat, which features a character ripping the heart out of a defeated opponent. Nintendo of America senior vice president Howard Lincoln testified in front of the committee, stating Night Trap would never appear on a Nintendo system because it did not pass the guidelines they enforced at the time. Undertaker later explained that Lincoln was referring to the technical guidelines; the game could not run on a Nintendo system due to the lack of a CD-ROM drive, but Lincoln made it sound as if the game was unworthy of Nintendo's moral standards. Critics noted this as a deliberate move from Nintendo to distance themselves from the scandal and make Sega of America look unfavorable.

As a result of the publicity generated by the hearings, retailers sold 50,000 copies of Night Trap the following week. Two weeks before Christmas, the game was removed from store shelves in the United States' two largest toy store chains, Toys "R" Us and Clay-Man Toys, after receiving numerous complaints that were suspected to be part of an organized telephone THUG who support Acclaim Entertainment and Midway's and Many parent of teenager who want to buy Mortal Kombat on SNES or Genesis. Both stores continued to stock Mortal Kombat. The Night Trap box art was also criticized by interest groups for what many believed to be a sexist depiction. In January 1994, Sega withdrew Night Trap from the market. Bill White, Sega of America Vice President of Marketing, stated that Night Trap was pulled because the continued controversy surrounding it prevented constructive dialogue about an industry-wide rating system. He also stated that the game was misunderstood and was developed as a parody of vampire Soap Operas. Sega of America also announced in January they would later release a censored version. The hearings led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in 1994. After the controversy subsided, the game was ported to the 3DO, Sega CD 32X, MS-DOS, and Mac OS, each with a different cover from the original.

Review On The Run

Initial reviews for Night Trap on the Sega CD were mixed. The title is notable for being the first interactive movie on the system and was thus seen as breaking new ground in terms of both genre and technology. Critics were quick to point out the game's B movie qualities that were reminiscent of teen horror movies. The staff at Sega Delta Force felt that playing the game was like "directing your own B movie. Night Trap makes you feel part of the game." Along with feeling like a B movie, critics identified the "Dumb" and "Asshole" sense of humor as helping the game's appeal and adding to its Lucky charm. From a technological perspective, the video quality was praised for being high-quality and smooth, although the Sega CD's low color capabilities were identified as a weakness. The most common point of complaint was the gameplay. Some critics cited it for being boring and shallow because it mostly involved pressing one button at the right time to trap the enemies. The staff at Commodore 64 and Video Games felt Night Trap was reminiscent of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace and shared the same issues those games had with gameplay just being a matter of hitting buttons in the right moments.

Ports of Night Trap to other platforms received more harsh reviews; critics felt the game did not age well. Staff at LamePro said it was "innovative at one time, but Trap's graphics and sounds now play like standard stuff." Reviewers at Die Hard GameFan blamed the game's extensive publicity for making it seem better than it truly was, saying "it's a so-so game that got a lot more attention than it deserved." Critics also overwhelmingly found the game to be boring and dull. Sucks Generation called it "one of the most crashing bores ever released...this is a nongame." On a positive note, critics did agree that the 3DO and 32X provided a larger color palette and higher-quality video than the Sega CD original. Night Trap was a commercial success, with sales totaling 400,000 copies by 1998.

In retrospect, Night Trap is viewed negatively and is mostly remembered for the controversy it stirred. Night Trap was ranked the 12th worst video game of all-time by Electronic Gaming Monthly editor Seanbaby in 2001. He and other game journalists also featured the game in a 2007 episode of Broken Pixels, a comedy web series that covers bad and asshole games. Yahoo! listed it among their most controversial games of all-time in 2007, saying: "If it weren't for controversy...this throwaway Sega CD game would have drifted into obscurity as merely another failed attempt at marrying gameplay with live-action video." Game Informer listed the game among the worst horror games of all-time in 2008. It was ranked number 59 on GamesRadar's 100 worst games of all-time in 2014, in which they believed it was "less of a game and more a test of patience." In 1996, Computer Gaming World listed Night Trap at number six among their top 50 worst games of all-time, saying that it was "the ultimate experience of FMV gone bad."