Sam Barlow didn’t know Her Story was an FMV

The full-motion video game format was all the rage for a brief period in the 1990s. The ability to play high-quality video — video! — on a home computer was revolutionary.

But FMV games quickly fell by the wayside. This was partially due to the rise of 3D graphics on more powerful home consoles like the PlayStation 2, but also the quality of the games: visually impressive, sure, but many of them not as interactive as anyone who wanted to, like, actually play a video game would want.

But, as Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy discuss in this interview excerpt, having really high-quality video footage doesn’t necessarily make a game feel more interactive. And the older FMVs found cool ways to work within their constraints.

This interview was done in September 2024 as part of the release of our documentary The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft, about one of the most ambitious FMV games of the ’90s. You can watch the full interview above.

Justin McElroy: Sam, let me ask you, when you talk about the kind of games you’ve made recently, do you like the term “FMV games”? Do you find it useful? Have you learned to live with it?

Sam Barlow: I dislike it in the sense of being a games history nerd, and caring about this — and I don’t like having to explain to people that don’t know what FMV is. So if somebody else introduces me to someone who’s not as plugged into games and they’re like, “Oh, Sam makes FMV games,” it’s like, “What is that? What does that mean?” And you have to explain, yeah, there was a time when, if you played video, you weren’t going to get all the frames. There was a point where we were like, Cool, digital video, and it was like eight frames. Yeah, there was this moment where the ability to actually play video at full speed was in itself a magical new technology. Obviously that’s such a specific weird point of technology. […] I think prior to me making Her Story, I was like, An FMV game is explicitly a game that was made during this phase. A lot of them fall into a similar bracket. And there are some ones that I think are cooler than the general consensus — like I think Night Trap — they actually thought about this, right?

McElroy: Night Trap can generate tension playing it even now. It still hits. Like when you go into a room and you see somebody getting killed because you didn’t catch the Auger in time… I mean, it works.

Barlow: I think a lot of what we think about being “bad” about FMV games is the more Choose Your Own Adventure ones where it’s like, Hey, this is a movie, and you get to choose A or B. I think the biggest sin of classic FMV games is when they’re like, Hey, this is a video game, we should have some, like… life-or-death, real-time gameplay. And that’s when it gets bad, right, because you don’t have the simulation or the analog nature. Night Trap, and another game that I think is actually probably objectively not great, something like Voyeur, at least those games are going, Hey, video is about watching. Is there a type of game mechanic or an idea we can come up with which acknowledges the watching? When Night Trap was around, [in] most games you embody an avatar, you move around space, you’re very locked to that. Then Night Trap is like, Oh, no, no, no, you’re looking through cameras, you can ping, ping, ping, ping [from camera to camera]. That’s a cool idea. We’ll see something like Five Nights at Freddy’s kind of run with that a bit later. That is the FMV game period. And I know that you can kind of loop things like Myst into it, but in my head… ostensibly Myst — and particularly Riven — is an FMV game, it’s a game that is composed of multiple video clips that are strung together. I kind of don’t in my head hold that in the same place.

The first time the phrase “FMV game” was thrown at me was, it was the only time I ever showed Her Story publicly. Because when I was making Her Story, I had no money and my ambitions were very small and I knew I was making this weird little thing. I’m just going to make it, and I think it’s cool, and we’ll see what the world thinks. And I didn’t have the money to travel to game shows. But there was one show, it was Rezzed in London, had a weird little indie basement thread to that — I’m blanking on the name now — where if they picked your game, you didn’t have to pay. Normally you have to pay a ton of money to have a booth or whatever. So I took Her Story to that when it was essentially finished. So I wasn’t going to get any useful player feedback. If people didn’t like it, I was screwed. And I was also like, I don’t think this is a game that works on a show floor! The games that people love on the show floor are the fun spectator ones or the multiplayer, or the fun action ones…

McElroy: It’s like, imagine trying to shout over someone else: “You have to adjust the boolean! It’s the boolean! You have to adjust the taxonomy!”

Barlow: So I took Her Story, and actually it was very reassuring because immediately I remember a guy sat down, and we had to kick him off because he sat playing with headphones, and 40 minutes later we were like, “Hey dude, there’s some other people [waiting to] play.” So that was cool.

But I had a journalist come up to me from PC Gamer, I think, who had been watching the game and they were like, “oh, this is actually really interesting.” They said to me, “What made you decide to resurrect the FMV genre?” And that was genuinely the first time where I was like, Oh, shit, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. And immediately following that, I went home and I was like, I need to actually know about FMV games. People had asked me about this and — because when they were coming out, I didn’t have a CD-ROM drive for that, at the height of the FMV game boom. And I always thought they looked amazing. I would go through the pages of my PC game magazines and you’d see these screenshots and go, Whoa! Like, I remember that kind of era when 7th Guest was hitting and Bill Gates said it was the future of video gaming. It was like, Whoa, this is incredible.

McElroy: You’ve mentioned what makes an FMV game, and you hit on — in a couple of different games — this awareness of the player, or awareness that the player is watching what’s happening on screen. And it’s weird; I wonder why it seems that FMV games traffic in that so much more. But when I think about the classic older Sewer Shark, Night Trap, even stuff like Wirehead and stuff like that, it is very much about the characters on screen talking to the player. And I feel like that’s a big shift. It’s something that sort of sets FMV games apart, is that tendency to be aware of the player’s presence.

Barlow: I think there’s a reason for this as well. When I was working with [production company] Eko, I remember I was in so many meetings where I was having to explain to people, “What is a video game? Why is this cool?” But I also had to be the negative voice in the room.

The guy who ran that company — extremely passionate, excited guy, loves video games — played a lot of FMV games in the olden days, and he would often come to things from the perspective of “interactive storytelling is so magical.” If I go and play a Telltale game, play The Walking Dead, people are getting so involved. If I’m playing Call of Duty, I feel so much more in the action than I might in a movie. So he was coming from: “A normal video game is so involving, and feels so magical. Imagine how magical it will feel if it looks like reality.”

And my corrective was to go, “Here’s the problem.” When I play Telltale’s The Walking Dead, and I see these slightly janky 3D characters moving around doing stuff, and I’m clicking through UI and everything, I know inherently that this is a mechanical toy. And when the mechanical toy does something cool, I’m like, Oh wow, the mechanical toy did a really cool thing! It’s more complicated than I thought, or It’s more surprising than I thought. Or Wow, they made me feel emotions about this toy. This is cool. When you would show people interactive video — and they had some cool internal experiments that were quite slick — because people are used to sitting down and watching live action all the time. Movies, TV, whatever. The part of their brain that is enjoying it is not realizing that it’s a clever toy, and if you do it correctly, if you make it so it cuts smoothly and doesn’t look like bad television, I’m not even — you know, I’m not realizing that the things I’m doing are having an effect, that there is any reactivity there. And actually, it being gorgeous live action was a problem. We know that, if you’re playing a Telltale game, the extent to which every single thing I click on has an immediate consequence in the narrative. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors. There’s sort of a knotting of story trees and things. So if you take some of that slightly clunky game interface stuff — if you take the fact that if I see an animated 3D character, I know that it’s running in real time — if you take that away and replace it with slick, smoothly edited video, even if it is being incredibly reactive and clever, I’m not realizing it as much.

So I think probably that whole thing of being aware of the player, I don’t know if this was something people just discovered, right? And I know that Night Trap, there was a lot of R&D behind that, right? There were several iterations of the technology. So I think at some point they kind of realized, we have to heavily foreground and lampshade this thing and be like, Hey, you, the player, you are in control. Welcome to Sewer Shark! Right?

McElroy: I wonder if games like Her Story, and I guess a couple of your others have used a similar structure, where you are navigating between scenes rather than trying to maintain an illusion of being immersed in something, in those decision moments. I think that a lot of FMV games bump against this thing where if you’re not actively interacting with them, what do they do with you? Because I think that any time that you get into that, like — you’ll see ’em in older games, especially — that one-second looping animation that a person… when you’re in the room with an FMV character, and they’re just sort of ambulating, barely waiting for you to click anything at all.

Barlow: That was one of the big innovations. I don’t know if you played Erica, that came out on PlayStation, I think one of their big technical innovations was that […] they could have multiple layers of video. So if you had a character looping, you could have the character loop on a five-second loop or a 10-second loop, but then you could have the background ambiance looping on a 20-second loop and then the cigarette smoke in the ashtray looping on a different loop. So you would have more ability to cheat that thing. Because we’re so good at spotting, right? The second you see the looping hologram, you’re like, Wait a minute, I’m in the Matrix, or whatever. It draws attention to itself.

We’ll be running more excerpts from this conversation between Sam Barlow and Justin McElroy each weekend. You can read the first one, about how Netflix killed interactive entertainment, here.