![]() ![]() Home consoles were on their knees, and arcades weren’t doing much better. Dragon’s Lair and its follow-ups, having been kept in the public eye thanks to numerous ports, sequels, and conversions, are some of the few games of this type to be remembered to this day outside of hardcore fans.ĭragon’s Lair was released in the middle of the great video game crash of 1983. However, many were not, and there is usually a direct connection between the games that were re-released on later formats to the ones that are still remembered today. In fact, it was due to this brief revival of the genre that several classic laserdisc arcade games were re-released. While not the first game in this format (the first was Quarter Horse, a horserace betting simulator released in 1982, and Sega’s Astron Belt was released in Japan earlier in ‘83), Dragon’s Lair is considered a classic and the first major success of the genre, and inspired a glut of little remembered imitators, very similar to the FMV games of the early CD-ROM era. The laserdisc player housing the disc was placed inside an arcade cabinet, and with ROM chips controlling what parts of the video were played when, you had the first FMV games. ![]() Instead, all of the video was placed on a laserdisc, which was, for all intents and purposes, the forerunner of the DVD. In an intriguing example of history repeating itself, the first FMV game to take the world by storm was actually released in 1983, before most people even considered putting anything but music on a CD. The truth is that FMV games actually got their start almost a decade earlier. Once the novelty wore off though, people saw how boring and repetitive most of them were. After the start of the infamous hearings on video game violence in the mid-1990s, Night Trap, one of the flagship FMV games for the Sega CD, became a huge best-seller, and many other games were released in the wake of it. Often considered a blight upon the early era of CD-ROM games, and sometimes even blamed for the death of early consoles using the technology (Sega CD, anyone?), the truth is that while they are in most cases pretty forgettable, there is a reason that so many were made: people were excited by them at first. ![]() Full Motion Video Games loved by few, scorned by most. ![]()
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