Bittersweet Infamy - #19 - Night Trap

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

Taylor tells Josie about the video game that had the U.S. Senate in an uproar. Plus: a plague of zombie cicadas grips America's Eastern Seaboard.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. So it's summer. Yes. You don't have this summer phenomena where you are, but the hazy click, click, click of cicadas is not the soundtrack to your summer, is it? No, no, we don't have cicadas up here. We've got crickets. Crickets. That's all. As far as things that make noise, I tell you that there was a cricket in my fucking apartment. For four nights, I had a cricket in my apartment. Did you sleep? You think you're going mad.

I've never seen, when I say we have crickets here, we have crickets here if you go somewhere rural. We don't particularly have crickets in Vancouver. Vancouver is not a buggy city. No, and certainly not to the point where you would get a single cricket mysteriously in your apartment in what ended up being your laundry hamper because for nights, I would walk back and forth. No, no, it wasn't my laundry hamper. It was my laundry, my towel closet. It was my towel closet. Okay, okay. The linen closet. It was the linen closet. And every time I would walk toward the end of the hallway where this mysterious chirping noise, is it the pipes? Is it my, is it like the last unspooling

thread of my sanity? What's going on? And I eventually found it and I was able to trap it in my laundry hamper and deliver it outside. I, a long story short, no, we don't have the sound of a cicada is really loud. A single one of them just like creates this cacophony. And it's like, it's just like this almost like a loud hissing like, and it's the sound of summer in the south and the eastern seaboard of the US. It's not obnoxious, I have to say, because it's such a white noise. It's like such a constant white noise until, until like you walk by the tree where they are and then it turns off. And then you're like, well, that's kind of cool. Yeah. No, for sure. There's, there's something to be said about like the

bugs, bugs chirping, Lenda romantic atmosphere to any bittersweet summer evening. Exactly. Yeah, fireflies. You know, well, I'm sure you've heard of brood X. The, the current, have you not? I feel like, no. Oh, brood X is the long awaited emergence of a generation of cicadas. Okay. Yeah. They, so cicadas go underground for about 17 years. Okay, it's part of their maturation process or whatever. So cicadas, they tunnel underground about a foot or so under the ground and they live off of the sap from tree roots. Okay. And depending on the type of cicada, they are underground for about 13 years or 17 years. Brood X is a 17 year collection. They are one of the largest broods of 17 year cicadas that we have recorded. So that's why it's kind of like this big newsy thing, because

there are so many of them. Okay. So there's a lot of them. They're gigantic. And probably in the 17 years that they've been dormant, climate change has done something that will make them go mad. Oh, perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And, and so the other thing about cicadas is they Oh, God, what would it be called? They shed. Yeah, they leave, they leave their They molt. They molt. They molt. Exactly. So they leave their exoskeleton. And it's like this, this little like feather light exact replica of it. And you'll find it on trees or on like fence posts. And because brood X is I play animal crossing. I know what's up. You know, because brood X is so big, they're just everywhere in the Eastern Eastern Seaboard right now.

Brood X is specific to the East Coast too. We don't have them down here. But there are so, so many of them and then like, they're getting eaten and it's the beautiful cycle of life. The unbeautiful cycle of life is this parasitic fungus that Yeah, okay. It is called the maso spora fungus. I hate it already. The spores of this fungus eat away specifically at the cicadas abdomen and their rear, including their genitals. So this thing just deposits spores in a lot of animal genital horror from you today. Yeah, summer. You know, you said it's a horny time. So it is a horny time. So the spores just like one scientist Brian Lovett describes it as the cicadas back end wears away like a eraser on a

pencil. It just disappears. That way to go. I know, right? The horrifying thing though, is that this is like a zombie like fungus. So the cicadas are still able to function. Oh, parasitic one of those mind control sports. Yes. And the spores make the cicadas act. Well, I'll say it this way. The spores make the cicadas extra horny. So they really, really want to get it on. They do all their like little mating shoo be shoo, shoo be shoo. And these cicadas, that's how they spread or that I should say this is how the parasite spreads through the populations is they make the cicadas so horny, and then they implant those spores in another cicada. That cicada gets extra horny, loses its genitals, still tries to mate,

spreads spore, spore, spore, spore, spore. Zombie cicada is fucking. That's what's happening in the world right now as we speak. The psychic was right. I so want to know what your psychic says, but I realized that that is a precious relationship I don't want to ask. It was exactly that. Okay, wow. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. So what do we do if this newfound plague of zombie cicadas? Do we breed some larger zombie animal to eat it and then some larger zombie animal to eat that? That's the only ethical scientific solution to this problem. Yes. That or shoot them. I feel like that might happen in the US as well. Just shotguns. That's what happens in a zombie movie, you get the shotguns out, right? Okay, here's my story. In December of 1993,

Democratic senators Herb Cole of Wisconsin and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut called a congressional hearing to tackle a pressing issue polluting society. Violent video games. Oh, yeah. The souls of America's youth, they said, depended on rejecting a culture of carnage. Two video games swirled at the center of the storm. The first was a duck hunter. No, it was not. That's hilarious. We had that game, like with the shotgun and everything. Oh, yeah, no, for sure. Well, they changed the color of that for that reason. The original blaster was gray and they changed it to like be a bright orange one. We had the bright orange one. So it didn't look like a gun. Yeah. See, we had the gray one. We were hipsters. Yeah, I just have to say it was

not mine. It was my brothers. That was drilled into me. Not mine. Sounds like an older brother, yes. The first game is near and dear to my heart. Mortal Kombat. Have you ever played Mortal Kombat? I've played it like at an arcade. Exactly, which is how it originally came out. Yeah, as in the arcades. There was a Mortal Kombat cabinet at legendary cool kid birthday party location, Stardust in Surrey. Oh, wow. What a magical place, Surrey. Yeah, truly. That was tripling cool Stardust. It's beautiful. Listen. So, yeah, Mortal Kombat is a fighting game featuring digitized actors, most notable for its copious bloodshed and graphic finishing moves, featuring hearts getting ripped out, heads being pulled off with the spine still attached, etc.

And the line finish him. Finish him fatality. Yes. And of course, there's just like a Mortal Kombat movie has just come out solid four out of 10, by the way. Oh, good. That sounds fun. It gets fun. It gets fun. Okay. Anyway, this is my lengthy film review of the new Mortal Kombat. The game was a hit in arcades. As you mentioned, you played it. That's what it was. It was an arcade game, but it got ported to home consoles in 1992. Kids, including a young Taylor Basso, loved it, but parents were concerned. The second and arguably even more controversial game was called Night Trap. Okay, I have not heard of that one. Night Trap. Night Trap is an FMV game, which stands for full motion video. What that basically means is that real video footage is

used in the gameplay. Oh, okay. In Night Trap, players are able to control security cameras, switching between surveillance feed in a house full of young women in peril with the task of saving them from the bad guys. Young women in peril? Yes. Are all these young women like very thin and blonde and white and like... Yeah. Okay. Continue. So you have heard of this game. Back in the Senate on the little TV cart that had been wheeled into the chambers, it's like an elementary school special. Oh, you know it's coming. You're gonna take a good nap. Senator Cole played a clip from the game of a tall, beautiful blonde in a nightgown trying to escape, but eventually being captured by those intruders. And Josie, I will give you that same

clip to watch now. Oh. So basically, I've just sent Josie a link to a clip. She's gonna watch it. I'm gonna overlay the audio in for you folks at home, just a heads up in case you're skittish about this sort of thing. It's a woman screaming. There's a lot of a woman screaming. It sounds like a cheesy horror movie to me, but if you are averse to such noises, there's your heads up. Already, like, because I dialed it or, you know, I copied and pasted it and there's no ad, so I'm like seeing it right away. It definitely has like a porky's aesthetic going on. Okay, she's wearing earrings with her short see-through, partly see-through nightgown. The guys behind her in the shower.

How could she not see this figure in the shower? We can clearly see this figure behind her. She's looking in the mirror. She thinks it's her friend playing a prank on her. Oh. You're not scaring me. Wait. What are you doing now? Oh my god. There's three of them and one has this weird device? Oh. Oh. Drilling into her neck with the weird device. And then carried through the wall. I don't know what that door was. I'll shall be revealed. I'll shall be revealed. They're not, no blood though. No blood. No blood. Give me your reactions to that. How do you, how do you feel about what you just watched? Porky's vibe. Scary because it's like single woman with these invaders coming into your

bathroom. Get that. But also kind of like somewhat comical to a little bit in a weird, in a weird way. It's like, what the fuck is going on? Also, the device looks very like third grade science project, you know? So that's that's, that's the trocar, Josie. Oh, the trocar. Yeah. Oh, okay. It's just class. If you didn't, if you didn't know it immediately to look at it, that is in fact a trocar. Oh, oh, I had no idea. Yeah. And then she's like in this tiny little nightgown full makeup and like big bouncy blonde hair that yeah, those are my feelings. Big bathroom. Spacious. It was the 80s. Everything was bigger than. Yeah. So the reaction to this clip in the Senate was sheer vehement disgust. Oh,

okay. Senator Cole called it especially repugnant. Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota said it is a sick, disgusting video game. Shame on the people who produced that trash. It's child abuse in my judgment. What year was this again? 93? 93. Okay. Howard Lincoln, then senior VP at Nintendo of America said that this game has no place in our society and vowed that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system. Was Night Trap a Nintendo game? It was a Sega game. Sega game. Also, I do have to say, I'm not used to video games that use real footage like that. Like, I wouldn't, if I saw that on its own, I wouldn't call it a video game. It is a very particular kind of video game and I'm going to explain why it is that way. You're right to be like this doesn't

look like video games as I'm used to them, especially in 1993. Right. Yeah, especially then. And then I think that also kind of makes it scarier too because it's like, oh, that's real. That looks real. You know. The senior VP of Nintendo of America vowed that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system. Fast forward to August 24th, 2018. The 25th anniversary of Night Trap is released for Nintendo Switch. Oh, on a Switch too. For many, this was a cause for celebration. Okay. One reviewer called it endearingly terrible. Another called it the best bad game ever made. Critics unanimously agreed that the repackaging and added features were a worthy treatment for a critical title in video game history. How did we get from there to here? From a plague on

the youth of America. Utter disgust. Disgust. This is child abuse. Spitting in the aisles. So angry. Frothing with anger. Yes. To like, that was kind of cute. To a beloved piece of historically significant kitsch. Okay. This is the story of Night Trap. So obviously, your man would not report on Night Trap without first playing Night Trap. For a tidy $3 on sale, I downloaded the game and I like not even for the podcast initially, I just knew of its reputation and was interested in playing it. Yeah. You sick. It was on sale for three bucks and it was it was a steal for that. Yeah. It was remastered and re-released by a studio called Screaming Villains that like got all of the

master footage somehow and was able to remaster it and make the format less janky and early 90s and kind of modernize it, right? Yeah. They package it with a lot of cool little extras, documentary shorts, behind the scenes stuff. It's a really nice presentation. Wow. So they revamped it and they revamped it to maintain the nostalgic factor. It's very much a treatment of the game knowing what it is. Like they also, in addition to being able to play Night Trap, you can also watch a little eight minute documentary on the controversy about Night Trap. Yeah. And you can see like interviews with the actors and whatever. Yeah. So it's interesting. Just to step away from Night Trap for a moment to give you the bigger picture,

there is a long history of protesting criticism around violence in video games. Oh, big time. In 1976, a video game called Death Race was pulled off the shelves. The National Coalition Against Censorship says, quote, the lo-fi black-and-white game looks like a slightly more advanced version of Pong and says the objective is to earn points by running over as many gremlins as possible within a given time frame. According to video game historian Steve Elkent, what got everyone upset about Death Race was that you heard this little when the person got hit and a little gravestone came up. You can find video of Death Race on YouTube and it's very, it looks like a Pong version of running people over with a car. Looks fun. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's like the huge thing

about video games is like even within TVs and films, typically not including telenovelas, maybe once you kill somebody just as in life, you can't bring them back. In a video game, they can always come back. It's always designed so that you just start over again. So the death doesn't mean as much. Can I can I share something with you then? Yeah. And it's it might seem weird to say it in the context of this, but I like violent video games. Like I and I feel like that's not I don't know. It's I feel like it's slightly stigmatized as a viewpoint for I mean reasons obviously we'll get into in this episode. But I do like I love turning on Grand Theft Auto and fucking smoking a bunch of people waking up at the hospital and going and stabbing 10 more.

I get such a kick straight up. I get such a kick out of it. And then I turn it off and like, you know me as a person, would you say that I have like any would you say that like stabby tendencies? Do I do I have stabby tendencies? I'm from Surrey too. It's remarkable that I don't. You do not. You do not. And isn't that part of like the the rebuttal to that is like, it's a created game. It's a simulation. And so that for sure people can blow off that steam potentially like a rage room where you go and like shatter glass and furniture and you're not doing it in your real life. You're you're letting that vent somewhere where it's safe to do so. Yes, absolutely. All of that. I think for me, there is always going to be people who

interpret whether it's a work of art, whether it's a participatory experience, whether it's whatever. There's always going to be people who interpret that in certain ways due to like trauma, due to mental illness, but I don't think that's I don't think that's exclusive to video games. I think that's true of almost everything in life. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, you want to hear about a fucking terrible game in 1983, a deeply distasteful, erotic, big heavy lifting on those quotes in erotic game called Custer's Revenge came under fire for its fragrant bouquet of sex, violence, and racism. The player controlled a pixel version of General Custer nude with a visible erection as he attempted to dodge gunfire and copulate with a new Native American woman on the other side of

the screen. 250 protesters gathered for the game's first public showing. I think that's I think Custer's Revenge is like correctly viewed as like an incredibly just a gross stain on that era of video gaming history. Yeah, like what? Oh, but back to Night Shops. That was so that's me giving you the this isn't the first time this has happened. Yeah, this is the story about this time that it happened. Yeah, okay. Night Shops story begins with a scrappy little gaming outfit called Axian, A-X-I-O-N. The group includes Rob Fulop, Jim Riley, and Tom Zito. Okay. Not that important to keep track of them really. Dudes. Dudes. Yes. One day in the mid 1980s, an engineer approaches Tom Zito with a device that uses VHS technology to create movie like gaming experiences

and allows four video tracks to be played simultaneously. Cutting edge. The group is like this is the future of gaming. Playable films. Yeah. Says Tom Zito, we were trying to change the definition of a video game. We thought that if you give people what they're most used to, namely television, and make it interactive, you've opened up a much bigger opportunity. They acquire the technology and they call it Project Nemo. And Nemo stands for Never Ever Mention Outside. Oh, a little fight club situation. This is like the they might as well have like the nuclear football. Like, we've got to guard this most precious, we've got a bajillion dollar idea here. Yeah. So in order to fund this revolutionary new game they're creating, they need a backer,

and they get one in the form of toy company Hasbro. Oh, I know Hasbro. You know Hasbro. They're still kicking around very happily to this day. They are going to use the technology to develop an experimental new gameplay device called Hasbro Vision. And the way that it would work is you would be allowed to play FMV games. So these like full motion video games on your television using your remote to control the action. Wow. Oh, so they're really trying to like link TV and this video game technology. They're really trying to make that the connection. It's basically like imagine if your VCR played played video games, except it's not a VCR, it's its own console. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Jim, Riley and Rob Fullup are put in charge of

designing the gameplay experience. And they're inspired by a play called Tamera by John Crisank, where you could follow characters from room to room and effectively choose whose story you wanted to see. We're familiar with a play like that. We are. So about 10 years ago. A decade. A full decade, Josie and I were part of a, I don't know how many people were on this team, 10, 12. We wrote a play very, basically you could follow characters around a house party. It was called Party This Weekend. It was directed by Laura McClain. It took place in an actual house in East Vancouver. And it was a cool experience writing with that because there was a lot of us working on the writing because we were each effectively writing a character to follow around

this party. And they all had to link up in certain ways. Yeah. And it's really interesting to write that way. It was a lot of fun. Yeah. Collaborative like to the nth degree, I'd say. Collaborative to the nth, collaborative down to the second. Yeah. Because you had to make sure that no one, that all of your scenes fit together like a puzzle. And so a lot of that, a lot of that will come up in what I'm just about to describe to you, right? Like that will be kind of logistically, that will be a bit of a struggle of theirs going forward. Okay. Is this complicated structure. And their way of gamifying the concept was that players would be able to watch multiple security camera feeds, which they could scroll between. Okay. According to Riley, this would create the

impression of unlimited choices in a story driven dramatic event. Quote, you're in control of time and space. Wow. So they're set in the bar low here. Nothing less than time and space. Is the original play featuring beautiful co-eds in 90s? According to Wikipedia, Tamara was by John Krizzink in 1981 about the painter Tamara Dylan Picca. And it's based on the historical meeting of Gabrielle de Nunzio and Lim Picca, who was hoping to be commissioned by de Nunzio to paint his portrait. So it's some real upper crust shit. Yeah, I would play that video game. Well, you're getting nitrapped. Okay, fair enough. So based on this surveillance footage concept in 1986, the team created a five minute demo

called scene of the crime. And basically a rich guy's safe gets burglarized. The player switches between cameras to observe the characters and eavesdrop on their conversations. And at the end of the game, the player must guess who stole the money. So kind of a clue. It's clue. Effectively. Yeah. And Hasbro, Hasbro owns clue. Clue is Hasbro. So yeah, that's right. Hasbro loves it and says, this is great. Now go and make it for kids. Yeah. And with that green light, the developers embark upon creating the game that would become Night Trap. Wait, their prompt is to make it for kids. And what they end up is with the Night Trap 90. At one point, I think it was Jim Riley says in one of the documentaries I watched, he goes, one bad note can ruin a whole project. And we

got a lot of bad notes. So also the top number one rule of workshop, you don't have to take all your notes. No, you can't take. But when Hasbro's lining your pockets, you do. Okay, yeah. When Hasbro is the money, they're the system. You've tied your fortunes to them and they tell you to do something. You kind of do have to do it. True. So before they can start filming their footage, they need a story. Jim Riley finds his inspiration in Ninjas. He's just a ninja guy. He likes Ninjas. It's the 80s. It's the 80s where I've where I've observed a disproportionate amount of our stories take place, by the way. I think it's because everyone was on Coke. Yeah. So Jim Riley imagines a concept where you're watching people in a mansion and it is set upon by Ninjas lurking

in the shadows. And your objective as the player is to spot the Ninjas and dispatch them via activating traps. Okay, okay. You're lukewarm on that? I just, I... You're not the audience maybe? Yeah, yeah. Give me the painter commissioning a portrait. I'm there for that one. Fair to use. Everyone on the team, the AXIEN team loves this concept. Great. Jim has saved the day. Thank God. They bring it to Hasbro where it receives a less warm reception. Okay. Hasbro is really hung up on the idea of what they call reproducible violence. Basically anything that players could conceivably reenact at home. That means you can't show someone getting stabbed with a knife, for example, because kids at home might imitate that behavior. Right. Knives are in the

kitchen. Boom. Done. Okay. This extends to Ninjas and their throwing stars. Right. That's like when mid-90s and my brother and the neighborhood boys decided to construct numchucks and all the parents were like, yeah, okay. And then they started playing with them and our, the dad who lived next door was like, y'all know these are lethal weapons, right? And they throw and they're like chucking them at each other and they could do a lot of damage. Yeah. And all the parents were like, yeah. Okay. Give them back boys. It was a learning experience for everybody. Yeah. But it sounds like everyone came out the other side. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Little, little older, little wiser, some tender spots next to your

temple, but it's okay. That's fine. That's fine. So thinking on the fly, Axian is like, what about vampires? Vampires don't exist. One. Let's do vampires. Love a vampire story. And Hasbro's like, okay, okay, but they can't bite anybody. Oh. And they can't move fast enough to physically overpower anybody. So Axian leaves this meeting with the problem of how to create a game where the antagonists are slow, weak vampires that can't bite anybody. Yeah. These prompts are getting harder and harder. There's a lot of hoops to jump through now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they come up with ogres. And I'll explain that to you to quote the game itself. And ogre is, quote, a vampire victim who's been half blood and left there to die.

Poor creatures have just enough blood to survive, but not enough blood to be vampires. Okay. So they're like Dracula's little hinkshmen who can be in the daylight and do all the stuff. And they're Rita Repulses putties. You know what I mean? Yeah. And there's a million of them. So those dudes all in black, the shambling dudes all in black in the clip you just watched, those were the ogres. Oh, okay. So like bumbling ninjas, that's what they were before. Yes, like bumbling ninjas. But in order to be credibly threatening, Jim Riley decides that the ogres need an apparatus to extract blood from their victims. Enter the trocar. Oh, the third great science project, Inviction, yes. Which is that pneumatic syringe looking business that you saw

earlier. Game of Sutra describes it as quote, a strange contraption that looked like a cross between a cattle prod and an oversized dildo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hasbro was somehow okay with this because this was non reproducible. Although in retrospect, Jim admits that he didn't think through how terrible the optics of this device would be. This is why you need women on game dev teams. Yes, yes, yes. Big lesson right there. Also, though, kids are fucking imaginative. They will create one of those things like a paper towel tube and a fucking some forks. Yeah, get a like a tattoo choker and like a screwdriver done. And those like, you know, those like claw things, a claw, and then you tape a tattoo choker to it. And then please if any young people are

listening, please don't do this at home. No, don't do it at home. I don't want to end up in Congress over this podcast. I really truly don't want to get spit on by a senator. Very true. With all that in place, Axie needs a big or big enough actor to headline the game. And they find their star in Dana Plato, best known as the teenage sister on TV sitcom and Gary Coleman vehicle, different strokes. Okay, yeah, big enough. Good. Yeah, big beautiful mid 80s piece of casting. Yeah, behind the camera, Jim Riley directs, they pulled together a 250 page screenplay. Oh my God, written by Terry McDonald. Oh, God, that's too long. Well, they're writing like interwoven interlapping scenes that need to be timed to be perfectly, you know this

shit, we've done this shit. I know, but that's too long. It wasn't 250 pages. No, actually, it might have been all in if you look at Vivian script and then your script and then you know what I mean? The cinematographer is Don Burgess, who'd go on to do Forrest Gump, Spiderman and the Polar Express. Oh my God. Polar Express. But for now, he's so eliminate here. It's not often remarked upon, but it's a landmark moment in video games directly rubbing shoulders with the television and film industry in a real way, says actor Andrews Jones. It really didn't feel like shooting a film. It felt like being part of an experiment. We knew that it was something that we were unlikely to see for a while. And when we did, it would show up in a completely

new format. Most films are shot out of sequence, but there was even less cohesiveness to what we were doing. It seemed very different. So incohesive that you don't know if it's going to be good or bad. You can't even probably get a sense of what it is. And because the medium would change and all that. Yeah, exactly. It's hard, especially then, I bet. Now maybe that idea comes a little bit more easily to us because film and video games have such a porous border these days. Yeah. We were just talking about there's a new Mortal Kombat movie that just came out, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So filming takes place in Culver City, CA, California. Callie. Tell me a bit about Culver City. I don't know. Is it outside of LA? Or is it outside of the Bay Area? In that it is in California,

but not LA. It is somewhere outside of LA. Okay, it's somewhere outside of LA. I imagine it is maybe like Cheap Studios would be my guess. Cheap Filming Studios. Yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah. I'm putting a request out to listeners. Bittersweetinfameaggmail.com. Hit us on our Instagram. We actually check that. Oh, yeah. If you know anyone, anything about Culver City, CA, please tell us. Thank you. The logistics are an enormous headache from a writing perspective and as we've been discussing, they also run into another hiccup with the augers where the makeup artists are like, you've only got like four guys here. We're not going to make them up to look like a hundred individual vampires that you need them to pretend to be. So we're just going to take some

stunt guys and put them in black garbage bags. Perfect. Beautiful solution. The actors playing the augers also discover that they need to walk hunched over in order to brace for the trap doors and springboards and various other stunt equipment. So that's why when you see them creeping up on Lisa in that bathroom, that's why they're like, eh. Yeah, they're very bumbly. Because if the player activates a trap, they need to be able to like fall into the wall or spin through. You know what I mean? Okay, okay. So they've got to be braced always on their forward knee. Yeah. More hiccups. The producers realized that because the video footage would be significantly more pixelated on the TV and computer screens of the 80s, so they bring up the lighting on the house to basically

sit calm level. Oh. Which is why it was so brightly lit like that. So to recap what started as a dimly lit thriller featuring ninjas descending upon a wealthy man's fortune has now become a brightly lit campy B movie starring shambling vampires in trash bags that cannot bite you but can extract your blood via a comically phallic pneumatic tube. That I think I didn't I didn't clock the lighting but I think the lighting creates a really comic vibe there. Because it's already- It looks like an episode of Full House. Yeah, I'm set up for that, for the shot, for the way that the bathroom is being filmed and the lighting. It's like somebody's gonna come in and be like, oop, did I do that? Or whatever it is, you know. You're not Erkel. Erkel will make a cameo. No,

but straight up Erkel looks like Erkel's about to fucking slide in and tug on his suspenders. It's that lighting. Yeah, yeah. If she were dressed with a few more clothes or with a more like covering dealio, it would feel like family sitcom. It's a lot of bad notes all at once. It's a lot of bad notes all at once, yeah. And they're all different from each other and it kind of makes no sense. Right, yeah. So the team puts the finishing touches on the game and it's ready to launch alongside the Hasbro vision in 1989 when Hasbro at the very last second cancels the Hasbro vision system, citing prohibitively high costs. Oh my god, they couldn't see that before? Yeah, but Hasbro doesn't care. Hasbro is content to throw away money in time because they've got

it. They've got clue. They don't fucking care. Axion is just this is it. This is what they've got. They've got this VHS thing and they need to make it into something. All in, Night Trap cost over $1.5 million to create. Oh my god, in today's money, that's like $80 million. They had to build that studio. They had to build hydraulics. They had to get Dana Plato's got a salary, I'm sure. Dana Plato. Those trash bags. Those aren't cheap. They probably tour constantly. Exactly. The hefty bag budget alone. So the cost of the Hasbro vision's memory hardware on its own drove the price of the console up to $299 US. The modern equivalent in US dollars is $646.32. Shit. And the whole idea too was that this would not go into arcades, right? It would

be in people's homes. This is a home console, yes. Right, yeah. Because if an arcade were to buy one of those, that might work out. They would just charge more for players to play that game. Exactly. But not for a home console. Unless. No, god no. Yeah. People got budgets. Right. And on that note, the popular Nintendo entertainment system, home of Mario, Legend of Zelda, blah, blah, blah, cost $100 US dollars. Okay, okay. Yeah, so. Long story short, money pit for both creators and consumers. Yeah. Night trap had come to nothing. But okay. Sounds pretty bad. Tom Zito of Axian doesn't want the story to end there. So he starts a company called Digital Pictures. He buys the rights to the abandoned control vision games, which were night trap, and another game called

sewer shark. And don't know anything. I wish I'd looked into see. No, I okay. Okay. And not as whatever it was could not possibly be as cursed as night track. No. He starts shopping the footage around to various publishers. Eventually he finds a buyer in Sega of Sonic the Hedgehog fame. Yes. And they're hoping to fill the library for their brand new Sega CD drive. So if you've never heard of the Sega CD, which I never had. I have not. I knew for sure you had. Thank you. You know, it's just not one of your interests. But so I chose to talk to you about it for a fucking hour and a half. If you've never heard of the Sega CD, it's an obscure accessory that you could attach to your Sega Genesis console that let it play CD ROMs. So it's like a peripheral for an existing

console. Yeah, okay, okay. The Sega CD received a North American release in 1992 and was not a commercial success for a variety of reasons. Within less than a year, Sega had abandoned game development for the hardware and it would kind of just drift along until they shuttered it in 96. It could also only show 32 colors on the screen at the time. Okay. So it compressed the video, which made it look really grainy and muddy. And so years and years later, on October 15, 1992, on this shitty forgotten console add on night trap finally had its long awaited coming out party. So I played night trap. Tell me all about it. Were you let me tell you a little bit about it? Were you sober? Well, actually, the situation was no, no, and I'll tell you all about it. Okay. No,

and I'll tell you all about it. The gameplay and the story are very convoluted. So if you find anything I say confusing, trust that it's because it actually is confusing. Okay. Yeah. There's this family called the Martins. Rich 80s yuppie types. A lot of polo shirts on it. Yes, he is wearing he's wearing like a polo shirt. 100%. Maybe two pop in the car. Maybe two one. You got to take one off to play tennis. Yes. They remind me of the couple from Hellraiser if you've ever seen it. There's someone out there. Look at that. They've been hosting parties at their spooky winery estate and or wine cave where they're using traps to capture their guests for unknown reasons. We're talking trap doors, rotating walls, that sort of thing. Very slapstick. You

go down a trap door and a big plume of dry ice smoke comes out. You understand. Love it. This is what we're talking about. Delicious. This has all aroused the suspicion of a government military group called the special control attack team or SCAT. Wait, what? What do you think of that name? STAT? SCAT. SCAT. Oh, I think something different about SCAT than I do STAT. I certainly do. They were not thinking. It's SCAT. It's SCAT. Would you trust SCAT? No. Would you trust SCAT to infiltrate this spooky winery? Shit, no. Okay, well, that will be borne out. Okay. So SCAT has wired the house with hidden cameras and implanted an undercover agent, Kelly with an eye. Good. Played by our friend Dana Play-Doh. Oh, Dana. Hey. Kelly is infiltrating a group of valley girls

who are coming to the winery for a totally rad sleepover. Oh, my God. Inter- interchangeable like you couldn't believe. Like you couldn't believe. Meanwhile, the Martins, who are themselves vampires, are trying to capture the girls in their booby traps so they can drain their blood and deliver it to a group of shambling toothless pseudo-vampires called... Oh, what were they called? Oh, no. I forget. Roobs. They are. They're truly the roobs. They're the augurs. Augurs. Augurs. The augurs. Augs for short. Often they'll be called the augs. Gotta keep them away from the augs. Augie, if he puts a polo shirt on. It's perfect. You understand beautifully what we're doing here. And obviously, the augurs can't suck blood on their own. No clue what's going on,

by the way. Well, my next line here is, that's the story, although players would be forgiven for not totally grasping it. Because you are also tasked with simultaneously monitoring eight security feeds, which you can switch freely between. So while you're trying to understand what the evil Martin family is chatting about in the kitchen, you're also missing all the slumber party girls introducing themselves in the driveway. And meanwhile, a bunch of augurs have just snuck into the bedroom. Okay. Your job is to get these augurs into these booby traps. And if you miss too many augurs, your liaison from scat stops the game and kicks you off the case. So. Oh, shit. The result is that you're constantly flicking back and forth between feeds, barely understanding what's

happening. If you pay attention to the augurs, you miss the story. And if you pay attention to the story, you miss capturing the augurs and it's game over. And there's always augurs entering during plot critical moments. That is not good script writing. It penalizes the player for trying to figure out what's going on. To this day, I still don't know what the girls are called. The Kimmy Gibbler looking one is Megan. The tall blonde is Lisa. And Kelly with an eye is Dana Plato. And then there's three other ones. I couldn't even. I'll name Jenny. I'll name Jenny. Jenny with an I, Jenny with an IE and Jenny with a Y. Yes. I think Jenny with a J too. Don't forget Jenny with a J. Oh, also on top of Jen's, yes. J at the end, I assume. And by the way,

also on top of all that, there's a randomly changing color based code that affects your ability to deploy the traps. And when I say randomly changing, I mean at certain intervals, the Martins will tell each other, change the code to purple. And if you happen to be tuned, and it changes every time they dub it over, so it'll be blue or orange or whatever. So you can even just memorize what it is. And if you don't happen to be tuned into the right feed when that code changes, then you're fucked. You can't deploy the traps. Gotta start over. And you're not paid to play this. That's correct. You pay to play this. I paid $3 for this. Okay. So the first time I tried to play this game was with my friend Jared,

with whom I share great mystery solving chemistry. And this, and this game is sort of a mystery. Ooh, what's going on, right? Yeah. Not only what's going on, but like what the fuck is going on? Kind of. Exactly. And Jared's the perfect companion for games like these, like perfect. Thanks, Jared. Thanks, Jared. But problem was, we were both decently drunk, me way more than him, and we could not figure out what to do. Oh, no. We could not. We were literally like, that button changed the color. Why is the color changing? What's that music? What's going on? What's, I can't tell what's happened. So it's this really, it's a very cerebral art piece to try to dive into this game. Sober, I had a bit more luck. Okay. By which I mean, I burnt at least two hours

trying to memorize when to duck away from the story action to bin the odds. Eventually, I consulted a walkthrough that outlined second by second what I needed to do and when I needed to do it. That sounds fun. Wow. Short of unlimited time and a fistful of Adderall. That was the only way I could make it through. I was going to say, it seems like the non sober approach to this is Adderall. So what a waste of Adderall. This is a game of memorization and timing and outside the context of its endearingly cheesy story. It is not fun. In fact, it's very bad. And that is why all those senators were spitting in the aisles. Exactly. So as for the story, how it plays out, it goes more or less how you'd expect the girls start getting attacked by the odds and disappearing,

the scat team enters to bail out Kelly with an eye and they drop like flies to eventually with good reflexes and a good memory, you should be able to take out the Martins with their own traps and save Agent Kelly from a bloody fate. In telling you this, I'm editing out a lot of the stray plot points like the Martin's creepy neighbor, weird Eddie and his anti-vampire laser. The hot vampire cousin who's in love with one of the sleepover girls. Right, definitely a cousin vibe. Yeah. Or the jive talking black scat agent who inexplicably enters the house dressed as a Jamaican tourist. Oh, rude, racist and rude. But one thing I won't edit out is the gorgeously 80s scene where the slumber party Valley girls all jam out in the living room

while lip syncing the night trap theme song. Cute. Oh, I didn't catch any of their lyrics, but no, they're all like bad boys will find you, watch out behind you. It's, it's Kitch, it's camp, right? Hello shirt line cave. Exactly. It was by an artist named Sunny blue skies, I believe is the singer there. No Brian steel. That's for sure. No Brian steel who who among us is truly last thing about the story. If you're interested in watching the actual story of night trap cut together like one big movie. Oh, there's a guy named Kay Huntington on YouTube. And from what I can gather, this person is very into the Sega CD as a as a peripheral, but also specifically really, really into night

trap. So if it's not clear, this is something of a cult game, right? Yeah, yeah, obviously. And he has a video on his channel of him getting a night trap half sleeve. That's beautiful. The world is such a big, beautiful place. Isn't it? Don't you love shit like that? And it's not a bad it's in like a in like a kind of comic book style and it's various scenes from the game. It's kind of dope. Nice. All played. So overall, the game includes about 90 minutes of footage and it takes about 30 minutes to play through if you're hitting all your marks perfectly, which is impossible, which is impossible. The racist thing you'll see is Dana Plato in a sports bra. And the most violent scene you'll see

is probably our friend Lisa in the nightie getting trapped by the odds in the bathroom, which according to Deborah Park, who portrayed Lisa was not supposed to be a big deal. She said, quote, I was wearing a spaghetti strap nightgown. It was cute. It was peach. I think I had little flowers here. That's her only quote in this story, but I thought it was cute. So I kept it. That's the scene that was played in the Senate. Yes. Okay. The tall, beautiful blonde. This is her like 10, 10, 15 years down the line looking back. Okay. Yeah. It was supposed to be cheesy. You could hear people laughing on the set. It wasn't at all supposed to depict sexual violence or anything like that, but they just, they just really whiffed it on the trocar. Yeah, more than anything.

It's funny too that that night trap of all games ends up in this position where it's vilified by everybody because there was so, so much of its weirdness came from this idea of reproducible violence and Hasbro being like, you can't do ninjas. You can't do vampires that by anyone. So it just ended up in this, like they were actually micromanaged to death to make sure that this wasn't something the kids would run and trip and stab themselves with, right? Yeah. It just all went really colossally wrong, I think. But I also think the response to that could have been, let's make this a mystery. Let's make it a treasure is in this huge mansion and all of these beautiful, intelligent girls from the Valley are going to solve this mystery. You know what I mean?

Like, that's an option. Kelly with an eye can figure this out. I, you know, I just, Kelly with an eye does figure it out if you win the game. Oh, okay. Okay. But again, even like, this speaks to, I'm glad we're having this confusion, because it's just such a confusing mishmash of a million things this game. Right. It does none of them particularly well. But I still kind of like that I played it somehow. Yeah. It's really strange. It's a part of history. Exactly. And it's such a, it's so its own thing. It's so its own weird thing that I am glad that I, like, there's a lot of artistic intent in there. Yeah. Too much, I would argue. So the idea that this played in Congress is also like, y'all know that this makes absolutely no

sense. And that would, by the time that you get to this specific scene, everything is made so ridiculous. There's absolutely, or I should say, there's very little horror involved, even, even in this kind of strangely sexualized setting. Yes. No, for sure. That's, that's exactly right. There's, there's a couple of things in the game that are like, you look at them and you're like, oh, that's iffy. But it's basically a horror movie that you play through. Yeah. And like a kitschy horror movie, too. A really kitschy, a really kitschy, cheesily acted, hor, brightly lit. Yeah. The vampires can't even bite anybody. So it's a very, it's, it's so its own animal. They always have to be braced for something. Yeah. For something to get flipped through a wall.

So where did the furory, furorium, British, where did the furor come from? Not the furor. So, so what's the deal? What is the deal, Taylor? In 1992, Nintendo and Sega were in a fierce tug of war for market share. Sega was the upstart, so as a means of distinguishing themselves from their ubiquitous competitor, they ran ads to make Sega seem cool and sexy and extreme. And I've written extreme with three X's there. Sega, extreme, Sega. So for Night Trap, that meant provocative ads that played up hot girls and danger and so on. Yeah. Which really, really leaning into like the Friday the 13th softcore splatter kind of thing. Yeah, but no blood. This was meant to catch the attention of potential

consumers. Unfortunately, it also caught the attention of Senate Democrats who were right in the middle of a moral panic about violence in video games. Word of Night Trap got back to the Dems and said Tom Zito, it was ideal fodder for someone who wanted to use it as a political hand grenade. And that's exactly what the Democrats led by Colin Lieberman did. Nineties Democrats, you know, I mean Democrats period, but part of why I was excited to do the story is because I feel like we bust on Republicans a lot on this show. We do to the to the point where I'm like, should I recommend this to some of my Texas family? But you know what? Democrats too. This. So this is a story where the Democrats are idiots. So

you're welcome, Red Belt, please welcome us back into your podcasting platform. Please welcome us back into your ear, into your headphones. According to developer Ron Fulop, a friend called him and said, did you know that Captain Kangaroo got on TV and said that Night Trap is a bad game? Oh no. Fulop ads, that's where it got very serious for me because I loved Captain Kangaroo. Oh, Captain. Oh, Captain, my Captain. Bob Keeshan did get on the mic specifically to denounce Night Trap. The controversy got picked up by The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, Toys R Us stopped selling Night Trap. Naturally, everyone involved with the production from the developers to the actors on Down is

blown away by the controversy because like, how the fuck did that happen with this game? Yeah. Yeah. No, I, I see that now. I definitely see that now. And I will say, I don't guess, I still don't get the video game. I don't understand it. Yeah. But that's even more reason why this was never going to catch on. Right. Yeah. No, it was never nobody. It's not a, it's not a fun game to play. It's not, if you're buying it because you want some co-ed spank bank shit, that's not in there really. No. Like. Is this kind of an extrapolated case of the Barbra Streisand effect, perhaps? Yes. Do you see what I'm saying there? Do you see what I'm saying? Yes, it is. Yeah. Yes, it is. Absolutely. Yeah. By calling all of this attention to Night

Trap, it's gotten so, what a good for you. It's so facto, I make connections. Wow. Good for you. Truly. Truly good for you. I watched all three hours of the 1993 Senate Committee hearings on violence and video games because of course I did. You are devoted, my friend. I love this shit. I cannot get enough of it. You are so devoted. So this was also hosted by K Huntington with the Night Trap half sleeve. This is hosted on his YouTube channel. Here's how it played out. So before we even start, the morning of the December 1993 Senate hearing, a group of influential game studios and toy retailers jointly announced a goal to create a self-regulatory framework for assessing and rating video games in order to avoid federal

regulation. Right. Just like movies have with PG, PG-13 and R and stuff. Exactly. And this is exactly what Colin Lieberman demanded in their bill, but for the sake of political theater and because they'd already paid for catering, the Democrats opted to go ahead with the hearing regardless. Oh my god. The catering. The catering. That's me editorializing. I don't know what the catering was like that day. Okay. It was just subway. Please know that everything I'm about to report back to you is very intentional, political kabuki. The problem is basically already solved at this point. Yes, yes. Okay. So the hearing. We start with a series of critics of violence and sexuality in video games, including, uh, child psychologists and members of concerned parents.

I was just going to say child psychologist, but yes. Okay. To give you an idea, uh, Maryland Droes, uh, of the National Coalition on Television Violence introduced herself busily. I'm Marilyn Droes. I'm from Farmington Hills, Michigan. I've been a parent for 16 years, a wife for 20, a teacher from Royal Oak, Michigan for 23, and a woman since the day I was born. And let me tell you, in all my labels and all the hats I wear, I find that so extremely offensive and the only word you can say to the manufacturers and the shareholders of that company is shame on you. Shame on you. Shame on you. I'm just imagining her like her, her pre-pain collar and like her little turtleneck, big chunky turtleneck. Oh really? Oh. Big chunky turtleneck.

Okay. Okay. Flippy, flippy hair style. That's a little more salt of the earth, the turtleneck. I have to say, I have to say. And then flippy, flippy hair. Okay. Let me tell you, Josie, just how good I am. Tell me. The second I heard that name, the National Coalition on Television Violence, I was like, that sounds like a scam. If I turn this rock over, I bet there's something underneath. Oh, and GBS. The National Coalition on Television Violence, like so many of those 1990s concerned parent groups, was one guy. A medical doctor named Thomas Radecki, who has a couple controversies under his belt, let me tell you about some of those. Uh-huh. In 1985, he claimed to have evidence that

Dungeons and Dragons incited players to murder. Okay, no. It's literally just nerds getting stoned and role-playing. I know. I play it. Are you play it? We all play it. Have you murdered? Wait, this is important. This is like scientific study right here. This is an experiment. Okay. Taylor Mitchell Basso, have you ever or in your entire life, played D&D? Yes. Have you ever killed somebody? I choose to invoke my fifth amendment right, so as not to incriminate myself. Fuck, dude. That was, it was going to be so- Yeah, you tried to get me to confess. You tried to get me to confess, but I won't do it again. It's the D&D that did it to you, isn't it? Tell me.

Well, they're still using that as like, that is like a second or third season Riverdale storyline. There's like some satanic D&D shit. So this, this moral panic around Dungeons and Dragons, which is obviously has so much overlap with this story, and it's like a precursor to the video game thing, still has legs. I remember once I was reading, I had like a magazine on Pokemon cards, and I was looking at magic cards in it, and my mom was like, that's stuff satanic, don't buy it. Even as a kid, I knew I was like, that's some weird 70s shit she never unlearned, but but that's, but this is what the shit that was happening in the 70s and 80s was they were just telling you, yo, Dungeons and Dragons makes you murder people, let's have a congressional hearing

about it. He insisted, quote, there is no doubt in my mind that the game Dungeons and Dragons is causing young men to kill themselves and others. The game is one of non-stop combat and violence. The kids start living in the fantasy and they can't find their way out of the dungeon. The evidence that he had was a letter from the fictional novel Mises and Monsters, which is about this. It's about a guy, it's a novel about a guy playing D&D and going crazy with Satan, and he took like a fictional letter from one character to another from that book, and was like, this is evidence that D&D causes suicides. Over the years, Redeki came under fire for fabricating his academic credentials. In March 1992, a year before the Senate hearings,

his medical license was revoked for engaging in a moral and unprofessional contact with a patient. In September 2012, 20 years later, the same thing happened again, specifically because he was trading opiate addiction recovery drugs for sex with patients. And D&D is bad. In August 2013, he got arrested for that same thing. And in June 2016, he got an 11 to 22 year prison sentence, which he is currently serving. And representing him here in the Senate and advancing his concerns about the moral decay of our children is Marilyn Drose. Hi, hi, how are you? Do you like my chunky turtleneck? I know, I said I shouldn't go so chunky, but then I thought you can't go too chunky, really, can you? All right, so much grandstanding and moral approbation follows. The individual

members of the video game industry are vilified and basically accused of peddling sin. This one child's psych Eugene Provenzo spends a wild hypothetical about children and being able to rape women in virtual reality, which I'm not sure how that was happening in 1993. Wait, like, like real women or like in the video game? If you know, you can, he's saying there will be a virtual reality since sexual assault simulator that will turn young boys into rapists. Hypothetically. There's probably more happening within that congressional meeting that is perpetuating rape culture than there is in a video game. But just saying, okay, imagine being a guy from fucking Mortal Kombat or Night Trap and being like, they're talking about raping women in virtual

reality. What this is nothing to do with what I I'm a lighting guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, what is happening here. I'm an auger. My knees fucked up because of that trap. But I've got my trusty choker. So although people seem not to like it very much. No, I know I agree with not liking that it just no, I agree. I think I think it's it's me if you didn't have something so pneumatic pounding into her neck, that scene goes down like a million notches. So Marilyn Drose seizes on the 80s action heroes of the unfortunately named scat team, who she says are a fascistic military unit indoctrinating children, children to be women killing soldiers. At one point, she holds up a stack of magazines and she's just like, look, like, look at all these

magazines. They talk about video games and these and then just kind of put some down. You do have to love the visual aid. It's like Trump's just some magazines, Trump's pile of paperwork. Like, look at all this paperwork. Yeah, look at these magazines I brought. It will shock you not at all. You hear the gameplay, the substance of the game, the basic storyline of the game are completely misunderstood and mischaracterized. Yeah. Marilyn says it's pathetic and shameful that the goal of a game is to drill a woman in the neck when of course you're trying to stop her from getting drilled in the neck. Exactly. Yeah. At multiple points in the hearing, also senators will ask about how we can stop kids

from playing night trap at arcades. And then someone will have to clarify that this isn't an arcade game. No, we're specifically designed to be a home. Yeah, exactly. Good points are occasionally raised. We do need to be careful about how we depict things like violence against women and things children are consuming. Very true. Video games shouldn't be marketed entirely towards boys. Amen. All these things get brought up in our salient points, but it really is kind of surreal how like severe and fear based the language they're using is when the game basically plays out like a slightly racier Goosebumps episode. Yeah. Yeah. The PG-13 Goosebumps. Yeah. Exactly. Are you afraid of the dark? So after the concerned parents clear out,

the video game industry folks take the stand. Presenters include reps from rival companies Nintendo and Sega, Mario vs Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as various software publishers and arcade industry representatives. The big story in this segment is Nintendo and Sega fucking burying each other. It's a boarding school fight. Someone needs to send in the headmistress like it is like slot fight. Nintendo claims that it already has a rigorous in-house quality control system unlike Sega. Sega claims that its Sega CD system is predominantly marketed toward adults unlike Nintendo. Nintendo says that's bullshit. Sega's like, well, what about all these violent video games you produced? It's just endless squabbling. Yeah. Yeah. Lieberman

transparently pits the two reps against each other largely for his own amusement. Just like Munch on a Subway sandwich watching them go at it kind of thing. In particular, he really hates the Sega guy's guts in a way that's really obvious and he lets it show. And I honestly think it's because Sega distributed Night Trap. And he had just decided that this was the rape simulator. Did he ever play the game? Did Joe Lieberman ever play Night Trap? After this hearing, Tom Zito, one of the guys from Night Trap introduces himself to Lieberman and he says, Senator, have you actually played the game? And Lieberman replies, I don't have to. This is Phil. Oh God. And they're very, they're all very, the way they frame it is always like,

if I had my way, this would be locked far, far away. No children would ever be able to these games shouldn't even be being made. But this is America and we treasure our right to free speech. We must come up with a comp. Meanwhile, the compromise has already been come up with that morning by people who didn't want the government to get involved. But they're like, no, no, no, we have our little dog and pony fucking bet already wheeled out the TV card into the Senate chamber floor. We're done. Let's put on a show. So Tom Zito was in Washington, but he didn't even get to defend the game because they bumped him for time restraints. And during the hearing, Senator Dorgan goes, it's a shame Mr. Zito isn't here to defend his game. And you can hear him

like kind of peep up like I'm here. And then he's like, what? Okay, bye. And then they just move swiftly on. Jesus. So what happened after the Senate hearing? Yeah, after the Senate hearing, there was leftovers obviously from the catering and in metaphorical and literal. Yes. So that very week, the seminal PC shooter doom was released. God ushering in a new era of online splatterific ultraviolence. The hearings birthed the entertainment software rating board or the ESRB, an American self regulatory organization that assigns age and content ratings to consumer video games. The ratings are similar to those as you pointed out assigned to motion pictures. There's E for everyone T for teen. Exactly. M for mature and AO for adults only. The ESRB

continues to be the definitive software rating body in North America to this day. Does nitrap have a rating now? Nitrap at the time received an M rating. I think more is an act of political theater. Like this is the game that we made the rating system for. We got to give it a bad one. But when I purchased it in 2018, it had been bumped down to T for teen. The moral panic over violent video games would continue in the decade going forward, especially flaring back up after the Columbine shootings in 1999. I was gonna actually say something. Yeah, okay, yeah. Although it seems to have died down a bit lately as we've all got more pressing shit to deal with.

Like actual real guns out in the world, willy nilly. Okay, cool. Those are fine, but if but no trokar is, it'll warp for you. Jesus. As for nitrap itself, Sills went through the roof. Good for nitrap! Strize and effect in full force. It turns out if you tell kids they can't have something, they really want it. Says Jim Riley, it was the best sales pitch that nitrap ever could have asked for. Nitrap is near universally regarded as a bad game. In 1996, computer gaming world listed nitrap at number six of the 50 worst games of all time. In 2001, it was ranked 12th worst video game of all time by Electronic Gaming Monthly. In 2008, Game Informer dubbed it one of the worst horror games ever, and it was ranked number 59 on games radars 100 worst games of all

time in 2014. So it's dropping. It's dropping and how horrible it is. More games are coming out. Oh, okay. We have more games than ever. Okay, yeah, yeah. In spite of that, it's hard to find a bad game more beloved for its many flaws and its intricate real world backstory. Did nitrap predict the future of video games? Not really. No, because I was like, wait, this is a video game? But, but more than you'd think. The triple A big name games you see taking the market by storm these days bear virtually no resemblance to nitrap. FMV games mostly died off in the 90s, but they have enjoyed a niche revival in the past 10 years or so now that the technology has caught up with the concept. While I play, I play games like this all the time, actually. So it is at

my wheelhouse. They're much better now. Okay, cool. They're much, much better. Good. I'm glad to hear that. This is just a really, this is the first big ambitious swipe at it. And holy shit, does it not work. While celebrities like Keanu Reeves, Norman Reedus, Elliot Page, Rami Malek, Hayden Panatier have all lent their likenesses to games, none of them have really played all that similarly to nitrap. And that's for the best. Okay. But you can definitely see the seeds of modern FMV and cinematic games like Death Come True, Her Story, Detroit Become Human, the Telltale series, all these games that Josie knows. I do know Her Story. You told me about Her Story. This is, Her Story owes a lot to this being the first so that Her Story didn't have to be this.

Yeah, yeah. This one crawled and splattered on the ground so that Her Story could fly. Exactly. And it also helps that now you can do this kind of stuff digitally as opposed to on VHS on how you have to custom make a console with a mill with like a certain kind of memory and, you know, whatever. Exactly. So let's wrap her. Where did everyone end up? Tom Zito's company, Digital Pitchers, went all in on the FMV game craze that never materialized amid declining consumer interest. Digital Pitchers went out of business in 1996. Rob Fulop created his own outfit, PF Magic, most famous for the pets with a Zed series of video games, which has sold over 22 million copies worldwide. In a review, Entertainment Weekly gave cats with

a Zed a B plus and wrote that it is an accurate simulation of felines. Good review. Jim Riley is a visual effects manager for big name shows like Ray Donovan 24 and Grey's Anatomy, where he gets to play around in all the fake blood and guts he wants and the Senate can't say a thing about it. Good for him. In a documentary short included with the 25th anniversary of the game originally filmed in the 90s, Riley says, quote, I have this horrible feeling that 20 years from now, someone's going to call me up and say, Jim, we want to do an interview. I'm going to say, great, you know, is it this new show? And no, Night Trap, the classic, the great, we want to get the behind the scenes of Night Trap. And we'll be pulling this stupid binder out every five years

going, yeah, well, we had a lot of fun. Sadly for Jim Riley, his words were prescient. To this day, he continues to field interviews about Night Trap. It's unlikely influence its devoted cult fan base and its status as a misunderstood, maligned, controversial, charming, and yes, absolutely god awful piece of video game history. Dang. Because I definitely saw that clip and I was like, porkies. I don't like this. And I like not that I sided with the congressional hearing because it was like violence of video games. But I was also like, this seems not super great. No, for sure. And I mean, I think that it is absolutely, like I say, I think that there's a lot to be said about the way that women are depicted in the media that we consume. And even

in the context of something like Night Trap, while it apes the kind of conventional horror movie structure of the final girl and her interchangeable coed friends, there's a lot to be mined in that in and of its own. But I don't think that's the level of discussion that the fucking national coalition of fucking Save Our Children was looking for. Exactly. And so you're right, it is a discussion worth having. But it's also an object lesson in if you present a video clip completely out of context, like I presented it to you, how does it look versus knowing the context of it? And I don't think that knowing the context of it necessarily excuses any effects that it may have. But it's also not a situation where this game was as it was dubbed a rape simulator.

Yeah, yeah. No, I think I think you kind of nailed it on the head showing it out of context doesn't do anybody any favors. Besides, invite discussions that aren't really relevant to the discussion that needs to be had. Exactly. And it's and like I say, I think that so much of this was an act of political theater. This was a game that was quietly put out on a Sega, CD console thing that like I can't I couldn't tell you how many people had that thing. Exactly. So when are you getting your Night Trap tattoo sleeve? I can't bite like that. I dipped a toe in the pool of Night Chat, but this person is living the gimmick. I am I am the inferior Night Chat fan to this person and I own and accept that.

But I did actually have a lot of fun learning about it. Yeah. And and playing it even in its weird way of like, let me burn an evening seeing if I can figure out how to block leave my way through this notoriously bad complicated 80s game with an outsized reputation. That's a good way to spend an evening. It is. It's not bad. Night Trap! Night Trap! It trapped your night, dude.

You just fucking battleship. You sunk my battleship. Yatsy. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release a new episode every other Sunday. And you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy.com. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. The sources I used to prepare this week's episode included the Wikipedia articles for Night Trap, Thomas Radecki, Sega CD, and pets. I watched the entirety of the 1993 Senate Committee hearings on violence and video games that was preserved on YouTube by Kay Huntington,

who was in general a very useful source throughout this episode. I watched the television show High Score on Netflix, Episode 5 Fight. I read an excerpt from Generation Xbox by Jamie Russell that detailed the origins of Night Trap, and that was published online in Game of Sutra on April 24th, 2012. I also consulted a timeline of video game controversies by the National Coalition Against Censorship. I played the Night Trap 25th anniversary edition on the Switch, which came packaged with the brief documentary Night Trap Dangerous Games, which I also watched. The song that you heard earlier on with the Night Trap theme song performed by Son of Blue Skies.

The song you're listening to right now, however, is T-Street by Brian Steele. Ah fuck it, let's switch to Night Trap. Night Trap by Brian Steele.