Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 86: Night Trap

Episode Date: May 4, 2018

Recorded live at Super Famicon in Greensboro NC! Jeremy Parish and Chris Sims chat with Josh Fairhurst from Limited Run Games about the mad adventure of bringing schlock-horror FMV classic Night Trap to modern consoles.

This week in Retronauts, we're trapped in the closet. Good one. Okay. Great. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the second exciting retronauts panel for this weekend at Super Famicom in Greensboro, North Carolina. Yes, that's the state. I'm Jeremy Parrish, with me again, flanking the stage. Chris is. Ready to talk about the augurs. The augurs. And here in the middle from Limited Run Games. I'm Josh Fairhurst, and the co-founder of Limited Round. games. And if you've ever longed for a copy of a digital only game and physical form and been unable to purchase it because it sells out in five minutes, this is the man you can talk to. Yep. You probably want to kill me. A lot of people do. I actually tried picking up what did you guys put out this week. I probably blake-only. Read-only memories. 2064.

Maybe it was last week. It was something that just went up a couple, like, within the past week or two. Last week was Next Machina from the Housemark, a really good arcade shooters. and La Malana. Yes, that was a La Blanana. I really wanted a copy of that. Just like that, 10 minutes. The standard edition went really fast, and we had a collector's edition.

That's actually really beautiful, but the common perception was that it was too expensive, which I guess I could see, but we've got a four-disc soundtrack in there when you're dealing with Japanese soundtracks. I mean, in Japan, soundtracks are 30 to 40 bucks. So to license that, I mean, the cost was pretty high. So we probably overgaged the demand on the collector's edition there.

It should have had more standards out there. Fair enough. Hindsight. It's always hindsight. But Josh is here with us today because we're talking about Nighttrap and Limited Run games helped publish the physical edition of the 20th anniversary of Nighttrap for PS4. What else was that, Steam? PS4 and Steam. Yeah.

And that's a, it's kind of crazy to look back, you know, and say, wow, the game. Nighttrap has reemerged into the public consciousness and is playable on game systems in the year 2017, because I don't know that anyone thought it would have that kind of longevity at the time. It turned very bright and then sort of guttered out and was kind of the punchline of a lot of jokes for a long time and then more or less forgotten, but it sort of come back and become newly relevant, I think, in the past few years. Yeah, I think it was pretty common to Kempner Nighttrap in that right around

2001 way of making fun of video games on the internet that's how I first heard about Nighttrap because I never had to say a CD when I was a kid Yeah, most people being able to be able to share video online Nighttrap was a popular kind of punching bag That and what was it last alert You don't want to be too stingy Some really great high quality voice acting

And just acting in general from early 90s CD-ROM games but I feel like a night trap was maybe more influential than people realized at the time and I've given it credit for because one of the big sort of underground cult games now is Five Nights at Freddy's

and Five Nights at Fridays is Night Trap. It's Night Trap not taking place in a mansion but in a pizzeria but the concept is the same. You're sort of sitting at a switchboard controlling video cameras and watching things happen sort of at a distance and kind of playing this

god's eye view of things and it's got this sort of horror element to it I mean it's very much a descendant of night trap I don't even know if I've got five minutes of Freddy's like a cult game like you can get five nights of Freddy's merchandise and target it's all over target

they have they have Freddie right next to Ariel from the little mermaid in the kids department it's insane and imagine imagine the parallel world where all of that is night trap merchandise Deanfully do it.

Thank you. Plus all. Ash and burns The changes come So girls go out I'll read you dead You better be good You've been to be where

Night Trap And once will find Anyway so yeah We just wanted to talk a little bit about The history of Night Trap Sort of the context behind it I think Chris will talk more about The actual game itself

and why he loves it so much. And hopefully Josh can talk about some of the behind-the-scenes experiences he's had relicensing the game. I know you guys weren't the sort of the driving force behind getting the game back into circulation, but you definitely played a part of it because the limited run physical release was sort of part of the overall strategy for the game's relaunch, which usually you guys kind of step in after a game's been out for a while. Yeah, usually it's a case of we're trying to preserve a game,

so we're trying to get something on disk that has all the patches or whatever, so it's after the release. But sometimes when we've got a game like Nighttrap where it just makes sense to push it that way, because I mean, Nighttrap existed physically. That's what it was. It wasn't a download game,

so we kind of all thought this is a game that should come out physically alongside the digital release, because that's how a lot of people are going to want to consume it. They're going to want it the way that they remember it. Actually, let's go about this backward. Josh, how did you get involved

with the Night Trap Reissue project? So a while about, back, I guess it was about three months after we had started this company, these guys from my life in gaming, which is kind of a big YouTube channel for retro-oficionados who want to view their games and the best quality possible on modern TVs, it came to us and they were like, hey, we're trying to do a documentary series on various game development companies and publishers, and one of the people they picked was us. I was like, sure, yeah, come on down here, film us, talk to us a bit. They ended up really liking us. So about seven months or

Eight months later, Corey from My Life in Gaming just comes out of the blue, and he's like, hey, there's this guy nearby, and I think you want to talk to him about what he's working on. He is doing Nighttrap for PS4, and this was before. Anybody knew it was there, and I was like, yeah, we got to get in on this. And I reached out to Tyler, who runs one man, gave a development operation called Screaming Villains, and said, hey, I do this thing called Limitigran. I think Nighttrap would be a big fit. I'm a huge Sega CD fan.

this is something that would be really big for me. So I'd love to help you get this out there in physical form. Do you want to do it? And it was an immediate, yes. It was like, no negotiation or anything. Just boom, yes, let's do it. And from there, we just kind of rolled. So you said that, you know, immediately you were drawn to it.

What was it about this game project that made you say, like, jump at it? So I've always been a big Sega fan. My brother had a Super Nintendo who never let me play it. But I had a Sega Genesis that my grandparents gave me. I grew up playing Sega. I couldn't afford a Sega CD. I couldn't get one. I had a neighbor nearby that had one, and he had a night trap, and I'd kind of seen it, and it was one of those coveted things that I always wanted as a kid. So I grew up kind of with this, this high opinion of night trap. I put it on a pedestal, I guess, because I couldn't

afford it. My friend had it. It was cool. It was something my parents didn't want me to play or whatever. Later on, I ended up acquiring a Sega CD, and that was the first thing I got, and I became a big fan at that point. So it was kind of big to me to have somebody come and say, like, hey, we're doing a new night trap. That's something that you could be involved with. And I was like, yes, I need to do this. This is something that's important for me. How old were you when you first played a night trap at your friend's house?

Probably nine, I think. Were you scarred? Do you think it twisted and broke you? Yes, I think it was absolute filth that I should not have been exposed. All that. horrifying realistic violence. Yeah, I was machines, man. I couldn't sleep for several weeks.

That's for sure. Yeah, that was kind of the sort of the big stink around Night Trap when it came out. debuted on Sega CD in October 1992. And shortly after, it became sort of, I guess it took its first turn as a punching bag, but in a different way, not as the butt of a joke, but rather as sort of the boogeyman that, some politicians held up to say video games or, you know, destroying America's youth. They're evil and corruptive.

And, you know, this was part of the sort of early 90s media backlash by some of the more hovering, you know, Dinn mother type left-wing politicians like Joe Lieberman and Tipper Gore, you know, people who, for whatever reason, felt that they, they, they, they, needed to be sort of everyone in America's mom and protect us from things like two live crew and the trap. And so video games came under a lot of fire in the early 90s. They were starting to become more graphic, more violent. Game graphics were starting to look quote-unquote realistic.

You had grainy video in games like Night Trap, and you had digitized video images, you know, in games like Pit Fighter and Mortal Kombat. And so there was, yeah, like, you look back at these things and they're laughable now. But at the time, you, you know, you have probably like these 50-year-olds who were thinking of video games in terms of like Pong and Pac-Man, you know, very simple, very abstract. And all of a sudden, you know, you have photo-realistic images and low-resolution bleeding on the screen and, you know, girls running around in their nightgowns. And so all of a sudden it became, you know, kind of came out of nowhere for these people who weren't really paying attention to video games. And I think they just kind of represented, you know, every parent in America thinking, oh, my goodness, what's happening to my children? They're so wild and rambunctious and out of control.

Never mind that those parents, you know, 20 years before were, you know, listening to the Rolling Stones and the Beatles and going to Woodstock and, you know, horrifying their own parents in terms. It's just a generational thing. Can you imagine living in a world where the worst thing you had to worry about was Night Trap and two live crew? I miss those days. And now we're turning into that generational thing where we're complaining about five nights of Freddy's or whatever. Well, these kids today are different. That's true. They're out of control.

Yeah, so anyway, Night Trap was kind of held up at these congressional hearings that came into inaction. around 1993, 94. And, you know, the result of those hearings was that we got the ESRB, and the industry basically kind of self-censored and said, we'll put a rating system on our games, just like the motion picture industry has. And, you know, that came about in part because of Nighttrap. And this was a case also where Nintendo sort of famously threw Sega under the bus. A lot of these games that came under fire were, you know,

like the Genesis version of Mortal Kombat, which had blood. versus Nintendo's version where you punch a guy and they would sweat a lot. And Nighttrap, which was on Sega CD. All those graves in Castlevania worked with boomerangs. Exactly. So, yeah, Nintendo, of course,

came out and we're like, oh, we're wholesome and clean and wonderful. Sega, though, they're evil. So you got a little bit of kind of backstabby nastiness here, too. But none of that really had to do with Nighttrap itself. It was more like a symbol than it anything else. You know, it was something, I guess it made for good sound bites. You could take

little snippets of the game and be like, look at this horribleness, look at what's happening here, and really kind of skew the public perception of the game based on a few of the more if you could call them salacious, but almost salacious parts of the game.

The bathroom scene is the classic one where the one of the women is in front of the mirror in a nightgown and an auger comes in and drills into her neck, and they played this over and over and over again in Congress and demonized this one scene because it was so easy to take out of context because you've got a scantily clad woman getting her neck drilled into by a man in dressed in all black or whatever and then dragged off while she's screaming so it was an

easy way to send suburban moms into a panic and a terror oh what are my kids playing this is awful yeah and they also kind of painted it as though you were the one who was victimizing the women in the game, which was the opposite of the case. It was very much, you know, like the idea was that you were playing some, I guess, agent who was kind of behind the scenes setting up traps in a mansion to prevent the women from being killed and from being abducted or whatever these augured people were going to do. So, yeah, so very, very much a case of misrepresentation in the media, but the irony is that the creators of Nighttrap went to pretty great pain.

to make the game less realistic, less, you know, less like it's an endorsement of violence. They created the augurs who are kind of goofy acting, the way they move around. Yeah, they had this weird shuffling gate. And they use these huge machines to drink blood from people as opposed to, like, syringes or something, or being vampires. The idea was, you know, they didn't want to encourage kids to do this at home, you know, to think that, oh, maybe I should become a vampire. Or whatever it is that people think kids are going to see. a violent movie in Doom. And even with

that preposterousness built into the game, you know, the senators, the congressional panel, still, or congressman, I guess, whatever, you know, the politicians, still managed to take out that little snippet and find something to

beat on over and over again. And so Nighttrap became sort of the emblem of everything that was wrong with video games. But Chris, clearly you as a fan of Night Trap don't feel that it's a great evil, the great Satan? Night trap is brilliant.

As a game, Nightrap in its original form is deeply flawed. It's weird. It's counterintuitive in a lot of ways. I do like that it tells you how many you could possibly get and how many you have gotten.

And you can lose that game and never realize it. But the thing that's really brilliant about Nighttrap is if you look at any science fiction from the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, one of the big things that everybody's like, oh, this is a marker of the future, are interactive movies. And that's what Nighttrap is. And it's a relatively decent attempt at creating a movie that you can interact with. Like you said, Jeremy, you as a player are a character. you are tasked with your assignment at the beginning

and then it's the exact experience of watching a horror movie and telling someone don't go up the stairs made into a game like hey don't go up there but you have the ability to affect it and that's

really smart that's a really good concept more than anything else I've said this a couple times this weekend talking at the table to people it reminds me of Castlemania too because Castlevania 2 is a game that was ambitious and that arguably gave a pattern for what would happen with a lot

of games in the future. It's a kind of weird prototype action RPG but the technology is not there. It fails not by virtue of ambition but by virtue of not knowing how to do this. And I feel like Nightraps the same way. Well, the difference between

Nighttrap and Castlevania 2 is that Castlevania 2 probably could work out. Castlevania 2 probably could work except for whatever reason the creators decided everyone in the game should lie to you about the things you're supposed to do. Instead of giving you helpful hints, they should tell you to hit your head

against the cliff, which is actually not a game mechanic. You can't actually do that in the game. But yeah, I think the technology could have been there, but that's beside the point. I get what you're saying. I think a lot of the problems with Nitro have to do with the fact that it took so long to create. The game

was originally conceived in the mid-80s, It was going to be part of a video, like a VHS-based system that Hasbro, I think Hasbro was developing. It was Hasbro, it was called Nemo. Yeah, it was created by a company called NEMO. I can't remember what they were going to call it, but they sold it to Hasbro. And, yeah, it was going to be a VHS-based video game system. So the idea there was interactive movies, you know, interactive videos that you can affect as a game. And that technology kind of shook out in some different form.

but the console itself, the Nemo, never actually launched. So this game that was being developed and, you know, filmed, they had the footage for it with Dana Plato and all the other actors and actresses. That was shelved, and the guy who kind of was sort of one of the movers and shakers on the original project, Tom Zito, took that content and launched digital pictures, who would be one of the sort of the big players in the series. Sillywood movie. Silicon Valley meets Hollywood.

That was kind of the up-and-coming this is going to be a big thing that video games wanted everyone to buy and do. It's kind of like the VR of the early 90s, where interactive movies were going to change the world. And they didn't.

But, you know, they kind of laid the base for actual games that have interactivity, things like Dragon Age, origins, or Uncharges, or Uncharacterial. or whatever. Like those are kind of the realization of what they were trying to do with Sillowood.

But anyway, that is kind of the origin of this game and it sort of kicked around until 1992 when they finally Sega CD came out and so Digital Pictures was able to create a proper game out of this concept and take that footage and finally

turn it into a product. You see something like a Dragon's Layer, which I think is a really similar concept. It is much more fondly remembered but is, honestly, like, Nighttrap has way more interactivity. Like, you're way more involved in the plot of Nighttrap than you are just waiting to see yellow light in Dragon's Lair. But one of the things that really surprised me,

I think it's really entertaining to just watch as a movie because it's really fun. I think it's really good. I think it's, there's a lot of, like, really, decent jokes. It's really self-aware. I think in that first round of internet comedy writing, you know, where it was a punching bag, I think a lot of people mistook, like, a knowing kind of cheesiness that was meant to blunt the reception by people who were going to think it was violent as, oh, this is so stupid. And it's like, no, well, it knows exactly what it's doing. It's making

a cheesy horror movie, because cheesy horror movies are fun, and they're easy to get into and think about. So there's a video on YouTube that I don't know if you've watched where it's every single security cam streamed at the same exact time. And you can see, like, this incredible amount of care was put into each scene and the timing of each scene where when one character walks out of the kitchen, you see them immediately walk into the next security camera with the exact timing and start having their own conversation threads with other characters. So you actually see all these threads playing out across multiple cameras on the same time. And it's kind of incredible.

how they were able to do this with such early technology. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's really interestingly put together, and in a way that I don't think it gets credit for him. I think one of the most important things a game can do if it's trying to convey, you know, like you are part of a world to make it immersive, is to create working, like a working self-consistent space.

And that's something Nighttrap does really well. Like, they went to great pains, as you said, you know, have continuity between the different cameras that you see the mansion throughout. I think what separates this game, you know, the sense of space from like a VR game or something, is that you're sort of dissociated. You're not actually within that space yourself. Instead, you're watching it, you know, there's the security camera panel.

So you're not actually taking part of that space. You kind of have to piece it together in your head. But once you understand how these cameras work together, how they interact and relate to one another, then yeah, like there is, you know, there's a map kind of constantly on screen most of the game. that shows the layout of the mansion and once you kind of get a feel for how the cameras represent that layout map

the game I think actually fits together pretty well. It's a game that you have to play through multiple times to figure out how you can actually play it and I think a lot of people don't like games like that. They want to be able to play through a game once and with a first time and have a chance at winning but with Nitrap

you can't really play a perfect game your first time through. You have to play it multiple times. And I think that's kind of been one of the things that's given the game a bad rep is people they play it, they lose, and then they think it's a bad game because they don't know what they're supposed to do yet. It's a little obtuse,

but if you play it multiple times, you can learn it and master it and get a lot better at it. It's that Tom Cruise movie they had to rename. You just have to keep going back for it. The age of tomorrow? Yeah, okay. I mean...

Yeah, that movie very much was about the experience of playing a video game, and this is, you know, kind of that, that experience as a video game where, you know, you keep trying, keep going out like Ground Dog Day, you just, you know, you keep throwing yourself at it and eventually you'll learn how all the pieces fit together. Yeah, which people love stories of time loops, right? They love stories like Ground Hawk Day, like that Ark of the Adventure Zone, where the characters go through and they put things together. But people don't tend to like that experience themselves. Yeah. Because they get

tired of the repetition. But I think it's really interesting. But like you said, things in that game happen whether you're around or not. And that's something that games today get a lot of credit for. Like Skyrant. NPCs will get up and have breakfast

and go shopping and come home and go to work. They'll do that whether you're around the theater or not. And I think, Jeremy, you made a really good point that if you want to follow them, you're in the game. Well, you can follow them and spy on them and do weird Skyron voyeur

stuff and watch them eat breakfast but you can still like go off and interact with it. In Nighttrap your role is very passive until like the two seconds where it's not and I think that combination of the dissociation and

the only being able to affect things in a small window of time A is what we call put time events now that are very popular and B I think I think that loves them. Yeah.

Popular among developers. Popular in that they have in a lot. But I think that's something that people weren't ready for or conditioned to accept in a time when you press A and Mario jumps, you know? And the game is limited by the technology that was possible at the time. The game consists of footage that was taped in the mid-80s, and by the time they had created the game, you know, five or six. later and actually put it together, they were working with this footage that was filmed

a certain way with certain actors, and they had to kind of make the best of it and piece it together that way. Whereas, you know, contemporary games, you don't have that limitation. You get the digital scan of, you know, the guy who played Kin Cosgrove, and then you can make your L.A. Norr work however you want it to. You can change things up. You have control over how your actors perform where they appear the sets that they're in. You're no longer limited as a video game developer by what is

fixed on film. And I think that's kind of the threshold that needed to be crossed for something like Night Trach to work. And nothing looks more dated than something from three years ago. Like something that's just recently gone out of fashion. No song sounds more dated right now

than Gengham style, you know. So nothing's more dated in 1990 than the footage of Nitrack from 1986. Right. I think it was filmed in 84 even, right? Yeah. So it was like, by the time it came out in 92, it was eight years old. And you've got this theme song that sounds like straight out of 1984, and that's... Highly underrated.

Oh, the theme song's great. Wonderful. We were released it on two different formats, so we have a cassette tape version of it and vinyl. So, like, we're doing our part in getting that... Nobody knows who composed. it. Nobody knows who the singer is. Even Tom Zito doesn't know. Wow. We have zero idea

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and Martin Lund did the actual composing for the game I think but nobody can figure out who Sunny Blue Skies is like you Google search that and you're not going to get anybody composing music it's we couldn't figure anything out so it sounds like a folk singer from 1976 yeah

maybe part of the Yacht Rock movement or something I don't know we've talked kind of around how the game works but haven't actually discussed what you do in Nighttrap. Yeah, you're at a security panel, but what are augurs and how are you stopping them? Like, what's the whole point of the game?

That's probably something worth touching on just to add some context to what we've been discussing. I don't know if one of you guys wants to jump in on that. So, I mean, in the game, you've got these teenagers who are visiting this wine house, the Martin Winehouse,

and, spoiler, the Martins are vampires. They need blood. So they invite these teenage girls over for sleepovers or whatever. And then these augurs come in to drain them of their blood for the Martin family. You're playing in the game as somebody who's operating security cameras. You're a member of the special control attack team, the SCAT team, which is a really bad name for a team.

I mean, there was a Nintendo Entertainment System game. So clearly people were making bad choices with their naming back then. They knew what they were doing. That they knew. Maybe in this game, probably not Natsubay. Probably not Natsune. So you've basically, one of the members of the SCAT team had previously been inside of the house and it rewired this security system that they had so that you could turn it against them.

The security camera was installed to trap the teenagers, but you're going to use it to trap the augurs instead. The thing is, the security system is operated on these color codes, like red, green, purple, blue, or whatever, and you have to listen for cues in the dialogue to know what to change them to. otherwise the traps are not going to work. Because the Martens are changing the trap keys to make sure that you are not using the traps against them. So one of the things people are

saying in Steam reviews or whatever when they're playing this game is they have no idea what changing the access code is so the traps are never working and they're like this game is broken, it doesn't work. You'll get half the reviews on Steam right now. It's literally people saying the game is broken and it doesn't work and it's because they don't know how to play the game

because they can't figure it out that you have to be in a specific time and a specific place to hear one of the characters say the access code is changing the blue and you don't hear that you have no idea what to do. Well I think this game is the product of a specific time and a specific place which is before

a game sort of gave you everything you need up front and you know kind of held your hand and walked you through. I actually sent the guy who developed Nitrepe was complaining about this and I sent him the picture of the Meevers from Super Metroid where the kids are like how do you get past this? Why can't

Sam this crawl? Yeah that And he was like, is this real? And I was like, yes. And you are experiencing this right now. Because the people that are downloading Nighttrap on Steam, you know, they might be 15 years old and they have no idea what this is. They got it because angry video game or trashes it and they thought it would be a laugh to buy or whatever. So he's dealing with that exact thing where these, the tutorial culture or whatever that kids have now where they need everything tutorialized and told to them they don't experiment that. That was at play there for him.

the game concept is extremely sort of abstract there's a lot happening in this premise just to get to the point where you're like occasionally you know opening trap floors to trap augurs I mean that is really what it is it's a really baroque setup there's a lot happening in this premise

is the most understated review of knife trap so yeah they're vampires they have 50 vampire who aren't vampires? They have vampire guns. There's a group of teenage girls, one of whom is an undercover agent

who will talk to you. There's also, like, are there scientists? I feel like they're a scientist. Maybe I missed the color. There might be on the SCAT team. I don't think there is in, like, the actual Martin's house, but the Martins themselves are vampires. They have, like, one cool son

vampire and, like, a cool daughter vampire. There's access codes, there's traps hidden in furniture that basically when you activate, everybody has to look shocked at and then walk into themselves and get, like, what happens

if they're just flying outside the window? Like, they're still out there. That doesn't kill a vampire. It's night time. Maybe it breaks their auger machine. Maybe so. But they're not vampires. They're just like vampire buddies. Vampire buddies would be a much better title for no job. Nighttrap cool

with a vampire buddy He's going to see origins. I love that for us. No, it's a lot going on. There's a lot happening. But I've never beaten Nighttrap. What is the winning condition for Nighttrap? Like all the girls survive

and you capture the Martins? You capture all the Martins and you capture all of the augurs and that's the wind condition and then Dana Plato gets all excited and then makes some playful remark about not trapping her or whatever and then it ends and it's credits roll. But one of the things you can do is

accidentally trap the good guys like the scat agents and the girls right? And that comes down to watching the little thing that tells you when you can have activated trap and activating at the right point. You have to activate it when the auger is nearby. But sometimes that's really

obtuse because the auger or the actor playing the auger has to stumble like three feet into the trap. So you don't really know if they're near the trap or not. The first time you play it, you don't even know where the traps are. So you don't really have a good sense of this. So I feel like the ideas in this game, you know, we've kind of talked about how technology came along later

to help sort of realize its ambitions. But, you know, I feel like the idea of being sort of this god's eye view trapping people, that came to fruition better in things like dungeon keeper, where you're actually, or, what is it, deception, techno's deception, where you're basically given, much more control over the traps that you can set. But the idea is kind of the same. You know, you're sort of overseeing this dungeon or, you know, this space

and trying to lay down traps and prevent someone from achieving their objective. And even later Digital Pictures games did this concept better. Like, double switch is a much better form of what Nighttrap wanted to do. Double switch is a much better game, but it, like, doesn't get as much credit because it doesn't have the contrary. mercy around it. I think it also, people get confused with Switch, which was another Sega CD game that's nothing at all like Nitrata.

And I know from my standpoint, when I was a kid, I didn't even know what Double Switch was, because the cover art for it says nothing about what the game is. It's just like this Egyptian relic or whatever. I thought it was like a platformer in like an Egyptian tomb or something. I had no idea what Double Switch was, so I didn't interact with it until I started doing the Nighttrap

thing with Tyler, the developer, and then he brought up, you know, double switch and some other games, and I was like, I should go look at these again and try them because they were totally off my radar because I didn't know what they were because the art was so bad. Well, I think one of the things that I appreciate about Nighttrap, watching it as a story, as opposed to something that I interact with. Because I'm not, I'll be honest, I like Nighttrap. I do not particularly enjoy playing Nighttrap. It's difficult. but it's a meta-commentary on horror movies in a way that 20 years later would be a huge thing.

Like, it goes through all the bits and pieces of a horror movie in a way that, again, is very self-aware, very funny. Like, right down to, you know, there's a scene where the kids are all having fun and having a party, and other weird dudes are sneaking around the house, getting ready to murder them. And there's a scene where everybody's like,

hey, I was going to take my shirt off, just walk around for a while, in what is basically a bikini top. And then, you know, Dana Plano into being the final girl. Like, it's very, it very much plays with the tropes and ideas of horror movies in a way that is way ahead of its time for being filmed in 84, way ahead of its time. And the technology there is way ahead of its time, too.

The idea of having basically, like, multi-track video where you're looking at multiple security cameras, like that was a pretty new concept in, you know, close-circuit TV cameras in the real world. And trying to make that work with a VHS-based system, I can't imagine how this would have worked

if the Nemo had actually happened. How would you switch cameras and it would have to fast forward to the right place on the tape? You have six VHS days? Yeah, I don't understand how I would have worked. If I remember correctly

from how it was described in some of the things that I'd read, it was a multi-track tape. So these video tracks were all playing at the exact same time. So it was actually just kind of moving where it was tracking and displaying video.

So it was a higher density magnetic tape inside of the Nemo cartridges, so they could actually have these videos playing simultaneously. Okay, so it might have actually switched faster than it does on CD-ROM. It's possible. Like a single-speed CD-ROM or whatever. It would have looked a lot better than what came out on Sega CD, that's for sure. Interesting. So, yeah, that's one of those great, you know, what-if kind of situations in video games.

Like, how would this game have been received if the Nemo had happened in 1986, 87? I mean, that would have been coming out at the same time as the NES, basically. It wouldn't have had the controversy around it. The original idea with the Nemo that has what it looked at was, at the time, you had the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari, whatever version of the Atari was on the market at the time, and they were looking at it, and they were saying, these are for kids, but I bet parents would like a way to interact with a game.

So the Nemo was going to be kind of pitched at parents as a way for, after the kids go to sleep, you guys can play this because it's like, playing a movie. It's not like playing these little, like, cartoons that your kids are playing. So they were very much going to kind of aim it at adults. And I think that would have skirted the controversy. And at this point, Nighttrap would probably be forgotten. Because I bet the Nemo would have ended up like the CDI or whatever. It would have been just this, this relic that people have as a centerpiece to joke about and see their collection. That's true. Yeah, I mean, you look at things like the laser active. Like, no one knows

what that is. So, yeah, you're right. Probably would have been forgotten. So maybe it's just as well that it got bogged down and put on to a format that couldn't support it quite as well and ended up getting, you know, thrown in Congress's face is a sign of corruption and devilness in video games. It's kind of

interesting to think about, though. But I'm wondering like, would it have changed how, like, you know, if this game had come out on the Nemo in 1986, 87, would it have changed how people saw interactive movies and, you know, would have pushed things forward? Because the idea

there is a lot more ambitious than something like Space Aves or Dragons Layer, which is basically just, you know, kind of choose your own adventure condensed into a video with tied button presses. Whereas this is much more, you know, despite its limitations, it is much more interactive. This game, it gives you much more agency over how you're looking at the world and what you're doing. I don't know if it would have necessarily impacted the industry in a different way. I think with the dawn of multimedia or whatever they were calling it when CD-ROMs were. we're starting to get into computers.

I think that we still would have seen the same movement towards live action stuff, seventh guests, those kind of things that still would have happened. But I don't think Nighttrap would get the hate that it gets today if it had come out on the Nemo. I think being in the context of being on this system that's all games like this, it would have shed a different light on it.

I think people would have understood the game better. They would have kind of seen it in a different light where the angry video game nerd would not be taking it to whatever. and burning it on a stake he would have, you know, probably wouldn't have even known about the game, honestly. It probably just would have kind of existed, I think.

Yeah, nobody ever gets mad at those VHS board games. Yeah, or like, no one's having hateful videos about, making hateful videos about Captain Power, which is basically the same thing. Like, a VHS... Check out my YouTube channel. Or...

The Angry Caton Power. I have this Robocop VHS board game, and like, I've never seen anybody really make fun of that or mention that, and it's not very good. I have to Star Wars 1, too, and, you know, those are just kind of, they just exist. People understood what the format was. It was in a different

context, so I guess it just didn't set itself up to be a punching bag, as well as something on Sega CD did. Because on Sega CD, you know, it was being held up against Snatcher or Lunar or whatever other shining examples of games were on that system. When you put Night Trap up against those, it's going to

get some flack. So, you know, having been involved sort of behind the scenes with the revival of the game? What's been your biggest, I don't know, your biggest surprise or the thing that most sort of you found unexpected about working with night draft? So I didn't, I didn't

think there was as big of a fan base around it as there was, and I don't even think Tyler knew what he was going to deal with in terms of fan base. We went into it thinking, you know, we're going to print 4,000 copies of this and that's going to be enough, that's going to serve demand.

They might not even sell out, it's night trap. It's on like every worst games of all. all-time list. Who's going to buy this? And we announced it on Twitter, and within six hours we had gotten 2,000 likes, which is kind of crazy. It was the most engagement we've ever had with the social media post. Firewatch, which was our previous biggest one that we'd done, award-winning indie game that everybody knew about, everybody had played, had only gotten like 1,700 likes over the course of a month when we announced that. Nighttrap, in a couple hours, got 2,000. And we were like, we totally under game.

demand for this. We totally underestimated how big of a fan base there was because the game wasn't just playing to gamers or collectors. There was this whole side we didn't realize of people who love B horror stuff. So a lot of the people were coming out

of the B horror community or just like the cult horror community, whatever and expressing excitement over this thing that they'd never interacted with us before and now they're like night trap. We got to get it. So it kind of coalesced into this perfect storm of us being completely

unprepared for it because we signed it at 4,000 copies, thought if we doubled that it would be enough and then even then it wasn't I mean we sold out of everything night trap related in like under a minute and it was our biggest run of anything ever and it was night trap.

Have you considered opening a new studio called second run games and you're not really lying no we like to just kind of move on to the next thing it keeps us light and on our feet and it helps us avoid the risk of ever getting stuck with too much stuff, but

other publishers have been picking up stuff that we underprint. Nick Hallis picked up Wonderboy and is kind of bringing that out to a wider audience. So we don't restrict anybody we work with from going to somebody else and reprinting later. We're kind of, I like to say we're kind of like a test pilot program. You know, if they feel like we serve

the demand, they won't do another reprint, but if they feel like we completely misjudged like with Wonderboy and Nighttrap, you know, they could go with somebody else. But in the case of Nighttrap, I think Tyler and Tom Zeta are just very happy with how it went. Now they're just kind of focusing on getting it out on Xbox, which is kind of the next big thing because it's not out on Xbox yet. I still get like every day, when's Nighttrap coming out on Xbox? I'm like, I don't know.

We don't publish on Xbox, so. Nobody saw that one coming. Nightraught on Xbox. Keep coming like when's Nighttrap going to be on Xbox? Yeah. So we get this on the enemy thing. What is this world for them then? And I mean, we get a lot of people saying, like, is Nighttrap going to come to Switch, too?

People do want NightTrap on everything. I mean, I would rather get a double switch on Switch. I mean, that would be great, right? Just for the, like, the World Within World kind of thing. People want to take Night Trap on trips. You want to be in a plane playing Night Trap next to someone? There's kind of a way to get a multiplayer into that, like, you know, past the controller around. Like, you can control this video stream.

I'll control this one. He added, in the 25th anniversary re-release, he added a survivor mode where it's kind of just non-stop camera feeds of augurs coming in that you have to trap and see how many you can trap before you get overwhelmed if you put in basically a horde mode to night trap which is kind of crazy to think about there's leaderboards on Steam where you can play night trap against other people so it's kind of

multiplayer I guess it's about as multiplayer as I think the concept allows and that was using the existing footage of the augers yeah it's it's really crazy that you can take footage you know 30 year old footage and create something new out of it yeah and it's actually it works seamlessly it looks good

I was really surprised when he said he was putting this in. I was like, there's no way he's going to be able to pull this off, and he did. And it's incredible because this is one guy doing this, and he managed to get so much extra stuff. The 25th anniversary re-release also contained Scene of the Crime. Scene of the Crime was the original video that Axelon pitched to Hasbro to sell the Nemo concept to them. It was this five-minute, basically, prototype for Nighttrap, and it had never been seen before. and now it's out there with the Night Trap re-release.

I didn't know about that. That's really interesting. I need to go check that. Yeah, and it's the only right that I have with it is really hard to unlock. You have to play a perfect game of Night Trap to unlock scene of the crime, and there's no way around that. So it's kind of like,

it's going to stay this little unknown relic, even though it's like, from historical perspective, it's very interesting that it's in there. I'm going to use the special unlock achievement called search YouTube. Yeah, I think it's watching that way. I'm genuinely glad to hear

that Nighttrap is finding an audience among like B-movie fans but I will say if Nightdrap came out today and it was 16-bit graphics with like text bubbles like word balloons it would be huge it would be the biggest game of the year

I mean there I don't know that's true but there have been some games done in that style it was a slight exaggeration but no what I'm saying is the The idea there is, you're not wrong. I can't remember the name of the game, but there have been a couple of games.

There's a corpse party, which is like a 16-bit VG take on a horror thing. No, it's an FMV game. It's like her or something. I can't remember that. Oh, her story? Her story? Okay, yeah. It seems very much kind of cut in the FMV cinematic game.

It's definitely kind of an evolution of FMV games, and it wasn't. all sorts of awards and it's shown that there's a valid approach to release an FMV game in 2017. There's still an audience. I mean, these games sold, this is something that I bring up when people are like, why Night Trab? And I'm like, these games sold millions of

copies. I mean, there's people who bought them because they enjoy the game. They're still fans of the genre. They still exist. They didn't disappear, so there's still a market for it. It's just people forgot about them in the same way until Double Find Adventure came out. People had forgotten about point-click adventures. Yeah, and you know,

people have tried kind of reviving this genre from time to time. There were a few of those, I don't know if they were digital pictures, but like Matt Dog McCree and a couple of other games showed up on Wii. I guess the idea being that like, you know, you're doing simple point and shoot type things. There was a company that, I guess, acquired

all the rights to Mad Dog McCree and Space Ace and Dragon's Lair and they just re-released it on everything no demand for a while. I remember GameStop had it on DVD. You could buy it. Yeah, you would use like the skip functions to control your way through. I think they put it out on the Nguyen. It was one of like the 10 games on

the Nguyen. Well, with Merlin Racing or Merlin car. Yeah. What is the new on? Boy. The talk for a little time. Yeah, that's a whole rabbit hole right there. Yeah, but I feel like the reissue of NITRAP

has been very successful, very gotten lots of sort of acclaim and a lot of interest. And maybe I'm just saying that because I was, I like, got the limited run documentary, or not limited run. my life in video, my life in gaming video that they did, so I'm a little biased, but I feel like it's shown a better way to, to approach this content and resurface it and, you know, represent it to a new audience than, you know, just slamming it on a DVD or whatever,

putting it on new on. Yeah, it was definitely not one of the cheap approaches at doing it, which people would typically look at these classic stuff, like Mad Dog McCree, where they'll just throw it out to die, on a shelf, whatever, and hope that somebody buys it. It was done with a level of care that a lot of re-releases of big games don't even get. Tyler put a lot of extra love and care and hardship into preserving this in the best way possible. He added in scenes that were cut. He actually, there was a scene where the young boy gets killed by augurs that had to cut out because they were afraid that this was going to be too far if a kid was dying.

And he added that back in. He added some other scenes in as well that I think overall there's four minutes of extra footage in this version and that was something that he just felt very important to present this game with all of the extra stuff everything related to it kind of create a time capsule for that game for fans of the game to really enjoy and love for years it was a great way to preserve it kind of and close the book on it I guess yeah and that's that's really how game preservation game reissures should be done you know to take that extra step to say you know we're not just shoveling this out the door you can buy it again you know play it on your current system

but rather, like, here's some context, here's some extra substance, here's something new to experience, and here it is presented in the best possible way. So that's great. I mean, I think if you asked someone 10 or 15 years ago, like, what's a game that would deserve that sort of deluxe reissue treatment? I don't think a lot of people would have said Night Trap. Even when we announced it, it was like,

this is my least favorite thing that I see every time we announce a game. Like, why this? Why not this? Like, as if this game comes at the expense. of another game. I don't, I didn't even count how many times when we announced Nighttrap it was, why Nighttrap and not Snatcher? It's like, Konami,

Kajima, what are we going to do? Yeah, let me just call up Kajima. Hey, Kajima, let me get Snatcher over here. It's not that easy. And nothing we released ever comes at the expense of anything else, but I feel like a game as important as Night Trap, even if

people think it's horrible, it deserves this preservation. I think a lot of I'm of the opinion that almost every game should be preserved even if you had. I feel like the thing that you've been doing with Game Boy going through and playing all of the old Game Boy games from the first release

to the last and documenting it, nobody's going to be able to do that on VS4 because of the digital games that are being elisted and lost. There's not going to be able to be an anthology there. So I feel like there's something important in preserving these games, even if it's at a minimal run size like we're doing, at least it exists.

so somebody can track it down and play it later for context without having to mod their PS4 and download something from the Pirate Bay. There's already PS4 games that are missing. A client that I worked with on my dev company, they put out a game on PS4 called Speak Easy. Nobody remembers it. It got a 3 out of 10 on GameSpot.

It's like basically just rock, paper, scissors on PS4 or whatever, but it's gone forever. Never made it to Pirate Bay. It only sold like 300 copies. At this point, because that game is missing, there is no way that anybody can ever do a complete anthology of PS4 releases because that game is gone. It's lost the time forever.

And I think that's sad. Even though it was a bad game, I feel like there should be some way for people to go back and play that. And there's not. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think game preservation is important. And I'm wondering, do you guys set aside a few copies of your games that you produce for, like, the Library of Congress or something,

or some sort of catalog? There's one company that Ben has been working at, Not really a company. A museum. The other game museum. Okay. That's great. We actually send copies to them, so there is some preservation there.

I've talked about trying to get them into the Library of Congress and some of the other stuff. We haven't acted on it, but we still have copies of our past releases to send them when we do get through to it. Because I do feel like that's a very important thing, getting it into the strong museum so people can go there and play it. Just making sure that these are accessible and playable is a very important thing for me. That's awesome. So I think that's pretty much it for Night Trap. I don't know if you have anything more to say as a fanboy, Chris. A closet trap?

That's right. All right. Well, I guess we will wrap it up then. Make way for the next panel, whatever that's going to be. Josh, thank you for your time. Thank you. And for your thoughts. And if you haven't checked out the 25th anniversary reissue of Night Trap, I highly recommend it.

although you won't be able to buy it physically I think. No, but you can buy it on Steam any purchase really helps the developer out. I mean it's a one-man team that developed that, so I highly encourage you to pick it up. If anything, you're just supporting a

really great developer who went out of his way to preserve a game the best way possible. And thanks everyone who came to the panel. Of course, we are retronauts, and if you haven't listened to us before, I'm glad you found your way here by mistake. Check us out at Retronauts.com or on iTunes.

It's a podcast. It happens every week. And this episode will, or this panel will go up as an episode at some point. So you might get to hear yourself laughing at the audience sometime on the podcast. Chris, thank you for hearing. And I think that's it. So thanks, everyone. You get caught in the night In the night

Yeah Oh Oh Oh My turn The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House, if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess from what I understand that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it.

It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.