Episode Details

In late 1993 the United States Senate held hearings on video game violence, and one of the two prime targets was Night Trap, a 1992 full-motion video game featuring vampires who hobbled awkwardly through a house. This deep dive traces the game's bizarre origins in the mid-1980s, when Rob Fulop and James Riley at Axlon developed a VHS-based console codenamed NEMO that could read four video tracks at once. Backed by Hasbro after a demo called Scene of the Crime, the project became a 16-day, 35mm Hollywood shoot in 1987 starring Dana Plato, with a ban on reproducible violence that produced mechanical claw devices and shuffling villains.

The hosts explain why the Control-VISION console was cancelled amid a DRAM shortage, how producer Tom Zito bought the footage and waited for CD-ROM technology, and how the Sega CD release in November 1992 landed just as gaming grew more graphic. They then examine the hearings, Nintendo's testimony that the game would never appear on its hardware, the retailer pullouts, Sega's withdrawal in January 1994, and the resulting creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board. The episode closes with the 2017 anniversary rebuild that earned a Teen rating, a 2024 Game Boy Advance novelty version, and Fulop's response: creating the virtual pet game Dogz.

• How the 1983 industry crash drove the search for live-action VHS gaming
• Why Hasbro's reproducible violence rule shaped the augurs' claws and hobbling walk
• The challenge of coding interactivity around locked, uneditable film footage
• Why Night Trap sold 50,000 copies in a week after the hearings and was then pulled from shelves
• How critics dismissed the actual gameplay as a tedious test of patience and memorization