Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry

In the early 90s a video game was released that changed the industry, despite poor sales and bad game play. That game was Night Trap. This is that story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, there's Jerry
over there being Saley and this is stuff you should know.

(00:23):
Video Obscure lost a video game episode. How did you
hear about this? This is your request? Yeah, so Night
Trap is the game that we're talking about. And I
heard about this from watching the Netflix documentary series High Score.
Did you netflix and chill while you were watching Jerk? Uh? No?

(00:45):
I Netflix by myself and chilled because Emily wasn't watching this.
That's a different thing. Yeah, this is a different thing. Okay, Um,
this was a documentary series on Netflix, I think six
parts that covered the history you have video games. I
can recommend it in one way and that it was
a very light, kind of fun watch, but it is

(01:07):
by no means comprehensive and a little goofy at times
and how they handled some stuff on Night Trap specifically
or like the whole series. But but it was fine,
and it's it's you know, if you're in the from
a certain generation and in the mood for like five
plus hours of a bit of a nostalgia kick. You
could do worse things, but it's not great. Have you

(01:27):
ever seen that documentary I think is King of Kong.
That's one of the best times ever made. I haven't
seen in years. I got to see it again. It's great.
I think our old buddy Josh Berman might have written
the original story that that was osed had something to
do with that. But Night Trap um I learned about
because an episode five they covered when video games started

(01:50):
becoming violent, so Mortal Kombat obviously factored in heavily in
that episode. And then this game called Night Trap. There's
another game I do want to cover on a shorty,
but the way one of the first l g tv
Q games ever that was really interesting and had a
cool story. What the heck is it called? I can't
remember now. Um I saw this a couple of months ago,

(02:11):
so it's been a while. Oh what was it? I
can't remember, but it was. It's great and that will
make it for a good shorty. But a really cool
story behind it. But this is Night Trap, which figured
in as the game that kind of brought about along
with Mortal Kombat, but was really central in forming what
ended up being the ratings Board for Video Games. I mean,

(02:31):
that's that's almost like understating it. Like this one game
YE paired with Mortal Kombat basically led directly to the
creation of that. Yeah, so that's really why it's notable.
The other thing that made it notable, and we'll get
into all this, was that it was a a live
action as in they shot you know, a little movie,

(02:54):
and that you controlled. Yeah, that sort of control you
could conceivably theory radically hypathetically controlled. Because it wasn't a
great game, but it lives in infamy because of every
because it's a really cool story. I think in the end,
it is a pretty cool story. Um. And the whole
thing starts actually with a play um from the I

(03:14):
think it was written in one by a playwright named
m John. Oh what's his last name? Okay, I want
to I wanted Chris. Yeah, you don't think so, I
don't know. Maybe, well regardless, he U. He wrote a
few episodes of Due South. What's that? It was like
a show about a Canadian mount he I think, oh,

(03:37):
all right, yeah he wrote this and it was if
you've been to Sleep no More in New York, you
may have the play Tamara to thank because it is
a lot like it's the concept of sleep No More.
As far as I know, this was the one that
like broke that ground, I think so. And the ground
they broke it it's about the painter Tamara day Limplympica,

(03:59):
who have never heard of. She was a Polish painter
who lived in Italy and the Roaring twenties when um
the fascists were starting to take power and she took
no guff from him. Hedonistic, amazing art Deco painter, art
Deco portraitist basically, so her works really interesting. I didn't
know anything about her. I've never heard of her until

(04:20):
this too, but I looked her up. She seemed pretty cool.
But this is a play about her where it is
set on a multi floor building. There are scenes taking
place at the same same time and multiple rooms and
as an audience, remember you can move from one room
to the other, missing out on some stuff, seeing some stuff, interacting.
I mean, it's sleep No More. They I don't know

(04:40):
if they just totally ripped it off or if they said, hey,
it's been you know, thirty years, who's gonna remember Tamara, right?
I think it was like they broke that ground and
once you break that ground and you're going to have
people following your wake. There's probably been other stuff that
did this, but Sleep No More I think, just got
so much attention in New York for its run. At
the might still be going or maybe coming back after

(05:02):
the pandemic. I would like to see that. I would
love to see Tamara too. But um, this it was.
It ran in New York, but it started a Toronto
art festival I think, and then some some producers set
it up in l A. And that's where it had
its longest run, from about the mid eighties to the nineties. Um,

(05:22):
they had this. This just just kept going and going
and going. I was reading an l A Times article
on it. But the reason that it factors into this
because it's basically the basis for this game night Trap,
where there are different things going on in different rooms
and you kind of cycle toggle between the different rooms

(05:44):
through security cameras in these rooms to see what's going on.
And while you're doing that, you're missing stuff that's happening
in other rooms in this game, and if you missed
too much stuff, you lose. If you catch enough stuff
and you do everything right and press all the correct buttons, uh,
you win. But that's that's basically how it applies. It's

(06:04):
like this this almost an homage to this play in
video game form, but it's full motion video, meaning it's
like a film or TV show that you vaguely control
or put better, you interact with. Yeah, and the idea
of the game, and we'll get a little bit more
into the development of it in a minute, but it
is basically like a party happening at this house. Um,

(06:28):
young like co ed types, like sorority girls. Maybe. Uh.
It's it's very sort of titillating, and that was one
of the big deals a little bit. I think that
for the time they did for the time I wouldn't say,
I mean, you got married with children is like ten
times more titilating. This is very tame, I think. Well,

(06:48):
you know, obviously part of the controversy comes from assaults
on women in the game, understandably, but again we'll get
to that. It is even tame compared to a lot
of the stuff that was out at the time. Um.
But what's going on in the game is they are
these um pseudo vampires called Augur's that are the bad

(07:09):
people in this game. And Jim Riley who who conceived
of this game When he had the idea of I
think he was watching security camera a security camera screen
with all these different rooms and it hit him like
what a great idea, And then he saw this play
and he said, we can actually do something like this,
Like what if a user and a game player could

(07:31):
go into any of these views that they want and
if they're missing something, they're missing something it might be important,
but they're in control of the game. Um. And I
mean that's or the story rather right. But again I
think you really pointed out something important that that was
the concept. In the actuality, they kind of missed the

(07:52):
mark a little bit, yes, Um. So with the game
the the um It was originally designed as part of
a platform called Control Vision and I think internally it
was called Nemo an e m oh and it was
being created by a company called Axelon, And Axelon was
actually a Nolan video game company name, but it was

(08:14):
a Nolan Bushnell company. After Atari, he founded Axelon, among others.
I think he created five companies at the same time
in parallel using this this incubator um that he had
created and UM, the developers that Exelon started creating a
full motion video HS based we should point out, yes,

(08:35):
I VHS and to get from one place to another,
rather than this was the breakthrough thing. This is the
thing that made this work, and they did get it
to work. But using VHS tapes you could toggle between
stuff in virtually real time without the VHS player having

(08:56):
to rewind or fast forward, which would have really just
kind of put the high bosch your whole thing. But instead,
because of the interlacing that that video um uses, they
could actually choose what field to show at what time
and basically switched between them, which was I mean, it
looks archaic, but it's a remarkable technology at the time

(09:18):
to be able to do that. Yeah, it's still mind blowing.
Like I'm I'm like, I've the vaguely understand how this
actually works. But the fact that they actually got this
to work and had a proof of concept going enough
that Hasbro was like sold, that was a big deal. Yeah,
and this was five. One of their designers was the

(09:39):
legendary Tom Crane who designed Pitfall, one of my favorite
all time games on the Atari. But it was a
good team and they went apparently to these Hamera performances.
They were also inspired by Dragon's Lair. Do you remember
that game? I do. I was never into it, but
I remember watching it just it looked cool. I mean
it was an animation game where it was fully and

(10:00):
made it and use laser disc to project this animated footage.
So it looked awesome. But it was just it wasn't
that great. The gameplay wasn't great. No, but it followed
a story. There was a story that was happening, and
then every once in a while there's something you had
to do to move the story along as part of
the game, and if you didn't do it right, the
dragon like turned you into to Ash or something like that. Right. Yeah,

(10:22):
but you're not actually controlling the player, which was the
big difference in these games. The regular game, you're you're
creating a sequence like you're you're doing this and then
sitting back and then hopefully the thing you're hoping to
happen happens. Now, the thing that differentiates that from Night
Trap is that there was no coherent story. While you

(10:44):
were off doing something that you were supposed to be
doing to win the game, the story kept going on
over here. So you can't follow a storyline that way, no,
which is a big deal and that was a big
differentiator between it and dragons Layer. All right, well let's
take a little break here. That's a good setup, I think,
and we'll come back and get more to Night Trap
right after this. All right, so I mentioned the augurs.

(11:26):
We need to explain a little bit about this game
and what it was supposed to be and what it
ended up being, because in the Netflix documentary Jim Riley
basically it's like, well, the first thing they created a
demo called Scene of the Crime and it was a
detective game, and uh, Hasbro liked it, like I said,
and but they had a big problem because he the

(11:49):
original idea that Jim had was to have ninjas, and
he's like, it'd be great. These ninjas come in, they
got throwing stars, they've got weapons, and they're doing all
this stuff and you can control it and it's it's
super cool. And Hasbro was like, wait a minute, we
can't have what we call reproducible violence. So anything that
a kid like, kids love throwing stars, and we can't

(12:10):
show ninjas throwing throwing stars into people because the kid
will go and do that. You can't have a knife
because the kid can go get a knife out of
a drawer. It's got to be something that a kid
cannot reproduce. So so they said, okay, well, how about
what if the ninja's turn out to be and I'm sorry,
I know ninja is the plural of ninja. Sorry, what
if they turned out to be vampires? And Hasbro said,

(12:34):
I kind of like where you're going with this, but
kids can still like bite people on the neck. What
I think it came the other way though, I think
that was a note from Hasbro, wasn't I'm pretty sure
they were like, what if they were vampires? And Jim
Riley was like, Okay, I guess I can do that
biting people's necks, and then Hasbro was like, I can't

(12:54):
do that because the kids can bite next to So
what they found and this is a great metaphor for
the Night Trap overall, what the ninja originally or what
they turned out to be in the end, we're loping
vampires who used what looked like a Ghostbusters pro tom
pack with a caller of the kind that that Arnold

(13:17):
Schwarzeneger was wearing at the beginning of Running Man, like
a clamp sort of yes on the end and that
that is what they used to draw the blood from
the hapless teens who you were in charge of protecting
as night trap. Yeah, so what Hasbro did was they
noted it to death and neutered it to death because

(13:40):
they said He even was like, all right, I can
do vampires. They can run around and hurt people, and
they said, no, no no, they can't even run around to
scare if they're fast. So they came up with Augur's
who In the game, they're described as vampires who had
been half bled and left to die, so they are
not quite vampires, but they aren't human either, and that

(14:03):
makes them lopy and lumbery instead of being able to
move fast. And if you see them, they look like
they're wearing garbage bags. They're lumbering around. They're drawing the
blood using a troll car. Is what the name of
that thing was. Because it was definitely its own thing.
It was its own thing, and it's funny. In the documentary,
Jim Riley was like, in the end, he said this

(14:26):
tro car, which you know, it didn't show it explicitly.
It showed the clamp going around the neck and this
little drill inside of a shaft start and then sort
of moving and then blood being drawn, but it didn't
like going in the neck or anything. But he said
what they ended up with, he said to me, was
something far creepier than a vampire biting someone's net. But
they were like, it's not reproducible though, so it's fine.

(14:48):
And it's also it's weird that Hasbro is so fixated
on not including reproducible violence because apparently they saw um
Night Trap as a way too interest adults, because they
had apparently found out during focus group testing of seeing
the crime. I believe that the parents who were in

(15:09):
the room or were part of the focus group, we're saying,
like I really kind of like this like a TV show,
but I get to control it because it looked like
something that they understood, and so Hasbro was like, Okay,
this has been like a kid's thing up to this point.
Maybe we can finally crack into the adult market with
this stuff. So it's weird that they that they kidified

(15:30):
it to death if they were trying to use it
to capture adults, but maybe they were like, it has
to go both ways in case adults don't like it. Well,
I think in the documentary they make the point that
hasbro was. I think the adults were looming out there
as a possibility, but they were like, adults will never
play video games. So what they really wanted until they

(15:51):
grow up and then continue to play video games. Well,
they really were after was a teenage market which didn't
fully exist at this point, like an old like sixteen
and seventeen year old boys, which is why they put
sorority girls in like a nighty at a slumber party.
Wasn't all in an effort to sort of TOI late,
you know, people like me right, and it worked like

(16:15):
a charm. I had never heard of it back then
because you just you would play night Trap in Netflix
and chill by yourself. So uh, they actually had to
shoot this like a movie. You know, they shot it
in Culver City on a sound stage. And what they
would do back then for and you know that there
were more full motion games of the time, and you
would try and cast one recognizable face among this cast

(16:39):
to sort of they called it the anchor, to like
all right, well this has got so and so in it.
And who did they cast for night Trap? Dane and
Plato from from Different Strokes. Yeh, Kimberly, who passed away
very tragically. Man, I was reading about her life. She yeah,
hard sad life, very tragic story. Yeah it is. It's
very sad. And they actually went back and rule her

(17:00):
death is suicide later did you know that. I don't
know if I knew that. Yeah, she died by suicide
ultimately because she overdoes dug. Yeah, soma, I believe, which
is like a generic lore tab interesting, which I'm think
you really have to try, Like, I don't think that's
an accidental thing, which is probably why they did that.

(17:20):
But it was at a family reunion in Oklahoma, which
I'm like, god, man, that's that's just a sad ending.
And her son actually died by suicide as well later on.
I think I knew that, like not super long ago, right,
like yeah. In the two thousand tens, yeah, man, very sad,
but yeah. Dana Plato was cast as that anchor. She

(17:42):
played Kelly, who was a secret agent who was had
infiltrated the house. She was undercover. Yeah, she's undercover, and
she would talk right to camera and say things like
you've got to get to the other room because the
augers are after whoever married, Yeah, go help her? Um. Yeah,
and we should say also so that the group of
crime fighters that she was a part of was called SCAT,

(18:04):
the Special Control Attack Team Uh SCAT uh. And then
I don't know if we also said so the people
who own the house had invited this group of teens
that included undercover Dana Plato Kelly, who I which I
saw admittedly on Wikipedia. This is this is a great

(18:25):
example of night trap being night trap in the in
the credits at the end, Kelly's name is spelled with
a y on the end. In the players the users
hand guide and I that's that's night trap for you
right there. But the family that invited the kids, these
teenage girls out to for a weekend at their house

(18:48):
are actually themselves vampires with teeth everything. They not augurs,
They're actually people. Know they brought them there for the
augur right right to source their blood. I guess there
is a pretty funny scene in it. When did you
watch any of it? I watched the whole thing. I watched.
I think grumpy Gamers did like a play through. Yeah,
they have a full watch their their stuff too, and yeah,

(19:10):
I've watched a lot of night trap stuff. The best
part is when they're explaining in the game what the
augers are and the woman says, you know, it's a
vampire who's been blah blah blah, and one of the
scat guys is in the background and he goes, you've
got to be driving me. Like it was great. It
was like, was this game made in nineteen eighty nine
or nineteen seventy three? It was really confusing, like what

(19:33):
era it was? So you said it was shot on
a sound stage in in Culver City and it took
like through thirty days almost um, but shoot a ton
of stuff. Yes, because it was like a two fifty
page script, which is incredibly long. Wow ed who helped
us out with this woman? He points out that two
hour movie might have a hundred and twenties page script.

(19:55):
It's about a minute per page. Is as a rule
of thumb, this is two fifty pages for a video
game that was not very good. They didn't have a
lot of dialogue, but there were a lot of different
outcomes that could happen in one just one particular scene short.
So if you shot a scene, you had to shoot
it multiple times to get what you wanted, and then
you had to shoot those multiple times multiple times for

(20:17):
each outcome. Yeah, and we should say that the violence
in the game, uh, like we said, is suggestive for
the augers. You don't know, we see anything. The only
real violence is when the augers are dispatched of But
it is very much wildly coyote bugs, bunny sort of thing. Yeah,
it's the definition of cartoonish. Yeah, Like there will be

(20:37):
a murphy bed will flip them out of a window,
or they'll just whoa like fall through a trap door
the stairs, very like one of the things. If they're
coming down the stairs, you can trap them by collapsing
the stairs when they fall into the trap like smoke machine,
pour smoke out of it. It's impossible that they weren't

(20:58):
going for cartoonish violence. There's no right. Of course, the
producers and directors we were trying to be like scary
in any way, shape or form. But it was shot
by Don Burgess, who was nominated for an Oscar less
than a decade after uh Night Trap for Forrest Gump.
So they had a real team. It wasn't just you know,

(21:18):
they didn't you know, say all right, let's go out
in the valley and use some uh like a porn crew, sure,
and just do this thing like they had a real crew. No,
and apparently has pro spent depending on who you ask,
at least a million dollars on this. They said one
five in the documentary, so they put some money into it,
and it is not apparent on the screen. The sets

(21:42):
look terrible. The doorways, I don't know if you notice,
but any doorway, they didn't build the door down to
the floor. They built the door down to like a
one ft tall step over, so anytime someone opens the door,
they step over this like one ft tall like wooden set.
That's also I mean the said is it's basically like

(22:03):
they could have repurposed it for growing pains or family
ties or made or no, they probably would have said, like,
this doesn't look good. I think they used it for
small wonder how about that? Uh, there is no nudity,
we should point out. But again it was never going
to be kid friendly. But also when you when you
will get to the court stuff, when you hear how

(22:25):
it's described by these senators, it's so over the time,
it's so over the top. Should we take a break?
You don't want to take a break to you know,
I'm excited and I'm ready to keep going. Let's take
a break. All right, Well, I guess we should take
a break by saying that Hasbro dumped the game. It's
a nice cliffhanger. Hasbro dumped the game? Wait, well, Hasbro

(22:46):
dumped the game or not? Okay, we'll find out right
after this. Okay, chuck cliffhanger ants or time. Hasbro dumped

(23:17):
the game because it wasn't that great. But the big
reason was because c d ram Technology started up and
they were like, we we've got VHS technology and we
stuck a million five into this turkey, like, let's just
dump it. And that should have been the end of it,
not just night Trap, but the whole Control Vision thing
that that night, the whole platform that Night Trap was

(23:37):
just going to be a game on totally gone CD
ROM killed it. Hasbro said forget it. The thing is,
the people who worked on designing this game said no, no, no, no,
hass being shortsighted. It's too good this game in particular,
maybe control Vision is granted, the VHS thing, we're gonna
just forget about that, but this game is too groundbreaking

(24:00):
to just let die. So they actually went to Hasbro
and said, how much will you sell us the footage,
the code, the whole shebang for night Trap for and
the designers actually bought the game from Hasbro and took
it and founded their own company, Digital Pictures. You know
how much they sold it for. But I couldn't fund
didn't find it either. Um, I would guess peanuts. Basically,

(24:21):
they probably were like, I don't ever want to hear
the words night or trapped together again to get it
out of here. Um. But these these designers, developers, directors, writers,
everybody got together form Digital Pictures and bought it and
started developing night Track, ironically for cd ROM, which is
the very, the very type of media. Yeah that killed

(24:45):
it in the first place. Yeah, But by Jim's telling
on the documentary, I don't know if they were already
going cd ROM or if it was initiated by Sega.
But he got a call, he said, out of the
blue from Sega, who had their aiming system at the time,
Sega Genesis and then Sega c D was an add
on system featuring this new cd ROM technology. And he said,

(25:08):
they got a call, they said, hey, you want to
develop this for cd ROM And uh, he probably got
a good laugh out about about that, and the irony
and then said sure, because night Trap must live. Yes,
this guy is dedicated to night Trap living. If there's
one thing that he wants to keep alive in the world,
it is night Trap. That's right. So Um, they started

(25:30):
developing it for CD ROM. Uh. It was a step
up for sure, from what I can tell, like the
graphics worked a lot better. Um. The problem is is
this is nine two was when it was finally released
as a CD ROM game. Yeah, they had shot all
this footage in the late eighties, but it looked like
the late seventies. There was a big difference between style wise.

(25:56):
It was a parent visually apparent and immediately apparent to anybody,
say a video game playing age. That was a big
strike against night Trap to begin with. But probably the
biggest stripe of all was that it wasn't a highly
playable game. It was not a good game, and it
probably would have just kind of faded away like it sold.

(26:16):
I guess enough that it qualified as like a note
not a disaster. Uh. They at least did more than
break even, but it probably would have just fallen into
the dustbin of history had it not been for Um
Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Senator Herb Cole of Wisconsin,
a couple of Democrats who created this crusade about violent

(26:40):
video games and I think three yeah, and so this
very much mirrored if you listen to our Satanic Panic
episodes and the p MRC and music label m p
a A m p a A like this was all
the time when everyone was saying, hey, listen, we need
to start at least labeling the stuff. Its parents know

(27:00):
what their kids are doing. And um, just watch a
little bit. You know, there's all kinds of it was
in the Netflix documentary, but there's all sorts of stuff
on YouTube about these hearings where they're talking about the
disgusting trash and the filth and the hyper violence, and
it's like, it's really not that violent. So so here's
the thing they were. They went after Moral Kombat, which

(27:22):
was super violent, it really was. And they went after
night Trap, which was again cartoonish. Not a drop of
blood spills from a person's body, right, um, but it
had ladies and lingerie one. Yes, okay, I'm not defending
any kind of violence against women, of course, not defending
objectifying women. But Night Trap was unfairly railroaded because for

(27:49):
some reason. I think probably because it was um, it
was film, it was people, Like the people were controlling people.
That was the different because there was there were a
hundred exploitation movies and horror movies by this point, two
hundred three hundred. It was a thousand times worse than this.

(28:11):
But the fact that you were controlling yet they never said,
and they make a big point about this in the documentary,
like you weren't doing the violence, Like the whole point
of the game was to stop the augurs. That's like,
you weren't the person doing the augur and preventing the violence. Yeah.
I guess that's why they called him augurs because it
was kind of like an augur. The tool was, Yeah,

(28:31):
that's what crowbar to bar what was it called cro Carr. Yeah.
But yeah, and they never I mean he Jim Riley
was like they clearly never even played the game. Yeah. No,
they were talking about the cover of the thing was
laurid they didn't like to cover of the box. Yeah
they Yeah, they definitely hadn't played the game. It was
just impossible from what they were saying, it happens in

(28:52):
the game. Uh. And the big one was like you
were saying that it um it let players carry out
sexual violence against women. No, you do the opposite of that.
There's violence that is carried out by the augers if
you don't do it right, if you if you're not
good at the game, if you lose, yes, exactly. But
even then, like even in the most disturbing scene, which

(29:15):
was the one with the lady in the in the
ninety looking in the mirror, the augers come in behind
her and it's for sure creepy looking at first, but
you know, then they get out the croke car I
can't remember crow car, and she's like, ahh and it's
like the worst B movie. And then they just sort
of drag her over the threshold of one of those doors,
I would say, gently escorted through the like you don't

(29:39):
see any of the violence even it's all just suggested. Yes.
But again, Night Trick got lumped in with Mortal Kombat
and um because of this, because it was very clear
that the riding was on the wall. The media has
a really great track record of saying, oh God, if
we don't come up with a rating system ourselves, Congress
is gonna impose it on us. And so they came

(30:01):
up with the e s r B, the Entertainment Software
Rating Board. That's right. It was an industry created self
imposed rating system that was brought about in large part
because of Nitri. Right, so Sega pulls the game. Eventually
it became really popular because of these senatorial hearings, which

(30:24):
is what always happens. Yes, that's exactly right. It was
starting to fade away. It would have been lost to history,
and then the senators came in and we're like, it's
go buy that game. Kids wanted to play it. But
Sega did eventually pull it. UH Digital Pictures re released
it as their own distributor and rated it M for mature.

(30:45):
And that should have That should have also been the
end of it, right, Yeah, I should have just kind
of went away, especially after Sega pulled it, because it
got pulled from KB Toys and Toys r US because
the kids. But like you're saying, it was still around
and when Sega pol there was like you couldn't find
it anyway. It should have been the end. And then
in two thousan fourteen, Tom Riley, Jim Riley, Jim Uh

(31:09):
Jim Riley started a Kickstarter and said we're gonna resurrect
Night Trap. All we need is three hundred and thirty
thousand dollars. People are gonna go crazy for this. Yeah,
it's gonna be the greatest kickstarter in the history of kickstarters.
And it was not the greatest kickstarter ever. It was
a really, really bad kickstarter that had a lot of criticism, skepticism,

(31:33):
and ultimately only garnered I think about forty dollars when
they were after three and that. Yeah, so that obviously
was the end of night Trap, right, that was not
the end of night Trap, the bad game that refused
to die. Uh. In sixteen, there was a video on
YouTube that showed someone playing night Trap on their telephone

(31:53):
on their smartphone, and so, I don't know if it
was Jim Riley or one of the original devs saw
it and was like, what is going on? You can't
play night Trap on a smartphone because it was never
developed that the technology, and let's that smartphone is playing
a CD that I don't know about in the background.
And they got in touch with the person. His name

(32:13):
was Tyler Hogel and he was a mobile game programmer
who followed was a fan of the original is like
in a cult fan way. That's a deep cut at
that time super deep cut and then basically said I'm
gonna get a playable version hacked together for smartphones and
did it like semi successfully. Yeah. Um so he basically

(32:36):
created this just on his own. And then once the
video surface and the original developers Jim Riley and some
of the others got in touch with him. Um, they said, here, man,
here's here's We lost the code years ago. No one
has any idea where it is, but we do have
original thirty five millimeter footage which is stamp, which is

(32:57):
really critical because you have to wait. As we'll talk
about how to play it in a second. The timing
is everything between the video and the players controls. Um.
So with the time stamps, Tyler Hogel was able to
basically create a new modern anniversary edition. Um that just
is actually kind of a as far as night trap

(33:17):
goes as the best night trap that there could possibly be. Yeah,
that was the dish rated T for teens this time preposterous,
which is funny. Uh And apparently the um you know
you said he lost the code, but he was like
that that's really easy. Like I've got all this footage
that's time stamp. It's like I can code this thing

(33:38):
in my sleep, basically, he basically did. So there's a
edition um of night Trap, which apparently Nintendo has a
version of, which is kind of funny because at the
time of those Senate hearing, Nintendo famously said they would
never allow night Trap on their platform, and they did. Yeah,

(34:00):
and Nintendo is still sort of known as the more
family friendly unit. I think they even had a bloodless
Mortal Kombat if I'm not mistaken, or maybe it was
a setting. Oh I think yes, that brings a bell.
Did you see the new Mortal Kombat movie? Did I
have seen zero Mortal Kombat movies? Uh? The new one
just came out on hbm X. Is it good? It's

(34:22):
pretty good. I mean, did you play the game. You
have nostalgia for the game? Sure, yeah, you should watch it.
It's good enough. It looks good and there's great fights
and then some nice Easter eggs and it's like the
Mortal Kombat movie that should have been because they made
one previously that wasn't that great. Yeah, from the nineties. Yeah,
but this one looks it's pretty cool. Okay, you rip

(34:42):
out spines and hearts and I'll go. And the way
they do the blood. It looks just like the game.
Is it rated T for team It's rated are because
it's a movie. But we mentioned that that it wasn't
that great of a game because of the game play. Um.
One of the biggest problems was that you've got all
these stories going on in these different windows, but you

(35:05):
can only kind of control one at a time, So
when you're controlling one scene, other stuff is going on,
and we mentioned that makes it impossible to follow the
actual story, so it suffers there. But there's also this
thing where you have a red light, a green light,
and a yellow light, and when these lights turn on
if it's the right color light, is when you engage

(35:26):
the trap button, and that's when the auger will flip
out the window. But it has to be timed right, uh.
And apparently while you're in these other rooms, if you
want to follow the story for a couple of minutes,
they will change the codes, the color codes. So if
you're in another room, they'll be like, the code is
now green, and you don't know that because you're not
watching it, so you go back and you think the

(35:48):
code is red, and so you're losing the game. Yeah,
because you have to have the right security code activated
to activate the traps, because this is the Martin's family's
security cameras. The Martin family, the Empires are the ones
who created the traps. You just hacked into it thanks
to your pals at SCAT, you're basically freelancing for. But
when they change those codes, it doesn't show on screen.

(36:13):
The character tells another character to go down to the
basement and change the code different screen that you may
not be watching, yeah, in a different room that you
can't hear or see or anything like that, because you're
in the living room and this conversation is happening in
the kitchen. That is not a thing where it's like, oh,
that's a cool little little you know that part of
the gameplay that is a maddening Yes, it's a bug, right, Um,

(36:36):
so that that that's a big part. That's a big
problem with it as well. And then also, um, you
don't have to get a perfect you don't have to
play a perfect game to win. But if if any
of the augers get any of the characters, you lose.
If too many augers started to accumulate, you lose and
you get yelled at by the leader of SCAT. It's

(36:57):
kind of funny. He gets really mad at you for
screwing up um. But to win, it's you're basically memorizing
where to go win and it happens, especially towards the end,
really quick. So like you'll, you know, set off a
trap in one room and you have to go remember
what room you're supposed to go to to get the
trap set for the next ager um And it's not

(37:19):
really fun. It gets really intense towards the end, but
not necessarily fun. Yeah, I mean, hats off to the
grabster because he actually played this thing and tried to
play it, which was more than I was willing to do.
But I did watch the walk throughs. Did you see
the night trap video or the lip sync video? There's
actually a theme song night Trap right look out behind

(37:41):
You or something like that that one of the characters
does an air guitar tennis rack get lip sync to dancing,
while the other characters have to watch and pretend like
they're not mortified with embarrassment at seeing this. It's it's
really something. Oh man, I kept waiting in the documentary
for a big reveal that, like George Clooney was one
of the augers or but Dana Plato is about as

(38:03):
you know, a list as it got at the time,
which was probably C list at the time. Yeah, you
got anything else? I got nothing else? Night Trap? Go
seek it out, Night Trap, look out behind you. That's right. Uh.
If you want to know more about Night Trap, you
don't even have to play. You can just go on
YouTube and watched basically the movie. Uh. And even then,
it's still generally incoherent. Um. But since I said it's

(38:26):
still generally incoherent, it's time for a listener mail. I'm
gonna call this speed reading trauma. Hey, guys, I should
start with the obligatory long time, first time, finally a
reason to email, and here I am so hello. I
didn't think that a short stuff on speed reading, of
all things, would trigger my first email, but here we go.
Halfway through the show, I was flooded with a vivid

(38:48):
memory of speed reading in my elementary school gifted class.
Speaking of other scams. Uh, this is in the early nineties.
My teacher would drag a transparency with a printed passage. Oh,
I kind of remember this across an overhead projector at
increasing speeds, and after each pass we would take a
comprehension test. I had no idea that this was a scam.

(39:09):
I just thought it was a standard part of the
curriculum that I wasn't very good at, and I felt
terrible about it. Then again, in my Louisiana public school
curriculum curriculum, we also had to get a hunting license
and shoot clay pigeons as part of Louisiana history in
middle school. I grew up shooting clay pigeons really for school, No, okay,
I would like to try that. It's cool ski shooting. Yeah,

(39:30):
that's another way to put it. Looks just stand behind.
That's the rule, right basically anyway, Thanks so much for
the entertainment and education entertainment, especially this past year. I've
often had you in my ear while I work from
home to feel a little less solitary. That is from
Kate Ellis Jensen in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks a lot, Kate,
that was a good email. Very sorry to set off

(39:52):
the trauma, but I'm glad that it's past. I'm presuming
it past. Yeah, I kind of remember that happening, but
I certainly was not in a gifted class. It doesn't
sound like a very fun procedure. It kind of sounds
like rape fines revealing himself to Philip Seymour Hoffman and
Red Dragon. Do you see Yeah, you know I'm talking
about We've talked about that recently. Yeah, the wheelchair and

(40:16):
fire scene experious, hilarious, um, but also really funny if
you stop and think about that. Movie just danced on
the line and sometimes it went over well. If you
want to know more about Red Dragon, oh wait, already
said that stuff. If you want to get in touch
with this like Kate did, then you can email us
like Kate did at Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com.

(40:43):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
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