Feel the Vibration!

Back in the 90s, CD-ROM technology was heating up and videogame companies were trying to figure out ways to best exploit it. Compact discs cost a lot less to mass-produce than cartridges and they offered a big jump in storage capacity. That meant there was one thing they could offer that cartridges couldn't:

Full Motion Video.

Digital Pictures was a company that dedicated itself exclusively to games that relied on FMV. Including the infamous Dana Plato classic "Night Trap", that sparked up a bunch of stupid videogame censorship debates back in the day. (Incidentally, "Night Trap" was originally designed for a never-released VHS-based game console called Control-Vision.) One thing united all the Digital Pictures FMV "games" -- they were all ridiculously shitty.

No exception was a series they designed called "Make My Video"...

"Marky Mark: Make My Video" featured music and video footage of future Oscar Nominee Mark Robert Michael Wahlberg. As far as I can tell, young Marky didn't shoot any actual footage for the "game". The series was sort of a music-video-editing sim (because all the kids wanted to edit video for fun), forcing you to select video footage on the fly to compose a music video... sort of like a TV director cuing live cameras. I'm pretty sure your video options consisted of a lot of shitty, grainy stock footage.

Those hoping for some juicy footage of the future Oscar Nominee "interacting" with the gamer would be disappointed, as the game employs a bunch of anonymous actors to set up the scenario. It sort of has the feel of an old porno, without any pay-offs.

I write all this to offer some context for the retro-shock of the actual game.

Though I never played this one, I played a bunch of the old Digital Pictures FMV-games. The head of the company used to give interviews claiming that he could never identify with the cartoony graphics of a "Legend of Zelda", and that using real live actors would engage gamers on a deeper level. But all their pseudo-games featured god-awful scripts that usually relied on the actors yelling at the camera, berating the gamer in some way. It was supposed to be fun because it was like the videos were talking back to you. And in the 90s, all the kids enjoyed being reamed out by D-list actors. It was a thing we liked back then. You really had to be there to understand.

The MAKE MY VIDEO series also had entries for C+C Music Factory and INXS -- and if they'd been successful, I hear they were working on "Phish: Make My Video" and "The Afghan Whigs: Make My Video". Because that's what the market would bear.

Times were so much more innocent.

My video-editing abilities are severely clipped at the moment due to major VISTA incompatibilities with the current versions of Adobe Premiere. Don't *I* have egg on my face! Strangely enough, Windows Vista features D-list actors berating you whenever you try to do something that you used to be able to do on Windows XP. I love the new technologies.