You’d be hard-pressed to find a gamer who hasn’t heard of Night Trap. The Sega CD game was a lightning rod for controversy in the 90s, eclipsing even Mortal Kombat on the moral panic scale. But few remember Project NEMO, the interactive movie-based console that spawned it. NEMO never saw the light of day, but it attracted some of the video game industry’s brightest minds.

The ghost of Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell, surrounded by robots.

“ Nolan fiercely wanted the company to put out arcade versions of the games... He believed playing the games in the arcade would get people to buy the home system.

Captain Nemo

Tom Zito.

“ Nobody on the team had any idea what an interactive movie looked like, how it should work, let alone how to go about making one.

Games on film

Rob Fulop.

Night(ie) Trap: developed for NEMO, but eventually released on Sega CD.

'N' is for Nintendo

David Crane.

Sillywood

Sewer Shark: Another game developed for NEMO but released on Sega CD.

Minds like David Crane, who co-founded Activision, and designed and programmed Pitfall! and Little Computer People; Rob Fulop, who programmed Night Driver, Missile Command and Space Invaders for the Atari 2600; and Ken Melville, who went on to design and write some of the biggest titles in interactive full motion video games. This was a dream team of video game creators working with Hasbro, the largest toy maker in the world. So what stopped them from shipping a console? Could they have changed the course of an industry with their foray into interactive FMV?I interviewed David Crane, Ken Melville, and Rob Fulop to find out what happened to Project NEMO – later dubbed the Control-Vision – and where they thought their work was taking them. This is the story of the birth, life, and death of Project NEMO as recounted by these three men. It is a story filled with quirky characters, creative conflicts, and eleventh-hour plot twists.Project NEMO was the culmination of Tom Zito’s fascination with film and video games. Zito studied film at New York University and wrote for the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker before becoming the Vice President of Marketing for Axlon – a toy manufacturer that belonged to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.In 1985, Bushnell approved Zito’s proposal to experiment with interactive games based on video footage, and so he started building a team of industry pioneers. Rob Fulop had already worked on a toy robot for Axlon called Tech Force the year before. Six months after Tech Force launched, Zito showed Fulop some NEMO prototypes, and asked if he wanted to develop demo software for it. In 1986, former Apple programmer Dick Huston invited Ken Melville aboard, who designed the anime-based laserdisc arcade game 999 with him five years earlier. David Crane was already researching similar technology, but was so impressed with NEMO’s progress that he joined the project. The team also included Steve Russell, the computer scientist who had greatly contributed to the design and programming behind Spacewar!, the first commercially released video game.Zito estimated he would need $7 million to release the console with software, but that was $7 million Axlon didn’t have. Hasbro – the house of Transformers and G.I. Joe – fronted the cash and partnered with Axlon in exchange for NEMO’s video game rights. “The bigwigs at Hasbro made no secret that they envied the money the game business was making,” Crane explained. “After the crash when other traditional toy companies were hurting, they patted themselves on the back for staying out. But behind closed doors they admitted the truth. One told me that they wanted to get into video games so bad they could taste it.”Within six months, Hasbro was frustrated with the pace of NEMO’s production. Hasbro insisted on taking over the project – it would no longer fund it while it remained under the Axlon umbrella. Zito obliged, leaving Axlon to form Isix, but that did not spell the end of Nolan Bushnell’s involvement.The history books paint Tom Zito as the driving force behind NEMO development, and rightly so, according to Fulop. “Tom made NEMO happen,” said Fulop. “The buck stopped with him. I would say he was more of a creative ‘enabler’ than the creative inspiration behind the games. But he got his hands dirty in every aspect of the project: hardware, OS, title selection, design, and development."Zito held weekly ‘VideoWare Review’ meetings, where NEMO software was commissioned and critiqued. “These were legendary meetings – very animated and opinionated,” said Fulop. “Nobody on the team had any idea what an interactive movie looked like, how it should work, let alone how to go about making one. Tom's approach was classic ‘design by committee.’ We would go around the room and solicit everybody's thoughts, after which Tom would render some sort of verdict.”VideoWare Review meetings were all the rage amongst Isix staff. Attendance was granted as a reward and withheld as punishment. Engineers, interns, and assistants were routinely invited as special guests for praiseworthy performances the week before. “One time the person who brought and cared for plants was there,” said Fulop. “Often these newcomers would have the loudest voice at the meeting. They viewed it as their chance to move up and be noticed within the fledgling division. The meetings lasted hours, and featured lots of diverging opinions. In other words, we fought a lot.” By Fulop’s count there was at least one blow-up and subsequent storm-out per meeting. “I personally had three storm outs during the life of the project," he said.The first NEMO prototype was a ColecoVision streaming video through a cable signal, which could be overlayed with interactive images. Rob Fulop’s team developed a cable demo called Armchair Quarterback to show how a video game could be played over a televised American football match. The player had to predict the next play and was scored based on their synergy with the on-field quarterback. The demo was impressive, but far from practical. “Running the game would have involved a live team encoding the broadcast data track in real-time,” said Fulop. “Ric LaCivita was a baseball producer for CBS… He showed us that Armchair Quarterback was essentially not doable, but for the demo we didn’t care. We just wanted to demonstrate how a live show could incorporate the Control-Vision system.”Fulop also made Scene of the Crime with director Jim Riley. “It was basically Night Trap without the traps,” said Fulop. “A five minute mystery shot over a weekend in a house in Hillsborough.” The demo was inspired by a play called Tamara, an experiment in parallel storytelling that asked the audience to move between 13 different rooms to piece together its multifaceted mystery. Tamara – and in turn, Scene of the Crime – became the template for FMV game design, particularly Night Trap.“The toughest part of creating a game like Night Trap was dealing with parallel scripting,” said Crane. “Philosophically, there were a bunch of closed-circuit cameras each watching different action. If one person was seen walking from the kitchen to the dining room, that person has to appear in the dining room walking from the kitchen. That was the simplest problem they had to solve. The whole story had to mesh, every track interweaving with every other. Normally in post-production, the director or producer would change a scene’s timing to tweak the pace of the story. In this case, a change of two seconds in one scene breaks the entire interactive experience.”For all their fragility, the bare necessities of FMV games – live actors, camera angles, cinematic presentation, branching screenplays, and recorded dialogue – would not appear outside of FMV games until a decade later, and have since become staples of AAA game development.Isix team members spoke fondly of Hasbro’s eccentric chief executive, Stephen Hassenfeld. “I recall Stephen visiting twice,” said Fulop. “Both times he came with full entourage – it was all very pomp and circumstance. He found small things to focus on and always asked about them. One of Steven's pet concerns was the 1-800 number for customer service. He kept insisting we choose a memorable phone number – ‘1-800-PLAYNOW’ sort of thing – I served briefly on the ‘800 Number Committee.’ Stephen's other peeve was the press leak of a secret game product in the fall, codenamed ‘NEMO.’ So we needed a cool-sounding phrase that NEMO would be the acronym for. People were assigned to generate as many sayings as possible made up of the four letters.”There was only one rule to Hassenfeld’s ‘Name NEMO’ Contest: the ‘N’ had to stand for ‘Nintendo.’ “I am proud to say that I won,” declared Fulop. “My winning entry was ‘Nintendo Ends Mid-October.’” The slogan sounded playful enough, but the Isix team took NEMO – and Nintendo – very seriously. To Melville, Hasbro’s objective was clear: “create a ‘Nintendo-killer’ that could be sold for under $100.”To this day, David Crane believes NEMO had the potential to change the gaming landscape, “not so much based on the games we were making at the time, but on what the system would have become once the development world got their hands on it. This would have provided a separate fork of entertainment, likely involving Hollywood and others pouring millions into game development. It had all the makings of a product that could have competed on equal footing with the big console manufacturers.”Where Crane saw a new path in entertainment, Rob Fulop saw a creative dead end. “I realized early on that the game of Pac-Man presented a much richer repeatable interactive experience than a movie-game ever could,” he told us. “Once you've seen the footage in Night Trap, you've seen the footage. Game Over. All movie-games are basically puzzles where the object of the puzzle is to unlock all of the footage. Once you have done that, it's done. Movie-games are much more disposable than video games.”Fulop went on to dissect the notion of parallel film and video game production. “The practical reality is that a feature film is such an expensive proposition,” said Fulop. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to tell the director he needs to shoot another scene with his crew – the cost per minute to be on the set of a feature film is astronomical – and there are always so many more important things. Scenes need to be reshot, action needs to be blocked out, and things need to be rehearsed. Showing up with a few sheets of paper detailing the extra footage needed for the movie-game version is so not going to happen, because nobody cares for two seconds about the movie-game. It's considered one of hundreds of promotional support materials for the feature film. The movie-game version of a feature film like Spider-Man would rate lower than a Spider-Man lunchbox with an image of Tobey Maguire on the cover.” In hindsight, the arranged marriage between Silicon Valley and Hollywood lived up to its nickname: Sillywood.Ken Melville – the writer-designer of Sewer Shark and co-founder of Digital Pictures – recalled the long, awkward dance in vivid detail. “The way it worked with Hollywood was this,” said Melville, “they saw us as a useful industrial market to bring in some extra cash. And individual guys took a real interest in it as an intellectual challenge. Or they needed to direct. [John] Dykstra had never directed so this was his first shot at it; his way to break into the club, maybe get a card. Then we had a series of Hollywood hacks as our production supers. We paid them better than what they'd make line-producing the next MacGuyver or whatever. So Hollywood treated us pretty much like a commercial house treats a client: money in the door, so they were courteous. But they didn't take us seriously as a medium.” After decades presiding over special effects for films like Star Wars and Star Trek, John Dykstra’s directorial debut was Sewer Shark, for NEMO.