Mining the Past: Tom Zito Interview
October 1995. Next-Generation magazine interviews Digital Pictures’ Tom Zito. DP was the “pioneering” publisher who jumped on the FMV bandwagon back in the early 90’s and rode it straight to hell despite obvious signs of its downfall. In what will probably become a recurring series as I troll through my old magazines one last time before dumping them on Half Price Books, here’s a few choice quotes.
Tom: When you’re watching a cartoon or animated character, there are certain emotions and unavoidable human reactions that you leave at home. Sure, you have all the pride of watching your animated character pummel an enemy into the ground, but there are certain human, gut-reactions that can only be triggered by seeing another human. Real people produce real reactions. And that’s what we’re after.
For example, I personally, could never really care enough about the Princess Zelda to spend the 40 hours I needed to spend battling through the forest in order to resuce her.
You know that’s just a flat out lie. He totally loved Zelda, who didn’t!?
On comparisons between Madden NFL and DP’s FMV-based Quarterback Attack:
“Sure, in our game you can’t do something like turning around and running the other way down the field like you could in, say, Madden. But the question is who would want to run the wrong way down the field? No quarterback in his right mind would do that. So how important is that to the game player? I think it’s just a conceptual, hypothetical issue as opposed to any enhancement to the experience of playing the game.
Instead, what we offer is the feeling that you’re actually down on a field with 350 lb guys, trying throw a pass with a sense of verisimilitude [ahem: ‘the appearance or semblance of truth’]. The only basic difference between our FMV-based games and one like Madden is that in the other games, you can do things that you would never do in a real football game — and you never fear for your life.”
NG responds: Ok, but in a CG “free space” world like Madden, by the time you’ve picked your formation, picked your play, picked your receiver, maneuvered your quarterback — manually — into the pocket, dodged a tacke or two, and then finally thrown the ball, there’s an infinite number of variations. There’s a very real chance that every single play is unique and that no one has seen exactly the same play twice. It could be argued that this, therefore, is more “real”.
Tom: If you think that all those plays on Madden look different, then we have very different definitions of “different.” To me, Madden looks like a TV screen full of little green ants. So I say, “look, that ant is a millimeter over to the right this time.” Big deal.
Man, you’ve really got to be dedicated to your sinking ship to say stuff like that. He goes on to admit that FMV would eventually be replaced by real time graphics but he puts it about ten years out. Anyone remember playing FMV games up through last year? I’m not certain but I think they died out right around the time Digital Pictures folded.
