FMV games are a particular video game genre that was popular during the early nineties as CD-ROMs and Laserdiscs made their way into the living rooms, providing an alternative to the low-capacity cartridges of most consoles until 1995.

These games rely on full motion video rather than sprites, vectors or 3D models to display action in the game. Due to the limits set by the format, most games' mechanics resemble those of modern music/dance games, where the player timely presses buttons according to a screen instruction. Other games were early rail shooters such as Tomcat Alley and Sewer Shark and adventure games like Gabriel Knight II - The Beast Within. Altough most games did manage to look better than most sprite-based games, they were a niche market - a vast majority of FMV games were panned at the time of their release, and most gamers dislike the lack of interaction inherent of these games.

Cost was also an issue, as these games were often very expensive to produce: Ground Zero Texas cost Sega around US$ 3 Million, about the same a low-budget movie would cost in 1994. Others attracted Hollywood stars such as Dana Plato (Diff'rent Strokes, cast for Night Trap) and Ron Stein (fight coordinator of Rocky and Raging Bull, who was hired as director for Sega's boxing game Prize Fighter).

As the first CD-based consoles were capable of displaying smooth and textured 3D graphics appeared, the full-FMV game fad vanished from the mainstream circles around 1995, altough it remained an option for PC adventure games for a couple more years. One of the last titles released was the 1998 PC and PlayStation adventure The X-Files Game, packed in 7 CDs.

Unfulfilled Potential

Certain video game critics see the full motion video genre as never have fulfilling its potential-or more specifically the full motion video technique. Games like Killer Instinct and Bram Stoker's Dracula proved that a sprite-based foreground could be applied to a full motion video background, causing the overall look to be arguably better than if the whole thing was rendered in real time, and other games such as Time Commando (1996) and Quest For Glory V (1998) went even further and combined FMV backgrounds with polygon characters. These critics lament that many modern games such as certain RPG's feature limited interactivity and would be potential users of high quality FMV, but instead use real time generated 3D graphics which they claim do not look as good as high quality pre-rendered movies, altough the quality gap between pre and real-time rendered scenes decreases as the processing power of consoles and computers evolves.