Digital Pictures

From Sega Retro

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Digital Pictures
Founded: 1991
Defunct: 1996
T-series code: T-162
Headquarters:
Menlo Park, California, United States

Digital Pictures was a North American video game company founded in 1991 by Ken Melville and Tom Zito. They made most of their income developing and publishing games that made use of full motion video (FMV) technology, starting with Night Trap, a game originally designed for the cancelled NEMO system by Hasbro, later ported to the Sega Mega-CD. Night Trap is widely credited as being the first game completely reliant on full motion video.

The company's full-motion video technology was originally advertised under the name Virtual VCR, with a series of three upcoming titles slated for release. The name was later adopted by Sega of America as a working name for the technology as a whole.

They almost single handedly carried the Sega Mega-CD 32X hybrid platform, being involved with four out of the six games to be released on Mega CD 32X discs.

Digital Pictures as a company failed along with the genre it invented. Towards the end of the 1990s consumer interest in FMV games dropped, and the company struggled to sell their games as a result.

Certain Mega CD games by Digital Pictures contain a short Red Book audio CD track of a phone ringing with a male voice answering "Good afternoon, Digital Pictures", followed by a backwards playback of several voices saying "number nine" ("enin rebmun"), a reference to The Beatles song Revolution 9. The message is a hint for Sewer Shark - if the player turns left (referred to as "niner" in the game) three times the player will not hit a wall.

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