Digital Pictures

From Sega Retro

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.

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 Digital Pictures struggled to sell their games as a result.

Certain Mega CD games by Digital Pictures contain a short redbook 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.

Softography