Last Update: 5/13/07
Phantasmagoria
Made during the height of the "interactive movie" boom in the computer game industry, Phantasmagoria is notable for being one of the first adventure games to use a human being as an on-screen avatar. Actress Victoria Morsell spent months in front of a bluescreen filming the hundreds of actions players could direct her character to perform. The game was released on seven CDs to accommodate the massive amount of video generated by this process. Today it still stands as a record of sorts for the largest number of media cuts used in a game, though several other games including an adventure game based on The X-Files television series have matched it in the sheer number of CDs used. However, if it were to use modern day video compression codecs while keeping the same resolution, the game could probably have shipped on as little as one or two discs. On the other hand, however, the seven discs were used to highlight the seven days, during which the story takes place - the game could easily fit about five discs, even without the advanced video compression. Also, it is worth mentioning that large portions of data were repeated on each CD, to avoid disk swapping when playing the game.
The game script was about 400 pages long, four times the size of a regular movie script, and an additional 100 pages of storyboards set the style for the over 800 scenes in the game. The game required four months of filming alone and over 200 persons were involved in the production, not counting the Gregorian choir of 135 persons that was used for parts of the music in the game.
Source: Wikipedia Article
The game script was about 400 pages long, four times the size of a regular movie script, and an additional 100 pages of storyboards set the style for the over 800 scenes in the game. The game required four months of filming alone and over 200 persons were involved in the production, not counting the Gregorian choir of 135 persons that was used for parts of the music in the game.
Source: Wikipedia Article
Publisher: Sierra Online
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Phantasmagoria was one of a handful of games that inspired me to become a game developer.
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While most of the games during the FMV craze were total crap, I was surprised to find Phantasmagoria engaging to the end (and genuinely scary at times as well!).
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