“As the story evolved, we started wondering ‘How do they extract the blood?’ That’s when I came up with a Trocar, a big syringe. Up against the games of today, it’s about as extreme as a Martha Stewart gardening simulator.”
However, at the time, a scantily clad lady getting her faced sucked by a giant plunger was too much for politicians. “It is a sick, disgusting videogame,” ranted senators, pulling the title from shelves and starting the videogame rating system as we know it today.
With or without controversy, interactive movies were doomed from the outset, and big-budget titles like Wing Commander III stuttered under the weight of their own ambition. Robert Paulsen explains: “It wasn’t so much that the genre failed, but that technology failed the genre. The ideas were just too far ahead of the technology. The budgets for these games got bigger but the end result was always the same - CDs couldn’t hold the information needed to give the games good video quality and true interactivity.”
