Our sister site Engadget has a fun interview with a programmer who is currently porting live action video game Night Trap to the browser using HTML5. Why? Because Night Trap, one of the first video games to use live-action video interspersed with game play, is awesome.
The creator, Dave Voyles, is a technical evangelist at Microsoft and he wrote that he relished the challenge of recreating a classic game for a wider audience.
The browser can finally handle it. Even a few years ago, this wasn’t possible in the browser. I do a lot of game and web development, and wanted to showcase what the browser can actually do. With this, I can dynamically adjust the quality of the video, based on your device speed and internet connection. It’s also platform-agnostic.
It’s a game with a lot of history. Filmed in 1987 and released in 1992, there are a number of gamers growing up today who have never played this out-of-print game, nonetheless even heard of it. Night Trap is a large reason why we have the ESRB rating today, so this is kind of my way of bringing the past back to the limelight for the next generation of gamers.
It’s a challenge. The fact that Digital Pictures was able to develop this in 1992 with, as far as I could find, only one programmer, is amazing. The programming language they had to use back then (68K Assembly) is far more difficult than what we had today, so I wanted to see if it was actually possible to completely rewrite something written in another language, without seeing any of the code.
There’s no clear timeline for the project but Voyles has had a lot of fun rebuilding the game from the snippets of video found on the Internet. Given that the game is the reason we now have ESRB ratings, the violence and the camp are two major reasons he wanted to tackle the project and it seems to be going swimmingly.
Can’t wait until you can save scantily clad ladies from vampires? Why not play a little Ennuigi while you wait. Until then, stay out of the bathroom.