Selects: Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry
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subject to change. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh, and for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2021 episode on Night Trap, the video game. One of those overlooked pieces of pop culture history about one of those unfortunate pieces of technology that emerged during a sea change, which made it utterly out of date the moment it was born. It's a great story about a not-at-all-great video game, and I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. There's Jerry over there being silly. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Video obscure, lost video game.

How did you hear about this? This is your request. Yeah, so Night Trap is the game that we're talking about, and I heard about this from watching the Netflix documentary series High Score. Did you Netflix and chill while you were watching that? Jerk.

No, I Netflixed by myself and chilled because Emily wasn't watching this. That's a different thing. Yeah, that's a different thing. Okay. This was a documentary series on Netflix, I think six parts that covered the history of video games. Yeah. I can recommend it in one way in that it was a very light kind of fun watch.

But it is by no means comprehensive and a little goofy at times in how they handled some stuff. On Night Trap specifically or like in general? The whole series. I got you. But it was fine. And it's, you know, if you're from a certain generation and in the mood for like five plus hours of a bit of a nostalgia kick, you could do worse things. But it's not great. Have you ever seen that documentary, I think it's King of Kong? Oh, sure. Oh.

Man, that is one of the best documentaries ever made. I haven't seen it in years. I've got to see it again. It's great. I think our old buddy Josh Bierman might have written the original story that that was based on. Oh, I'm not surprised. He had something to do with that. But Night Trap I learned about because in Episode 5 they covered –

when video games started becoming violent. So Mortal Kombat obviously factored in heavily in that episode. And then this game called Night Trap. There's another game I do want to cover on a shorty, by the way, one of the first LGTBQ games.

that was really interesting and had a cool story. What the heck is it called? I can't remember now. I saw this a couple of months ago, so it's been a while. Oh, what was it? I can't remember, but it's great, and that'll make for a good shorty. Okay. But a really cool story behind it. But this is Night Trap.

which figured in as the game that kind of brought about, along with Mortal Kombat, but was really central in forming what ended up being the ratings board for video games. I mean, that's almost like understating it. Like this one game paired with Mortal Kombat basically led directly to the creation of that. Yeah, so that's really why it's notable. The other thing that made it notable, and we'll get into all this, was that it was a live...

as in they shot, you know, a little movie. Right. That you controlled. Yeah, that you sort of controlled. You could conceivably, theoretically, hypothetically control. Because it wasn't a great game, but it lives in infamy because of every, because it's a really cool story, I think, in the end. It is a pretty cool story. And the whole thing starts, actually, with a play from the, I think it was written in 1981 by a playwright named, I don't know,

John, oh, what's his last name? Krizank. Okay, I want to say. Or Krizank. Or Krizanch. Nah. You don't think so? I don't know, maybe. Well, regardless, he wrote a few episodes of Due South. What was that? It was like a show about a Canadian Mountie, I think. Oh, all right. Yeah, he wrote this, and it was, if you've been to Sleep No More in New York, you may have the play Tamora.

to thank because it is a lot like the concept of Sleep No More. As far as I know, this was the one that, like, broke that ground. I think so. And the ground they broke, it's about the painter Tamara de Lempicka, who I've never heard of. She was a Polish painter who lived in Italy in the roaring 20s when the fascists were starting to take power, and she took no guff from them. No guff. Hedonistic.

amazing art deco painter, art deco portraitist, basically. Interesting. Her work's really interesting. I didn't know anything about her. I'd never heard of her until this, too. But I looked her up. She seemed pretty cool. But this is a play about her where it is set on a multi-floor building. There are scenes taking place at the same time in multiple rooms.

And as an audience member, you can move from one room to the other, missing out on some stuff, seeing some stuff, interacting. I mean, it's sleep no more. Yeah. I don't know if they just totally ripped it off or if they said, hey, it's been, you know, 30 years. Who's going to remember Tamora? Yeah.

Right. I think it was like they broke that ground. And once you break that ground, you're going to have people following your wake. There's probably been other stuff that did this. But Sleep No More, I think, just got so much attention in New York for its run. It might still be going or maybe coming back after the pandemic. I would like to see that. I would love to see Tamara, too. But it ran in New York, but it started at a Toronto –

I think. Oh, interesting. And then some producers set it up in L.A. and that's where it had its longest run from about the mid-80s to the 90s. They had this, this just kept going and going and going. I was reading an L.A. Times article on it.

But the reason that it factors into this is because it's basically the basis for this game Night Trap where there are different things going on in different rooms and you kind of cycle toggle between the different rooms through security cameras in these rooms to see what's going on. And while you're doing that, you're missing stuff that's happening in other rooms in this game. Right.

And if you miss too much stuff, you lose. If you catch enough stuff and you do everything right and press all the correct buttons, you win. But that's basically how it applies. It's like this almost an homage to this play in video game form, but it's full motion video, meaning it's like a film or TV show that you vaguely control or put better you interact with.

Yeah, and the idea of the game, and we'll get a little bit more into the development of it in a minute, but it is basically like a party happening at this house. Young, like, co-ed types, like sorority girls maybe. Yeah. It's very sort of titillating, and that was one of the big deals. A little bit. I think that's...

I think this is overstated. Even for the time, I wouldn't say. I mean, you got married with children. It was like ten times more titillating. This is very tame, I think. Well, you know, obviously part of the controversy comes from assaults on women in the game, understandably. But again, we'll get to that. It is even tame compared to a lot of the stuff that was out at the time. But what's going on in the game is they are these –

pseudo-vampires called Augers that are the bad people in this game. And Jim Riley, who conceived of this game when he had the idea of, I think he was watching security camera, a security camera screen with all these different rooms, and it hit him like, what a great idea to

And then he saw this play and he said, we can actually do something like this. Like what if a user and a game player could go into any of these views that they want? And if they're missing something, they're missing something. It might be important. Yeah. But they're in control of the game. Right. And I mean, that's... Or the story rather. Right. But again, I think you really pointed out something important. That was the concept itself.

In the actuality, they kind of missed the mark a little bit. Yes. So with the game, it was originally designed as part of a platform called Control Vision. Yeah.

I think internally it was called Nemo, N-E-M-O. And it was being created by a company called Axalon. And Axalon was actually a Nolan... Such an 80s-like video game company name. But it was a Nolan Bushnell company. After Atari, he founded Axalon, among others. I think he created five companies at the same time in parallel using this incubator that he had created. And the developers at Axalon started...

Creating a full motion video. VHS based, we should point out. Yes, on VHS. And to get from one place to another rather than this is the breakthrough thing. This is the thing that made this work. And they did get it to work. Yeah.

But using VHS tapes, you could toggle between stuff in virtually real time without the VHS player having to rewind or fast forward, which would have really just kind of put the kibosh on the whole thing. But instead, because of the interlacing that video uses, they could actually choose what field to show at what time and basically switch between them. Which was...

I mean, it looks archaic, but it's a remarkable technology at the time to be able to do that. Right. Yeah, it's still mind-blowing. Like, I'm like, I vaguely understand how this actually works. But the fact that they actually got this to work and had a proof of concept going, enough that Hasbro was, like, sold, that was a big deal.

Yeah, and this was 85. One of their designers was the legendary Tom Crane who designed Pitfall, one of my favorite all-time games on the Atari. That's a good one. But it was a good team, and they went apparently to these Tamra performances. They were also inspired by Dragon's Lair. Do you remember that game? I do. I was never into it, but I remember watching it. It looked cool. I mean, it was an animation game where it was fully –

and used Laserdisc to project this animated footage. So it looked awesome, but it wasn't that great. The gameplay wasn't great. No, but it followed a story. There was a story that was happening, and then every once in a while there was something you had to do to move the story along as part of the game. And if you didn't do it right, the dragon turned you into ash or something like that.

that, right? Yeah, but you're not actually controlling the player, which was the big difference in these games from a regular game. You're creating a sequence. Like, you're doing this and then sitting back, and then hopefully the thing you're hoping to happen happens. Now, the thing that differentiates that from Night Trap is that there was no

coherent story. While you were off doing something that you were supposed to be doing to win the game, the story kept going on over here. So you can't follow a storyline that way. No, which is a big deal. That was a big differentiator between it and Dragonslayer. All right, well, let's take a little break here. That's a good setup, I think, and we'll come back and get more into Night Trap right after this. So you should know

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All right, so I mentioned the Augers. We need to explain a little bit about this game and what it was supposed to be and what it ended up being because in the Netflix documentary, Jim Reilly basically is like, well, the first thing they created a demo called Scene of the Crime. Yes. And it was a detective game.

And Hasbro liked it, like I said, but they had a big problem because the original idea that Jim had was to have ninjas. And he's like, it'd be great. These ninjas come in. They got throwing stars. They got weapons. And they're doing all this stuff. And you can control it. And it's super cool. And Hasbro was like, wait a minute.

We can't have what we call reproducible violence. So anything that a kid, like kids love throwing stars, and we can't show ninjas throwing throwing stars into people because a kid will go and do that. You can't have a knife because a kid can go get a knife out of a drawer. It's got to be something that a kid cannot reproduce. So they said, okay, well, how about what if the ninjas turn out to be, and I'm sorry, I know ninja is the plural of ninja. Sorry, everyone. What if they turn out to be vampires? Yes.

Right. And Hasbro said, I kind of like where you're going with this.

But kids can still, like, bite people on the neck. What else you got? I think it came the other way, though. I think that was a note from Hasbro. Oh, was it? I'm pretty sure they were like, what if they were vampires? Okay. And Jim Riley was like, okay, I guess I can do that. Okay. Biting people's necks. And then Hasbro was like, can't do that because kids can bite necks too. So what they found, and this is a great metaphor for the night trap overall. Yeah.

What the ninja originally, or what they turned out to be in the end, were loping vampires who used what looked like a Ghostbusters proton pack. Sort of, yeah. With a collar of the kind that Arnold Schwarzenegger was wearing at the beginning of Running Man. Yeah, like a clamp sort of. Yes. Yeah. On the end. And that is what they used.

is what they used to draw the blood from the hapless teens who you were in charge of protecting as Night Trap. Yeah, so what Hasbro did was they noted it to death and neutered it to death.

Because they said, he even was like, all right, I can do vampires. I can run around and hurt people. And they said, no, no, no, they can't even run around. It's too scary if they're fast. So they came up with augers who in the game they're described as vampires who had been half-bled and left to die. So they are not quite vampires, but they aren't human either. And that makes them lopey and lumbery instead of being able to move fast. Right.

And if you see them, they look like they're wearing garbage bags. They're lumbering around. They're drawing the blood using a trocar is what the name of that thing was. Oh, is it? Okay. Because it was definitely its own thing. It was its own thing. And it's funny. In the documentary, Jim Reilly was like, in the end, he said, this trocar, which...

You know, it didn't show it explicitly. It showed the clamp going around the neck and this little drill inside of a shaft start and then sort of moving and then blood being drawn. But it doesn't show, like, going in the neck or anything. No. But he said what they ended up with, he said, to me, was something far creepier than a vampire biting someone's neck. Sure. But they were like, it's not reproducible, though, so it's fine. And it's also, it's weird that Hasbro is so fixated on not including reproducible violence because apparently they saw...

night trap as a way to interest adults. Right. Because they apparently found out during focus group testing of a scene of the crime, I believe, that the parents who were in the room or were part of the focus group were saying like, I really kind of like this. It's like a TV show, but I get to control it. Because it looked like something that

They understood. Right. And so Hasbro was like, oh, okay, this has been like a kid's thing up to this point. Maybe we can finally crack into the adult market with this stuff. So it's weird that they kidified it to death if they were trying to use it to capture adults. But maybe they were like it has to go both ways in case adults don't like it. Well, I think in the documentary they make the point that Hasbro was –

I think the adults were looming out there as a possibility, but they were like, adults will never play video games. So what they really wanted until they grow up and continue to play video games, what they really were after was a teenage market, which didn't fully exist at this point. Oh, gotcha. Like an old, like 16 and 17-year-old boys, which is why they put sorority girls in like a nightie at a slumber party, was in all in an effort to sort of titillate, you know, people like me.

Right. And it worked like a charm. I had never heard of it back then. Because you just, you would play Night Trap and Netflix and chill by yourself. So they actually had to shoot this like a movie, you know. They shot it in Culver City on a soundstage. And what they would do back then for, and there were more full motion games of the time. And you would try and cast one person.

recognizable face among this cast to sort of, they called it the anchor, to like, all right, well, this has got so-and-so in it. And who did they cast for Night Trap? Dana Plato from Different Strokes. Kimberly. Kimberly, who passed away very tragically. Man, I was reading about her life. She had a hard life.

Yes. Very tragic story. Yeah, it is. It's very sad. And they actually went back and ruled her death a suicide later. Did you know that? I don't know if I knew that. Yeah. She died by suicide ultimately. Was it via drugs? Yeah, on Soma, I believe, which is like a –

generic lore tab. Interesting. Which I think you really have to try. Like, I don't think that's an accidental thing, which is probably why they did that. But it was at a family reunion in Oklahoma. Wow. Which I'm like, God, man, that's just a sad ending. And her son actually died by suicide as well later on. I think I knew that. Like, not super long ago, right? Like, yeah, in the 2010s. Yeah. Oh, man. Very sad. But, yeah, Dana Plato...

was cast as that anchor. She played Kelly, who was a secret agent who had infiltrated the house. She was undercover. Yeah, she's undercover, and she would talk right to camera and say things like, you've got to get to the other room because the Augers are after whoever, Mary. Help her. Yeah, go help her. Yeah, and we should say also, so the group of crime fighters that she was a part of was called SCAT, the Special Control Attack Team.

And then I don't know if we also said – so the people who own the house –

had invited this group of teens that included undercover Dana Plato, Kelly, which I saw admittedly on Wikipedia. This is a great example of Night Trap being Night Trap. In the credits at the end, Kelly's name is spelled with a Y on the end. In the player's – the user's hand guide – It's an I. It's an I. Yeah.

That's Night Trap for you right there. But the family that invited the kids, the teenage girls out for a weekend at their house are actually themselves vampires with teeth and everything. They're not augers. They're actually vampires. And they don't attack people. No, they brought them there for the augers. Right, right, right. To source their blood, I guess. Yeah. There is a pretty funny scene in it when, did you watch any of it?

I watched the whole thing. I watched, I think Grumpy Gamers did like a playthrough. Yeah, they have a full thing. I watched their stuff too. And yeah, I've watched a lot of Night Trap stuff. The best part is when they're explaining in the game what the augers are and the woman says, you know, it's a vampire who's been blah, blah, blah. And one of the scat guys is in the background and he goes, you've got to be jiving me. I didn't see that. Oh, it was great. It was like.

Was this game made in 1989 or 1973? It was really confusing. Yeah. Like what era it was. So you said it was shot on a soundstage in Culver City. Yeah. And it took like 30 days almost. But it had to shoot a ton of stuff. Yes, because it was like a 250-page script. Yeah.

Which is incredibly long. Wow. Ed, who helped us out with this one, he points out that a two-hour movie might have 120-page script. It's about a minute per page is the rule of thumb. This is 250 pages for a video game that was not very good. Yeah. That didn't have a lot of dialogue, but—

there were a lot of different outcomes that could happen in one, just one particular scene. Sure. So if you shot a scene, you had to shoot it multiple times to get what you wanted. Right. And then you had to shoot those multiple times, multiple times for each outcome. Yeah. And we should say that the violence in the game, like,

like we said, is suggestive for the augers. You don't really see anything. The only real violence is when the augers are dispatched of, but it is very much a Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny sort of thing. Yeah, it's the definition of cartoonish violence. Yeah, like they will be...

a Murphy bed will flip them out of a window where they'll just, whoa, like fall through a trap door. The stairs, very like one of the things if they're coming down the stairs, you can trap them by collapsing the stairs and they slide down. That's a cartoon. When they fall into the trap, like a smoke machine pours smoke out of it.

It's impossible that they weren't going for cartoonish violence. There's no way that the producers and directors were trying to be like scary in any way, shape or form. But it was shot by Don Burgess who was nominated for an Oscar less than a decade after Night Trap for Forrest Gump. So they had a real team. It wasn't just, you know, they didn't.

You know say all right. Let's go out in the valley and use some like a porn

crew. Sure. And just do this thing. Like, they had a real crew. No, and apparently Hasbro spent, depending on who you ask, at least a million dollars on this. Yeah, they said one five in the documentary. So they put some money into it. And it is not apparent on the screen. The sets look terrible. The doorways, I don't know if you noticed, but any doorway, they didn't build the door down to the floor. They built the door down to...

Like a one-foot-tall stepover. So anytime someone opens the door, they step over this, like, one-foot-tall, like, wooden set. That's awesome. I mean, the set is basically like they could have repurposed it for growing pains or family ties or something like that. Or no, they probably would have said, like, this doesn't look good enough for growing pains. Right, maybe small wonder. I think they used it for small wonder. How about that? There is no nudity, we should point out. But again—

Was never going to be kid-friendly, but also when you will get to the court stuff, when you hear how it's described by these senators. It's so over the top. It's so over the top. Yeah. Should we take a break? You don't want to take a break, do you? No, I'm excited and I'm ready to keep going. Let's take a break. All right. Well, I guess we should take a break by saying that Hasbro dumped the game. This is a nice cliffhanger. Oh, okay. Hasbro dumped the game. Wait, wait. Well, Hasbro dumped the game or not, Chuck? Okay. We'll find out right after this.

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Okay, Chuck. It's cliffhanger answer time.

Hasbro dumped the game. Oh, my gosh. Because, A, it wasn't that great. But the big reason was because CD-ROM technology started up. And they were like, we've got VHS technology. And we sunk a million five into this turkey. Yeah. Like, let's just dump it. And that should have been the end of it. Not just Night Trap, but the whole Control Vision thing. Yeah, sure. The whole platform that Night Trap was just going to be a game on. Yeah. Totally gone. CD-ROM killed it. Hasbro said, forget it.

The thing is, the people who worked on designing this game said, no, no, no, no, Hasbro's being short-sighted here. It's too good. This game in particular, maybe Control Vision is dead. Granted, the VHS thing, we're going to just forget about that. But this game is too groundbreaking to just let die. So they actually went to Hasbro and said –

How much will you sell us the footage, the code, the whole shebang for Night Trap for? And the designers actually bought the game from Hasbro and took it and founded their own company, Digital Pictures. Do you know how much they sold it for? No, I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it either. I would guess peanuts, basically. Right. They probably were like, I don't ever want to hear the words night or trap together again. Get it out of here.

But these designers, developers, directors, writers, everybody got together, formed Digital Pictures and bought it and started developing Night Trek, ironically, for CD-ROM, which is the very type of media that killed it in the first place. Yeah. By Jim's telling on the documentary, I don't know if they were already going CD-ROM or if –

It was initiated by Sega, but he got a call, he said, out of the blue from Sega, who had their gaming system at the time, Sega Genesis, and then Sega CD was an add-on system featuring this new CD-ROM technology. And he said they got a call that said, hey, you want to develop this for CD-ROM? And he probably got a good laugh out about that and the irony and then said, sure, because Night Trap must live.

Yes, this guy is dedicated to Night Trap living. If there's one thing that he wants to keep alive in the world, it is Night Trap. That's right. So they started developing it for CD-ROM. It was a step up, for sure, from what I can tell. Like, the graphics worked a lot better. The problem is, is this was 1992? 1992 was when it was finally released as a CD-ROM game, yeah. They had shot all this footage in the late 80s.

But it looked like the late 70s. There was a big difference between, say, 1988 and 1992 style-wise. It was apparent. Visually apparent and immediately apparent to anybody, say, a video game playing age. Yeah, agreed. That was a big strike against Night Trap to begin with. But probably the biggest strike of all was that it wasn't a highly playable game.

It was not a good game. And it probably would have just kind of faded away. Like it sold, I guess, enough that it qualified as like not a disaster. They at least did more than break even. But it probably would have just fallen into the dustbin of history had it not been for Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, a couple of Democrats who

who created this crusade about violent video games in, I think, 1993. Yeah. And so this very much mirrored, if you listen to our Satanic Panic episodes and the PMRC and music labeling. MPAA. MPAA. Like this was all the time when everyone was saying, hey, listen, we need to start at least labeling this stuff so parents know what their kids are doing.

And just watch a little bit. You know, there's all kinds. It was in the Netflix documentary, but there's all sorts of stuff on YouTube about these hearings where they're talking about the disgusting trash and the filth and the hyper violence. And it's like it's really not that violent. So so here's the thing.

They went after Mortal Kombat. Yeah, which was super violent. It really was. Yeah. And they went after Night Trap, which was, again, cartoonish. Not a drop of blood spills from a person's body. Right. But it had ladies in lingerie. One. Yes. Okay. I'm not defending any kind of violence against women. Oh, of course not. I'm not defending objectifying women. Uh-huh.

But Night Trap was unfairly railroaded. Oh, yeah. Because for some reason, I think probably because it was film. It was people. Like the people were controlling people. That was the difference because there were a hundred people.

Exploitation movies and horror movies by this point. Sure. 200. Yeah. 300. It was on. A thousand times worse than this. Yeah. But the fact that you were controlling, yet they never said, and they make a big point about this in the documentary, like...

You weren't doing the violence. Like the whole point of the game was to stop the augers. Yes. Like you weren't the person doing the augering. You're preventing the violence. Yeah, I guess that's why they called them augers because it was kind of like an auger. Yeah, yeah. The tool was. Yeah, that's what I guess. Well, crowbar, towbar, what was it called? Crowcar? Trocar? Trocar, yeah. Crowbar. But yeah, and they never, I mean, Jim Riley was like, they clearly never even played the game. Yeah, no. No.

They were talking about— The cover of the thing was lurid. They didn't like the cover of the box. Yeah. Yeah, they definitely hadn't played the game. It was just impossible from what they were saying happens in the game. And the big one was, like you were saying, that it—

it let players carry out sexual violence against women. No, you do the opposite of that. Right. There's violence that is carried out by the augers if you don't do it right, if you're not good at the game, if you lose. Yes, exactly. But even then, like, even in the most disturbing scene, which was the one with the lady and the knighty looking in the mirror, the augers come in behind her, and it's for sure creepy looking at first. But, you know, then they get out the coat

I can't even remember. Trocar. Trocar. And she's like, ah, ah. And it's like the worst B movie. And then they just sort of drag her over the threshold of one of those doors. I would say gently escorted through the door. Like you don't see any of the violence even. No. It's all just suggested. Right. Yes. But, again, Night Trap got lumped in with Mortal Kombat and –

And because of this, because it was very clear that the writing was on the wall, the media has a really great track record of saying, oh, God, if we don't come up with a rating system ourself, Congress is going to impose it on us. And so they came up with the ESRB, the Entertainment Software Rating Board.

That's right. It was an industry-created, self-imposed rating system that was brought about in large part because of Night Trap. Right. So Sega pulls the game eventually. It became really popular because of these senatorial hearings. Right. Which is what always happens. Yes, that's exactly right. It was starting to fade away. It would have been lost to history. And then the senators came in and were like, go buy that game. Kids wanted to play it. But Sega did eventually pull it.

Digital Pictures re-released it as their own distributor and rated it M for Mature. And that should have also been the end of it, right? Yeah.

Yeah, it should have just kind of went away, especially after Sega pulled it because it got pulled from KB Toys and Toys R Us because of kids. But like you're saying, it was still around. And then when Sega pulled it, it was like you couldn't find it anyway. That should have been the end. And then in 2014, Tom Riley, Jim Riley? Jim. Jim Riley started a Kickstarter. Yeah.

And said, we're going to resurrect Night Trap. All we need is $330,000. People are going to go crazy for this. It's going to be the greatest. It's going to be the cult following. Yeah. Yeah. It's going to be the greatest Kickstarter in the history of Kickstarters. And it was not the greatest Kickstarter ever. It was a really, really bad Kickstarter that had a lot of criticism, skepticism, and ultimately only garnered, I think, about $40,000 when they were after $330,000. And that was in 2014. Yeah.

Yeah, so that obviously was the end of Night Trap, right? That was not the end of Night Trap. The bad game that refused to die. In 2016, there was a video on YouTube that showed someone playing Night Trap on their telephone, on their smartphone. And I don't know if it was Jim Riley or one of the original devs saw it.

and was like, what is going on? You can't play Night Trap on a smartphone because it was never developed that technology unless that smartphone is playing a CD that I don't know about in the background. And they got in touch with a person. His name was Tyler Hogel.

And he was a mobile game programmer who followed, was a fan of the original, like an occult fan way. That's a deep cut at that time. Oh, super deep cut. And then basically said, I'm going to get a playable version hacked together for smartphones and did it like semi-successfully. Yeah. So he basically created this just on his own.

And then once the video surfaced and the original developers, Jim Riley and some of the others got in touch with them, they said, here, man, here's – we lost the code years ago. No one has any idea where it is. But we do have original 35-millimeter footage, which is timestamped, which is really critical because you have to wait. We'll talk about how to play it in a second.

The timing is everything between the video and the player's controls. So with the timestamps, Tyler Hogle was able to basically create a new modern 25th anniversary edition that just is actually kind of a – as far as Night Trap goes, it's the best Night Trap that there could possibly be. Yeah, that was the 2017 25th edition.

Rated T for teens this time. Still preposterous. Which is funny. And apparently, you know, you said he lost the code, but he was like, that's really easy. Like, I've got all this footage that's time stamped. Yeah. He's like, I can code this thing in my sleep, basically. He basically did. So there is a 25th edition of

of Night Trap, which apparently Nintendo has a version of. Oh, interesting. Which is kind of funny because at the time of those Senate hearings in 1993-94, Nintendo famously said they would never allow Night Trap on their platform, and they did. Yeah, and Nintendo is still sort of known as the more family-friendly unit. I think they even had a bloodless Mortal Kombat version

if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe it was a setting. Oh, I think, yes, it rings a bell. Did you see the new Mortal Kombat movie? I have seen zero Mortal Kombat movies. The new one just came out on HBO Max. Is it good? It's pretty good. I mean, did you play the game? Yeah, yeah. Do you have nostalgia for the game? Sure. Yeah, you should watch it. Okay. It's good enough. It looks good, and there's great fights, and then some nice Easter eggs. Okay. It's like the Mortal Kombat movie that should have been.

Because they made one previously that wasn't that great. Yeah, from the 90s. Yeah, but this one looks pretty cool. Okay. Okay. You rip out spines and hearts and all the good stuff. Oh, okay. I'll go check it out. And the way they do the blood, it looks just like the game. Is it rated T for teen? No, it's rated R. Okay. Because it's a movie. But we mentioned that it wasn't that great of a game because of the gameplay. One of the biggest problems was that you've got all these stories going on in these different windows, right?

but you can only kind of control one at a time. So when you're controlling one scene, uh,

Other stuff is going on, and we mentioned that makes it impossible to follow the actual story. That's a big problem. So it suffers there. Yeah. But there's also this thing where you have a red light, a green light, and a yellow light. And when these lights turn on, if it's the right color light, is when you engage the trap button. Right. And that's when the auger will flip out the window, but it has to be timed right. Yeah. And apparently while you're in these other rooms, if you want to follow the story for a couple of minutes, they will change the codes automatically.

The color codes. Right. So if you're in another room, they'll be like, the code is now green. Yes. And you don't know that because you're not watching it. So you go back and you think the code is red. Right. And so you're losing the game. Yeah, because you have to have the right security code activated to activate the traps. Right. Because this is the Martin family's security cameras. The Martin family, the vampires, are the ones who created the traps. You just hacked into it thanks to your pals at SCAT. Right. Who you're basically freelancing for. Uh-huh.

But when they change those codes, it doesn't show on screen. Right. The character tells another character to go down to the basement and change the code to orange. On a different screen that you may not be watching. Yeah, in a different room that you can't hear or see or anything like that because you're in the living room and this conversation is happening in the kitchen.

That is not a thing where it's like, oh, that's a cool little part of the gameplay. That is a maddening – yes, it's a bug, right. So that's a big part – that's a big problem with it as well. And then also you don't have to get a perfect –

You don't have to play a perfect game to win. But if any of the augers get any of the characters, you lose. If too many augers start to accumulate, you lose. And you get yelled at by the leader of SCAT. It's kind of funny. He gets really mad at you for screwing up. But to win, you're basically memorizing where to go when. And it happens, especially toward the end, really quick.

So, like, you'll, you know, set off a trap in one room and you have to go remember what room you're supposed to go to to get the trap set for the next auger. And it's not really fun. It gets really intense toward the end, but not necessarily fun. Yeah. I mean, hats off to the Grabster because he actually played this thing and tried to play it. Right.

Which was more than I was willing to do, but I did watch the walkthroughs. Did you see the Night Trap video or the lip sync video? I did not. There's actually a theme song, Night Trap. Oh, right. Look out behind you or something like that, that one of the characters does an air guitar, tennis racket, lip sync to. Wow.

dancing while the other characters have to watch and pretend like they're not mortified with embarrassment at seeing this. It's really something. Oh, man. I kept waiting in the documentary for a big reveal that, like, George Clooney was one of the augers or something like that. But Dana Plato was about as, you know, A-list as it got at the time, which was probably C-list at the time. Yeah. Yeah.

You got anything else? I got nothing else. Night Trap. Go seek it out. Night Trap. Look out behind you. That's right. If you want to know more about Night Trap, you don't even have to play it. You can just go on YouTube and watch basically the movie. And even then, it's still generally incoherent. But since I said it's still generally incoherent, it's time for Listener Mail. Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this speed reading trauma. Hey, guys, I should start with the obligatory long time first time. Finally, reason to email. And here I am. So, hello. I didn't think that a short stuff on speed reading of all things would trigger my first email. But here we go. Halfway through the show, I was flooded with a vivid memory of speed reading in my elementary school gifted class. Speaking of other scams, this is in the early 90s. My teacher would drag a transparency with a printed passage saying,

Oh, I kind of remember this. Across an overhead projector at increasing speeds, and after each pass, we would take a comprehension test.

I had no idea that this was a scam. I just thought it was a standard part of the curriculum that I wasn't very good at, and I felt terrible about it. Aw. Then again, in my Louisiana public school curriculum, we also had to get a hunting license and shoot clay pigeons as part of Louisiana history in middle school. I grew up shooting clay pigeons. Really? For school? No. Oh, okay. I would like to try that. It's cool. Skeet shooting? Yeah, that's another way to put it. Looks like fun. Just stand behind. That's the rule, right? Basically.

Anyway, thanks so much for the entertainment and education, edutainment. Especially this past year, I've often had you in my ear while I work from home to feel a little less solitary. That is from Kate Ellis Jensen in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks a lot, Kate. That was a good email. Very sorry to set off the trauma, but I'm glad that it's passed. I'm presuming it passed.

Yeah, I kind of remember that happening, but I certainly was not in a gifted class. It doesn't sound like a very fun procedure. It kind of sounds like Ralph Fiennes revealing himself to Philip Seymour Hoffman in Red Dragon. Oh, spoiler. Do you see...

Yeah. You know what I'm talking about? Sure. We talked about that recently. Yeah, the wheelchair and fire scene was very visceral. Hilarious. But also really funny if you stop and think about it. Sure. That movie just danced on the line and sometimes it went over. Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about Red Dragon, oh wait, I already said that stuff. If you want to get in touch with us like Kate did, then you can email us like Kate did at stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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