From a Golden Age to Collapse and Revival: Periodising the FMV Genre

This paper proposes a set of periods describing the stages of development as well as the ebbs and flows of popularity of the Full Motion Video (FMV) game genre (Majewski & Knight, 2026) across the more than 40-year timespan of its existence. It is argued this periodisation is helpful for understanding the historical trajectory of the FMV genre and provides a contextual framework for the study of individual titles.

Periodisation is commonly used to describe the key stages across the lifespan of a medium, and more narrowly, the stages in the lifespan of a genre. Admittedly, due to the relative youth of videogames, their periodisation is less rigorously applied in academic contexts (e.g. Williams, 2012) than for films (Thompson & Bordwell, 2003), but various forms of periodisation can be identified in academic and popular discourse. These include technology-based periods or console generations (e.g. Wardyga, 2019), but also simply decades (e.g. Egenfeldt-Nielsen, Smith & Tosca, 2024). Several authors on game genres have employed periodisation to organise a genre’s history. Barton & Stacks (2019) build a six ‘age’ periodisation of the computer RPG genre, while Perron (2018) distinguishes five periods in his study of horror videogames. Both studies reveal significant evidence about their respective genres, making periodisation a useful and productive tool when cataloguing the evolution of a genre and delimiting research.

Employing ideas of film historiography from Thompson & Bordwell (2003), periodisation is seen as a way of organising evidence to explain the past. This present paper considers causality, influence, and key trends that define the proposed periods of the FMV game genre. The four periods proposed are: 1) the precursor period of the ‘Early FMV’ games until approximately 1992; 2) the ‘Golden Age of FMV’ from 1992 to 1997; 3) the ‘FMV Interval’ from 1998 to 2015; and 4) the ‘FMV Indie Revival & Adaptations’ period which begins in 2015 and continues to the present. The periods represent distinct stages in the genre’s evolution, particularly in terms of technologies, design techniques, popularity, and production output. Strikingly, unlike the gradual qualitative buildup of the cRPG mapped by Barton & Stacks across several stages, FMV goes from its early period immediately into a Golden Age, which both begins and ends abruptly. FMV games virtually exploded in popularity as a genre (Perron, 2003, 2014; Russell, 2012), with numerous and popular games released in short succession within this timeframe, only to rapidly dissipate after 1997 (c.f. Fahs, 2008). Almost overnight, FMV games lost popularity, projects were cancelled or vanished into obscurity, beginning the long Interval period during which relatively few FMV games were made. This period lasts until 2015, when the release of Her Story and a few other titles renewed interest in the genre especially among independent developers (Therrien, Poremba & Ray, 2020).

This periodisation of the FMV genre provides a valid way to frame the genre’s history, helping to contextualise individual FMV titles. It also paves the way for further research, as much remains to be examined around the unusually sharp period delimitations, and key events triggering the transitions between periods.