The FMV game: A genre that never existed, but refuses to die

Full-motion video (FMV) is a technique only rarely used in the games of today. The technique involves recording video with live actors, which is then streamed during the game in the form of passive or interactive cutscenes (cf. Howells, 2002; Klevjer 2008; Perron and Arsenault 2008; Therrien, Poremba, and Ray 2020). Although it could be seen as simply another way to render cutscenes, FMV differs both in its application by developers and in its reception by players from other pre-rendered cutscenes that use either hand-animated images or computer-generated imagery (CGI). In turn, all three forms, but again especially FMV, differ sharply from the real-time-rendered cutscenes so commonly seen in today’s games. In terms of its application, FMV in the 1980s and 1990s arguably served to offset the high costs of hand-animated or CGI scenes and the poor visual quality of the graphics generated in real time directly in the game engine (cf. Howells, 2002; Majewski and Knight 2017).