Fox Hunt Retrospective

Over on the Capcom-Unity Blog, PR kingpin Chris Kramer has unearthed a YouTube video featuring the opening movie from Capcom's FMV tour-de-force, Fox Hunt, prompting him to reflect on what was a strange time for Capcom and for video games in general. For those too young to remember, there was a time in the mid-to-late-'90s when people thought that the future of electronic entertainment lay in digitized video of bad actors in front of green screens. Which, after typing that, I realize is pretty much what Giant Bomb does. Anyway.

Perhaps the weirdest thing about watching the Fox Hunt intro movie is that, I dunno, it doesn't really look that terrible. Last year Jeff and I spent several afternoons playing through Night Trap repeatedly, and that game makes Fox Hunt look like Citizen Frickin' Kane, so I've got some perspective here. What's a little disconcerting is the realization that 12 years after Fox Hunt, I'm not so sure that the average video game narratives are any less corny or stilted than this.

Some games prospered from it though, like Mortal Kombat. I would trade the old art style for the current anyday.

I thought that was pretty intense.

I would watch the hell out of a show called "Jungle Rabbi".

How anybody can take FMV seriously without Razor Callahan is a mystery.

Haha, that was pretty awesome. But god I bet the gameplay is ass.

What the hell did I just watch...

At least it's better than Crime Patrol... maybe.

"I'm not so sure that the average video game narratives are any less corny or stilted than this"

How about the huge budget ones? GTA4 anyone? That game is great but the plot and especially the way the game tries to justify you being a "good guy" that is "only" killing bad and sometimes not so bad people "just to get by" contains just plain awful scripting. My point is that stories in videogames are much too often made up by people who have no business writing stories, most often the same guy that is designing the game or whatever.
It`s something that needs to be adressed now when the general public is getting into games that has higher expectations of storytelling from watching mainly movies or even read a book or two before getting into games.
I think us that have played a lot of games since we where kids have just sort of come to accept the crappiness of gamestories.

Dear Ryan,

I was wondering if I could ask of you a favor. I don't really know how you could do it, but if you could please return the last 4 minutes and 37 seconds of my life back to me, I would GREATLY appreciate it.
Thank you,
MALACHE

Huh, interesting...sort of. O_o

The only thing this video achieved was make me crave a smoke. 

Man I don't remember that intro being so damn EXTREME.  Oh and LOL @ Horizontal Justice.

I also laughed at horizontal justice but what is the plot for that movie I could hardly make out a thing that was said and all I understand is that that Russan made TV shows and he's not getting credit for them so he's going to set off a nuke and the hillbilly drew a goatee on a picture of his momma.

I remember going to E3 and seeing a display for that at Capcoms booth, and thinking "what are they doing?".

The idea sounded fine for the 3DO years before, I'll admit I really enjoyed those "video" games like Sewer Shark and Burning Soldier.  Maybe because I grew up loving Dragon's Lair and Space Ace.  But on the Playstation in 1996, that was just madness.

I think the whole premise about this genre was that developrs thought graphics were getting to the point where 2D couldn't really go any further with the hardware.  Even with all the blazing processing and 32 bit color, a sprite is a sprite and the number of them on screen was already in the thousands, so they were capped out.  3D was still in it's infancy and prohibitively expensive to develop, while filming people on Ulitimatte and using the tried and true formula started by Dragon's Lair was actually cheaper. 

Ironically we're seeing this kind of game come back in a sense with games like Heavy Rain and all the QTE elements popping up.

I got bored after the first snow scenes finished.

Looks positively craptastic.

Wow, I never knew of this "game's" existence... Reminds me of Red Alert cutscenes lol... except those were bad in a good way.  This video just made me feel embarrassed to watch.

I'm plugging "The White House Shadow" into my TiVo right now.

I freakin' played Fox Hunt! I remember there being nudity? I might be wrong though.

WTF lol

I somehow missed this throughout the years.

Where's Tom Servo and Crow when you need them?

this is a game..?

I love this game, and I still have a copy for the PC. It's great.

Funny thing is that games STILL do these corny ass bad acting videos, The C&C franchise comes to mind but to be fair the cutscenes for those games have become hallmark I guess, and they are bad, but they kind of play apon that, which makes it good.

But stuff like these and night trap,phantasmasimagorra(I think anyway) and I believe Sewer Shark, those were bad, the "why am I even playing this crap?" bad.

Oh, boy. It's funny what connections can be made. I decided to watch some of Ryckert's Game Informer series "Replay" and Fox Hunt was the game of choice for this particular episode. In deciding to look up more about the game, Google's search of "Fox Hunt Giant Bomb" brought me here. I should have known! I wish you could see what's become of everything, duder.