Alex Rowe
1 min readNov 26, 2024

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Road Avenger was cool! It came originally from the early "first boom" of arcade laserdisc games in the 80's. Data East's Time Gal and Ninja Hayate are both from that period and also showed up on the Sega CD--as did most of the American Laser Games stuff.

I think the most memorable maker of home live action FMV content was probably Digital Pictures. They are perhaps most known now for all the regulatory controversy around Night Trap, but the rest of their output is far more eclectic and random. Some of it has aged about as poorly as the stuff in my above article, but it was also a more creatively bold collection of games, I think.

The only true classic of the genre that remains non-ironically celebrated is Dragon's Lair, which still gets regular releases on new platforms. Time Gal got an anniversary collection with a new HD transfer for the Switch, but sadly it never made it out of Japan. Road Avenger had an amazing port to the iPhone years ago, of all things, but that also never made its way elsewhere unfortunately. I think it was a 32-bit app so it's not easy to get running these days.

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Alex Rowe
Alex Rowe

Written by Alex Rowe

I post commentary about gaming, tech, and sometimes music. I’ve written professionally about games since 2005. Look mom, I’m using my English degree!

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