Digital Pictures was a video game company founded in 1991 by Tom Zito and Ken Melville, and collapsed by the end of the decade. Today they are most well-known for their library of Interactive Movie games released on the Sega CD.
Whilst their games make up a sizable amount of the Sega CD's library, several of them were ported over to the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer and Sega Saturn. However, their first efforts were originally designed in the 80's for Hasbro's abandoned NEMO console; the assets would later be dug up and used for their Sega CD games.
Starting in the 2010s, the company Screaming Villains has started producing high-definitions remasters of Digital Pictures' output, allowing for much better color definition and framerate than what was possible upon their initial release.
Games developed include:
- Corpse Killer (remastered in 2019)
- Night Trap (remastered in 2017)
- Sewer Shark
- Make My Video series
- Ground Zero: Texas (remastered in 2021)
- Slam City
- Double Switch (remastered in 2018)
- Quarterback Attack
- Supreme Warrior
- Kids on Site (remastered in 2022)
- Midnight Raiders
- Prize Fighter
- Citizen X (unfinished)
Tropes applied to the company and their output:
- Kaizo Trap: They're fond of this one. Even just sitting and watching the intro cutscenes will often deny you 100% Completion, if they don't give you a Nonstandard Game Over outright.
- Magical Security Cam: Night Trap, Double Switch, and Ground Zero Texas all fall victim to this, as their gameplay is specifically stated to be tied into the camera view the player is given, and yet they pan and rotate in ways that shouldn't be possible for stationary recording. Hilariously, their prototype game, Scene of the Crime
, was an aversion despite having a similar premise. - The New Rock & Roll: Night Trap attracted controversy alongside Mortal Kombat (1992) and Doom for supposedly promoting adult content and graphic violence to minors, eventually forming the ESRB.
- Rail Shooter: Corpse Killer and Sewer Shark.
- Real Time: A staple of the company's output whenever it tasks you with monitoring multiple locations at once. All the available video feeds in a given game are happening simultaneously and you'll have to pick and choose what to watch, often sacrificing learning the plot if you want to get a perfect score.
- Shout-Out: Most if not all of their games (at least for the Sega CD) had a track that when played on a regular CD player (or the Sega CD's CD player) was apparently one to The Beatles combined with Subliminal Seduction note :(phone rings)"Good afternoon, Digital Pictures..enin rebmun ,enin rebmun ,enin rebmuN"
- Stock Footage: The footage for Night Trap was filmed in the 80's, but was stored in a vault until being used for the Sega CD.
- Public domain stock footage is used extensively in Make My Video, and Sewer Shark and Ground Zero Texas recycle enemy encounters and scenery frequently.
- A 2003 TV movie called Maximum Surge (also known on video as Game Over) used about 35 minutes of stock footage from no less than four Digital Pictures games.
- Totally Radical: Especially Make My Video.
