Temujin: The Capricorn Collection Preview

When full motion video first muscled its way onto the PC gaming scene three or four years ago, many analysts viewed it as the "magic bullet" that would move computer games from a niche industry into the big leagues of show biz. "Interactive movie" and "multimedia game" became overnight buzzwords, and games based almost entirely on full motion video, or FMV, were hastily shoved out the door and onto the shelves of retail stores.

The prevailing sentiment seemed to be, "If it looks like TV, it'll be as popular as TV." But somewhere along the line a lot of developers forgot that they were making computer games, not TV shows, and that the people buying them were often searching for an alternative to television. And when those people found themselves not actually playing a game but instead clicking on hot spots or icons and seeing the same sort of stuff they'd turned to computer games to avoid in the first place, they weren't a happy lot. Before it had started, the FMV craze died a quick death.

Well, almost. When gaming newcomer SouthPeak Interactive - a subsidiary company of the SAS Institute, the world's largest privately owned software company - started work on its debut game Temujin: The Capricorn Collection some 18 months ago, the decision was made to make video the basis of the game engine. The reason? Because the Temujin design team felt that it wasn't FMV that made games dull, it was the way it was being implemented. "We saw that the reason people were starting to brush off the FMV paradigm was the boredom with basically loading what amounted to a movie onto your PC and having brief interludes of distraction - loosely called gameplay - in between the video clips," says David Johnston, the manager of title engineering at SouthPeak Interactive.

But the visual quality of FMV appealed to the Temujin team; as John Toebes, the manager of SouthPeak's Video Reality department, put it, "Our decision to enter this realm was driven by the fact that people have been pushing for more quality and realism in games. This can be clearly seen in the big demand for 3-D accelerators." So for SouthPeak, the question was simple: How do you make FMV truly interactive?

The answer the company arrived at was Video Reality, a trademarked technology that uses digitized video but which allows the gamer to interact with the environment as the video is being "played back." To put it simply, you move through a video-based game world with the ability to stop, look around, and interact with the environment at any time. While Video Reality doesn't let you cover every single square inch of the game world as you do in a first-person shooter, it's a huge step from the "click a button, watch a movie" format of past FMV games.

"With Video Reality, players are no longer passive observers, but active participants," says Johnston. "They'll still receive exposition on the story and gameplay through dramatic scenes, but they'll encounter these scenes while actually wandering through the game's world - not just by clicking on the right area of the screen and being ripped completely out of context into video discourse. In a nutshell, we gave them a way to actually be a part of the FMV, instead of being limited to 'witnessing' it."

The world that you will explore in Temujin is the fictional Stevenson Museum, which has an exhibition of treasures that belonged to the Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan (Temujin was Khan's actual name; Genghis Khan roughly translates into "Universal Ruler" or "Master of the Universe"). When the game opens, you have been drugged and don't even remember your identity - but as your memory returns you begin to unravel a conspiracy that's using powerful ancient magic to subvert the President of the United States and taking control of the entire planet. The key to the magic lies somewhere in the Capricorn Collection - the collection of Temujin's treasures.

To ensure the plot of Temujin wouldn't take a back seat to the technology, SouthPeak turned to Lee Sheldon, who's been nominated twice for the Edgar Award for mystery writing and once by the Writers Guild of America for outstanding achievement in television writing. Besides writing and/or producing such television shows as Star Trek: The Next Generation, Cagney and Lacey, and Simon & Simon, Sheldon also wrote and codesigned .

One of the complaints about past video-based adventures is the lack of traditional puzzles, but, according to Sheldon, that won't be the case with Temujin. "The structure of the game is episodic, but nonlinear within each episode," he says, "and there's a unique blend of two types of puzzles in the game. There are traditional adventure game puzzles the player must solve for immediate information, to acquire other useful items or to get past obstacles. Then there's another layer of meta-game puzzles based on the conflict between good and evil magic; the interface itself will provide ongoing tools to help collect and solve these meta-game puzzles that will ultimately reveal the underlying mysteries in the game." And while there are roughly 90 minutes of dramatic footage in the game, don't think this is a "click and watch" game - those 90 minutes are spread over roughly 150 sequences, not all of which are necessary to complete the game.

Will SouthPeak be able to redeem FMV's sullied name? We won't know for sure until Temujin ships this September, but if you'd like to get a taste of how Video Reality looks you can visit and request a free Temujin "Tour" CD. It doesn't include the game's inventory system and basically just lets you roam through a small portion of the Stevenson Museum, but it does give you a good idea of what to expect in the final product.