In late 1993 the United States Senate held hearings on video game violence, and one of the two prime targets was Night Trap, a 1992 full-motion video game featuring vampires who hobbled awkwardly through a house. This deep dive traces the game's bizarre origins in the mid-1980s, when Rob Fulop and James Riley at Axlon developed a VHS-based console codenamed NEMO that could read four video tracks at once. Backed by Hasbro after a demo called Scene of the Crime, the project became a 16-day, 35mm Hollywood shoot in 1987 starring Dana Plato, with a ban on reproducible violence that produced mechanical claw devices and shuffling villains.

The hosts explain why the Control-VISION console was cancelled amid a DRAM shortage, how producer Tom Zito bought the footage and waited for CD-ROM technology, and how the Sega CD release in November 1992 lande ...