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Spy on a vampiric slumber party in the browser port of 'Night Trap'
There's a Night Trap fan group on Facebook. This isn't too surprising, considering Night Trap's storied past in the video game industry and its unabashed, nostalgic charm. It's a full-motion video game (FMV) -- meaning it stars real people, just like a live-action movie -- released in 1992 for the Sega CD and later ported to Sega 32X, 3DO, MS-DOS and Mac OS. Night Trap follows a group of young women at a slumber party that turns deadly when vampiric creatures show up, looking to feast on the girls' blood. Players, viewing the party via hidden cameras, attempt to trap the evil beasties and save the girls. For this unconventional premise, Night Trap holds a permanent seat in video game history alongside Doom and Mortal Kombat: These titles were partly responsible for the creation of the ESRB rating system, following a series of congressional hearings on "violent" video games in the early 1990s. Concerned groups accused Night Trap of encouraging kidnapping and featuring ultra-violent content, although compared with many modern, award-winning games, it's a truly tame experience. So, of course there's a Night Trap fan group on Facebook. It's precisely this Facebook group that Dave Voyles, a technical evangelist at Microsoft, turned to when he was seeking inspiration for his next programming project a few weeks back. Now, Voyles is knee-deep in Night Trap's code, reworking it to run in any browser for a new generation of fans to enjoy.
