That was a dreadful time to be a fan of video games. It really felt like the industry was swinging irrevocably in the direction of turning out nothing but these lame attempts at "interactive movies."

News outlets like Wired breathlessly covered these things and lots of folks from outside the game industry were pouring money into them.

These full-motion abominations were the absolute antithesis of everything I loved about video games: smart and tightly crafted design, fast and responsive action, and the fact that games in general were an alternative to the low-IQ crap turned out by (what felt like) the big bloated corpse of Hollywood and the rest of the mainstream entertainment world.

In hindsight, we know that most of those games were huge critical and fiscal failures. And that was somewhat evident to me at the time. Still, I worried: were the powers-that-be going to pour sooooooo much money into these things that they might achieve some level of respectability and actually become the new norm? There are countless examples of this happening in the entertainment world, such as the music industry's longstanding preference for marketing bland one-size-fits-all music. etc.

Games like Ripper may have been comically bad, but perhaps they were like early Hollywood movies... "quaint" efforts that paved the way for a new and emerging dominant art form that displaced some of its predecessors?

Of course, in retrospect, those fears were laughable.

Turned out those FMV games were a true evolutionary dead end, and in the long run they were probably responsible for the game industry recalibrating itself and embracing the things it actually does well.