10 TERRIBLE Video Games (That Revolutionised The Industry)
9. Night Trap Helped Birth The ESRB
Though there's a sure charm to the FMV games of yore, let's be honest - the vast majority of them were absolute rubbish, and the bewilderingly legendary Night Trap is no exception.
If the concept, of rescuing a slumber party of scantily-clad ladies from a fleet of vampires, sounds like a ton of fun, the shockingly tedious execution quickly makes Night Trap more of a chore than anything.
The programmatic gameplay, where success relies mostly on rote memorisation of enemy routes, quickly wears out its welcome, and so the game endures today mostly as a campy curio - albeit enough to receive a 25th Anniversary Edition re-release in 2017.
Yet the tendrils of Night Trap's legacy reach much further than that - along with Doom and Mortal Kombat, it was at the forefront of the 1993 United States Senate hearings on video games, which in turn led to the creation of the monolithic Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).
Beyond regulating which games could be sold to who, the ESRB was instrumental in distinguishing video games from toys in the public sphere, all while debates raged about the potential for "objectionable" content to have undue influence on children's growing brains.
Were it not for Night Trap, Doom, and Mortal Kombat stirring the pot, it's safe to say that the public, non-gamer perception of the medium - as a mere kids' play-thing - would've been woefully ignorant for considerably longer.