Remastered footage of Dana Plato in Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition released 8/15/2017 on Steam
When you think of the LaserDisc game era, everybody knows Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. Around this time in the 90s on the home console scene emerged the Sega CD. And one of those type games featured Dana Plato from Different Strokes in a wild, weird “you control the movie” game called Night Trap.
If you’ve never played this game, it’s something else. I remember playing it and thinking, what’s with these skulking creatures attacking these young girls with this metal drill and draining their blood? The mood, the shadows, it was pure B-movie, shlock, but a bit unsettling.
Night Trap was reviewed mixed to poorly at the time and critics seemed to mock it more than love it (see Wikipedia collection of Night Trap reviews pictured right). Night Trap was most popular for drama surrounding its supposed uber-mature content, leading it and Mortal Kombat to be early targets for the creation of the ESRP, which rated Night Trap with a “M”ature rating.
Interestingly, when the 25th Anniversary Night Trap edition was released, this more progressive version of the ESRB re-rated the game as ‘T”een. IMO, it should have been that rating all along. And Mortal Kombat with the green blood on SNES was just another stupid thing in the 90s. Genesis was cooler because it had the blood code .. I mean, it’s just something odd in the history of console gaming.
But back to Night Trap. It was somewhat unique at the time, because there weren’t many FMV (Full Motion Video) games. For those of us that owned a Sega CD, it had a charm to it and was actually one of the few games like Dragon’s Lair, only FMV instead of animation. It made you feel like you were controlling a movie. Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace are better games, but there is something special about controlling what happens to Dana Plato’s character and her friends.
Speaking of Dana Plato, R.I.P, she died in 1999 at age 34, a mere 7 year after Night Trap was released in 1992. It was originally ruled an accidental overdose but was later turned into suicide. Plato’s acting career is pretty sparse beyond Night Trap, including some NC-17 type adult material. There’s even a softcore lesbian scene featuring Plato’s character in the clearly exploitive Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and … Jill, but interested readers in that will have to hit their favorite search engine.
The game itself is pretty B movie camp and it still calls out to me all these years later. Not because it was ever an amazing game, but one I’d like to add back to my game collection. We had it, but in a recent review of our game library it seems to have gone missing. Maybe it’s in another case or something, because I found the empty case, I don’t know, but it’s one I’d like to add back. Fortunately, it’s on Steam and that version is probably the one I’ll pick up next.
The quote in that video above from Nintendo of America’s Howard Lincoln’s testimony to congress, “Let me say, for the record, I want to state that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system.” And then in 2017, guess what we find:
lol, my how times can change – Night Trap – 25th Anniversary Edition for Nintendo Switch – Nintendo Official Site
The limited edition of Night Trap for the Nintendo Switch had a VHS tape with all 48 minutes of Night Trap cut scenes, but the Anniversary Edition still has a theater mode to watch all of that:
Night Trap – 25th Anniversary Edition also includes new features such as deleted scenes, two documentaries, the all-new Theater that allows you to watch all story-related videos uninterrupted, a new mode called Survivor that will test your skills at trapping intruders and behind the scenes production images. For the first time ever, the unreleased prototype Scene Of The Crime will be fully playable and included with Night Trap – 25th Anniversary Edition.
Description from Nintendo’s page for Night Trap 25th Anniversary Edition
According to the picture at the top of this article, it has gone on sale on Steam as low as $2.99 back in June 2020. Regular price is $14.99. If you’re a Night Trap fan, or nostalgia fan like me, this game is probably worth somewhere between these numbers. I haven’t been able to pull the trigger at 15 bucks, but I’ve done worse paying more for some games, so might already own this by the time this is published. Or … maybe a Steam sale will come along and reduce the price again and that will be when I pick it up.
In the myriad of games Sega is revisiting (see: SEGA announces plans to mine old IPs: Golden Axe, Shinobi, Streets of Rage, Crazy Taxi and more), maybe they can get somebody to look at a modern version of Night Trap? Apparently, in 2014 a sequel was part of a Kickstarter campaign that failed:
In May 2014, Night Trap designer James Riley announced that he was in talks to re-release the game with improved resolution and gameplay. That August, a Kickstarter campaign appeared for the game’s original creators, who formed a company titled Night Trap LLC. The developers said that if the campaign was successful, they would be looking into re-releasing other Digital Pictures titles. Furthermore, the company was also considering making a sequel to the original game. The Kickstarter failed, only gaining $39,843 of its $330,000 goal.
Wikipedia text previously linked above, reference: ReVamped by Night Trap, LLC — Kickstarter
What about you, friendly readers? Are you interested in Night Trap? Have you played it before? This isn’t necessarily a recommendation on my part, it’s more of “this is a curious game in history you might want to check out.” It’s good to see it’s not locked away in the past, unavailable to play unless you bought it back in the day — like we did — when it was “new” or bought via secondhand site.