Full-motion video was a big step forward for games back in the ’90s, and game developers embraced the new technology wholeheartedly … by creating a voyeuristic horror film ripoff about scantily-clad teenage girls being attacked by vampires.
Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition is coming to the Nintendo Switch this Summer both digitally and physically!https://t.co/j1ZxEqvV8L pic.twitter.com/ZbsXKWvkn1
— Limited Run Games (@LimitedRunGames) April 20, 2018
Fast-forward 25 years, and publisher Limited Run games announced on Twitter that the anniversary edition of Night Trap will be available on the Nintendo Switch later this year, despite Nintendo’s vow decades ago that the game would never appear on a Nintendo system. The game is currently available on PlayStation 4 and on PC, and rumors of a sequel have floated around for some time.
Starring Dana Plato of Different Strokes fame and marketed as an interactive movie, Night Trap was released for the Sega CD system in 1992. As a member of the Sega Control Attack Team (or S.C.A.T.), your job was to monitor activities in the house via surveillance cameras and set traps for the various evil vampires trying to invade the house and terrorize the occupants. The game featured varying events depending on which girls you managed to save.
Night Trap was actually filmed five years before its release and created for an unreleased console, but in the 16-bit era, there was simply no way to fit all that data onto a cartridge. It reportedly cost some $1.5 million to make — an unheard-of sum by the standards of the day.
Although incredibly tame by today’s standards, the game caused an uproar among parents and politicians concerned about what these new-fangled video games were doing to the impressionable minds of children. Night Trap, along with Mortal Kombat, prompted Senate hearings that eventually led to the creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB).
Nintendo did demand that Acclaim remove the infamous fatalities from the Super NES version of Mortal Kombat. Sega, which had always marketed itself as the “edgier” company during the console wars of the ‘90s, released an unexpurgated version for Genesis. Nintendo capitulated and Mortal Kombat 2 was released on Super NES, fatalities and all.
“In the past year, some very violent and offensive games have reached the market, and of course I’m speaking about Mortal Kombat and Night Trap,” Nintendo chairman Howard Lincoln told the Senate committee in 1993. “And let me say that for the record, I want to state that Night Trap will never appear on a Nintendo system. Obviously it would not pass our guidelines. This game … which promotes violence against women, simply has no place in our society.”
Night Trap will be available this summer as a digital release from the Switch Shop, as well as a physical copy.
Imagine tapping a Zelda icon on your iPhone and jumping straight into Hyrule. A new open-source project called nxnative makes that possible by repackaging Switch games you’ve bought into apps for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with no emulator in the middle.
Why does this run so well on Apple devices?
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”