TITLE
Finding NEMO: The Story Behind Hasbro’s ‘Nintendo-Killer’
AUTHOR
Adam Redsell
PUBLICATION
IGN
YEAR
2013
ARTICLE TYPE
Article
FROM THE ARTICLE
You’d be hard-pressed to find a gamer who hasn’t heard of Night Trap. The Sega CD game was a lightning rod for controversy in the 90s, eclipsing even Mortal Kombat on the moral panic scale. But few remember Project NEMO, the interactive movie-based console that spawned it. NEMO never saw the light of day, but it attracted some of the video game industry’s brightest minds.
Minds like David Crane, who co-founded Activision, and designed and programmed Pitfall! and Little Computer People; Rob Fulop, who programmed Night Driver, Missile Command and Space Invaders for the Atari 2600; and Ken Melville, who went on to design and write some of the biggest titles in interactive full motion video games. This was a dream team of video game creators working with Hasbro, the largest toy maker in the world. So what stopped them from shipping a console? Could they have changed the course of an industry with their foray into interactive FMV?I interviewed David Crane, Ken Melville, and Rob Fulop to find out what happened to Project NEMO – later dubbed the Control-Vision – and where they thought their work was taking them. This is the story of the birth, life, and death of Project NEMO as recounted by these three men. It is a story filled with quirky characters, creative conflicts, and eleventh-hour plot twists.
COMPANIES MENTIONED
Hasbro
GAMES MENTIONED
Night Trap
Sewer Shark
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Nolan Bushnell
David Crane
Rob Fulop
Stephen Hassenfeld
Ken Melville
Tom Zito
PLATFORMS MENTIONED
Project NEMO
TOPICS MENTIONED
Canceled Games