I vaguely remember an article I read just before the launch of the Sega CD and the CD-i, that was about multimedia gaming. I didn't really understand it, since I was about 13, but looking back on what it was supposed to be, I see it was ahead of its time. I don't mean in terms of technology, but in game design.

Multimedia gaming simply means trying to incorporate a separate medium into a video game. On that note, text based games might count, since they incorporate books, but not really, since the prose is usually limited to describing your surroundings and your actions.

The first attempt to directly incorporate other media into gaming was FMV gaming. Many of you should have at least heard of Dragon's Lair and Space Ace. In reality, they were simple memorization games, but most games were simpler at the time. In the case of those games it was the technology that was the problem, as Laserdisc was too expensive and unreliable to be a game format.

The next step in FMV gaming came with the advent of the CD-ROM, which was far more suited to gaming, being a completely digital format, and costing a lot less.

In this case, the problem was game design. FMVs were simply not suited to complex gaming. For one thing, primitive compression meant the FMVs had to be extremely low resolution (Laserdisc did have a higher movie capacity than CD), but in terms of actual performance, the framerate of those games was slow.

If you don't know what I mean, watch The Angry Video Game Nerd's review of the system. It reminds me of streaming video over dial-up, only these days, even that could top those games.

Either way, most of these games were usually either Dragon's Lair knockoffs, Adventure games with FMVs instead of text or pictures (I would say Night Trap was that kind of game), or FMVs with digitized sprites overlaid to have actual interactive elements (such as Sewer Shark). Almost none made any really compelling games.

So despite the cost and effort, FMV gaming died out. Yet that wasn't the end of multimedia gaming. It was just that developers were trying too much, too soon.

The beginnings of successful multimedia games seem to have started with a game called Miracle, which used games to attempt to teach kids to learn to play the piano (even though the actual peripheral was a synthesizer keyboard). In other words, this was a music based game.

So it would be music, not FMVs, that would be the birth of true multimedia gaming.

Of course games had music, but to directly incorporate them into the gameplay was another matter. One of the earliest games to use music for non-educational purposes was Konami's Beatmania, which lead to a whole division of music games, from Guitar Freaks, to of course Dance Dance Revolution.

Guitar Freaks wasn't that successful in the US, but Harmonix, which had developed the games Frequency and Amplitude, took the idea and made Guitar Hero and then Rock Band. This was absolute multimedia gaming. For the gamers, it had the chance to of course live out the rock fantasy in the form of a video game, but there was also multimedia on the business end. Songs on those games tended to get sales boosts. These games had done more to help the music industry than years of lawsuits and DRM ever could.

Another form of music making an absolute multimedia game is Audiosurf. Sure it's basically just gliding around, collecting and avoiding blocks, but the fact is that the levels are actually altered depending on the song. You don't even need to map out the music, like in Guitar Hero. The game does it for you. Game and music are one.

So what does it mean for the future of multimedia gaming? Well that depends on the ingenuity and imagination of developers. It's unlikely that movies could be incorporated into games the way music is. It would take something else. Whatever it is, it will be interesting to see it pulled off.