Full-motion video in the context of "Cutscenes"

Adventure games are a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story, driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, such as literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of genres. Most adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since the emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult. Colossal Cave Adventure is identified by Rick Adams as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, Monkey Island, Syberia, and Myst.

Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from the first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements.

Night Trap is a 1992 interactive movie developed by Digital Pictures and published by Sega for the Sega CD. Presented primarily through full-motion video (FMV), Night Trap has the player observe a group of teenage girls having a sleepover at a house which, unbeknownst to them, is infested with vampires. The player watches live surveillance footage and triggers traps to capture anyone endangering the girls. The player can switch between different cameras to keep watch over the girls and eavesdrop on conversations to follow the story and listen for clues.

The Night Trap concept originated in a 1986 prototype game developed by Axlon to demonstrate their Control-Vision game console to Hasbro. The system used VHS tape technology to present film-like gaming experiences. With the system picked up by Hasbro, the production of Night Trap commenced. The video footage was recorded in 1987, followed by six months of editing and game programming. Hasbro suddenly canceled the Control-Vision in 1989, which prompted the game's executive producer, Tom Zito, to purchase the film footage and found Digital Pictures to complete Night Trap. The game was eventually released in November 1992 as the first interactive movie on the Sega CD, becoming a North American launch title for the add-on.