Reading the thread on old Nickelodeon shows (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=75430), someone mentioned Nick Arcade. For those not familiar, it was your basic kids game show with a video game theme. Players answered questions, they played various video games to score points, etc. At the end of the show, the winning team got to go “inside a video game”. To the viewers at home, thats exactly what it looked like: a video game, with the live-action kids interacting with it. Now, I’ve never been quite sure of how this was done, and it was never explained on the show. My guess is that it was a chromakey setup (you know, bluescreen/greenscreen), and that the kids had to watch themselves on a screen to determine where to move to, etc. The thing is, they actually had to move around the screen in many of the video games; therefore, they were actually moving around a real environment, somewhere offscreen. Was there a series of large blank rooms with staircases, trap-doors, etc, which the “video game” part was superimposed over? It seems like a pretty elaborate setup, but I don’t see how else they could have done it. Anyone have any thoughts?
As I remember them, most of the games were very linear. The kids did have to jump, duck, and run, but there wasn’t really any climbing or anything like that. My guess is pretty much the same as yours: the kids stood in from of a green screen watching the action on a monitor. Additionally, I think the image on the monitor self-scrolled, because I don’t remember the kids doing all that much moving.
That was so cool when I was 11 or 12, though. They got to be inside a video game! How cool is that? State of the art technology! Wow!
Looks like I accidentally posted in MPSIMS. I guess this is kinda appropriate, but if it should be in GQ, don’t hesitate to move it.
As it happens, I worked for InVideo systems on this very project. Twas exactly as you hypothesized. A existing set, OR a small wall, where the kids would run in place, depending on the game.
Most of the games were running in place, jumping, and ducking, but there was one boss-game with two levels and ladders.
The key to it was edge-detection chromakey (green-screen) technology. Basically, we hacked an amiga’s mouse port and a few other things. If the object detected with the chromakey’s edge intersected with the edge of a computerized image, it’s a trigger. One of our earlier and simplest games was Volleyball. Think of Pong. Two paddles, one on each side, and a ball in the center. We had the people on each side of a green painted wall, and a CG ball. They could watch themselves on a TV screen, and when the ball came to them, they could whack it, sending it back.
We called it Third-Person Virtual Reality.
Unfortunately, my projected upgrade, with two cameras simulating a three-d space, never went through.
Yah, the level with the two-levels and the climable…something…was the one I was specifically thinking of. I remember several were in the vein of “You’re on a magic carpet, avoid the enemies, grab the coins”, wherein the background was self-scrolling. The host on that show was hilarious…anyone remember him? He would always make up little songs to go with the background “Nick Arcade” theme, and kind of rattle them off during the game. Ahh, memories.
And remember moving Mikey across the screen? I remember yelling at the tv,screaming "No! Dont go left! You’ll lose a turn,go up up up!!!