Digital Pictures was an American video game developer founded in 1991 by Lode Coen, Mark Klein, Ken Melville, Anne Flaut-Reed, Kevin Welsh and Tom Zito. The six founders met in the late 1980s while working at Isix, a subsidiary of the toy manufacture Hasbro.

The Isix team was developing a video game system codenamed NEMO that used VHS tapes rather than cartridges for its media. The VHS tapes allowed games to feature live action and interactive full motion video. In conjunction with the prototype console they also developed a software prototype called Scene of The Crime, which led to the production of two full-length games, Night Trap and Sewer Shark.

Development for NEMO began in 1985 and was supported by Nolan Bushnell’s company Axlon which included Apple Computer’s co-founder Steve Wozniak. They created a prototype using a modified ColecoVision console to combine interactive images with a video stream transmitted through a cable. Hasbro backed the prototype agreeing to invest $7 million in exchange for the video game rights to the technology.

Three demo games were created by mid 1986 and the NEMO was given the name Control-Vision. After the development of the three demos, an interactive mystery, a baseball game and interactive music video the development team received approval from the executives at Hasbro to continue forward with the project and create two full games for the system.

In 1987 the Isix team started development on the interactive movie Night Trap and Sewer Shark. After filming Sewer Shark at a cost of $3 million Hasbro announced on October 19, 1988 that it has decided to pull the plug on its secretive $26 million video game console as it would be too expensive for most families to purchase.

After Hasbro decided not to move forward with the Control-Vision, they proceeded with closing its Isix subsidiary. The key members of the Isix team founded Digital Pictures in 1991 and purchased the software assets from Hasbro. The newly formed Digital Pictured turned their attention to Sega’s upcoming add-on peripheral for the Sega Genesis / Mega Drive the Sega CD / Mega-CD as the optical disc media would be better suited for their game than cartridge-based media.

In converting Night Trap and Sewer Shark to the Sega CD platform, Digital Pictures modified the software by having the console read all four tracks worth of data as a single continuous stream to minimize seek times on the CD. In order to work within the systems limitation, the development team had to create a custom video codec to highly compress the data streams so they could be read in real-time from the CD based media.

Both games were very successful and helped propel the Sega CD add-on, so much so that Sega negotiated a deal with Digital Pictures to bundle Sewer Shark with the Sega CD in North America. The mature-themed content found in Night Trap was the source of controversy which seem to just enhance its popularity.

Digital Pictures continued to create other full motion video-based titles primarily for the Sega CD and are regarded as a pioneer of the interactive movie genre. However, in the mid 1990s the demand for full motion video games dropped substantially and Digital Pictures ended up closing in 1996.