Publisher: Vivid Interactive
Developer: Vivid Interactive
Single Player
3DO Interactive Multiplayer
Rock n roll star is vampire!
I was expecting a little more for my brush with the forgotten fifth generation console known as the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. Love Bites, not to be confused with the Judas Priest song, was obviously going to be one of the American console's titles that are more adult when I learnt of it. The figurehead who pushed the console, founder of Electronic Arts Trip Hawkins, planned this console at its 1993 release to be the future in video games, including moving away from where Nintendo and Sega had more openly cartoonish sprite games, looking towards more mature games. I presumed this would be an erotic Full Motion Video (FMV) game with some interactivity: both in how, working from CDs than cartridges, this allowed for video and live action in their software, and that they got games centred on themes that are more adult. I had presumed however, from Vivid Interactive, that there would be a semblance of a game with Love Bites where in fact, with a vampire fang fetish, this is literally a compilation of six softcore clips you can go through in less than an hour.
A little context is needed. When it was being heavily promoted, the 3DO was a huge deal at the time. Unique in how its business model was - the hardware, baring a basic template, would be licensed to multiple manufacturing companies with the focus by the creators on the software - it is utterly strange how the 3DO has vanished without a trace baring those of us who grew up with this, or as I have in my fascinating specifically with the fifth generation of games consoles, have come to it with interest. I grew up in this time with the Sega Saturn, another loser in the battle of that generation, and the Sony Playstation, which won the era. This was the time of the Nintendo 64, late to the battle but, in spite of effectively a tiny lifespan with its hardware being its own chain to drag around, having a nostalgic longevity due to the handful of games which have last a lasting impression. It was also the era of the Atari Jaguar, where Atari as a legendary games company would perish in the new 64 bit era, or when the Philips CD-I existed, to some barely a gaming console, and perished, and PC gaming would evolve and grow into the 2000s. This strange era of consoles trying to reach new technological heights, with these casualties, was found even in the United Kingdom, as I have seen a boxed Atari Jaguar in my youth in a second hand gaming store, and the 3DO did get a release here. Love Bites got a release here, with a bright red approved 18 age rating, for over at least one hundred pounds now on eBay, which is hilarious knowing how little content you get. This is more the case as a sexy video where, to be blunt about this, all you get are female models topless and very little more explicit.
The 3DO was an innovating console in many ways, as a multimedia system with no region coding, potential for online play even in the early nineties, and striving to push the technology of games. Most of its exclusive games are, however, obscure nowadays, likely never re-released and preserved beyond the original discs in emulation, and some of the best can be released on other consoles at the time. Some may know this as the console of Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (1993) only, an infamous "FMV" game known as the definition, with limited game play, of why the nineties was not as politically correct as you would presume. Vivid Interactive, creators of Love Bites, were a publisher and developer on the 3DO where, when others like the Sega Genesis and the Nintendo SNES would have censored content and avoid certain media, they had access to FMV software and decided as here to distribute softcore titillation videos.
And they are strange in the sense that, whilst a lot of FMV and interactive videos came to this console, you would automatically presume even in 1995 when Love Bites was released just having it as a video tape would make more sense. You select one of six videos, which interconnect with abrupt cuts to end them, from a set of digitally rendered windows, the one you chosen snatched away by a digital graphic bat. The FMV rendering of this era makes all the videos have digitised fuzz to them, and the only point of the control system is to pause, fast forward and reverse the footage back. That is it barring the help button providing the control system. I will say right now, for the lack of value this would have in the day, it is a bizarre little curiosity if you accept that this is a compilation of nude model shots in motion, based around vampire motifs. It is the equivalent of when the tabloid newspaper in British called The Sun, which they actually did even if kids could see them, had topless female models on Page 3, as you do not see anything here baring topless nudity and merely the suggestion of more.
With an original score by "Saint" which is proto-vapourwave, a lot of dissolves and "Edited by Faith", Love Bites, as directed by Philip Christian, is a strange fever dream of softcore with horror imagery without any gore, any true fang biting and just a horror based series of erotic photo shoots. A Philip Christian is the director of Immortal Desire (1993), a hardcore film about witchcraft and spanning three eras in time which was cut down into a 3DO version, which gives an idea of this company's work. Love Bites however is a tamer version of the promotional videos by British video distributor Redemption Video, who for the USA and UK had promo, and their own production, could get more lurid and S&M based; this is more esoteric, with the dialogue and voiceover here bordering on pretentious or just a fever dream.
It evokes Michael Nimm, a hardcore film maker from this era who used early CGI and green screen superimposition, whose work has been cut into softcore forms by Redemption Video themselves like Cashmere (1999), a work based on late fifties and early sixties Americana which I have seen in the cut down version, if here the 3DO game is less ambitious in content but with a similar haze. A little weirder and this could have been trying to steal Rinse Dream's trademarks, another hardcore filmmaker of very weird atmosphere, for the Gothic vampire tropes. This is all, if you came here for a videogame review, a tangent to enter, but with a very tame video production here, Love Bites is an absolutely strange item someone would have had to spend a bit for at the time, and still does more so now second hand, now in its digital obsoletion stranger in its content. And considering the voice over's stream of consciousness tone ("Pain in the neck / Twelve inches underneath"), the comparison to Rinse Dream (a.k.a. Stephen Sayadian) even if a poor man's equivalent is apt.
Vivid Interactive would at least try with some interactive "game", as one called Mind Teazzer (1994) has you construct the pieces of an erotic scene as a jigsaw puzzle, but we are dealing with the curious era before porn was prominent in accessibility, even if you ignore the fact hardcore was more easier to access in the United States on videotape. We are entirely based in the notion of "games" (in air quotes) here designed for a male target audienc,e with no real discussion of multiple gazes like a bisexual or gay female gaze, let alone a feminist one, though the emphasis on tame cheesecake is apt here. Also yes, across other platforms, even the NES in unofficial cartridges, you have erotic games including from Japan so this was one company. (For example, coming up researching for this review, an exclusive for the Japanese 3DO market was Twinkle Knights (1995), a strip card battler with full motion video and live action actresses). It is the strange underbelly of video gaming and the sex industry when the technology was still developing, and it may be off-putting for some, but having expected an interactive and campy softcore vampire game with this review originally, I end up having to discuss how this market even included just videos you had to choose clips with a controller pad for.
The aesthetic is my thing if ridiculous - vapor funk with "vampire bat" repeated over and over as lyrics at one point greeted me to my delight at one point. The use of public domain horror films is also a curious surprise, superimposed between the new material. Footage from F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) appears; I do not think Murnau, the legendary German filmmaker, would have expected his film, as a ghost decades after his passing, to be spliced with a topless woman posing seductively. George A. Romero would have not expected Night of the Living Dead (1968), Love Bites splicing a scene of the cast locked up in the house watching TV to another model in black and white. There is no real plot to speak of either, which is different from other Vivid Interactive work which sound they could have been straight-to-video movies of the time. There is no real theme either, baring the tone of vampires, or my belief as expressed early on in this review that someone has a fetish for fake vampire fangs. Once the production has a model as "Elsa the Vampire Slayer", and in an all-female cast, even recreates the end of Murnau's Nosferatu, which is the oddest pastiche for a film which even had Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a film which imagined Murnau (as played by John Malkovich) had actually hired a real vampire for the film played by Willem Dafoe.
That this is not an actual game does make this an obscurity whose worth to resell in the modern day a conundrum. The obvious answer is not, because even if you sold these Vivid Interactive titles as a set, and that company made a lot, they would be kitsch nowadays, more so as most are not actually games in the truest sense from what is discerned. It would be interesting to see them preserved, even if gender politics would be, obviously, a question to raise, and as previously mentioned, this being the era where internet pornography is a concept for good and for bad, which is probably a greater concern than the former. It was not a good way to introduce myself to the 3DO, wishing to experience game play, but imbibing off its FMV notoriety here is at least a pleasure even if an awkward semblance to what I had hoped for. This was a console whose history is lost to time and old second hand copies, not one preserved on Steam. It is a weird history knowing Plumbers Don't Wear Ties, just for infamy, will be one title preserved and re-released from this console, when in hoping to dig into the past, I hope to see it as a time capsule more than this. Love Bites was this even if not the right initial leap.
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