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Comment by bityard | Hacker News Reader

Our family's Packard Bell in 1996 came with a full-motion video game called Silent Steel. Coming from a 486, FMV video games sure felt like the future.

It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.

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That sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too.

Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic.

I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.

Yeah it was mayo clinic.

Also there was packard bell navigator. I still have all the shovelware cds from that machine. Other stuff was Tuneland, which was narrated by howie mandel and my little brother loved, Sports Illustrated clips, and some weird not very good reference books. Maybe there were some creation tool demos, I vaguely remember corel draw and some 3d took.

It was never clear to me if the journeyman project was a demo or a full game- I remember getting stuck pretty quickly.

Sega CD had several games like that too. "Night Trap" was the most well known, and gained some notoriety for a bit of laughably tame footage.

What about Sewer Shark?

Absolutely!

Packard Bells shipped with MegaRace which blended studio video, with main character Lance Boyle, with the game engine for a seamless experience.

that style of game came and went fairly quickly, for good reasons.

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