Colossal Pictures
Colossal Pictures was an American animation, film and multimedia studio based in San Francisco, with a history dating back to the 1970s. The company specialised in animation, advertising, visual effects and television production, and later also in interactive multimedia and video games.
In the games industry, Colossal Pictures is primarily associated with the title Psychic Detective, an unusual cinematic adventure game published by Electronic Arts in the mid-1990s. The game was released for PC, PlayStation and 3DO and is one of the most notable examples of the period of experimentation with Full Motion Video (FMV) technology.
Psychic Detective features extensive live-action sequences with real actors. The main character is Eric Fox, a man with paranormal abilities who becomes embroiled in the investigation of a mysterious death. Thanks to his abilities, he can enter the minds of other characters and observe events from their perspective.
This mechanism allows the player to switch between different characters throughout the story and gather information that would otherwise remain hidden. The choice of whom the player follows and when can alter the amount of information obtained and influence the game’s subsequent course.
Psychic Detective was an exceptionally ambitious multimedia project for its time. It combined elements of film, adventure games, mystery thrillers and interactive storytelling, and utilised the capacity of CD-ROMs to store large amounts of live-action video footage. The PlayStation version is therefore distributed across three CDs.
However, Colossal Pictures did not focus primarily on traditional video game development. Its main area of expertise was animation and audiovisual production, and *Psychic Detective* represents one of its most notable forays into the world of interactive entertainment.
The studio was also known for its work on adverts, television animation and visual projects for other companies. It was among the pioneers in combining traditional animation, computer graphics and new digital technologies.
In the history of gaming, Colossal Pictures is of particular interest thanks to Psychic Detective, which today stands as a testament to the experimental era of FMV games in the 1990s and is one of the more unusual titles on the first PlayStation.
