Screaming Villains has announced that its anniversary edition of the 1992 FMV game Night Trap will be headed to the Nintendo Switch later this year, just one year after it released the remastered game for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
The revival of the infamous game itself calls back to early discussions about violent and sexual content in video games since Night Trap was one of the specific games called out in a 1993 Congressional hearing on the subject, alongside titles like Mortal Kombat.
But devs well versed in the turbulent history of Night Trap will note the ‘never say never’ tagline attached to the announcement trailer as a dig at former Nintendo senior vice president Howard Lincoln’s oath from those very hearings that the once controversial game would never appear on a Nintendo platform.
At the time, Howard criticized the game and its developers in front of a government committee for doing little to prevent children from consuming the controversial violent and sexual content found within the FMV game, saying that Night Trap wouldn’t appear on a Nintendo system since it would not pass Nintendo’s own guidelines.
Night Trap first released on the Sega CD in 1992 after plans to release the game on Hasbro’s scrapped VHS-powered “Project NEMO” console fell through. The game would go on to appear on other platforms despite the congressional hearing controversy and was the subject of a failed Kickstarter campaign from co-creator Tom Zito for a high-definition remake in 2014.
The big return to the spotlight for Night Trap came in 2016 when Screaming Villains posted a video of a Night Trap Android prototype that attracted the attention of the game’s co-creators Rob Fulop and Tom Zito, eventually resulting in a partnership with Limited Run Games to release PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC versions of Night Trap: 25th Anniversary Edition. Now, with Limited Run Games at its back once again, the game is headed to Switch both physically and digitally this summer.