The History of Photography Games

This week saw the release of New Pokemon Snap for the Switch, the sequel to the beloved 1999 N64 game where you rode around on a self-driving buggy taking photographs of pocket monsters for scientific research. The simple but compelling gameplay and rich (for the time) world made it a classic, but it was far from the first game to use photography as its core mechanic. Let’s dig into the vaults to explore this unusual, niche genre.

Gekisha Boy

Released for the Japanese PC Engine in 1992, this was a curious hybrid of side-scroller and shooter. The titular boy moves from left to right against a scrolling background of objects and hazards, controlling a viewfinder reticle at the same time. By positioning the camera over unusual or dangerous things and taking photographs, he earns points to upgrade his equipment and move on to new areas. It’s goofy but fun and inspired a PS2 remake.

Paparazzi! Tales of Tinseltown

Full-motion video games were hot stuff in the mid-90s, as computers gained the ability to stream (grainy, low-resolution) video off optical storage mechanisms. This 1995 game asked you to track down 24 fake “celebrities” and get shots of them for your bosses at a gutter gossip rag. The actual camera action is pretty minimal, but it’s a fun concept for a game that could certainly be done better.

Pokemon Snap

Considered by many to be one of the best photography games ever, Nintendo pulled out all the stops with this one. Everything matters when you line up your shots—framing, composition, whether the creature is striking a cool pose or just lying around—and each trip through the world gave you the opportunity to try a different tactic, from throwing pester balls and food to grab their attention to playing a special flute to make them dance. This game captured the “rail shooter” aspect of the genre but did so many little things right to make it feel unique and special. It’s amazing we didn’t get a sequel for over two decades.

Fatal Frame

First debuting in 2001, Tecmo’s horror franchise jumped on the survival horror bandwagon but gave it a new twist. Instead of being armed with a gun, your protagonist is the owner of a special camera that lets you see malevolent spirits that would otherwise be invisible and capture them on film before they attack you. Shifting to first-person perspective to use the camera gives the game a totally intense vibe, with your limited view creating an intense feeling of panic. Multiple sequels have followed, refining and improving the formula each time.

Dead or Alive Xtreme

As much as we’d like to just gloss over Tecmo’s bizarre and pervy fighting game spin-off series, there’s no denying that it’s one of the longest-lived virtual photography simulators on the market. Taking the busty female characters from DOA and putting them into an island paradise to swim and play volleyball, you win their trust and take snaps of them in a variety of swimwear and lurid situations. 

Dead Rising

Capcom’s other zombie-centric franchise stars photojournalist Frank West as he fends off a horde of the undead over a 72-hour time span. Frank can improve his skills and stats by smashing the dead, but he can also whip out his camera and shoot snaps for “Prestige Points,” graded on a five-axis scale that includes drama, horror, and “erotica.” It’s probably the only game series ever released that explicitly rewards you for taking creepshots. Frank’s camera has appeared in a few other titles since, including Marvel Vs. Capcom 3.

Afrika

One of the most-hyped PlayStation 3 launch titles, Rhino Studios’ safari game didn’t hit stores until 2009. In it, players control a photojournalist hired to document a number of species in Africa. Traveling by car, foot, or balloon, you carefully approach your prey and line up the best possible shot to earn cash. This was primarily a showcase for the console’s cutting-edge graphics capabilities, with the actual gameplay being pretty slow-paced and monotonous.

Warco

Typically we’d omit unreleased games from a history like this, but we had to bend the rules for Warco, a project by Australian journalist Tony Maniaty in collaboration with Defiant Development. Putting a player in the shoes of a war correspondent, it aimed to show players the chaos and human cost of the shooter games they were used to. With camera in hand, you would capture footage to document events and edit together later to form a narrative. It was a deeply ambitious game that we’re sad didn’t find its way to completion.

Snapshot

As game genres grow in complexity, designers are finding new ways to interact with basic concepts. 2012’s Snapshot looks, on the surface, like a standard Super Mario-esque platformer, with a hero that has to run and jump through 2D levels to reach a goal. But the twist here involves a free-roaming Polaroid-like camera with which you can capture objects in the game world and then “develop” them in other locations to solve puzzles and more.

Firewatch

2016’s Firewatch is mostly a first-person narrative adventure game casting the player as a fire lookout in a Wyoming forest. During the game, though, you pick up a disposable camera and have the opportunity to use it to snap photos of whatever you want until you run out of film. Some players used it to document evidence and clues they found, while others snapped shots of the game’s gorgeous landscapes. At the end, the camera didn’t have any real gameplay purpose, but developers Campo Santo threw in a fascinating feature. After completing the game, you could send them $15 and they’d mail you prints of everything in the “disposable” camera’s roll.

11-11: Memories Retold 

Produced by Aardman Animations and video game studio Digixart, this fascinating and unique game set during World War I has two playable characters—a German engineer and a Canadian photographer. When controlling the shutterbug, players use his camera to document a variety of situations in ways that either tell the truth or lean towards propaganda. It’s a short game, but a rich and compelling one, with a unique visual style.

The Bradwell Conspiracy

As technology has developed, the way we think about photography has also changed. While most photo games still hew to the analog metaphor of limited film and waiting to develop, others dive right into the digital world. 2019 adventure The Bradwell Conspiracy makes you use photography as the key method of communication. After an explosion strands you underground, you have to send pictures to a guide on the surface to help you get to safety. It’s a fascinating use of the concept and a damn fine game.

Umurangi Generation

One of the most robust and interesting photography games ever released, 2020’s Umurangi Generation lets you explore a dystopian future Aotearoa as a Maori courier taking snapshots during an alien invasion. This game is all about taking the time to appreciate its rich, uniquely crafted locations, using environmental storytelling to tell the tale of global crisis, the parties responsible and the victims trying to survive in its wake.