Approximately one million years ago (but actually just a smidgen over a decade), Capcom USA was given the green light to start up game development in the US for the first time (I don’t count Yo! Noid or California Raisins). This was pre-Maximo, mind, back in the dim and dusty days when the PSOne was still an unreleased glimmer in Ken Kutaragi’s eye. The best ideas we could come up with on these fair shores were Werewolf: The Apocalypse (an isometric action game that could have been cool if given a chance) and – urgh! – Major Damage (character designs by Glen Schofield , who is now a Big Deal at EA, making much better games). But before those two projects were canned, the first project that Capcom Digital Studios shipped was a “game” called Fox Hunt , which went on to become the last Full Motion Video game ever released. With good reason. Read on to learn more about this game that you hopefully don’t remember.

Fox Hunt was a sprawling, epic disaster almost from the get-go, replete with crazy Hollywood producers with no experience in games (and, truth be told, little Hollywood experience) and a stunning cast of Z-grade talent including a guy who eventually went on to be in 2 episodes of  “ER,” a woman with an awesome name (Robia LaMorte!) who was in a few episodes of “Buffy” and, curiously, Rob Lowe . Wrap this whole package up in incredibly grainy video compression and controls that were… inaccurate to say the least and you can see why this particular Capcom project is probably not really sticking out in your mind. Fortunately, Gamespot will always remember for us.

The game was originally intended to ship on PSOne, Saturn (!), PC and Mac, but lack of enthusiasm on the retail side ended up knocking back the SKUs to just PSOne and PC. In fact, the head of sales at Capcom at the time told me “Congratulations, Kramer, PR is my biggest sales client for the PC version of Fox Hunt.” Unfortunately, we did not get a commemorative plaque or set of steak knives for this accomplishment.

On the positive side (well, for me, at least), we got to throw a pretty kick-ass launch party at the House of Blues in Hollywood, replete with two smokin’ hot Playboy bunnies, a very friendly Lewis Arquette, George Lazenby (I think) and even Capcom’s own founder/CEO, Kenzo Tsujimoto-san. Regrettably, Gary Coleman was unable to attend, as I believe he was busy getting mugged in front of an arcade or something. Bonus: The younger dudes in marketing drank lots of secret Jager shots at the bar when the grown ups weren’t looking, which resulted in us later nearly being kicked out of fancy-pants Hollywood dining spot The Ivy while giving Robert Johnson the stones to try to make friends with Tony Curtis from across a nightclub dancefloor. PR later came up with a pretty cool press mailer for the game; I think we put a whole spy kit together in an attaché case. Capcom also teamed up with Spy Magazine to do a killer soundtrack, which I still own and still occasionally listen to, and I always thought that the logo and packaging were pretty darn good for the time.

The anecdotal blame for Fox Hunt is usually (if anyone remembers or cares, that is) laid at the feet of Greg Ballard, who was president of Capcom Entertainment when the game was published. Greg was blasted by the media with the blame laser because he had just come to Capcom after spending time at Digital Pictures , a company dedicated to – get this – making Full Motion Video games. Only FMV games. For reals. Truth was Greg was not so wild about Fox Hunt after working on awesome games like Corpse Killer and C&C Music Factory: Make My Video, but the “game” had actually been greenlit and production started months before he even arrived at Capcom.

We later found out that the producers of the “game” had recut Fox Hunt into a movie and released it on video on Europe. A quick check of IMDB shows that it even came out on DVD in Italy in 2005. Wacky!