You can now buy the original painting of the cover art for Sega’s Night Trap, the FMV title that sparked the 90s Congressional hearings on mature content in videogames.
The seller of the Night Trap painting doesn’t know what game it depicts, but we certainly do. I don’t have any way to authenticate the piece of art but all of the details seem to match up. The seller said it came from the Sega vaults and the air-brushed painting looks a bigger, more detailed version of the box art for the Sega CD copy of Night Trap. The painting is signed, and, as of press time, the winning bid is only $250. I don’t know about you, but I’m seriously considering placing a bid, and it has nothing to do with the ladyparts clearly visible in the painting. The painting is part of our gaming heritage.
It’s kind of laughable when you look at it now but Sega’s Night Trap was once thought to be poisoning our youth. The full motion video title put you in a mansion in which you try to stop several scantily clad teenage girls from being attacked by vampires. Congressional hearings in the 90s cited Mortal Kombat, Doom and Night Trap as chief evidence of the moral depravity of videogame industry. Of course, the Congressmen got the plot of Night Trap all wrong and thought that the player was attacking naked girls instead of trying to save them but that’s neither here nor there.
The hearings spawned the Entertainment Software Rating Board and the M for Mature or E for Everybody ratings we see on videogames today. Night Trap, and the nearly-nekkid young vixen depicted in this painting, began the discussion of mature content in videogames that will be finally decided by the Supreme Court on Nov. 2nd.
Owning that is worth a few hundred bucks, isn’t it? Now, I just have to explain this to the wife…
