There’s just no game like Sunset Visitor’s Peabody Award-winning 1000xResist. The 2024 science fiction adventure game stunned developers with its one-of-a-kind, deeply personal story that blended a dystopian vision of post-apocalyptic Earth, the terror of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pain of growing up as an immigrant whose parents fled the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests. If you heard the words “Hekki Grace” while visiting game industry events in 2025, you have creative director Remy Siu to thank.
The studio’s next game Prove You’re Human—the first to be published by Black Tabby Games’ new publishing label—is equally ambitious. According to Siu, it’s a game about an artificial intelligence who “dares” to dream that she’s human, and the player character has been hired to “put her in her place.” “It’s really leaning in on the vocabulary of CAPTCHAs,” Siu said, referring to the computer security protocol that asks users to prove they’re human by interpreting visually confusing data. The player both responds to CAPTCHAs and navigates them in the game environment.
These CAPTCHAs are made interactive by what Liu calls “Semiotic Panic.” He described it as a sensation that comes with trying to understand the multiple meanings of a word. “We have one CAPTCHA in the game that says ‘select arms,’ and there are human limbs in the frames, and there are also weapons in the frames. Both can be described as “arms.”
Prove You’re Human is also a “full-motion video” (FMV) game assembled with bits of real-life footage of actors (Siu noted that as with Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, the human actor has been scanned to also be used as a digital in-game avatar). The goal is to depict virtual spaces using real-time 3D rendering, and the “real-life” world of the game through footage.
These are the sorts of design principles Siu has been noodling on while dreaming up Prove You’re Human—a game that Black Tabby Publishing greenlit just off his paper pitch. They’re the engaging, heady ideas that, when done right, can elevate a game from a toy to play in one’s downtime to an interactive and intellectually stimulating work.
Siu was brimming with excitement to discuss these higher-level notions. But he admitted that in the office, he’s been banging his head against a technical problem that he says affects many FMV game developers: video codecs.
Supporting so many codecs has become so frustrating that Siu has a message for everyone working at game engine companies like Unity and Unreal, to platform owners like Valve, Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony: get together, and agree to support a codec that works across all platforms.
Codec support impacts the potential of full-motion video games
Video codecs are types of software used to compress and decompress digital video (the word’s slapped together from “encoder and decoder”). Because high-quality video can take up an immense amount of storage, visual media of all types is often compressed when being transported to the user. These aren’t perfect transfers. This process usually creates “lossy” video files that lose some data in the original file.
How lossy those files are depends on the codec—and how much a person will notice the loss varies on the type of hardware they’re viewing the video on. A video file encoded in H.264 will look as expected on home televisions, computer monitors, and phones when played through Blu-Ray discs or streaming services.
Those files may not look as nice when displayed on a larger screen or through a video projector. The color of an image, the detail of objects, and frame rates can all get thrown off if an image isn’t properly processed.
According to Siu, the many different platforms that Prove You’re Human can ship on all require different codecs. “I complain about this all the time in the office,” he said. “There badly needs to be a consortium where all the platforms get together…and just decide the codec that is best used in this scenario, and then have that integrated from a hardware and software perspective.”
“We have to use some nasty codecs to make sure all platforms are supported.” This can balloon the file size of a game’s build, since the game needs to include four or more different versions of that video. “There’s a lot of trade-offs. Do I use a codec that I know is better for PC, or do I pick one [lower-quality] codec that I know works on all platforms?”
“I could complain about this for days,” he said, ever-so-briefly staring off into the middle distance with existential despair. “You have hardware decoding on some PCs now on processors, so those [codecs] work really well for certain machines.”
“We had this issue on 1000xResist where somebody had a seemingly powerful processor on paper, but it was from 2011 and did not have hardware encoding, so they’re relying on software encoding for our compressed videos with a newer codec.”
He pleaded for any developers working directly on engines to “raise a flag internally” for the benefit of future games.
Siu’s codec-based headaches make for a fascinating case study in how industry professionals struggle with intense technical challenges to produce complex experiences. So if you’re a developer close to any of the game engines or platform holders—Siu and other FMV artists need your help.
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