Maximum Surge

The game is set in the 21st century. The player character, an unnamed soldier, is hired to protect the Brokaw Territory and stop Drexel (Walter Koenig), who is trying to replace humanity with evil cyborg beings which transfer information by means of umbilical data cords. It is up to the player character to destroy his bases and ultimately face him in the final battle. Alongside him in the fight are a mercenary named Jo (Yasmine Bleeth), a computer hacker, and the resistance commander.

Maximum Surge differed from previous Digital Pictures games in that the gameplay graphics were not crafted from standalone full motion video, but from bits of full motion video superimposed upon traditional computer graphic backgrounds. This allowed the gameplay to break from the on-rails format typical of FMV-based games, giving the player the ability to look from left to right to a limited extent in order to shoot enemies who appear outside the player's initial range of vision. Digital Pictures president Tom Zito commented that "Maximum Surge is really the first game in which we used the camera as a tool rather than as a recording device. Just as if you were going to create Doom, you would go to a SGI workstation and create all the pieces of Doom as computer graphics, in Maximum Surge we have taken a video camera and done exactly the same thing."

The video footage was filmed in Hollywood and Long Beach, California. Yasmine Bleeth commented "Maximum Surge was a completely new experience for me. It was great to get tough and gritty. The whole concept of CD-ROM is still mind-blowing to me."