Interactive film


An interactive film, also known as movie game, is a video game that presents its gameplay in a cinematic, scripted manner, often through the use of full-motion video of either animated or live-action footage.

Design

This genre came about with the invention of laserdiscs and laserdisc players, the first nonlinear or random access video play devices. The fact that a laserdisc player could jump to and play any chapter instantaneously meant that games with branching plotlines could be constructed from out-of-order video chapters, in much the same way as Choose Your Own Adventure books are constructed from out-of-order pages.
Thus, interactive movies were animated or filmed with real actors like movies and followed a main storyline. Alternative scenes were filmed to be triggered after wrong actions of the player.
A popular example of a commercial interactive movie was the 1983 arcade game Dragon's Lair, featuring a full motion video cartoon by ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, where the player controlled some of the moves of the main character. When in danger, the player was to decide which move, action, or combination to choose. If they chose the wrong move, they would see a 'lose a life' scene, until they found the correct one which would allow them to see the rest of the story. There was only one possible successful storyline in Dragon's Lair; the only activity the user had was to choose or guess the move the designers intended them to make. Despite the lack of choice, Dragon's Lair was very popular.
The hardware for these games consisted of a laserdisc player linked to a processor configured with interface software that assigned a jump-to-chapter function to each of the controller buttons at each decision point. Much as a Choose Your Own Adventure book might say "If you turn left, go to page 7. If you turn right, go to page 8", the controller for Dragon's Lair or Cliff Hanger was programmed to go to the next chapter in the successful story if a player activated the correct control, or to go to the death chapter if they activated the wrong one. Because laserdisc players of the day were not robust enough to handle the wear and tear of constant arcade use, they required frequent replacement. The laserdiscs that contained the footage were ordinary laserdiscs with nothing special about them save for the order of their chapters and, if removed from the arcade console, would play their video on standard, non-interactive laserdisc players.
Later advances in technology allowed interactive movies to overlay multiple fields of FMV, called "vites", in much the same way as polygonal models and sprites are overlaid on top of backgrounds in traditional video game graphics.

History

The first example of interactive cinema was Kinoautomat, which was written and directed by Radúz Činčera. This movie was first screened at Expo '67 in Montreal. This film was produced before the invention of the laserdisc or similar technology, so a live moderator appeared on stage at certain points to ask the audience to choose between two scenes. The chosen scene would play following an audience vote.
The first interactive movie game was Nintendo's Wild Gunman, a 1974 electro-mechanical arcade game that used film reel projection to display live-action full-motion video footage of Wild West gunslingers. In the 1970s, Kasco released The Driver, a hit electro-mechanical arcade game with live-action FMV, projecting car footage filmed by Toei.
An early attempt to combine random access video with computer games was Rollercoaster, written in BASIC for the Apple II by David Lubar for David H. Ahl, editor of Creative Computing. This was a text adventure that could trigger a laserdisc player to play portions of the feature film Rollercoaster. The program was conceived and written in 1981, and it was published in the January 1982 issue of Creative Computing along with an article by Lubar detailing its creation, an article by Ahl claiming that Rollercoaster was the first video/computer game hybrid and proposing a theory of video/computer interactivity, and other articles reviewing hardware necessary to run the game and do further experiments.
The first arcade laserdisc video game was Sega's Astron Belt, an early third-person space combat rail shooter featuring live-action full-motion video footage over which the player/enemy ships and laser fire are superimposed. Developed in 1982, it was unveiled at the 1982 AMOA show in Chicago and released the following year. However, the game that popularized the genre in the United States was Dragon's Lair, animated by Don Bluth and released by Cinematronics shortly after. Around the same time, the laserdisc games Bega's Battle and Cliff Hanger were also released.
Several laserdisc games added their own innovations to the genre. Bega's Battle, released by Data East in 1983, introduced "branching paths", in which there were multiple "correct moves" at certain points in the animation, and the move the player chose would affect the order of later scenes. Space Ace, another Don Bluth animated game released by Cinematronics the following year, also featured a similar branching formula. In 1984, Super Don Quix-ote, Esh's Aurunmilla and Ninja Hayate overlaid crude computer graphics on top of the animation to indicate the correct input to the player, which the 1985 games Time Gal and Road Blaster also featured.
Because Dragon's Lair and Space Ace were immensely popular, they spawned a deluge of sequels and similar laserdisc games, despite the astronomical cost of the animation. To cut costs, several companies simply hacked together scenes from anime that were obscure to American audiences of the day. One such early example was Stern's Cliff Hanger, a 1983 game released around the same time which used footage from the Lupin III movies Castle of Cagliostro and Mystery of Mamo. Another example released around that time was Bega's Battle, which used footage from Harmagedon, though it used a different approach, introducing a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Years later, this would become the standard approach to video game storytelling. Bega's Battle also featured a branching storyline. Time Gal added a time-stopping feature, where specific moments in the game involve Reika stopping time; during these moments, players are presented with a list of three options and have seven seconds to choose the one which will save the character.
In 1987, the game Night Trap, featuring full-motion video, was created for Hasbro's Control-Vision video game system, which used VHS tapes. When Hasbro discontinued production of Control-Vision, the footage was placed into archive until it was purchased in 1991 by the founders of Digital Pictures. Digital Pictures ported Night Trap to the Sega CD platform, releasing it in 1992.
In 1988, Epyx announced three VCR games including one based on its video game California Games. They combined videotape footage with a board game. In the late 1980s, American Laser Games started to produce a wide variety of live-action light gun laserdisc video games, which played much like the early cartoon games, but used a light gun instead of a joystick to affect the action. Meanwhile, Digital Pictures started to produce a variety of interactive movies for home consoles. When CD-ROMs were embedded in home computers, games with live action and full motion video featuring actors were considered cutting-edge, and some interactive movies were made. Some notable adventure games from this era are Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, ', Voyeur, ', ', Ripper, Snatcher, Black Dahlia, The X-Files Game, Phantasmagoria, Bad Day on the Midway and The Dark Eye. Others in the action genre are Brain Dead 13 and '.
Due to the limitation of memory and disk space, as well as the lengthy timeframes and high costs required for the production, not many variations and alternative scenes for possible player moves were filmed, so the games tended not to allow much freedom and variety of gameplay. Thus, interactive movie games were not usually very replayable after being completed once.
From the time of its original introduction, the DVD format specification has included the ability to use an ordinary DVD player to play interactive games, such as Dragon's Lair, the Scene It? and other series of DVD games, or games that are included as bonus material on movie DVDs. Aftermath Media released the interactive movies Tender Loving Care and Point of View for the DVD platform. Such games have appeared on DVDs aimed at younger target audiences, such as the special features discs of the Harry Potter film series.
Later video games used this approach using fully animated computer generated scenes, including various adventure games such as the Sound Novel series by Chunsoft, Shenmue series by Sega, Shadow of Memories by Konami, Time Travelers by Level 5, and Fahrenheit by Quantic Dream. During many scenes, the player has limited control of the character and chooses certain actions to progress the story. Other scenes are quick time event action sequences, requiring the player to hit appropriate buttons at the right time to succeed. Some of these games, such as the Sound Novel series, Shadow of Memories, Time Travelers, Heavy Rain, ' and ', have numerous branching storylines that result from what actions the player takes or fails to complete properly, which can include the death of major characters or failure to solve the mystery. This idea was even further realized in Telltale's The Walking Dead series, where player actions can drastically change future games, for example, different characters may be alive in the end depending on choices made by the player in The Walking Dead season 1, but those same characters affect '.
Cast members' work during the 1990s on interactive movies' chroma key sets was different from traditional filmmaking: They performed multiple possible actions players choose in a game, usually looked into the camera to react to the player, and usually did not react to others on the set. Such products were popular during the early 1990s as CD-ROMs and Laserdiscs made their way into the living rooms, providing an alternative to the low-capacity cartridges of most consoles. As the first CD-based consoles capable of displaying smooth and textured 3D graphics appeared, the full-FMV game had vanished from the mainstream circles around 1995, although it remained an option for PC adventure games for a couple more years. One of the last titles released was the 1998 PC and PlayStation adventure ', packed in 7 CDs. That same year, ' became the first game developed specifically for DVD-ROM and one of the last "interactive movies" to make heavy use of live-action FMV. In 2014, the Tex Murphy series continued with a new FMV game, '.
With advances in computer technology, interactive films waned as more developers used fully digitized characters and scenes. This format was popularized by Telltale Games, achieving success in The Walking Dead series of adventure games. These have sometimes been called interactive movies, as while the player can make choices that affect the game's overall narrative, they do not have direct control over characters, making the experience comparable to watching a sequence of cut scenes.
With the advent of YouTube annotations in 2008, a series of five Interactive Adventures were created by Chad, Matt & Rob that utilized the annotations to tell interactive stories that allowed the user to guide the narrative. The series included The Time Machine, The Murder, The Birthday Party, The Teleporter, and The Treasure Hunt.
In the 2010s, streaming services like Netflix started to grow in popularity and sophistication. By 2016, Netflix had started experimenting with interactive works aimed at children, including an animated version of Puss in Boots and an adaption of Telltale's '. Netflix's first major interactive film with live-action scenes was ', a film in the Black Mirror anthology series and released in December 2018. Netflix worked with Black Mirrors creator Charlie Brooker to develop a narrative that took advantage of the interactive format, while developing their own tools to improve caching of scenes and management of the film's progression to use on future projects.

Specialized hardware formats

LaserDisc games

A LaserDisc video game is a video game that uses pre-recorded video played from a LaserDisc, either as the entirety of the graphics or as part of the graphics. The first arcade laserdisc game was Sega's Astron Belt, an early third-person space combat rail shooter featuring live-action full-motion video footage over which the player/enemy ships and laser fire are superimposed. Developed in 1982, the game's unveiling at the 1982 AMOA show in Chicago marked the beginning of LaserDisc fever in the videogame industry, and its release in Japan the following year marked the first commercial release of a LaserDisc game. However, its release in the United States was delayed due to several hardware and software bugs, by which time Dragon's Lair had beaten it to public release there.
The first LaserDisc game to gain popularity in the United States was Dragon's Lair in 1983. It contained animated scenes, much like a cartoon. The scenes would be played back and at certain points during playback the player would have to press a specific direction on the joystick or the button to advance the game to the next scene, like a quick time event. For instance, a scene begins with the hero, a knight named Dirk, falling through a hole in a drawbridge and being attacked by tentacles. If the player presses the button at this point, Dirk fends off the tentacles with his sword and pulls himself back up out of the hole. If the player fails to press the sword button at the right time, or instead presses a direction on the joystick, Dirk is attacked by the tentacles and crushed. Each unsuccessful move, however, would produce a few moments of black screen, when the LaserDisc switched to the scene showing the death of the character, which interrupted the continuous flow of gameplay found in other videogame graphic systems of the time; this was a common criticism of some players and critics.
Despite the high cost of the animation, a deluge of similar LaserDisc video games followed Dragon's Lair because of its immense popularity. To cut costs, several companies simply hacked together scenes from several Japanese anime movies that were obscure in America at the time, creating games like Cliff Hanger and Bega's Battle, both of which were released roughly around the same time as Dragon's Lair. Later arcade LaserDisc games include Freedom Fighter, Badlands, Space Ace, and Road Blaster.
Other LaserDisc video games followed the lead of Astron Belt by integrating more and more computer graphics with the pre-recorded video. For example, Funai's Inter Stellar in 1983 was a forward-scrolling third-person rail shooter that used computer graphics for the ships and full-motion video for the backgrounds. Similarly, M.A.C.H. 3 and Cube Quest were vertical scrolling shooters that used the LaserDisc video for the background and computer graphics for the ships. The Firefox arcade game included a Philips LaserDisc player to combine live action video and sound from the Firefox film with computer generated graphics and sound. The game used a special CAV LaserDisc containing multiple storylines stored in very short, interleaved segments on the disc. The player would seek the short distance to the next segment of a storyline during the vertical retrace interval by adjusting the tracking mirror, allowing perfectly continuous video even as the player switched storylines under control of the game's computer. This method of seeking was noted for being extremely strenuous on the player and frequently led to the machines breaking, slightly hindering the appeal of LaserDisc arcade games. In the 1990s, American Laser Games produced a wide variety of live-action light gun LaserDisc video games, which played much like the early LaserDisc games, but used a light gun instead of a joystick to affect the action.
Bega's Battle, released by Data East in 1983, took a different approach and introduced a new form of video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cut scenes to develop a story between the game's shooting stages. Years later, this would become the standard approach to video game storytelling. Bega's Battle also featured a branching storyline.

DVD games

A DVD game is a standalone game that can be played on a set-top DVD player. The game takes advantage of technology built into the DVD format to create an interactive gaming environment compatible with most DVD players without requiring additional hardware. DVD TV games were first developed in the late 1990s. They were poorly received and understood as an entertainment medium. However, DVD-based game consoles like the PlayStation 2 popularized DVD-based gaming and also functioned as a DVD video player. In addition, the format has been used to import some video games to the DVD format, allowing them to be played with a standard DVD player rather than requiring a PC. Examples include Dragon's Lair and Who Shot Johnny Rock?. The PC/console game ' was released in 2006 as a DVD game entitled '.
Japanese games such as visual novels and eroge that were originally made for PC are commonly ported to DVDPG. Instead of standard save methods, DVDPGs use password save systems. Similar game types include BDPG and UMDPG.

Live interactive movies

The world's first live interactive movie was My One Demand filmed and premiered on 25 June 2015. Created by Blast Theory, the film was streamed live to the TIFF Lightbox on three successive nights. The cast of eight included Julian Richings and Clare Coulter. Audiences in the cinema used mobile phones to answer questions from the narrator, played by Maggie Huculak and their answers were included in the voiceover as well as in the closing credits.

Reception

Although interactive movies had a filmic quality that sprite-based games could not duplicate at the time, they were a niche market— the limited amount of direct interactivity put off many gamers. The popularity of FMV games declined during 1995, as real-time 3D graphics gained increasing attention. The negative response to FMV-based games was so common that it was even acknowledged in game marketing; a print advertisement for the interactive movie Psychic Detective stated, "Yeah, we know full-motion video games in the past sucked."
Cost was also an issue, as live action video with decent production values is expensive to film, while video shot on a low budget damages the overall image of the game. cost Sega around US$3 million, about the same as a low-budget movie would cost in 1994.
Though not as crucial an issue as the limited interactivity, another issue that drew criticism was the quality of the video itself. While the video was often relatively smooth, it was not actually full-motion as it was not of 24 frames per second or higher. In addition to this, the hardware it was displayed on, particularly in the case of the Sega CD, had a limited color palette, resulting in notably inferior image quality due to the requirement of dithering. Game designer Chris Crawford disparages the concept of interactive movies, except those aimed at elementary-school-age children, in his book Chris Crawford on Game Design. He writes that since the player must process what is known and explore the options, choosing a path at a branch-point is every bit as demanding as making a decision in a conventional game, but with much less reward since the result can only be one of a small number of branches.
Defenders of the genre have argued that, by allowing the player to interact with real people rather than animated characters, interactive full-motion video can produce emotional and visceral reactions that are not possible with either movies or traditional video games.

Other uses

Some studios hybridized ordinary computer game play with interactive movie play; the earliest examples of this were the entries in the Origin Systems Wing Commander series starting with Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger. Between combat missions, Wing Commander III featured cut-scenes with live actors; the game offered limited storyline branching based on whether missions were won or lost and on choices made at decision points during the cut-scenes.
Other games like BioForge would, perhaps erroneously, use the term for a game that has rich action and plot of cinematic proportions—but, in terms of gameplay, has no relation to FMV movies.
The term is an ambiguous one since many video games follow a storyline similar to the way movies would.