Interactive film
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.
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.
Because laserdisc players of the day were not robust enough to handle the wear and tear of constant arcade use, they required frequent replacement.
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.
They were similar to shooting gallery carnival games, except that players shot at a cinema screen displaying film footage of targets.
They showed footage of targets, and when a player shot the screen at the right time, it would trigger a mechanism that temporarily pauses the film and registers a point.
Cinematic shooting gallery games enjoyed short-lived popularity in several parts of Britain during the 1910s, and often had safari animals as targets, with footage recorded from British imperial colonies.
[2] Capitol Projector's 1954 arcade electro-mechanical game machine Auto Test was a driving test simulation that used a film reel video projector to display pre-recorded driving video footage, awarding the player points for making correct decisions as the footage is played.
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.
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.
Among those that followed the lead of Dragon's Lair, progressing pre-recorded video with quick time events, was its successor Space Ace, another Don Bluth animated game released by Cinematronics later the same year.
[19] The success of Dragon's Lair spawned a number of sequels and similar laserdisc cartoon games incorporating quick time events.
To cut costs, several companies simply hacked together scenes from Japanese anime that were obscure to American audiences of the day.
One such example was Stern's Cliff Hanger (1983), which used footage from the Lupin III movies Castle of Cagliostro (directed by Hayao Miyazaki) and Mystery of Mamo, both originally animated by TMS Entertainment.
Instead, the arcade market was being reinvigorated by sports video games such as Karate Champ, Track & Field, Punch-Out and several Nintendo VS. System titles.
Some notable adventure games from this era are Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive (both part of the Tex Murphy series), The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery, Voyeur, Star Trek: Klingon, Star Trek: Borg, Ripper, Snatcher, Black Dahlia, The X-Files Game, Phantasmagoria, Bad Day on the Midway and The Dark Eye.
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.
Aftermath Media (founded by Rob Landeros of Trilobyte) released the interactive movies Tender Loving Care and Point of View (P.O.V) 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.
Some of these games, such as the Sound Novel series, Shadow of Memories, Time Travelers, Until Dawn, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and Detroit: Become Human, 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.
[41] 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.
That same year, Tex Murphy: Overseer became the first game developed specifically for DVD-ROM and one of the last "interactive movies" to make heavy use of live-action FMV.
However, unlike its predecessors, Cage chooses not to work with live action, but to use only synthetic images, avoiding, at least in part, the effect of estrangement typical of interactive films in the passage from moments of exploration to sequences of narrative exposure.
[43] From the interactive films on DVD Cage assimilates two different aspects in his videogames, respectively the use of quick time events (QTE) and the freedom of choice left to the player to determine the development of the plot.
In the gameplay of Heavy Rain, however, QTEs are not used solely for the purpose of succeeding in certain actions but also as a vehicle to perform the countless narrative choices placed on the player.
In an interview, director Cage stated that the game was designed with a focus on physical immersion by letting the player control the animation of the character with the right analog stick.
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 Minecraft: Story Mode.
In 2022, another interactive short released by Netflix, called Cat Burglar, which is an interactive trivia cartoon, where the viewer plays a cat burglar named Rowdy who is trying to steal a valuable artwork from a museum which is being protected by security guard dog named Peanut and must answer the correct questions in order to progress through the story.
[56] 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.
Between combat missions, Wing Commander III featured cutscenes 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 cutscenes (Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom, with some of the same actors, was similar).
