When Roger Ebert declared that video games could never be a true art form on the order of film and literature, it ignited the outrage of game designers and fans alike. After all, in fusing visual art, music, story, and interactivity, games could be considered the ultimate artistic medium. But he raised a point: Video games often strive to offer a compromise between traditional art forms and the interactive. After all, if a war movie is art, and a game of chess is not, would something that combines the two not be a diluted artwork?
Whether this criticism is valid or not, it's something that designers have long struggled to reconcile. Since the early days of computer games, there has been a desire to capture the essence of traditional narrative media. In the 1970s, Will Crowther's text-based game, Adventure, gave birth to the "interactive fiction" genre, sometimes known as "adventure games" in its honor. But an interactive story book would hardly be as exciting as playing a movie, and for many, this has always been the Holy Grail of game design.
Fittingly, it was Crowther's Adventure that served as the foundation for the first leap into the world of cinematic gaming. Inspired by the seminal text adventure, a young inventor named Rick Dyer embarked on a mission that would last nearly two decades: to create a new kind of interactive storytelling. He called his project "The Fantasy Machine" and envisioned it as a device to allow images corresponding to different scenes in the game to be displayed. Starting in 1979, he would create a series of prototypes. The earliest versions used drawings on spooled paper and later film strips, but eventually, Dyer turned to laserdiscs to bring his vision to life. The game he would conceive for it was part of a fantasy universe he called "Shadoan."
Dyer's prototype was the first of its kind, but he wouldn't be the only one to come up with the idea; In 1981, David Lubar created a text adventure game for Apple II that could trigger various scenes of a laserdisc movie. But this was not Rick Dyer's vision. He wanted to create a game consisting entirely of video that would have all of the visual impact of a movie, but with real interactivity.
After seeing Don Bluth's breakout animated classic, The Secret of NIMH, Dyer knew who he needed to realize this vision. He had no money, only the promise of an innovative new technology and the chance to do something different. Bluth agreed to do the project without an up-front investment, in exchange for one-third ownership of the resultant company, Starcom. Cinematronics, a developer of vector-graphics arcade games, agreed to manufacture and distribute the game in exchange for another third of Starcom. Cinematronics had been struggling since arcade owners began turning away from high-maintenance vector hardware, and hoped the new concept would help them regain their foothold.
But once again, they weren't alone. At the 1982 AMOA show, Sega demonstrated a prototype of Astron Belt, a shooter that combined color sprites overlaid on a videodisc background. Unlike the Starcom project, it had no pretensions of narrative structure or interactive cinema, but Dyer still knew he was in a race to get the first laserdisc game into arcades.
Astron Belt's release slipped, and Starcom's debut title premiered in 1983. Now known as Dragon's Lair, it was a single sub-plot of the grander Shadoan concept, which Dyer would be forced to shelve for later. Dragon's Lair was a simple game that no longer resembled the adventures that once inspired it. Instead of real decision making, it had players press one of the four cardinal directions or a sword button to determine if the hero, Dirk, would live or die in each clip.
Despite being a fairly rudimentary exercise in memorization, it was an experience unlike anything arcade-goers had seen. As an animated film, Dragon's Lair was compelling, and the idea of being an agent in this story proved irresistible. At the height of its popularity, Dragon's Lair cabinets were each earning $1400 a week, more than justifying the high price tag of $4000.
Wave of the Future
The success of Dragon's Lair blew open the doors for this new kind of gaming. Despite a bevy of hardware problems - mostly the result of laserdisc players not being made to constantly seek new tracks -- and simplistic gameplay, Dragon's Lair was continuing to rake in the dough. Now operating under the name RDI Video Systems, Bluth and Dyer began working on a follow-up, titled Space Ace.
Space Ace would not be the only attempt to cash in on the Dragon's Lair phenomenon. Developers all over the world took notice of this new concept, and quickly got to work ripping it off. In 1984, Space Ace would find itself in a more crowded market, alongside Universal's Super Don Quixote, Data East's Cobra Command, Taito's Ninja Hayate, and a parade of others.
While most of these games either attempted to use the laserdisc media solely for backgrounds (like Astron Belt) or used video as the foundation of the gameplay like Dragon's Lair, a few started to take a middle road. Data East's first laserdisc game, Bega's Battle, used brief "cut-scenes" to develop a story between the game's sprite-based shooting stages. The next year, Us vs. Them would follow suit, using live actors. This approach wouldn't catch on any time soon, but would eventually become the status quo compromise for videogame storytelling.
After a fallout with Cinematronics stalled development of Dragon's Lair II (a struggle that would not be resolved for seven years), Rick Dyer and Don Bluth parted ways. Dyer turned his efforts back toward his "Fantasy Machine," now called the Halcyon. For four years, he had been developing his invention into a console that would allow players to enjoy laserdisc games at home.
He also returned to his original ideas about storytelling and game play, taking the first of many steps closer to the adventure genre. Returning to the original Shadoan universe he once conceived, his next animated adventure, Thayer's Quest, moved away from the quick choices that forced players to memorize cues, instead opting to allow them to answer questions and choose branching paths.
Alas, timing is everything, and the Halcyon's couldn't have been worse. By 1985, the console market was badly weakened after the fall of Atari, and laserdiscs were losing out to the newer VHS standard. The system would eventually see a very limited release of a handful of prototype machines, but would never make it to store shelves. Investors felt the $2500 price tag would have been discouraging for consumers, despite the fact that the unit would pay for itself in only 5000 plays. Thayer's Quest would be one of only two games produced for the console, and its arcade counterpart would prove less successful than his collaborations with Bluth.
Home Movies
By the mid-'80s, much of the novelty factor had worn off, and arcade goers began to turn away from the plethora of playable cartoons lining the aisles. With his funds depleted by the Halcyon project, Rick Dyer left the videogame industry to produce talking exercise machines. It seemed the fad was ending. It was during this time that Atari founder Nolan Bushnell invited a young journalist named Tom Zito to work for him at his new company, Axlon.
Undeterred by -- or perhaps unaware of -- the Halcyon's failure, Zito would lead a group that included legends of the Atari-era like David Crane (Pitfall!, Freeway) and Rob Fulop (Demon Attack, Cosmic Ark) with the goal of creating a home console designed to deliver interactive television. In order to finance the project, Zito turned to toy-maker Hasbro, and NEMO was born. This project would take a different direction than the laserdisc games that came before, both in technology and concept.
Up to this point, the vast majority of laserdisc games were animated. Of those that were not, only Us vs. Them and Firefox made use of live actors, and even then, only in cut-scenes (the latter borrowing those scenes from the Clint Eastwood movie of the same name). NEMO featured new, parallel video technology, and would create an interactive movie experience composed entirely of live-action footage.
Unlike the disc-based systems of the past, the NEMO used tapes for media, and thus could not randomly seek to any point, making classic branching adventures like Dragon's Lair impossible. Instead it allowed multiple tracks of video to be interleaved, and the software could control which stream to play, much like switching channels.
After a few proof-of-concept demos, the team began work of their first game in 1986. Initially they hoped to make a title to tie-in with A Nightmare on Elm Street, but it eventually became an original property, Night Trap. The interactive horror flick didn't play like anything before it. Taking advantage of the NEMO's strengths, it tasked players with switching between several security cameras to catch intruders in a house full of hapless young girls. In addition to the challenge of the game, it also allowed players to follow different parallel plots by watching different characters at different times.
The following year they completed a second title, Sewer Shark, but the system's launch was still no where in sight. Before long it became apparent that their benefactors at Hasbro were losing confidence in the project, and in 1988 the plug was pulled. Zito took the opportunity to purchase the rights to Night Trap and Sewer Shark, just in case he could find a new customer elsewhere, but the future looked bleak.
Don't Call it a Comeback
By the end of the '80s, the market for laserdisc games had all but dried up. High production costs made them a less attractive prospect for developers, and they were no longer drawing more than other games in arcades. But the stars would soon align to give this genre a second chance.
Robert Grebe was working at ICAT, a developer of firearms training machines, when he got the idea for a laserdisc-based shooting game that would use light guns instead of joysticks. Like the still-unreleased Night Trap, his game would use live actors instead of animation. He started a new company, American Laser Games, and their first release, the western-themed Mad Dog McCree, hit arcades in 1990.
The timing was perfect. There was an elevated interest in photorealism in games, with Atari's Pit Fighter leading the charge for a wave of games using digitized actors for sprites. ALG's playable spaghetti western proved to be a hit with arcade goers, and would soon be followed by a string of successors.
Not long after, Rick Dyer returned to the arcade scene. His latest title, Time Traveler, sported a nifty optical illusion that made the characters appear to stand in mid air on the cabinet's horizontal surface. This "hologram" game would soon become one of the top-earning arcade games, and Dyer would also manage to release Dragon's Lair II, which had been in on hold in near-complete form for seven years.
As luck would have it, these arcade successes would coincide with the rise of CD-ROM media in home consoles and computers, multiplying the storage capacity of carts and floppy disks by hundreds. The PC Engine CD had just launched in Japan, and Phillips was pushing its new CD-i console in North America. "Multimedia" was the buzzword of the day, and suddenly full-motion video seemed like a must.
This new media would offer Zito and his two unreleased games a second chance. When Sony partnered with Nintendo to create a new CD add-on for their new Super Nintendo system, they turned to Zito to deliver ports of his long-shelved interactive tape games. Of course, as many of us know, the relationship between Sony and Nintendo broke down in an embarrassing spectacle when Sony went public with their project at the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show -- one day before Nintendo would announce their decision to go with Phillips instead. Sony would not have their revenge for three more years, when their disc-based console would eventually become Nintendo's fiercest competitor, the PlayStation.
Zito's second chance proved no more fruitful than the first, but the third time's a charm. After witnessing the spectacular meltdown of Nintendo's project, Sega, who had announced their own CD-based add-on a few months earlier, approached Zito about reworking his games for their platform. Zito would quickly pull together a new company, Digital Pictures, and readied his games as launch titles for the Sega CD. On October 15 of that year, the Sega CD would ship with Sewer Shark as its premier pack-in and Night Trap as its most notorious system-seller.
The floodgates were open, and for a time, it seemed interactive movies were the wave of the future. The laserdisc generation was back on top, with ports of classics like Dragon's Lair and Time Gal lining the store shelves alongside conversions of American Laser Games' shooting titles. Rick Dyer would even get to revisit the Shadoan universe one more time and created a long overdue CD-ROM sequel to Thayer's Quest, featuring a point-and-click interface and a more thoughtful approach to game play. He touted the game as the true manifestation of his original vision.
True to its interactive fiction roots, the interactive movie format attracted established adventure game developers. ICOM, developers of classic adventures like Shadow Gate and Déjà Vu, released a pair of FMV-based Sherlock Holmes games that would prove to be their biggest successes in years. Developers were reinventing themselves left and right.
Even existing series like Access Software's Tex Murphy series and Sierra's Gabriel Knight would hop on board the interactive movie bandwagon. Aaron Conners, who wrote Tex's 1994 FMV adventure, Under a Killing Moon, recalls, "The hype about 'interactive movies' was all so exciting and sexy, the mainstream media jumped all over it. The problem was (and is), games aren't movies; even the best stories in computer games don't compare." The dilemmas that faced interactive fiction and laserdisc games rang true even for the best of the bunch. "It's not because they're not good," Conners adds, "but because the mediums are so different."
Polygons Killed the Video Star
Digital Pictures would go on to produce 17 games in the next four years, tackling ever more genres in their quest to convert the entire industry to grainy, digitized video. Tom Zito would be the format's most outspoken defender, becoming increasingly critical of "traditional" games. In a 1995 interview, Zito confidently explained, "Sure, in our game [Quarterback Attack] you can't do something like turning around and running the other way down the field like you could in, say, Madden. But the question is: Who would want to?" But Zito and company failed to realize that theirs was not the only revolution bubbling in the industry.
By the mid-'90s, new consoles were pushing the boundaries of 3D. This dazzling new dimension of game play usurped full-motion video as the flashy way to draw in gamers and offered developers a new way to deliver cinematic presentation, while increasing player freedom, instead of limiting it. Suddenly the rigid constraints of digitized video seemed archaic, and the market for FMV games bottomed out, seemingly overnight.
Meanwhile, arcade developers faced their own crisis. ALG's Rob Grebe recalls, "In the spring of 1996, there was a wide spread downturn (read: free fall) in arcade game sales worldwide. It still seems weird to me that the arcade market could have crumbled so quickly." Companies like his faced a rapidly changing landscape on both sides, with little chance to adapt.
By the end of 1996, Digital Pictures was gone, American Laser Games had left the arcade business, and Dyer had released his last interactive cartoon. Conners remembers, "In the end, FMV, blue screen, acting, even story became synonymous with 'bad.' Sadly, there were a few high quality products that got lumped in with everything else and flushed. The backlash was fierce, and would taint the very concept of 'interactive movies.'"
Indeed, it was the end of an era. The fall of the FMV game may have contributed to -- and at least coincided with -- the decline of the adventure genre that inspired it. The commercial failure of Grim Fandango was the shot heard 'round the world, and marked the death of the mainstream adventure game.
It was around this time that we would see games like Half-Life help to popularize a new kind of uniquely interactive storytelling, free from the conventions of classic narrative media like books and movies. Players would become an active participant in discovering and interpreting the story, rather than having it spoon-fed to them through short clips of movies or text.
As enough time passes, some of the stigma has left the term "interactive movie," and at least one company, the Paris-based Quantic Dream, is ready to revisit the idea. Their 2005 adventure game, Indigo Prophecy, was proudly billed as an "interactive drama," and their follow-up, Heavy Rain, will carry the concept further. In a recent interview with IGN, Quantic Dream founder David Cage proclaims, "Story and game play are not opposite, as some like to think they are; they are complementary."
Even before the existence of videogames, many filmmakers have long tried to make their movies an active experience. Challenging the mind and demanding the viewer draw connections have always been the hallmarks of a true artist. Now more than ever, technology offers an opportunity to explore this notion in new ways. It may simply be a matter of presenting it to the public in the right way.
"You shouldn't think of an interactive movie as a conventional videogame," insists Night Trap designer Rob Fulop, adding "Night Trap is meant to be an interactive entertainment experience. Comparing it to Pac-Man is meaningless." It may, indeed, be a problem of perspective. In recent years Digital Leisure has managed to successfully market many old laserdisc games on DVD format. This audience does not expect an experience comparable to a video game, but rather a more interesting way to watch a DVD. In this way, there is an important distinction between an "interactive movie" and a "cinematic game."
As we move into a world of streaming media where all of our entertainment becomes increasingly interactive, an eventual return to interactive movies seems like a real possibility. Fulop speculates, "I think the multiple track format has a future in dramatic narratives. I can see this sort of thing becoming more doable after micro-transactions become standard." Rob Grebe is similarly optimistic, noting, "Today's advanced special effects could be interwoven through video sequences to create an entertaining product."
It's unclear if there will ever be a real future for interactive movies, but it is obvious that there remains much left to be explored. Like "virtual reality" and other grand experiments that the world wasn't ready for, it could be some time before people view the medium as a tool and not a novelty. Maybe Heavy Rain will be the landmark game that shows us how game play and narrative enhance each other. Maybe the breakthrough will come from a great filmmaker. One thing is as clear as ever: Stories and game play are both potent means of manipulating emotions, and artists have never been held back by using every tool at their disposal -- regardless of what Roger Ebert might think.
