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An interactive film is a video game or other interactive media that has characteristics of a cinematic film. In the video game industry, the term refers to a movie game, a video game that presents its gameplay in a cinematic, scripted manner, often through the use of full-motion video of either Animation or Live action footage.
In the film industry, the term "interactive film" refers to interactive cinema, a film where one or more viewers can interact with the film and influence the events that unfold in the film.
Thus, interactive movies were animated or filmed with real actors like movies (or in some later cases, rendered with 3D models) and followed a main storyline. Alternative scenes were filmed to be triggered after wrong (or alternate allowable) actions of the player (such as 'Game Over' scenes).
A popular example of a commercial interactive movie was the 1983 arcade game Dragon's Lair, featuring an animated full motion video (FMV) 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.
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. It was not intended to be cinematic or a racing game, but was a driving simulation designed for educational purposes.
An early example of interactive cinema was the 1967 film 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.
An early example of an interactive movie game was Nintendo's Wild Gunman, a 1974 electro-mechanical arcade game that used a pair of 16mm film projectors to display live-action full-motion video (FMV) footage of Wild West gunslingers that the player could shoot and kill with a light gun.Carl Therrien, Inspecting Video Game Historiography Through Critical Lens: Etymology of the First-Person Shooter Genre, Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research, Volume 15, issue 2, December 2015, ISSN 1604-7982 In 1979, Kasco (Kansei Seiki Seisakusho) released The Driver, a hit electro-mechanical arcade game with live-action 16mm film projection of a car chase filmed by Toei Company. Kasco and the Electro-Mechanical Golden Age (Interview), Classic Videogame Station ODYSSEY, 2001
In 1975, Nintendo's was a horse race betting arcade game that used Electronic Video Recording (EVR) technology to playback video footage of horse races from a video tape. Before each race, players would place bets on each horse, with the machine dispensing medals (tokens) to any player that successfully chose the winning horse. EVR Race was Japan's highest-grossing medal game for three years in a row, from 1976 to 1978. Another horse race betting game, Electro-Sport's Quarter Horse (1982), was the first arcade game to utilize a laserdisc player, and operated in the same manner as EVR Race, with the laserdisc being used to play back pre-recorded non-interactive video footage of horse races; Gameplay was limited to the player placing bets before the race.
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 1977 American 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 next laserdisc game to be announced was Data East's video game adaptation of the Japanese anime film Genma Taisen (1983), introduced in March 1983, with the game released internationally in June 1983. It introduced a new approach to video game storytelling: using brief full-motion video cutscenes to develop a story between the game's Shooter game stages; years later, this would become the standard approach to video game storytelling. Bega's Battle also featured a branching storyline.
In the United States, the game that popularized the genre was Dragon's Lair, animated by Don Bluth and released by Cinematronics. Released in June 1983, it was the first laserdisc game released in the US. 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 video game graphic systems of the time; this was a common criticism of some players and critics.
There were generally two styles of laserdisc games that emerged. Those that followed the lead of Astron Belt integrated pre-recorded laserdisc video with real-time computer graphics and gameplay, making them more like traditional interactive video games. Those that followed the lead of Dragon's Lair integrated animated cartoon laserdisc video with quick time events, making them more like interactive cartoons. The latter style of laserdisc games were generally more successful than the former.
The Firefox (1984) 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 - a rail shooter - used a LaserDisc containing multiple clips stored in very short, interleaved segments on the disc. The player would seek the short distance to the next segment of a clip during the vertical retrace interval by adjusting the tracking mirror, allowing perfectly continuous video even as the player switched clips under control of the game's computer. This clip-switching method was used to allow the game to randomise the placement and timing of the enemy aircraft - which were part of the LaserDisc footage - as well as to show them exploding seamlessly wherever the player managed to hit them, as opposed to other LaserDisc games, which would have enemies appear at the same predetermined place and moment every time. However, this method was notorious 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.
The success of Dragon's Lair spawned a number of sequels and similar laserdisc cartoon games incorporating quick time events. However, original animation production was expensive. 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. Anime-based laserdisc games helped expose many Americans in the 1980s to Japanese anime, particularly Cliff Hanger which exposed many Americans to Lupin III and Hayao Miyazaki before any Lupin or Miyazaki anime productions had officially been released theatrically or on home video in the United States.
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 for quick time event scenes, which the 1985 games Time Gal and Road Blaster also featured. Time Gal also 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. Another example of an arcade LaserDisc game using a similar style would be Badlands.
In 1988, Epyx announced three VCR games including one based on its video game California Games. They combined videotape footage with a board game. From the late 1980s, American Laser Games started to produce a wide variety of live-action light gun laserdisc 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 .
When were embedded in home consoles such as the Sega CD as well as home computers, games with live action and full motion video featuring actors were considered cutting-edge, and some interactive movies were made. Some notable from this era are Under a Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive (both part of the Tex Murphy series), , Voyeur, , , Ripper, Snatcher, Black Dahlia, The X-Files Game, Phantasmagoria, Bad Day on the Midway and The Dark Eye. Others in the action game 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 (which was reissued on DVD), the Scene It? and other series of DVD games, or games that are included as bonus material on movie DVDs. 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.
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 ROM cartridge 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, 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 , but those same characters affect . Other examples of episodic adventure games include Telltale's The Wolf Among Us series and the Life Is Strange series, created by Dontnod Entertainment.
Another example comes from Quantum Break, published by Remedy in 2016. Between the game's acts, episodes from a TV show filmed in live action are displayed to the player: the scenes in these episodes change conforming to the decisions the player has taken and the objects he has interacted with. The looks of the characters are maintained between the live action sequences and the 3D computer generated ones, thanks to the use of the motion capture technique.
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. In 2020 Netflix released an interactive television special of the long standing Carmen Sandiego interactive media with . 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.
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 (of which a maximum of 64 colors were displayable simultaneously), 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 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. Games that highlight a linear story at the cost of the player's freedom may be better described as story-dominant games. This is also the case of videogames that offer long and detailed cutscenes with a cinematographic aesthetic, as seen in Hideo Kojima's Death Stranding released in 2019, which critics described as a videogame movie or interactive film; in this example, the player's actions have no direct consequence in the storyline, and the interaction is limited to the field of the gameplay.
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