Interactive film


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 animated 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.

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 an animated full motion video 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.

Origins

The earliest rudimentary examples of mechanical interactive cinematic games date back to the early 20th century, with "cinematic shooting gallery" games in the United Kingdom. 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. The first successful example of such a game was Life Targets, released in the UK in 1912. 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. Cinematic shooting gallery games declined some time after the 1910s.
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 footage of Wild West gunslingers that the player could shoot and kill with a light gun. In 1979, Kasco released The Driver, a hit electro-mechanical arcade game with live-action 16mm film projection of a car chase filmed by Toei.
In 1975, Nintendo's was a horse race betting arcade game that used Electronic Video Recording 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 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, 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.

Specialized hardware formats

LaserDisc games

A LaserDisc 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 major arcade laserdisc video game was Sega's Astron Belt, a 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 September 1982 Amusement Machine Show in Tokyo and the November 1982 AMOA show in Chicago, and was then released in Japan in March 1983. However, its release in the United States was delayed due to several hardware and software bugs, by which time other laserdisc games had beaten it to public release there.
The next laserdisc game to be announced was Data East's video game adaptation of the Japanese anime film Genma Taisen, 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 shooting 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.

Real-time gameplay

Among those that followed the lead of Astron Belt, combining pre-recorded video with real-time computer graphics and gameplay, several were introduced at Tokyo's AM Show in September 1983, with its successor Star Blazer unanimously hailed as the "strongest" laserdisc game of the show. Other games at the show included Funai's Interstellar, a forward-scrolling third-person rail shooter that used pre-rendered 3D computer graphics for the laserdisc video backgrounds and real-time 2D computer graphics for the ships. Cube Quest, introduced at the same AM Show in Tokyo, was a vertical scrolling shooter that used pre-rendered computer animation for the laserdisc video backgrounds and real-time 3D computer graphics for the ships. Later that year, Gottlieb's M.A.C.H. 3 was a vertical scrolling shooter game that combined live-action laserdisc video backgrounds with 2D 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 - 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.