The Fall of Interactive Movies

Like many things, it began with a dream – a dream of Hollywood glory; of a world where videogames and their creators would finally take their rightful place in mainstream entertainment. Instead of sprites, there would be actors. Cinematic experiences instead of clunky old ‘gameplay’. It would revolutionise games and lend them a sense of legitimacy as well as excitement. After all, why would anyone waste time shooting at bland, generic Space Invaders when they could be the star of their own all-out Star Wars experience?

At a time when Lucasarts could do no wrong, the Rebel Assaults were divisive experiences. In retrospect, this was a Warning.

Stupid as it sounds now, all this was based on understandable concerns. In the early 90s, the videogame industry was a very different place. Budgets were low and teams usually small. Early forays into real-time 3D were promising, but far from impressive – blocky characters stumbling round featureless worlds like they’d just swallowed a pack of laxatives, occasionally stopping to nod at each other and exchange dialogue without moving their lips. The idea of something like GTA4 or World of Warcraft becoming a worldwide phenomenon in its own right was little more than a cruel fantasy. If games got any attention back then, it was via a headline like ‘Nintendo Killed My Son’ or ‘Ban This Sick Filth’. To the outside world, they’d never looked more like toys – no realism, no depth, constantly rehashing the same childish settings for an immature audience.

This wasn’t true, of course. The 90s were a real golden age for the PC, giving us many of our greatest memories. Doom, Day of the Tentacle, Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. However, it was a frustrating one for developers, many of whom were looking up at Hollywood with a mixture of envy. Joining that world might mean being taken seriously, and seriously cashing in. If people liked watching movies, surely interactive movies would be even better.

Right?

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Aaaargh! Kill it! KILL IT!

Interactive movies were one of the most expensive mistakes the industry ever made, to the point that the term has effectively been banned ever since. You can’t even use it to describe games like GTA4, Gears of War, and Call of Duty 4, all of which were widely praised for drawing from the Hollywood well, so toxic is the genre’s very name. Even at the time, a good yardstick for spotting the good games was to see which were actually referred to as or chose to call themselves interactive movies and which were absorbed into a larger genre, typically adventure games, which simply happened to use FMV.

The basic problem was this: the more a game relied on movies, the less the player would be able to do. To maintain some semblance of a flow, they had to keep moving. However, every action, every movement, every success and every failure had to be either pre-filmed or pre-rendered. This was expensive in terms of production, and with the best will in the world, designers had to make cuts. Even if you could get the footage in the can, you still had to squeeze it on a disc. CD-ROM was still cutting-edge technology, but even with low-quality, low-resolution graphics, it filled up fast. One of the last interactive movies, Black Dahlia, shipped on eight of the buggers.

A little bit of video for a game that shipped on floppy disks.

Movies are usually linked to the dawn of CD-ROM, but a handful of companies started early. The clips would be short, and usually low-resolution, or simply digitised photos being animated, or just sprites based on photographs… far from anything approaching FMV, but impressive in its day. The Sierra adventure Lost in Time was one of the first to give it a shot, with a dual CD/floppy disk release, but Tex Murphy creators Access Software managed to get in even earlier with the spy thriller Countdown. Using some technical magic to force speech out of the crappy PC speaker in the days before everyone had soundcards, it used some of the worst actors in the world to act out the amnesiac main character’s slowly returning memories. Not good, but still impressive.

Having cut its teeth on FMV, it went one step further in its next game, Martian Memorandum (the second Tex Murphy adventure), by using actual video clips for all conversations. Under A Killing Moon, the first of its three full-on interactive movies, took the next jump up, with FMV for its major cutscenes. Even so, it was limited. Characters only came to life when it was their turn to move, being frozen in time while others talked. It wasn’t until The Pandora Directive that the series got proper full-motion sequences and characters that even came close to being part of the gameworld.

Rock. Hard Place. Choose.

Dedicated interactive movies had two ways of solving the problem. The first was the Dragon’s Lair method, introduced to arcades in 1983. Every scene had exactly two possible endings. Press the right button at the right time and you moved onto the next room. Press the wrong one, or do nothing, and you died instantly and have to try again. Later games made that button-press slightly more complicated, typically using a control-room style interface, but it was the same concept. The Daedalus Encounter used puzzles instead of action scenes. Over on the MegaCD, the infamous Night Trap – more on that one later – made you hunt for the right room before pressing the button.

A second, slightly more entertaining method was to use the pre-rendered footage a glorified background. Megarace, Microcosm, Rebel Assault, and many others rear-projected the background like an old movie chase sequence, with the game overlaying traditional sprites on top and trying to keep track of whether you were hitting the walls/obstacles. Rebel Assault was easily the most successful of these games. It was a shameless example of style over substance, but the mix of Star Wars and genuinely fast-paced action meant that people didn’t mind too much. It was a game that showed off both your PC, and your shiny new CD drive. In that context, it was fine, although the sequel pushed it a bit.

If by Full Motion Video, you mean ‘a little box in the top-left corner of the screen’, then yes, Critical Path was an FMV game.

Thankfully, both these game genres quickly proved dead ends. Rear projection was no match for proper 3D terrain, even in early offerings like Wipeout. As for click-or-die, it only ever worked in the arcades, where games that could be finished in under half an hour were acceptable. American Laser Games made a particular name for itself here with its massive arcade cabinets and shooting games like Mad Dog McCree, Who Shot Johnny Rock? and Space Pirates, all based on lightgun technology. Despite featuring some of the cheapest kills ever (such as a seemingly dead enemy lifting his gun up to shoot you from the floor) they were popular in arcades, definitely fun to have a few goes on at least, and ALG made a good living on them… before somewhat bizarrely transforming into Her Interactive to make Nancy Drew games instead.

Most interactive movies quickly moved to something at least slightly less reliant on pre-recorded film footage, whether it was copying the adventure game style of old, or integrating more involved action between the clips. The 7th Guest was the original showpiece for this on PC, selling for twice the price of a standard game and getting lots of well deserved attention. Its 3D rendered haunted house and fiendishly beautiful logic puzzles were unquestionably eyecatching, even if it was a one-trick pony. The trouble with that was that nobody felt much like playing another one later. The scrappy sequel, The 11th Hour, underperformed, as did a cartoon version of the concept, Clandestiny. The series’ final gasp was a compilation pack that just served up a few puzzles from the original games, Uncle Henry’s Playhouse. It sold 176 copies. Worldwide.

Lights. Camera. Actually, no…

“Aaaargh! Everything they said about gamers was true!”

If most interactive movies stank as games, it was nothing compared to how bad they were as movies. It’s easy to mock the actors, and yes, many of them were terrible, but that’s too easy. In most cases, they were simply the most visible face of a grotesquely over-ambitious project that wanted to be a big budget movie on a budget of 10p, being rushed through an embarrassing script by an inexperienced (possibly first-time) director, with nothing to bounce their performance off except a big blue screen and a vague description of what they’re actually meant to be doing. If you don’t have someone capable of telling star talent like, for instance, Christopher Walken, that his performance is even embarrassing the furniture, you only have yourself to blame for his ‘acting’ in Ripper.

The Tex Murphy series shows this wonderfully. There were five of them in total, three of which were done as interactive movies: Under A Killing Moon, The Pandora Directive, and Overseer. All five starred Chris Jones, the company’s co-founder and finance guy as Tex Murphy, a PI in futuristic San Francisco. In the first one, he really only modelled for the box. For UAKM, with its full FMV sequences and new Hollywood leanings, Jones did almost everything – co-writing, designing, directing, and leading up a cast mostly made up of other Access employees. The result was fun, but hammier than a pig that just ate a bacon sandwich, with acting more like an amateur dramatics evening than a film.

For the next two games, Access brought in actual director Adrian Carr, and the quality skyrocketed. The acting became more assured. The cinematography warranted the name. They’re hardly the greatest stories ever told – although they’re excellent adventures – but the difference was night and day. The games became cult industry legends, and Jones joined C&C’s Joe Kucan as one of our true homegrown gaming stars.

To Create A Falling Star

Wing Commander 3 and 4 were two of the very, very few games with actual star-power, a story told well, and a great game to back them up..

Sadly, few companies bothered taking the time and effort to improve the general standard. Instead, they went for quick fixes. The word ‘Starring’ has rarely been so universally abused. When Critical Path proudly announced ‘Starring Eileen Weisinger as Kat’, it was with the sincere hope that you didn’t know she was a stuntwoman rather than an actress you might actually have heard of (although what most people don’t know is that she later appeared again, without star billing, as Vesna in The Last Express). Games would proudly trumpet big names like Dennis Hopper and Tim Curry… hell, even names like Margot Kidder and Dirk Benedict… regardless of how much time they actually spent on screen, or whether they were an important character or simply a comedy bartender, like John Hurt’s in Privateer: The Darkening. (The star of that one? A then largely unknown actor called Clive Owen. Wonder what he’s doing now…)

Believe it or not, that’s meant to be Dennis Hopper.

Most of the time, these were simply small, irrelevant jobs that known actors would agree to do between ‘real’ jobs, spend a day or so filming, then never think about again. Dennis Hopper agreed to star in Take Two’s Hell not because of a desire to be part of the endless creative possibilities of videogame/movie crossovers, but because CEO Ryan Brant, was a friend of the family. Why not? He was only in a handful of scenes in that and, much later, Take Two’s last interactive movie, Black Dahlia. Easy money, obvious sell on the box.

The Wing Commander games are arguably the only ones where known actors have emerged smelling of roses. It helped that unlike many, these games had a real budget – a then-insane $4 million for Wing Commander III, which used the standard bluescreen technique, and $12 million for the fourth game, which finally allowed for actual sets and physical special effects. Mark Hamill’s performance as world-weary space hero Christopher Blair grounded the series in a way that surprised everyone who thought Origin had just hired Luke Skywalker as a gimmick, while Tom Wilson (as the arrogant but insecure pilot Maniac) was pleased to be recognised as something other than Biff Tannen from the Back to the Future movies. Malcolm McDowell and John Rhys-Davies also showed up and gave excellent performances, to the point that the fourth game’s most exciting moment wasn’t the last space battle, but the FMV debate that followed it, where you had to talk a council chamber full of diplomats into acknowledging the bad guy’s naughtiness.

Fall Of The Legends

Sadly, the story didn’t end well. The success of the games finally gave series creator Chris Roberts the chance to make the real Wing Commander movie he’d always wanted… which bombed, deservingly. It was a terrible movie, and a dreadful end to a once proud series.

Still, at least Roberts was king of the world for a while. Most interactive movies were dire beyond belief, and not even worth tracking down now for comedy value. Their size means you won’t find them as abandonware, and even the pirates don’t normally bother. However, most of the big names do float up on eBay from time to time, with prices ranging from around £1 to £15. And some of them are still worth checking out, if somewhat tough to get running. DOS is doable with DOSBox. Windows 3.1 is a nightmare.

Spycraft never did explain why Evil Niles Crane wanted to assassinate the President. Unless I missed a scene somewhere.

Of those worth hunting down, The Tex Murphy games and Gabriel Knight 2 top the list, and are both easily downloaded at Good Old Games. These are both pretty standard recommendations however, so we’d like to offer up some lesser knowns too.

First, Spycraft: The Great Game. It’s more or less a series of spy-themed minigames, but not the usual logic puzzles and button pressing exercises. You get to crack codes and fake evidence and even torture an enemy agent with electricity, and do all kinds of other fun stuff. Interestingly, Activision roped in both the ex-head of the CIA and the ex-head of the KGB to be in the movie bits, making it arguably the closest a computer game has ever gotten to ending the Cold War.

Second, The Last Express. It’s not a traditional interactive movie, using still rotoscoped frames instead of video, but it’s as close as traditional adventure games got – a game about watching people and soaking in the ambience on board the Orient Express on the eve of World War One. It was made by Jordan Mechner of Prince of Persia fame, and it’s wonderful – some great puzzle design, fantastic atmosphere, and a really great premise. Nothing like enough people have played it. Do your part to rectify that. There were plans to make it into an actual movie, called Firebird, but sadly they never came to anything.

Finally… actually, we’ll have to get back to you on that. Other interactive movies were fun or funny, and a few very interesting, but few are genuinely worth taking the time to play for their own sake, never mind track down and get working.

Tex Murphy. Film-noir fun, a bit like Max Payne except without a script written in little childrens’ crayons.

Of course, there’s the other side of the coin too. Even by the appalling standards of most FMV games, some manage to stand out as true gaming black holes that make Phantasmagoria look like… at least a better game than Phantasmagoria actually was. Capcom’s Foxhunt was one of the most infamous – a $5 million slapstick spy adventure involving fat 20 something-assassins, gay secret agents, rocket-wheelchairs and all manner of other stuff too stupid to describe. The planned movie version wasn’t so much cancelled as us spared it.

In many cases, it was something about the game that made it stand out at the bottom of the barrel. In the case of A Fork In The Tale, Rob Schneider was in it. What? Isn’t that enough? Cockroach game Bad Mojo set new levels of bad taste with its digitised graphics, including a freshly killed rat and a decapitated catfish. Critical Path, Blown Away, Urban Runner, and many, many others simply had no reason to exist. It’s stunning that at any point, ever, someone thought them a good idea. Especially Urban Runner, which went through most of its life with the hysterical title ‘Lost In Town’.

None of these games however come close to the horror that is Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties. Arguably the worst game ever released on any console ever, there’s exactly one actual movie in it (where an angry girl in a bra basically berates you for playing the game) with the rest just a shockingly bad photostory where you only get to make about five or six actual decisions, most of which end in an instant game over. Its mere existence is an insult to gamers everywhere; the thought that anyone, anyone anywhere at any time would actually consider it worth currency has us spitting tacks.

But guess what? You can play it for free, right here, thanks to the power of interactive YouTube movies. It’s the worst game you’ll ever play. You’re welcome.

Adults Only!

Shortly after Night Trap came out, the whole world descended into sex-crazed anarchy. True story.

While about as objectively erotic as a dish of coleslaw, Plumbers does highlight something odd – just how restrained most interactive movies were. This was at least partly a political issue, thanks to Night Trap – a Sega CD game that quickly found itself banned and brought up in the US Senate as an example of a video game nasty. Clearly, a horrific nightmare of blood and gore, right? Well, no. It really didn’t deserve any of this.

As with Rockstar’s Bully, the controversy was based on a misunderstanding – that the player’s job was to spy on and murder a group of nubile co-eds at a slumber party. Instead, it was a parody of the slasher genre, involving activating Scooby Doo style traps to protect them from a band of PG rated vampires. What the controversy did make clear though was that mainstream developers at least didn’t have to do very much to get into trouble. Even some actors expressed concern at the interactive elements of games getting in the way of their craft, notably Tia Carrere, who specifically requested that she not be directly killable by the player character in The Daedalus Encounter, even if they had wasted good money to see Wayne’s World 2. Or play The Daedalus Encounter.

Violent content was usually taken care of by games’ settings – sci-fi laser guns and similar offering the side-bonus of not having to deal with the safety issues surrounding even stage pistols, or having to pay to fit actors with exploding squibs. Only a handful of interactive movies brought any genuinely tough material, notably Harvester (a very bloody, badly misjudged game in which the player is supposedly being trained to become a murderer via VR) and Spycraft, with its interactive prisoner-torture minigame.

Apparently chafed nipples are sexy.

As for sex, needless to say, that was right out – for the most part anyway. Admittedly, at least part of this is probably less down to restraint than developers not having the guts to get actors to drop their pants, but either way, they rarely delivered. Sony’s Voyeur may have had a steamy name, but a couple of women in their knickers and a guy pretending to be a dog were about all you actually got to see. Even more ambitious games like Riana Rouge, entirely sold on the sex appeal of Playmate Gillian Bonner, proved oddly reluctant to fully deploy its… ahem… built in special effects for the benefits of players who didn’t realise they’d bought a game ‘driven by themes of female empowerment and integration’ instead of the world’s most expensive way to not see boobies.

“Can I buy you a cup of tea and a bra, my dear?”

This being gaming, it goes without saying that whatever fan service and erotic content did slowly seep into the genre was aimed squarely at men. The idea that women might be playing these games was alien to most of the writers, even in games where your character’s gender was irrelevant. Kat in Critical Path would still tease your faceless soldier about the possibility of doing a shower scene. Spycraft spent the entire game calling the player ‘Thorn’ specifically to avoid the question… only to accidentally drop Game Overs where Thorn is clearly thrown into a men’s prison. Oops.

With all this in mind, it’s amusing that the main games that shook up the status quo were all from female designers – Roberta Williams, Lorelei Shannon, and Jane Jensen. Roberta Williams produced Phantasmagoria, which featured some of the most shocking violence seen on the PC up to this point – mostly committed against innocent women, including a (pretty tame) rape scene involving the game’s heroine. Its sequel, designed by Shannon, made new main character Curtis Craig’s bisexuality and growing obsession with sadomasochism into a plot point, although in a story as badly written and confused as the dimension-hopping Phantasmagoria: A Puzzle Of Flesh, it didn’t really matter.

The Beast Within. Murder, sex, and lots of great tourist destinations to keep in mind next time you head to Germany.

By far the most effective example was Jane Jensen’s Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within. This excellent supernatural mystery weaved together werewolves, Wagner, and the ‘mad’ king Ludwig II of Bavaria into a superb original story written entirely for adults. It was filmed on bluescreen, but used real-world places, including Munich and the castle of Neuschwanstein for backgrounds, with so much background detail, it was almost edutainment. Its most impressive feature however was the growing sexual tensions between the womanising main character and the game’s villain, von Glower. There was nothing explicit about it, no tacky erotic scenes or anything similar to push that side of the story to the forefront. It was simply brought out in the subtle moments of acting that contemporary sprites and 3D models could never have managed.

FMV Comes Home

Command and Conquer is the last big franchise to bother with FMV, but only because of tradition. It’s mostly just people talking in offices though.

It was this ability to do more than basic graphics that ultimately cemented FMV in the gaming world for several years, even after it was clear that full-on interactive movies were too expensive to make, too much trouble, and just plain not worth the effort. This didn’t meant the end of live actors, and certainly not rendered cut-scenes. The same problems that had made the idea of movie games so compelling in the first place were still around, and wouldn’t be going anywhere for several years.

What changed was that FMV took its rightful place in the world – supporting the gameplay. Command and Conquer is an excellent example, not least because it’s one of the few franchises still bothering with live action at all. Filmed mission briefing. Tactical strategy fun. Explosive cut-scenes. Long briefings full of celebs telling you how great you are.

That’s the kind of ego boost we can get behind.

However, when it comes down to it, the only real reason that C&C still bothers is that the hammy acting is as closely associated with it as anything else it brought to the table. Fans expect to see Joe Kucan chewing the scenery as Kane, or Tanya vamping it up in a croptop. Most games have simply moved beyond it. Hybrid visual styles don’t cut it for most games, their bluescreen look rarely coming across as convincing, and it’s no longer a cheaper way of achieving the same goal. Fully rendered or realtime scenes offer so much more freedom and flexibility, with the bonus of never breaking you out of the creator’s carefully created worlds. It may not be ‘better’ than reality, but it’s definitely more consistent, and offers much more in the way of stylised action and authorial control over the fiction. Why struggle to make everyone believe that the latest big name is actually wandering around the post-apocalyptic future when you can create your own Alyx, or Farah, or Guybrush, or some other character that will always be 100% yours?

It doesn’t make any sense. It never will again.

But just for a while, in the 90s, it almost did.

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