Choose Your Path Quickly: The Many Crossroads of the Interactive Movie

This paper explores the interactive movie with full-motion video (FMV) as an artifact of the attempts to merge two media: videogames and cinema. As a hybrid struggling to combine gameplay with narrative, the interactive movie perhaps unsurprisingly did not garner much scholarly attention in the early years – and turf wars – of game studies. Nonetheless, FMV games in general were an important game form across the 1980s and 1990s, well deserving of deeper consideration, and interactive movies represent a key subcategory of this form. The present paper summarizes the discourse on FMV games, the core makeup and structure of the interactive movie, before zooming in to focus on three titles, Dragon’s Lair (1983), Mad Dog McCree (1990), and Night Trap (1992). The authors analyze how these games leveraged, experimented with, and simultaneously were constrained by, then-new optical disc technology, and how the combination of FMV and CD-ROM shaped their gameplay mechanics. The paper concludes by situating these titles and their technologies in the evolutionary maze of the videogame and their continuing influence in the medium.