Cutscenes explores—and blurs—the intersection of cinema and video games.
Immortality (Sam Barlow, 2022).
Videodrome. Like video circus, video arena. Do you know it? It’s just torture and murder. No plot, no characters. Very, very realistic. I think it’s what’s next.
—Max Renn, in Videodrome (David Cronenberg, 1983)
In 1967, Radúz Činčera presented Kinoautomat, often described as the world’s first interactive movie, at Expo 67 in Montreal. Installed in the Czechoslovak Pavilion, the system included a feature film, One Man and His House. At nine intervals, representing the reel changes, audience members were prompted to progress the film’s narrative in one of two directions, voting using red or green buttons, determining which reel would be threaded next. At the time, The New Yorker described Kinoautomat as “a guaranteed hit,” adding, emphatically, that “the Czechs should build a monument to the man who conceived the idea.” The format did not take off, but interest in the idea of the interactive movie lingered, mutating alongside various technological advances and consumer trends. Game developers, hoping to capitalize on the promise of interactivity, strove to produce participatory experiences in the vein of Kinoautomat, to be enjoyed in the comfort of one’s home. One such innovation was the full-motion video (FMV) game, wherein prerecorded live-action footage is incorporated within a video game, either as plot-thickening cutscenes or as a part of the actual gameplay. In its 1980s and ’90s heyday,the promise of FMV was that a player could interact with, and control the direction of, the movies they watched, becoming the architect of the events unfolding on screen in real time.
It was the invention of the LaserDisc that kickstarted FMV, even if some pioneering electro-mechanical arcade experiments predated it. Capitol Projector’s Auto Test (1954) driving test simulation awarded the player points for making decisive inputs while prerecorded vehicle footage was projected, while Nintendo’s Wild Gunman (1974) switched between two 16mm film projectors depending on whether the player had drawn their own light gun fast enough against live-action desperados. In 1983, Astron Belt, a rail shooter featuring a pixelated spacecraft that was piloted against a backdrop of prerecorded space-set videos, inspired the creation of Dragon’s Lair, a FMV arcade game boasting animation by Don Bluth (The Secret of NIMH, 1982). In the game, a short fantasy film featuring an adventurous knight, players had to time button inputs in order to trigger successful playback of the next clip, memorizing a lengthy sequence in order to access the entire 22 minutes of footage. On its launch, Newsweek described Dragon’s Lair as “the first arcade game in the United States with a movie-quality image to go along with the action.” Its vibrant color and graphical fidelity in an era in which all other games featured simplistic sprite-based graphics, made the title an immediate success. Excitement dissipated once players saw past the beautiful animation and became frustrated by the rudimentary, repetitive gameplay.
Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair (Knowledge Adventure, 1996).
Various other LaserDisc arcade games followed, all similarly hamstrung by hardware limitations and lack of narrative depth. The fad then subsided until it became possible to bring FMV games into the home. The arrival of disc drives inside home computers and the Sega CD console saw a surge of interest in FMV games in the 1990s, though the low-budget nature of these productions, the clunkiness of their interactivity, and the preponderance of kitsch destined them to be looked back on with a mixture of derision and nostalgic appreciation. Some games were made entirely from video footage, such as the charming Wirehead (1993), in which a family man has his brain rewired to respond to the player’s controller inputs, or the genuinely ambitious Ground Zero: Texas (1993), a game about a full-scale alien invasion made with a Hollywood crew and a $3 million budget. Others, like The 7th Guest (1993) or Phantasmagoria (1995), blended FMV into the point-and-click adventure structure, inserting living actors into fantastical scenarios in a manner never before seen in games.
Some of these titles courted controversy, with detractors decrying the pairing of live-action violence with an interactive medium, which supposedly primed its players for imitation. Most infamous perhaps was Night Trap (1993), in which the player switches between the different channels of a surveillance video system to capture vampires encroaching on a teen-girl sleepover in a suburban home. The game was condemned in 1993–94 US Senate hearings for its “graphic depiction of violence against women.” Senator Joseph Lieberman claimed that the use of “actual actors” in Night Trap’s live-action FMV sequences led to an “unprecedented level of realism.” Though anyone who had played the game could see this notion was farcical, the controversy brought attention to the FMV format, driving investment. Steven Spielberg lent his name to a game, Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair (1996), that aimed to simulate the movie-making process, and studios made FMV tie-ins, notably Sony Imageworks’s Johnny Mnemonic: The Interactive Action Movie (1995), and The X Files Game (1998) from Fox Interactive. This craze was short-lived. Hollywood realized the technology was too crude, and players were frustrated by the consistently laggy playback, hammy acting, bad writing, and gameplay that rarely went beyond pressing a certain button at a certain time.
Night Trap (Digital Pictures, 1993).
With the rise of the cutscene—wherein footage, either prerecorded or rendered inside of the game engine, advances the narrative of the game—the FMV game fell out of favor, regarded as a form that had shown promise but proved to be more trouble than it was worth. One aspect of the FMV game outlasted the medium’s heyday: The on-screen button prompts of Dragon’s Lair were adapted into what are now called quick time events (QTEs), which trigger the progression of forking in-game outcomes or advance cutscenes, a way to keep players alert during otherwise passive sequences. Developers continued to explore games with branching narratives and interactive elements, such as in the interactive storytelling experiments of Quantum Dream’s Fahrenheit (2005) and Heavy Rain (2010), Telltale Games’ choose-your-own-adventure adaptations of The Walking Dead (2012–19), and Supermassive Games’ multiple-choice horrors Until Dawn (2015) and The Quarry (2022). All make frequent use of the QTE, as popularized by Shenmue (1999–2019) and Uncharted (2007–22). But the much maligned FMV game did not totally vanish. A recent renaissance includes revival titles such as Contradiction: Spot The Liar (2015), The Complex (2020), and Not For Broadcast (2022), a range of productions made by Chinese developers, and, most prominently, a trilogy of games by the British independent game designer Sam Barlow, Her Story (2015), Telling Lies (2019), and Immortality (2022).
Of these, it was this final trilogy that can be credited with bringing the format back to the mainstream. Barlow has been lauded by news outlets for “reviving” and even “redeeming” the FMV genre—though he says he didn’t mean to. His games tap into the voyeuristic promise of FMV, addressing what it means to watch footage within an interactive frame. In Her Story, the player assumes the role of a detective in 1990s Britain, delving through videotapes stored in a police database to solve a missing persons case, using keyword searches to trigger new clips and reveal more of the story. The spiraling narrative of Telling Lies follows an FBI agent undercover in an environmental activist group. The player explores documents stored on a hard drive seized by the government, with keywords again used to trigger the uncovering of new material—all of which is either webcam or cellphone video. Immortality is more ambitious still, with a sophisticated story involving an actress who has gone missing. Tracing her disappearance across three fully realized fiction films, each channeling the stylistic conventions of a certain cinematic era, the plot ultimately unfolds to reveal a supernatural layer underneath. Mimicking the mechanics of film editing, in Immortality the player rewinds and fast-forwards clips to search for information, but also teleports between films using a “match cut” device that links similar images through connected props, backdrops, costumes, and characters, shuttling the player across different settings, shoots, and time periods. Each game experiments with the FMV framework, finding inventive new ways to play with the access, navigation, and playback of the clips, but also with the player’s voyeuristic position as the custodian of this found material.
To delve deeper into the FMV format and its history, I spoke to Sam Barlow, writer and director of the aforementioned trilogy, and Natalie Watson, producer of Immortality. We discussed three touchstone titles—Dragon’s Lair, Night Trap, and Phantasmagoria—identifying their resonance with the mechanics and conventions of Immortality.
Immortality (Sam Barlow, 2022).
NOTEBOOK: Let’s begin with Dragon’s Lair. I’m curious what you both think of this game and its legacy?
SAM BARLOW: My very crude take—and this applies to all the more arcade-y FMV games—would be that taking the video-clip playback technology available at that time and applying that to a game is not the best idea. I think part of the reason that this genre became so maligned is the fact that when you have a fast, skill- or response-based interaction using video clips, you essentially lose any fluidity of gameplay. So it's easy to kind of look at it and go, Well, this sucks. But then you realize that something like Shenmue [1999] popularized putting this same kind of gameplay back into a more mainstream video game. And since then, every big action game will have action set pieces that reduce your input to pressing one of the colored buttons or pushing the analog stick in the right direction at a certain point. So my meta defense of FMV is that if you look at a game like Uncharted [2007], those scripted sequences are actually not a million miles from Dragon's Lair. Everything is planned and scripted. There is a little more fluidity to it than Dragon’s Lair, but, ultimately, my contract as a player with the game is the same. Your job is not to express yourself but to perform the role of the stuntman. The animation in Dragon’s Lair is really gorgeous. But where I plug into FMV is the medium’s storytelling possibilities, and Dragon's Lair was not really digging into that.
NOTEBOOK: Because you’re not making decisions but just allowing the video to continue by not failing and causing the “movie” to stop?
BARLOW: If it’s an interactive experience there should be some level of expression in what you as the player are doing. If a different person plays the same game, there should be a different outcome. There should be some back and forth between the player and the game. Five different people can play the same level in Uncharted and it would run exactly the same. So, I think Dragon's Lair is a great example of what has proved to be a less fruitful path for FMV, which is to try and replicate systemic action gameplay. But as an artifact, I do think it is very cute.
NATALIE WATSON: I agree with Sam that there isn't much difference between Dragon’s Lair and something like Uncharted, or a quick time event in Until Dawn [2015]. Dragon’s Lair and Uncharted are both, at their core, a sequence of scripted, film-like events that you’re trying not to fail.
Dragon’s Lair (Rick Dyer, 1983).
NOTEBOOK: Let’s move to Night Trap. It seems that this game is talked about mostly for its notoriety?
BARLOW: I could talk for five hours about Night Trap; it’s such a fascinating point of history. There was this hit of pure videodrome in that era where even the word video sounded so futuristic, and Hasbro wanted to build a games console that used video as its storage media. You had this incredible team within Hasbro that included Nolan Bushnell and all these other OG video-game pioneers. They went and saw this avant-garde interactive theater production [Tamara, 1981, in which the audience followed parallel stories through the thirteen rooms of a house], an equivalent of Sleep No More [2011–25] at the time, and came back from that buzzing and created a prototype for Night Trap using video cassettes. The videotape had all of the different screens from the rooms of the house in a single image, then the console could pick out the bit you were looking at so it felt like you were choosing to see what was happening.
The notoriety of Night Trap comes from several places. It was the flag-bearer for FMV gaming. The Hasbro video-based system didn't happen, but then the Sega CD came out. The Sega CD was not the same resolution, but it was, at the time, the cutting edge of seeing real people inside your TV. Then there was the whole violence thing. Night Trap is the reason we have the games age-ratings system we have now. To the Moral Majority, Night Trap was portrayed as a game where the player is going to abduct and murder women in lingerie. But, actually, the premise of Night Trap is that the player is trying to save them.
It's interesting that the root of Night Trap was a bunch of hippies going to a Sleep No More–type thing, and then thinking about the narrative possibilities. We think of Night Trap as this trashy B movie, but it was such a good take upon making a game that’s built around video. It wasn’t necessarily doing anything simulationist or systemic, but the fact that it is about watching is really compelling. There was another FMV game—also limited by the technology—called Voyeur [1993], which similarly involved the makers thinking through making a game about the act of observing and watching.
NOTEBOOK: I found it interesting that when you launch Night Trap, it says that you’re on this mission, and you have this system—the Sega CD itself—that allows you to control the cameras in the house. It's crude, but the direct address and the placement of you as this voyeuristic yet participatory figure is interesting.
BARLOW: Someone asked me recently, “Why do so many FMV games do this thing where they directly address the audience?” That bit where a character gives you your mission briefing is obviously extremely on the nose. But it’s something that naturally happens in an FMV game because you don’t always have that character that is representing you on screen in the same way as you do in a regular game. And there is a greater awareness on the part of the people making these things that the audience is singular. In a normal game, you don’t have to remind the player that they are in control. Whereas in an FMV game, you have to remind the player that they are not watching an episode of television. You want to reinforce to them that the things they are doing matter. I think that’s probably where this direct address came from.
Natalie, where does Night Trap sit for you? It’s the FMV game that everyone is aware of culturally, right?
Night Trap (Digital Pictures, 1993).
WATSON: I think my first introduction to Night Trap was through a video-game history class in college where we went through the history of games, starting with Senet, the Olympics, Knucklebones, and other games from truly back in the day, then going all the way through to modern games. I remember Night Trap coming up in the same unit as Her Story. The thing that stands out to me the most about Night Trap is what we’ve been discussing about contextualizing the player and giving them a role. Whereas other games might have a tutorial, or an introductory cinematic, or some other thing that sets them up in this world, I think the inclination for FMV games to address the player and recognize that it is a choice to have this kind of interactive experience with the game itself. There are ways that you’re reminded of your subjectivity in the space.
BARLOW: There is a through line in the history of interactive cinema. There’s a Czech film, Kinoautomat. And William Castle did interactive stuff that technically wasn’t interactive, because he was this big bullshit legend. He made Dr. Sardonicus [1961], where, near the end, the movie instructs the audience to vote on whether or not the main character should be killed. Everyone has a foam hand, and the ushers would come in and make a show of looking to see who had their hand raised. Then the movie would continue, and show whether the audience had voted to kill or to save. The addressing of the audience is even more imperative. They literally would pause the movie, step out, break the fourth wall, and get the audience’s take. The trick was that it was a linear movie and the guy would always get murdered!
NOTEBOOK: The vote didn’t matter?
BARLOW: The audience would always vote to kill the guy.
WATSON: That’s so funny.
BARLOW: Isn’t it? What was our next game?
NOTEBOOK: Phantasmagoria.
Phantasmagoria (Roberta Williams, 1995).
BARLOW: The adventure game was, at that point, the storytelling genre. It had defined characters and stories, and they existed within genres that are more complicated and rich than most video games were then––murder mysteries, thrillers, and fantasy adventures. The thing that I found really cool about FMV games is that having human performance unlocked all these genres that didn’t otherwise exist in games. Suddenly you had erotic thrillers, psychological horror, or even legal thrillers—all this stuff that didn’t, and couldn’t, exist previously. You couldn’t do an erotic thriller with 8-bit sprites, because it wouldn’t do the erotic thing. You couldn’t do a legal thriller because the necessary levels of subtext and character performance—all of that stuff that I was interested in exploring in Her Story—couldn’t exist.
With Phantasmagoria, writer and designer Roberta Williams asked herself, What could I do with real people? She decided to make something extremely gory and violent, and slightly sexy and psychological too—or at least that was the ambition. In all the FMV games we’ve made, we found that there is the opportunity to explore more nuance in terms of performance and subtext in games when you have a real person on screen. But also, these things that are such bugbears in games, such as violence and sex, take on a different context when you start putting real people on the screen. Before this call, I did a bit of reading to remind myself what the take is on Phantasmagoria. There were a bunch of people chiming in on Reddit saying how this game was their first experience of this kind of extreme media. They couldn’t get the violent video cassette because their parents would have intercepted it, but parents had no idea what this game was about. There’s a slice of the population for whom Phantasmagoria was quite a pivotal thing.
The other thing that immediately comes to mind when I think of Phantasmagoria is this bonkers game Harvester [1996]. It went even further than Phantasmagoria with the aim of making the most edgy, video-nasty-esque, boundary-pushing video game. It was a similar thing—all digitized characters, lots of gory deaths. But it was probably more artistically successful because the people making it understood this whole thing people were talking about with video game violence at the time, the Satanic Panic, and the general way in which the American Moral Majority was thinking about these things then. I saw an interview with the creator [Gilbert Austin]. He said that they weren't just being edgelords, they were trying to explore something with the violence. If you look at the list of content warnings for Harvester, the stuff they did is crazy. Prior to something like Harvester or Phantasmagoria, you couldn’t really shock someone with gore in a video game. If you chop the head off a sprite, it doesn’t feel the same as doing it to a real, filmed person.
Mortal Kombat (Midway, 1992).
WATSON: And yet it was Mortal Kombat [1992] and Night Trap that were being legislated against by the US government. It seems to me that the sensibility at the time was quite fragile?
BARLOW: It definitely plugs into that video nasty thing. The point of video nasties—at least as I remember it; I was a kid at the time—was that there was stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily get away with putting in a regular movie theater, and there’s stuff you definitely couldn’t put on television, but the video nasty was a loophole. They could put it on video and distribute these cassettes. Going and renting a movie wasn’t quite the same as sitting in a movie theater with a bunch of people, so that sense of intimacy—or privacy—that came with video led to the video nasties. There was also a lot of mail order. This all led people to tap into stuff that had never been seen before—more shocking and gory.
NOTEBOOK: Were FMV games another loophole? I had wondered why there was so much horror in FMV.
BARLOW: The question was probably more—if I’m giving the benefit of the doubt—what can we do that will be really powerful with this medium? I played a lot of scary text adventure games when I was a kid—The Lurking Horror [1987] scared the shit out of me—but there was a limit to how those things could make you feel on a visceral level. When you look at the production values of a lot of these FMV games, generally the film crews that were making this stuff, and the people that were acting in them, were the same people that were making straight-to-video stuff. It was the lower budget, more cowboy side of the Hollywood system. That might also have led to the predominance of genre work in the medium?
Immortality (Sam Barlow, 2022).
NOTEBOOK: Maybe we can move to Immortality then. I’m interested to hear what influence this history of FMV games might have had on the making of Immortality. Were there choices—whether mechanical or artistic ones—that you were both inspired by as creators, and conventions you wanted to depart from?
BARLOW: One of my favorite filmmakers, Nicolas Roeg, was fascinated by nonlinear editing and trying to mirror the way human memory works. So with Immortality, I was conscious that this sort of random-access way of navigating through video clips with some level of player agency is an interesting way to play with visual storytelling. I always raise my eyebrow when people call Her Story or Telling Lies interactive movies, so there was a perverse thing going on at the start of Immortality where I was like, Okay, if you want an interactive movie then this is what I think an interactive movie is. It’s not Dragon’s Lair, it’s not Night Trap. It is us going, Okay, what is interesting about movies? The “in” on Her Story was that it was a deconstruction of detective fiction, and for Immortality it was a deconstruction of a movie.
I was happy to say that Her Story and Telling Lies were not movies because there was no concept of cutting in them. But with Immortality we talked about how to explore cutting in an interactive experience. When I explained the game, a lot of people would assume I was describing a sort of gamified Final Cut. But If we did that, it would take the magic out of the cut. So when we had the idea of including what we call “the match cut,” it was about allowing you a way to create cuts or jumps between pieces of footage that will still be surprising even if there is some agency in that choice. What if the interactive movie is not about driving the story through a series of forking branches while you sit back and watch, but instead about how to make the act of watching even more expressive and involved?
I was also fascinated by the idea of pulling the audience in earlier in the creative process, because I think that’s one of the really cool things about interactivity. The reason that there is a single cut of a movie is, to some extent, practical, because you need to print the movie and distribute it. The final cut of a movie is often the cut that the studio thinks will play best to the broadest audience. You might do a test screening of your movie and the audience decides that they don’t want this character to die at the end, because it makes them sad. The studio goes back and recuts the movie, but there’s a percentage of the audience that would really love the sad ending to the movie. For the entire history of filmmaking, you’ve generally had this idea of the fixed cut. There are examples where this isn’t the case. Stanley Kubrick would continue to edit his films after they were released in cinemas and issue new prints. And there are failures like the Clue [Jonathan Lynn, 1985] movie, where they distributed three different cuts of the movie. When Krzysztof Kieślowski was making The Double Life of Veronique [1991], he really didn’t have a handle on how he was going to cut it and had created so many different versions with different plots that, at some point, he asked if Miramax could release 24 versions of this movie in cinemas.
The Atrocity Exhibition (J. G. Ballard, cover of first edition, 1970).
So, you have all of these technical constraints that make movie-making a very static thing. When Roger Ebert decided to put himself in the middle of the “Are video games art?” debate, his very weak justification for games not being art was that art has to be authored and fixed. But Roger, you know how films are made! You know that a week before any Kubrick film was finished, it might have had a different ending. You know that there was a script for some movie that was written that when they got to set an actor improvised on. You know that films are made where they shoot the film and then they get to the editing room and they realize it doesn’t work and they completely change the story. We know that film is extremely fluid, and that the authoring of it—like all authorship—is in itself fluid. So this idea that at some point there is the locked version seems silly to be fixated on. Plus, before broadcast technology there was a lot more fluidity. With all traditions of oral storytelling, the story changes in the telling. Or with printed literature too. Charles Dickens wrote two different endings to Great Expectations, so if you go buy the Oxford Classics version it will come with an alternate final chapter—like a choose your own adventure.
So for me, as a writer I love being in this space where there is fluidity and possibility—where the story is around me. J. G. Ballard has this great experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. It has fragmented little sequences that have recurring characters and themes. I have this edition with an introduction by Ballard where he says that the way you should read this book is to flip through the pages and if you see a phrase that jumps out drop in and read it. If you read the book in this way, you’ll be reading it in the way in which it was written. That really stuck with me, the sense of being immersed in a story, and the idea of the linearity of a story only being really something that exists at the very end.
NOTEBOOK: It makes me think of this book I read: The Unfortunates, by B. S. Johnson. The book comes in a box, and all the chapters are bound as individual booklets. You’re instructed to read the first chapter first and the last chapter last, but you can throw everything else up in the air and read the story in any order that you want. I was surprised how well the random sequence I assigned to the story worked.
BARLOW: Yeah, there’s all these interesting literary precedents of more avant-garde structures, but my issue with The Atrocity Exhibition is that it is still a book, so the easiest way to 100-percent it is to sit and read it from cover to cover. What I loved about Her Story was that because this thing is digital and hidden, you don’t know what the bounds of the story are. There’s real excitement in dredging up something and dropping in a new piece of the story that you haven’t seen that is now redefining how you think of it.
Immortality (Sam Barlow, 2022).
NOTEBOOK: Natalie, we were talking about the ambition of Phantasmagoria and that experiment of bringing in many actors and a large production crew and attempting to tell a complex story with serious themes, and Immortality seems, to me at least, a lot more ambitious. How did you manage what must have been an ever expanding project and bring it into a shape that players could still have a handle on?
WATSON: It’s funny because a valid assumption about Immortality would be that it is this ever spiraling project, but the reality was that Immortality was extremely defined in its initial concept. The game that Sam first described to me when we met was the game that we made. There were certain affordances we could make where we could have it all while maintaining a realistic mindset. We shot every scene of every fictional movie, essentially, but we were able to be smart about how we would shoot every scene. For example, for the scene that is meant to be the music-video awards. While in the final product of the fictional movie we would have been essentially shooting the VMAs, in Immortality that was a table read.
We had this master spreadsheet lovingly called “The Organizing Monster,” which had every single scene that we were meant to shoot, as well as the method: was it a table read, a rehearsal, or the final production? And also things like time of day, take number on the slate, every piece of information needed to keep track of continuity. Then also details like: What is Marissa feeling in this scene? And then, what is happening between the characters that Marissa and her other actor colleagues are playing?
The other incredible part about it was that we had already started developing the game while Sam and the other writers, Alan Scott and Amelia Gray, were writing their scripts. So as the narrative of Immortality is coming together, the mechanics of the game are also coming together in parallel. We had a working prototype of the game before the shoot. We tested it using footage from movies that we pulled rips from, and also footage Sam had made to demonstrate how the supernatural layer of the game could work. So it was incredible to be able to have something to point to when working with a traditional film crew.
BARLOW: The screenplay would get fed into the prototype. The prediction of how the gameplay would work was that anytime there was a named character or object in the action lines it would be capitalized, and the code would pull that out. Here is a scene in which—amongst other things—you will be able to match cut on Marissa, and on John, and she is holding an apple, and there will be a dagger on the table. We were playing a version of the game that would print the text up over the footage of other movies, and from that you could see that someone playing this will be able to match cut on the apple which will then take them somewhere. Does this action feel meaningful and fun, and do the places the algorithm sends them make sense? When we were ready to shoot, we were confident that this all was going to work.