Well 1983 saw the release of Dragon's Lair and for me sparked an interest in Interactive Movies, that really effected my choices as I grew up. For some obscure reason we never started out with a VHS or BetaMax Deck in the house, I grew up with a Philips LaserDisc Player, so I had a particular interest when my brother pointed out that the video game cabinent used the same principle. As a Videogame, it stood out against the crowd of Pac-Man's and Defenders, and enjoyed watching others playing the game, especially as it was a money eater, but mainly it was because the games had a plot.
Overtime, an obsession to find other LaserDisc games in arcades kept me entertained in Blackpool and Redcar. Ones I really remember well were:
Firefox, that used footage from the film, Space Ace - the scifi equivelent of Dragon's Lair, Hologram Time Traveller - that used this weird parabolic bowl projection system that made the game look like a free-standing hologram, and a really fun lightgun based game called Mad Dog McCree, that used live action.
When I was doing my Interactive Arts Degree back in the early 1990's, one of my final year projects was the creation of a live action based interactive film using an Amiga 1200 and 16 shades of grey video footage, captured onto ( a stonking ) 40mb harddrive. An interactive fiction in the guise of a weird Franz Kafka meets Film noir film.
Looking back on these games now, they are limited in the range of interaction, at best branching narratives that fold back to a winning conclusion. But for the time, and before broadband and fast computers that can render in realtime , they were inspiring the next generation of interactive film-makers. They also demonstrate where Interactive Storytelling needs to improve on, with autonomous characters and Procedural Worlds and Plots that the audience can deeply invest in.
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