Dragon's Lair

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

Interactive movies, a subset of 1980s and early 1990s full-motion video (FMV) games, occupy a neglected corner of game history, and this analysis argues that they merit serious scholarly attention.

• Interactive movies were a subset of 1980s and early 1990s full-motion video (FMV) games that intercut FMV cutscenes with quick-time event (QTE) gameplay, and they have been largely neglected by game studies scholarship.
• Dragon's Lair is described as arguably the only prestige title among period FMV games, thanks to its cinematic spectacle and prominent arcade placement, and it pioneered interactive cutscenes well before later games popularized the mechanic.
• Later entries added new affordances: branching and signal cues in Space Ace, spatial gameplay in the light-gun shooter Mad Dog McCree that anticipates first-person shooters, and time-and-space surveillance mechanics in Night Trap.