The 1980's is widely considered the golden age of arcade games in the US. The newest games, the best graphics – it could only be found in the arcade. Classics like Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Tempest and Galaga were born in that era. It was also the era that gave us the usage of real video in videogames. Dragon's Lair is the prime example of this development in technology. They are/were often criticized for their lack of interactivity. Why use a linear technology for something that is more or less defined by interactivity? This article tries to show the reasoning behind the advent of video technology in video games.

Dragon's Lair was not the first game that used video technology. In 1982 a company called Electro-Sport released the game Quarterhorse. In the game the player could place bets on horses and then watches the race itself. The races were just video footage of horse races and stored on LaserDisc. In total there were 120 races and outcomes possible.

The flyers that were distributed to the owners of the arcade holders gives us some interesting insight in how both the producers and the arcade owners viewed video games.

“Imagine installing a real racetrack in your amusement area. Live horses, live odds, live action. Electro-sports does just that with it's new Quarterhorse Video Machine. Actual Quarterhorse races, live cheering crowd, stride by stride excitement added by the voice of the track announcer. Include the random Double Odds, and you have by far the most exciting, the most advanced, the most entertaining video amusement machine in America.”

The rest of the flyer talks about how easy the machine is to maintain, the excellent LaserDisc technology and how “we at Electro-Horse have created what many people believe to be the ultimate in Video entertainment”. The cited paragraph is about all the information about actual game-play. Hammering on about the impressive 'graphics' was considered more important than how players actually played the game. And compared to the games on the market that didn't use video technology, they of course looked much better.

In a way it seems like Electro-Horse's marketing department actively used the so-called horseless-carriage syndrome (and no, not because its a game about horses..) to market their product to potential buyers. The game of horse betting has very little interaction and could easily be transferred to a machine such as Quarterhorse. Compared to video games from that time like Pac Man or even Space Invaders it makes such little use of what makes videogames be videogames – interactivity. Because it is based on an already existing game that exists in real life it is easy to understand without the need to have much knowledge about videogames, but therefor also has incredibly limited interactivity.

Other companies did use video in different ways. In the year 1982 Sega showed their prototype for the new arcade game Astron Belt. The player controls a spaceship that flies through a predefined route. Full motion video was used as the backdrop for this, and was pulled from sci-fi movies. The player's ship and the enemies were all 'standard' graphics. It's interesting to note that in this example the usage of video doesn't interfere with the actual gameplay – it's not a replacement for the interactive graphics that the player controls.

So with these two games, we already two completely different ways of incorporating video into these arcade games. Sure, Astron Belt can be considered a very linear game but was it more linear than other comparable games like say Galaxian? Astron Belt's events are triggered by the action of the player, although there is of course only one outcome. This is however no different from Galaxian where there is only one way to progress further.

So we cannot claim that video in itself creates a linear game that is driven purely by the narrative and not by the players actions. Companies like Sega who had made traditional videogames made the video be in service of the game, not the other way around like we see in Quarterhorse where the video is the main act and interactivity is only a small part of the 'entertainment experience'.

The example that Sega gave didn't however mean that all FMV games went into that direction. As we will see in next week's article about Dragon's Lair, it was easy for people to let interactivity suffer under great 'graphics'.

This article is part of a series about FMV games and the impact it has had on the games industry. Visit GNN next week for the second part in this series.