Cutscene

• 1. Introduction

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  Cutscenes arrive when a video game pauses itself. The controller goes quiet and a scene plays on screen without asking anything of the player. Steven Spielberg and Guillermo del Toro, both committed video game players, described them as intrusive. That critique from two celebrated directors captures a tension in the form that designers have never fully resolved. The cutscene has its roots in a mid-1960s mainframe game that few people remember today.

• 2. The First Interruptions

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  Mabel Addis designed The Sumerian Game in 1966, a mainframe title built for an audience that had no idea what the Sumerian world looked like. She gave them a slideshow synchronized to an audio recording, played before the game began. The format was not yet an in-game cutscene by the later definition. The intention, however, was the same: prepare the player before the interactivity begins.

  Taito's Space Invaders Part II, released in 1979, put a scene inside the game itself. When the last alien of a round was shot, it would limp off screen in a brief comical sequence. Namco's Pac-Man followed in 1980 with its own short interludes. The ghost Blinky and Pac-Man chased each other between stages, giving a mechanical game a moment of character.

  Shigeru Miyamoto gave the format a new purpose with Donkey Kong in 1981. Rather than brief comedy between rounds, his cutscenes advanced a complete story from beginning to end. Data East extended that ambition with Bega's Battle in 1983, a laserdisc arcade game that paired animated full-motion video with voice acting. The scenes developed a narrative across the shooting stages. That pairing became the standard approach to game storytelling for years to come.

  Bugaboo (The Flea) in 1983 and Karateka in 1984 helped carry cutscenes to home computers. Ron Gilbert brought non-interactive plot sequences to the point-and-click adventure genre in 1987 with Maniac Mansion. Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden arrived on the Famicom in 1988. It reached the NES the following year, bringing more than 20 minutes of anime-like cinema scenes to a console action game. Woven between stages, the scenes used still illustrations, dialogue, and sound effects. The designers also employed low camera angles, close-ups, and widescreen letterboxing for a deliberately cinematic feel. By 1989, titles as different as Prince of Persia and Zero Wing were using the technique. CD-ROM would soon expand what was physically possible, its much greater storage capacity opening the door to full-motion video and high-quality voice recordings.

• 3. Form and Technique

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  Wing Commander IV used fully constructed sets and cast Hollywood actors including Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell to play its characters. The approach treated each cutscene as a short film. Electronic Arts built its Lord of the Rings and Star Wars releases around footage drawn directly from the film productions. Enter the Matrix was filmed concurrently with The Matrix Reloaded, with the Wachowskis directing the game's scenes as well as the film's. The Neverhood Chronicles, a 1996 point-and-click title from DreamWorks Interactive, took a different direction. Douglas TenNapel directed its full-motion video cutscenes using stop motion, with puppets and environments sculpted from plasticine.

  Myst, Wing Commander III, and Phantasmagoria each combined live footage of actors with pre-rendered animated backgrounds in a single scene. This blending was particularly common during the 1990s. Final Fantasy VII pushed it further by weaving pre-rendered full-motion video into scenes that otherwise use real-time graphics. Fully pre-rendered sequences take the approach to its extreme. Developed before release and stored as video files, they draw on the full range of CGI, cel animation, or graphic novel panel art. Their visual quality is set by the developers' tools, not by what the player's hardware can process.

  Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty let players move the camera during a real-time cutscene. This is possible because real-time sequences render through the same engine that runs during play. The technique is also known as Machinima. Real-time scenes are generally of lower visual quality than pre-rendered ones, but they reflect choices the player has already made in the game. Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild carry a player's chosen outfit into their cutscenes. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas does the same. Halo: Reach and Kane & Lynch: Dead Men also gave players camera control during real-time scenes.

  Dragon's Lair, Road Blaster, and Space Ace took the laserdisc format and turned the cutscene into something the player could fail. Button prompts appeared on screen as the action unfolded, and the player had to respond correctly to continue. This mechanic, now commonly called quick time events, made the cutscene interactive without turning it into ordinary gameplay. The player watches, but the outcome depends on how well they respond. Whether any of these forms counted as play, cinema, or something else was a question nobody agreed on. Game designers, Hollywood directors, and critics had incompatible answers.

• 4. Disputed Ground

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  Ken Levine, a game designer and avid gamer, was among those who described cutscenes as intrusive. Hollywood writer Danny Bilson called cinematics the last resort of game storytelling. His argument was that a player who picks up a controller does not want to watch a film. Raph Koster offered a more analytical version of the same concern. He described the cutscene as the part of a game with the largest possibility for emotional engagement. He also noted that it is the part that can be cut with no effect on actual gameplay. Koster concluded that many of the peak emotional moments in video games are produced by cutscenes rather than by the game's interactive systems.

  A GameFront article surveyed successful games that use cutscenes extensively and described them as a highly effective way to communicate a storyteller's vision. Rune Klevjer answered the critics directly, writing: "A cutscene does not cut off gameplay. It is an integral part of the configurative experience." Klevjer argued that cutscenes always affect the rhythm of a game. When they are well implemented, he observed, they build suspense or give the player visual information that is helpful or crucial. That is the distinction Klevjer was drawing. His phrase "the configurative experience" points toward an idea that neither critics nor defenders have fully mapped. What a game becomes when its story is told well enough to feel continuous with the play is a design problem. No one has solved it cleanly.