Theater Games: Serious Business

 

Neil Druckmann may like to believe that The Last Of Us started an entirely new genre of video game, but the fact is that this is a genre with a history dating at least 40 years prior. 

The people that enjoy discussing games like The Last of Us, Hellblade, and A Plague Tale are very similar to the crowd of middle-age men shopping in the home theater section of late 1900s electronics store. Phrases like "Yeah, but have you seen it on LaserDisc?", or "Is this the letterbox version", or "How much is delivery and installation" were often heard alongside copies of Rick Dyer's Dragon's Lair. 

Dragon's Lair, in it's proper LaserDisc form, was the pinnacle of "video game" in 1983. Setting the tone for Theater Game genre, Rick Dyer reduced player interaction to a bare necessity to increase the ability for the media to deliver high-quality images and movie-quality story. With animation quality rivaling Disney's The Sword in the Stone, in part because the involvement of ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, Dragon's Lair enjoys a mythic reputation. While the game was a massive success in 1983, this is most likely due to the arcade industries relative struggle to be successful in 1983. The studios later, similarly advanced, animated games Space Ace, and Dragon's Lair II, were no where near as successful as the first. 

That did not stop the video game industry from trying to reproduce the success of the original Dragon's Lair using the same philosophy that Rick Dyer used. They believed that interaction came second to presentation and heavy investments would equate to large success. After the failure of LaserDisc to become a heavily adopted media format, and the failure of attempts at various VHS-based consoles, the limited consumer base of systems like Sega CD, 3DO, and Atari Jaguar CD, the Theater Genre migrated to PC. After Rick Dyer's exit and Don Bluth's last efforts ultimately fell short in 1990 and 1993 with Dragon's Lair II and III, Chris Roberts and Origin Systems set records for production costs with 1994's Wing Commander III: Heart of the Tiger.

Unlike Chris Roberts' Star Citizen, Wing Commander III did little to innovate the series gameplay. Instead it focused on delivering story through full-motion video cut scenes, starring John Rhys-Davies (Indiana Jones, The Lord of the Rings), Mark Hamill (Star Wars), and Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange, Caligula). The production budget was about 5 million USD and reports show that the game made a profit around three times the budget, making it successful enough to immediately spur a sequel. 

The ironically titled Wing Commander IV: Price of Freedom took the same philosophy as III, more theater and less game, with the exception of added dialogue choices. The production moved to full film production sets and the budget more than doubled to a record-setting 12 million USD. John Rys-Davies and Mark Hamill returned, with Malcolm McDowell. It shipped on DOS as a 6-CD set. As of 2000, it was reported that proceeds from lifetime sales of the game may have come close to breaking even, after releasing in 1996.

Alongside the 1996 release of Wing Commander IV was another Theater game genre giant, Toonstruck. Toonstruck was a point and click adventure game published by Virgin Interactive and internal studio, Burst. It featured Christopher Lloyd, Dan Castellaneta, Tim Curry, and Ben Stein. Mixing the full-motion video of the actors with a high-quality animated world, the game was following a trend in Hollywood of adult-content juxtaposed with cartoons, starting with American Pop, and evolved into Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Cool World. In total, the production costed 8 million USD and the game was a financial failure for Virgin Interactive, despite critical acclaim. 

From here we see a rather large break between attempted integrations of Film and Video Games, until 2002 when the industry receives two games that attempt to copy film quality in some manner. October's Grand Theft Auto Vice City and December's The Getaway both focus on adapting crime drama film into an interactive medium. Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto Vice City takes a less technical approach to the video and rendering side, featuring mostly expressionless faces backed by film voice actors like Ray Liotta, William Fichtner, Burt Reynolds, and Luis Guzman. The game retains interactivity in the irreverent open-world sections and opts for semi-seriousness during mission cut-scenes. It falls short of film quality by many measures, but the integration of film actors and B-movie writing is a notable step back towards film integrations. 

December's The Getaway is a decidedly larger leap, one that publisher Sony would make a trend of later, towards high-budget, high-quality integration of film and video games. The irreverent open-world sections of Grand Theft Auto Vice City are replaced by a 16 square miles of a virtual replica of London. The game featured new face capture technology that gave the cut-scenes an unprecedented amount of realism. While receiving much criticism for the writing, the series became a multi-media series with a 2020 AMC television series titled Gangs of London, the same as the spin-off sequel game of The Getaway. While the game would go on to sell 4 million copies, the exit of Phil Harrison and the entry of Shuhei Yoshida at the top of Sony PlayStation publishing signaled the end for The Getaway and Team Soho, but a large chunk of Team Soho would be resurrected in time for the second wave of the Theater Game genre. 

Team Bondi's LA Noire, Naughty Dog's Uncharted 2, Remedy's Alan Wake, and Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain were released in a two-year span that marked the second wave of the Theater Game Genre. All 4 featured reduced or simplified interactivity when compared to their contemporaries, with a heavy focus on voice acting, character rendering, writing, and cut-scenes. While Team Bondi's LA Noire failed to earn a sequel, Quantic Dream, Remedy, and Naughty Dog would continue to grow the second wave into a stable genre. Today much of Sony PlayStation's internal studio titles borrow heavily from the principles created during the second wave of Theater Games. Third-party studios like Remedy, Quantic Dream, Supermassive, and Asobo specialize in these low agency, film experience titles. These titles enjoy far more success than their predecessors, but whether that continues is yet to be seen.

First wave Theater Genre games were a part of a technology trend. These games were attached to high-budget equipment, high-budget lifestyles, and relied on publishers willing to take big gambles. The ebb and flow of money into and out of the video game industry trends with the attempted marriage of film and video games. The first wave broke with rise of investment into the dotcom bubble, the small resurgence in the early 2000s during the console boom with Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 fighting for technological dominance, and the true second wave coming after investors sought to shelter their money in the only sector not dragged down by the Great Recession. 

But the video game industry is now struggling to retain investors. Closures, layoffs, and cost-cutting bound across the industry as publishers seek short-term book fixes. These single-quarter gains will be washed with reduced output, reduced sales, and reduced GDP as time marches on. CEOs will resign, businesses will eventually close, and the second wave of the Theater Game genre will likely come to an end. The question is, then, what will replace it?