News culture Before Netflix got involved, the very first interactive film actually came from 1967
The idea of giving the audience the power to influence the course of a story doesn't originate with modern streaming platforms. Long before the advent of interactive narratives on Netflix and others, a daring film project was launched at the 1967 Montreal Universal Exhibition.
Montreal World's Fair
Presented in the Czechoslovak Pavilion, Cinema machine offered a unique experience. The film, a black comedy, starred Petr Novák, whose apartment was on fire in the first minutes. The originality of the device lay in the interruption of the film at nine key moments. At each stop, a character appeared on the screen and asked the audience to choose between two alternative scenes.. Viewers then voted using buttons at their seats and the film continued based on the majority vote.
This participatory approach changed the role of the spectator, turning him from a simple passive observer into an actor in the story. The installation itself should reinforce this interactivity. The 127-seat capacity screening room was equipped with red and green buttons at each seat, allowing viewers to cast their vote. Lights, also red and green, surrounded the screen, displaying the voting results in real time. Whatever choice the audience made, the film always led to the same conclusion: the apartment is on fire.
A return of the genre in recent years
We therefore have to go back to 1967 to find traces of the first interactive film. Although no work in this style has been able to establish itself in almost six decades, viewers were able to witness a new emergence of the genre. For example the series Black mirror and its consequence Bandersnatch published in 2018, of which we have the most famous example. This is a special episode of the fifth season in which we follow a developer who adapts a novel into a video game. An episode that has multiple alternative endings. We can cite others that are less obvious, such as You versus wild or The epic of Puss in Boots.
However, these interactive works are not just reserved for the cinema. In video games, there are many narrative titles in which the player can influence the course of the story according to his decisions. The most famous include Detroit: Become Human, Cyberpunk 2077 and even Baldur's Gate 3.
