Hello its blogging time again and it's video game history time again! And today, we're talking about one of the most infamous game design mechanics of recent memory: The Quick Time Event!
However, there were arcade games that used pre shot film footage long before Dragons Lair was a twinkle in Rick Dyer's eye. In fact, the idea of seeing movies in arcades is nothing new, as early as the 1890s, devices like the Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope were some of the earliest devices to show motion pictures before the days of film.
The Mutoscope was the more popular of the two since it was cheaper to buy. It worked a bit like a giant Rolodex card filer, When you inserted a coin, it would unlock a breaking mechanism allowing you to use a crank handle on the side. As you turned the crank, A wheel of around 850 cards illuminated by a light would flip over creating the frames of movement. These films were typically only 1 minute in length and when you reached the end, the mechanism turns off the light.
The Mutoscope was originally manufactured from 1895 to 1909 for the American Mutoscope Company, later American Mutoscope and Biograph Company by the Marvin & Casler Co., Canastota, New York, with the last of the original reels being produced in 1916. Production eventually resumed after the formation of International Mutoscope Reel Company in 1925, and new machine and reels continued production until 1949.
Eventually the company diversified into making other types of arcade machines and in 1941, they introduced an electro-mechanical driving game called Drive Mobile.
Based on older British driving games from the 1930s, Drive Mobile used a steering wheel to control a model car over a road painted on a metal drum, with the goal being to keep the car centered as the road shifts left and right.
It became very popular and spawned a sequel with 2 player gameplay called Cross Country Race a couple years later in 1948 as well as seated version with 3 gameplay styles called Drive Yourself in 1954.
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That same year, another company called Capitol Projector Corporation made their own racing arcade game. They were founded in 1925, and made projectors as well as Mutoscopes machines and Mutoscope reels.
The result was Auto Test, launched in arcades in 1954.
What made it unique was, rather than take the approach of Drive Mobile using a looping drum and a model car, Auto Test used pre recorded footage on 8mm film projected onto the screen along with a looping audio tape, with the goal being to preform the right action at the right time, awarding the player points for making correct decisions as the footage is played.
The game was also a commercial success, being sold from 1954 to 1959, and coming in different variations like a smaller version called Junior Auto Test, another version with a real car seat and real dashboard designed to go into driving schools, and a similar game for boating called Cruiser Pilot.
Other arcade game companies made similar machines but they peaked at the end of the 50's. By 1960 these machines were off the market and Capitol Projector went out of business sometime after 1962. However, fast forward to 1974 and this concept reemerged in Japan thanks to a familiar name as one of their first arcade games, Nintendo.
To explain this we need to take a brief look at the history of Nintendo. Nintendo was founded in 1889 by an entrepreneurial artist named Fusajiro Yamauchi as playing card company manufacturing a type of Japanese playing card called Hanafuda (Translated literally into english as flower cards).
By 1949, and by that point the company was being lead by Fusajiro's great grandson Hiroshi Yamauchi, after his grandfather and then current president Sekiryo Kaneda, passed away from a stroke. In 1961, It became clear to Yamauchi that there was no more room for expansion in the playing card business due to competition from US Imports, so he began looking at other businesses to diversify into. Nintendo experimented with all sorts of business ventures, everything from An Instant rice food company, to a taxi service, to a TV station, to even a Love Hotel, but all of them failed after a short period. But out of all these businesses the company tried their hands in, there was one product type that managed to have major success: Toys.
While Nintendo's first toys were selling in decent numbers, they weren't massively successful. But their success would change one day in 1965 when Yamauchi hired a young engineer named Gunpei Yokoi. Although Yokoi was a high profiled engineer, he was actually initially hired as a janitor, before moving on to becoming a maintenance engineer for the Hanafuda machines. Each day, he would inspect the machines used to print and calibrate Nintendo’s cards and fix them if they broke down. He was very good at his job, as he worked efficiently and diligently, and often worked so fast that he usually finished his inspections of the equipment in time for lunch.
However, Because he fixed the machines so quickly, it often left him with nothing to do. So he often used the factory’s lathe to make his own creations out of wood. One day, He created an extending arm out of 2 crossed pieces of wood with grips on each end. As he used it, Yamauchi happened to walk by and see it, shortly after calling Yokoi into his office. At first Yokoi thought that Yamauchi would scold him and fire him, but instead Yamauchi asked him to turn his creation into a toy that could be sold for the upcoming holiday season. So Yokoi added colored balls and cylinders, changed from wood to plastic and in 1966, the toy was released as the Ultra Hand. It was an instant success, and eventually sold over 1 million units. The Ultra Hand alone caused Yokoi to go from from a maintenance engineer to one of their most valuable toy designers within just 1 year!
One day in 1970, A salesman for Sharp Electronics named Masayuki Uemura walked into Yokoi's office on a sales call to demonstrate Sharps new line of Photoresistors to see if the company was interested in buying any.
A Photoresistor (Also known as a light-dependent resistor, LDR, or photo-conductive cell), is an electronic component designed to turn light into an electricity. By the early 70s, these where replacing the older photo conductive vacuum tubes first developed in the 1930s. These Photoresistors are designed to be used in any type of device that needs to sense light, so they're used in everything from clock radios and nightlights, to light based alarm systems and street lights.
Thinking of the possibilities, Yokoi not only said yes, but convinced Uemura (An engineer himself) to join Nintendo and work with him on the project, and their efforts lead to the release of the Nintendo Kôsenjû SP (光線銃SP) series, also known as the Beam Gun series. While guns and targets were sold separately, they could have been purchased in packages as well. There were 2 guns available: A revolver or a riffle, and targets consisted of things like bottles, a lion, wildlife scenes, and even a roulette wheel and slot machine.
The Beam Gun toys effectively worked similar to the old Seeburg Ray-O-Light light gun arcade games of the 1930s and 40s. Inside the gun was a lightbulb that would produce a flash of light, and inside the target was a Photoresistor. When you pull the trigger, the gun flashes a light in the barrel and when it hit the Photoresistor on the target, it allowed the target to be mechanically animated. For example, with the bottle targets it will activate a spring and make it appear that it broke in half.
The Beam Gun series was also an instant success, So much so, that in 1973, Nintendo bought old abandoned bowling alleys, and turned them into the first Laser Clay Shooting Ranges. They worked by using an overhead projector showed targets on a wall, when users fired their guns, mirrors tracked the light, and detected hits, switching the projector image to a destroyed target. It worked very similar to Auto Test, only instead of driving it was shooting, and was more defiant on whether you succeeded or failed.
While the Laser Clay Shooting Ranges were initially very successful, Unfortunately, The 1973 Oil Crisis caused sales to drop immediately. Nintendo then began adapting the hardware into a smaller and less expensive version called Mini Laser Clay, but that also failed to sell in high numbers.
Eventually, Yokoi took the concept and adapted it into an arcade game which allowed users to simulate a western shootout. That game was called Wild Gunman!
Again, it It worked very similar to Auto Test, only more defiant on whether you succeeded or failed. It used 16 mm film to show gunmen popping up into an alley and the player had had to pull the trigger at the right time to see if they made the shot, or they died.
Wild Gunman ended up being a success and Nintendo continued working on arcade games using similar technology. In 1975, they introduced EVR Race, An arcade game in which up to 10 players could bet on horse or auto races played back on an EVR video tape. They also released other shooting games using 16mm film including Sky Hawk, Battle Shark and the final entry Test Driver (Which was the most similar to the original Auto Test).
There was also Kasco's The Driver, released in 1978, and also used real 8mm film footage to simulate driving.
However, as video games began to take off in Japan around the same time, these early ancestors to the quick time event disappeared as well. But not for long, because the same year Test Driver and The Driver were released, in 1978, Dutch electronics company Phillips introduced the Laserdisc format.
While Laserdisc was designed as a home video format, it was way too expensive to be successful in that field. However that didn't stop others from buy and experimenting with the format for niche applications. The first attempt to combine random access video with computer games was Rollercoaster, written in BASIC for the Apple II by David Lubar in 1981 and published in the January 1982 issue of Creative Computing magazine.
By using an OmniScan interface from Aurora Systems, Lubar was able to write an adventure game in Applesoft BASIC that could allow the Apple II to control a Pioneer VP-1000 Laserdisc player. The game itself is based and uses footage from Rollercoaster, a 1977 disaster-suspense film starring George Segal and Henry Fonda.
The plot involves an extortionist (Played by Timothy Bottoms) who sets off a bomb on an amusement park roller coaster, and then says that he will do the same to five other rides around the country simultaneously unless he's paid one million dollars. Amusement park employee Harry Calder (Played by George Segal) gets unwillingly drawn into the precarious situation when the FBI's lead agent (Played by Richard Widmark) presses him into service as the go-between with the authorities and the bomber.
In the game, you take the role of Widmark's character, Lead FBI Agent Hoyt, to stop the bomber. By using comands to controll the Omniscan in BASIC, Lubar was able to take different scenes and video sequences form the film to create an explorable world.
While the game was inovative, it wasn't very successful 2 reasons. The first problem was the price, To play the game, You needed an Apple II, A Disk II drive, a monitor, the Omniscan card, a separate TV, A Pioneer VP-1000, and the Actual film. All of this would have costed $3549 dollars! and that's 1982 dollars, adjusting for inflation, that's $11,822 dollars today!
The second problem was that you still needed to type the program in yourself, it wasn't sold at retail. Remember, this was January of 1982, and at the time, Most computer users got their software from either typing in programs from books or magazines, or buying the few software title that were sold next to the computer that they bought. Most of those retail software titles were written by other hobbyists themselves and were often done by hand by copying the program to a blank tape or disk, packaging it into a zip lock bag along with manual and was hung on the bulletin board of the store.
So other than republishing the game in the book Big Computer Games in 1984, Creative Computing never sold the game at retail.
So clearly, LaserDisc games were never going to take off in the home. However, While the average person may not be able to afford the equipment, Arcade operator's could, and it wasn't long before arcade game manufacturers started to create hardware that could use Laserdiscs. The first company to Incorporate Laserdiscs into Arcade hardware was Sega, who introduced Astron Belt in September of 1982 at the 20th Amusement Machine Show in Japan, and in North America in November of 1982 at the Amusement & Music Operators Association (AMOA) show in Chicago. With the game making it's way to arcades in May of 1983 in Japan, October of 1983 in North America, and July of 1983 in Europe.
While the game does use a LaserDisc player, the video is only used to create visuals for the background. The game itself is just a space shooter. You control a spaceship on a mission to take down an enemy armada. Enemy fighters and ships shoot at you, and there are mines and other objects that must be shot or avoided.
The game is divided into waves. At the end of each wave, a command ship will appear and needs to be destroyed. In later waves the enemy fighters move and shoot more aggressively, and their shots are more accurate. Some waves take place in open space, while others require you to battle enemies while flying through narrow trenches and tunnels.
There's also a timer at the beginning of the game, with an unlimited number of lives available. The length of the timer can be adjusted by the machine operator, but is normally 60 seconds. After the timer expires, You're given a limited number of additional lives, Lose them all, and the games over.
The game was a commercial success in arcades, especially in Japan where it was the top-grossing upright/cockpit arcade game for four months. While critical reception was initially positive following its AMOA 1982 debut, it was later mixed following its North American release as it drew unfavorable comparisons with other laserdisc games.
Yeah, By the type it came out in July of 1983 in North America, Dragon's Lair was already out in arcades, It itself being inspired by Astron Belt.
As a brief recap of the development of Dragon's Lair, The game got its start in 1979 as a side project of Engineer Rick Dyer
Dyer came up with the idea after his experience playing the game Colossal Caves at Hughes Research Laboratories, Malibu, California. he created a prototype device that used a rudimentary computer to roll scrolls of hand drawn images and text on strips of paper in his garage.
He then transferred these to a system using computer controlled filmstrips and then to a cassette-based set-up. He called his device "The Fantasy Machine" and began peddling the system out to various toy companies to market his invention.
Unfortunately, no one was interested, He realized that still images with narration were insufficient to capture the toy market, If he wanted to get people interested, animation was the way to go. So he began looking for a new storage medium to do just that. And after seeing Sega's Astron Belt at the AMOA show in 1982, Dyer decided to use LaserDiscs for his system.
He also redesigned the system to be more of an advanced home computer, with a keyboard and speech recognition capability. Dyer renamed the system "The Halcyon" after the HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
However it needed more money to be developed into a comercial product, so in the meantime, he designed a version of the system that could be used in arcades. He also already had a game concept ready to go called "The Secrets of the Lost Woods", a sword and sorcery epic inspired by the J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books and Adventure. Meanwhile Former Disney animator Don Bluth was having his own struggles.
His carrer began in 1955, after graduating from high school, and when he traveled to California to work as an inbetweener for Disney's Sleeping Beauty before leaving to enroll at Brigham Young University as an English major but continued working summers at Disney. After graduating in 1967, he then moved to working for Filmation Studios as a layout artist, working on shows like The Archie Show, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down, as well as animation layout work on the 1968 psychedelic, counter-culture film Yellow Submarine. In 1971 he returned to Disney to work on films like Robin Hood, The Rescuers and Pete’s Dragon.
Bluth left the company again in 1979 after noticing the company's cheapening animation quality. He formed his animation studio, Don Bluth Productions, along with 11 former Disney animators to work on independent short films like Banjo the Woodpile Cat, and contract work, such as one of the animated segments of Xanadu. By 1982, they released their first feature-length film, The Secret of NIMH.
While the film was a hit with critics for its animation, story and characters, It did poorly in the box office, mainly because it was overshadowed by Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. But when Bluth did research he found out that Arcade industry was generating more than the movie industry, he realized that that was where the money was and thought it would be something that could help the animation industry grow.
As luck would have it, Dyer happened to see The Secret of NIMH in theaters and was blown away by the animation as everyone else. Thinking the animation would be perfect for his game, He contacted Bluth and asked if he would be interested in doing the animation work for his game. Realizing the opportunity, Bluth agreed and together they began working on the game. But since the project couldn't afford the animator’s costs, Bluth accepted a deal where his company would gain 1/3 interest in a new company set up for the project called Starcom, with Dyer owning another third. With the rest going to publisher Cinematronics, and a capital investment.
After another couple of months of development, the game was renamed Dragon's Lair, and was released on July 3rd 1983. The Plot is quite simple. You play as Dirk the Daring, a knight on an adventure to rescue Princess Daphne from the evil dragon Singe who has locked her in the castle of an evil wizard. Along the way Dirk runs into monsters, obstacles, and other hazards that will kill him in gruesome ways. with the goal being to safely beat these hazards to defeat Singe and rescue Daphne.
Despite being expensive to play at ¢50 cents a game, it was an instant success, Earning a maximum of $1,400 a week! Soon other companies like Stern, Gotlieb/Mylstar, and Atari, also began making games using LaserDiscs.
However following the Video Game Crash of 1983 and 1984, as well as the downturn of arcades caused LaserDisc games to become a flash in the pan and they disappeared by the end of 1984. However the format lived on in arcades in Japan, with companies like Data East, Taito, and Konami also making LaserDisc games.
LaserDisc games made a brief return to arcades in the early 90's with the introduction of Mad Dog Macree.
Even Rick Dyer came back into the picture as well. In 1991, he worked with Sega to create the game Hologram Time Traveler for arcades.
The game's premise is that American old west cowboy Marshal Gram is required to save the universe from scientist turned evil time lord Vulcor, who's found a way to manipulate and distort time itself; and to also rescue Princess Kyi-La of the Galactic Federation, whom Vulcor is holding prisoner in his quest to disrupt the flow of time. The player takes the role of Gram to pursue the villain across time through the ages overcoming various obstacles along the way while undoing all the damage done by Vulcor.
What made the game uniqe was that it used a mirror projection effect using a Large black curved mirror and a CRT TV in the bottom of the control panel, resulting in a holographic effect similar to the holograms from Star Wars.
While the game was initally very successful, sales fell off shortly in the wake of Capcom's Street Fighter II. Sega attempted to rectify this with a conversion kit for the game that made it into a fighting game called Holosseum, but that also failed. and soon Hologram Time Traveler marked the end of the LaserDisc arcade game.
There is a problem with all of these games though, these aren't technically video games. You see, all these games require the player to memorize the proper sequence and timing of their input, effectively making the entire game one continuous Quick Time Event. Also the graphics weren't created by the hardware itself and instead relied on prerecorded footage. So how did this early ancestor to the Quick Time Event evolve to be mechanic we know used in proper video games? Well the answer involves the attempts to bring LaserDisc games to home consoles.
So lets go back to 1984 for a moment, At the time, Dragons lair was still doing incredibly well in arcades, with Cinematronics earning $32 million dollars in revenue by February of that year. People knew a home version would make a killing, but due to the cost of the hardware required and the limitations of video game consoles and home computers at the time, it would have been impossible.
The Coleco ADAM (1983)
The Coleco port has two different gameplay styles, one were the player controls Dirk directly, maneuvering him through obstacles with the joystick and buttons much like a standard arcade game and another where the player needs to move in the right direction or use your sword at the right time, which is much closer to the gameplay of the original. The timed scenes don’t use animation, but sprites on tiled backgrounds like most games of the time. This could arguably make it the first true video game with Quick Time Events.
However, the game didn't sell well since the Coleco ADAM itself didn't sell well due to its price and reliability issues. The ADAM was such a flop, that Coleco ended up losing over millions of dollars and decided to exit the video game and computer business entirely, by discontinuing the ADAM and the Colecovision in 1985.
But before that happened, they sold the rights to some of rights to their games to other game publishers, Their port of Dragon's Lair being one of them. The rights ended up catching the attention of a British publisher called Software Projects, who are probably best known for publishing Mathew Smith's Manic Miner and Jet Set Series Willy for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Software Projects was successfull in getting the rights, and in 1986, they ported the game to the ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, and Amstrad CPC.
The game sold much better than its Coleco counterpart mostly because it was ported to more popular computers. It did so well, that there was even a sequel titled Dragon’s Lair: Escape from Singe’s Castle, developed and published in 1987. The game was released for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, with the C64 version getting a US by EA. The plot goes that after rescuing Daphne, Dirk has returned to the castle to gather treasure. While the graphics and sound are pretty good, The level design is insanely difficult almost to the point of making it impossible.
Then in 1989, a conversion of the game for the Commodore Amiga. developed by Canadian developer Visionary Design Technologies and published by fellow Canadian publisher ReadySoft. The game was programmed by Randy Linden (who would later be known for creating the Playstation emulator Bleem!). By using rotoscoping to separate the characters from the backgrounds, and then redrawing both to work within the graphical limitations of the Amiga, Linden and his team managed to squeeze several rooms of the game onto six 3.5” floppy disks, a massive technical achievement for the time. Despite its long loading times and finicky controls, it was the best home version available at the time by a wide margin. It was also available on MS-DOS and the Atari ST.
Unfortunately, The introduction of CD-ROM Consoles and computers in the early 90's rendered the softwae based versions Of Dragon's Lair obsolete. With conversions also not fairing well and full motion games as a whole disappearing after the US introduction of the Playstation 1 in 1995.
The first company to incorporate Quick Time Events into games a mechanic was Sega once again, when they decided to make an arcade game using the rights they acquired for Die Hard, the popular franchise of action movies from the 1980s staring Bruce Willis.
The result was Die Hard Arcade, released in arcades in 1996, with a port to the Sega Saturn the following year.
The plot goes that John McClane and Kris Thompsenhave to save the President's daughter, Caroline Powell, from terrorists. There are a number of bosses in the game, including a biker called Hog, a Mexican wrestler named Jocko, the twin team of Mr. Oishi (a sumo wrestler) and Mr. Tubbs (an army general), a nameless muscle-bound fire chief armed with tiny grenades, and two pairs of laser-shooting Spiderbots. The final boss, of which all the others are henchmen, is known as Wolf "White Fang" Hongo. At the end of the game, if both players are still alive, the two players will fight each other on the rooftop of the skyscraper to gain the sole appreciation of the President's daughter.
The game itself is your standard beat em up game like Double Dragon, Streets of Rage, or Final Fight, but used 3D polygonal graphics. In fact it was the very first beat em up game to use texture-mapped 3D polygon graphics. But durring certain sections of the game, it goes into sections where the player needs to press the attack buttons at the right time to progress, Making these the first modern incarnation of Quick Time Events.
The game was very successful on launch, being Sega's most successful US-produced arcade game up to that point, and the later Saturn port also got praise for it's faithfulness to the arcade original.
However the mechanic didn't get wider recongition or its name until 1997 when Sega game designer Yu Suzuki was working on his most ambitious game project up til that point.
When it comes to Sega, Suzuki has quite a reputation. He began his career at the company in 1983 as a support programer, working on the game Champion Boxing for the SG-1000, but later would become the lead developer for his own games using Sega's Super Scaler arcade hardware, creating games like Hang On, Outrun, and After Burner.
By 1993, he had finished work on Virtua Fighter, and was looking to create a longer paced story driven game than the shorter action based coin op arcade games he was working on up to that point.
Working with Segas AM2, he created a prototype game for the Sega Saturn called The Old Man and the Peach Tree, With the plot centering around a young man named Taro, seeking a martial arts grandmaster in 1950s Luoyang, China. However, the game only served a test for camera, combat and conversation systems and was never finished.
Then in 1996, AM2 began developing a 3D Saturn RPG with the working title Guppy, which later became Virtua Fighter RPG: Akira's Story, an RPG starring the Virtua Fighter character Akira. AM2 planned a "cinematic" approach, including voice acting and elaborate combat sequences, with Suzuki researching locations in China, and cinema. However development was also canceled.
The in 1997, The team decided to take their work and retool it into a game for Sega's upcoming console, The Dreamcast. The Virtua Fighter setting was scraped in favor of an original story revolving around a teenage martial artist investigating his father's murder in 1980's Yokosuka. the development was very ambitious for its time and costed Sega over $70 million dollars in development and marketing. The end result was Shenmue, launched for the Dreamcast on December 29th, 1999 in Japan, November 7th, 2000 in North America, and December 1st, 2000 in Europe.
The game is set in 1986 in Yokosuka, and follows Ryo Hazuki, a teenage martial arts student who witnesses his father Iwao Hazuki's murder and sets off to investigate his death and find the ones responsible.
The game itself is an open world action adventure game, with the meat of the game being to explore around Yokosuka to look for clues and talk to various people around town to gain incite into Iwao's murder, as well as getting into fights with enemies in the streets via beat em up sections (Simmilar in playstyle to Virtua Fighter). However, the player is also free to just explore around at their own pace and do side activities outside of the story. The game itself is a persistent world with detail unmatched compared to similar games of the era. There's a day to night cycle that effects stores and buses, Ryo receives a daily allowance which can be to buy things like food, raffle tickets, audio cassettes and capsule toys, and there's even minigames to play like Forklift Racing, Raffles, and even the ability to play complete versions of Sega Arcade games like Hang On and Space Harrier.
The game also used events similar to Die Hard during certain points in the story. Suzuki called these events Quick Timer Events but later on, the the R was droped and the mechanics got the name Quick Time Events.
While the game received praise from critics for its graphics, soundtrack and ambition and sold over 1.2 million copies, it was a commercial failure since it didn't recoup its development cost. Despite this, Shenmue gained a cult following and was soon followed up a sequel, Shenmue II in 2001 for the Dreamcast and Xbox, a crowdfunded sequel, Shenmue III in 2019, and the spiritual successor series Yakuza, which debuted on the PlayStation 2 in 2004 and is still on going (Now going internationally under its original name in Japan: Like A Dragon) and spawned its own spin off Judgement.
By more inadept look at Shenmue and it's pioneering gameplay elements is definitely an entry for another day, but Shenmue marked the Quick Time Event's official debut in the modern sense and has been used in games, to varying degrees of success, ever since. It's development clearly had a long run starting with it's start in educational driving simulators like Auto Race in 1950's America, to making its way to Japan to be used in Light Gun games Like Wild Gunman and The Driver in the mid to late 70's, before being reintroduced in America as part of a Laserdisc based game craze with Dragons Lair in early 80s arcades before being moved to non film software based conversions in mid to late 80's Europe and Canada, before finally being making its final evolution back in japan with an Action movie game tie in, and an ambitious game project turned cult classic. That wraps up this entry today, hope you enjoyed my look at the long and fascinating look at the history of the Quick time event, and as always, Thanks for reading! see you next time!