In the 1990s, before broadband and streaming services made accessing content easy, Australian company Brilliant Digital experimented with delivering entertainment over dial-up internet. To make downloads faster, they used game engines to create animated movies, which were compressed into short sections small enough to share online.
Each week a new episode was delivered to American subscribers of Brilliant Digital’s multipath movies, which featured interactivity that let users make decisions and influence the narrative, like the ‘choose your own adventure’ books popular in the 1980s.
Brilliant Digital created movies for popular titles from the era, like Xena: Warrior Princess, Ace Ventura, Superman and even the band Kiss. For those living outside the US, content was delivered on CD-ROMs and represents a unique cultural artefact of a brief period during the internet’s development.
Curator Notes
"Multipath Movies are animated movies made with real-time 3D objects and characters rendered 'on the fly.' This means that you’re not just watching a flat animation that’s made to look like 3D animation – you’re actually watching real time action in a 3D world. To this 3D world we’ve added a branching storyline that takes you to any one of the many different story plots. You watch the action as it unfolds, and you choose the direction in which you’d like the story to go. Multipath Movies combine the excitement of a game with the plot development of a movie – together for the first time online."
This was the statement that Brilliant Digital used on their web site to explain to audiences how the new entertainment medium worked. The multipath movie was a branching tree cinematic adventure in the tradition of the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the 1980s and 1990, though multipath movies generally allowed for fewer audience choices, as each choice had to be animated and recorded.
The animation for the multipath movies was done in real time in Brilliant Digital’s custom game engine animation software. This was software optimised to make movies in and to compress files to allow them to be small enough to stream on the internet, decades before companies like Netflix would offer such a service. Brilliant Digital is one of the earliest companies to invest in the potential of 3D games engines for cinematic outcomes. Gamers in the 1990s were also exploring the potential of making movies in games engines and the art of machinima evolved from early experiments gamers sharing run in Quake WADS to serious experiments in fan filmmaking in-engines. An activity that saw companies such as Epic and Blizzard add tools to their engines and licensing to their EULA to support game fans in their real time 3d animation experiments.
In 2022, real-time animation created in game engines is a central part of the film industry for SFX. For example, Epic’s Unreal Engine was used to help create the extraordinary worlds and action of the Disney+ series The Mandalorian. Unity, a competitor of Unreal Engine, is also looking to this space with the acquisition of Weta SFX.
Dr Helen Stuckey | Play it Again project
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Not in ACMI's collection
Previously on display
15 June 2023
ACMI: Gallery 1
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ACMI Identifier
188456
Curatorial section
The Story of the Moving Image → Games Lab → GL-03. Cluster 3 → GL-03-C01