“Director’s Chair” Game Recut As Interactive Short

By
Garth Franklin
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Back in the mid 1990s came “Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair,” a simulation video game in which players are guided by Spielberg (appearing as himself) through the process of moviemaking.

From scriptwriting and filming to editing and post-production, the game made use of full motion video clips featuring performances from Jennifer Aniston, Quentin Tarantino, Katherine Helmond, and Penn & Teller, among others.

The film within the game has Tarantino chewing scenery as a prisoner on death row, sentenced to death for the killing of an old lady (Helmond). The man’s partner (Aniston) sets out to clear his name by investigating a pair of sinister magicians (Penn & Teller).

Hollywood professionals like cinematographer Dean Cundey and editor Michael Kahn were also involved in the game, but it received mixed reviews and has mostly been forgotten.

Now, the game’s original creator and Carnegie-Mellon University lecturer Paolo Pedercini has used the site Molleindustria to release a free browser version of the short film within the game.

This time it has been reconfigured to present the short as an interactive movie similar to recent Netflix efforts like “Black Mirror: Bandersnatch” and “Kimmy vs. The Reverend”.

Pedercini wrote on Twitter that buried in the CD-ROM there was enough footage to make the project, but he had to heavily rework it – editing all the clips, adding sound and music and upscaling the ultra low res videos with an AI-tool.

You can play the film over at Director’s Choices.

Source: Indiewire