FMV Friday: Braveheart: The Interactive CD-ROM & Romeo + Juliet: The Interactive CD-ROM

Oh God, Let's Talk About When Every Movie Repackaged Their Press Junkets As "Interactive CD-ROMs."

No, this is NOT the Eidos Braveheart game you're probably thinking about.

We return to the world of interactive multimedia from the '90s with two stunning examples of a very particular type of multimedia: the movie-tie-in interactive CD-ROM! The examples of this are almost endless, as, with the ubiquity of the CD-ROM and the rise of multimedia-focused studios, nearly every single major film for the better part of the '90s had an interactive CD-ROM tie-in. Some came packaged in merchandise or special edition DVD packages, and others were entirely standalone products. These "games," if we even want to call them that, all followed the same template, with a few differences in between. Content from a press junket, usually information about an upcoming film that producers shared with the press to "assist" reviewers in understanding a movie's worldbuilding, was repackaged in the form of interactive slideshows with snippets of the film interspersed with interviews with the actors. This model was not unique to the 1990s and early 2000s movie industry, as the music industry also utilized interactive CD-ROMs to promote upcoming albums from established artists. If and when the time comes for me to discuss the Rolling Stones' Voodoo Lounge interactive CD-ROM or Prince Interactive, I will navigate the tricky DMCA waters to provide that knowledge to you.

But the movie industry's embrace of the multimedia era of gaming was on a whole different level. For a hot minute, it seemed like every major blockbuster had some tie-in interactive CD-ROM that shared behind-the-scenes footage or actor interviews all within a multimedia package wherein you either navigated rudimentary 3D rendered environments meant to convey sets in the actual movie or had you flipping through encyclopedia pages to track down stuff that wasn't even in the Special Edition DVD release. Star Wars Episode I had one, Jumanji had one, Titanic had "James Cameron's Titanic Explorer," and even the BBC made a multimedia CD-ROM for goddamn Only Fools and Horses; I shit you not! Then you had Imagination Pilots, who took things one step further, buying the rights to B-tier action films and writing and advertising their FMV multimedia games as whole-ass sequels to real-world movies, but with none of the actors or characters from the films they tried to emulate. There's a video game sequel to Blown Away from them, and it is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen in my entire life.

Unsurprisingly, this goes for a pretty penny on eBay these days.

But we aren't here to talk about weird experimental interactive CD-ROMs like that or "Peter Gabriel Eve." At this point, you know me all too well. If I really am going to continue to give you a tour through the drecks of the multimedia era of video games, I'm going to showcase some bottom-of-the-barrel horseshit. I think you all expect the worst of the worst from me these days, and for once, I'm happy to oblige. The two "games" I have as subjects are more typical of movie tie-in CD-ROMs. They barely qualify as games and convey all their information through slideshows, though one is much more creative and earnest about it than the other. Both rely on interviews or real footage to trick fans of a film into buying them, and I suspect they might actually feature original content not seen anywhere else. So, without further ado, let's talk about the Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: An Interactive Trip to Verona Beach! Yeah, it's about to get weird in here!

Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM

What's In This Thing?

Because I know all of you are just DYING to see storyboards for Braveheart!

No, this isn't the Braveheart game from Eidos. The Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM is a collaboration between developer Medisoft Corporation, a company with no available documentation, and Twentieth Century Fox. When you boot it up, Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM divides its content into five sections: "Archives," "Society," "Games," "Warfare," and "Movie." However, each of these categories falls into one of two buckets: either the section is an interactive encyclopedia about the historical context of Braveheart, or shares behind-the-scenes footage with interviews from actors and producers during the pre- and post-production of the film. This point may be lost on anyone who grew up after the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, part of the reason movie companies were excited to embrace multimedia games is that DVDs had not yet completely overtaken VHS as the primary physical medium for selling films as home media. Even if you bought films on DVDs, they were glitchy, often had poor aspect ratios (i.e., the great fullscreen versus widescreen debate), and the first generation of DVDs didn't have start menus that allowed you to select features or settings like later generations; instead, they ran the movie right from the rip just like VHS tapes. So, when I say much of the content on Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM was homemade, I'm not lying. While I'm not going to argue that anyone, even the most die-hard fans of Braveheart, should try to track this thing down, there's at least something commendable about it having stuff that isn't even found in the Special Editions of the DVD release of Braveheart. So, if you do have some fascination with this film, it might be worth tracking down just for that.

However, here's the peculiar thing: Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM goes a step further than most movie tie-in interactive CD-ROMs. Instead of just being a slideshow, the game features an almost fully voiced interactive encyclopedia. Of the five sections on the menu I mentioned, three of them lead to codex entries about the history of William Wallace, Scotland in the Middle Ages, King Edward I, Robert the Bruce, and historical documents such as the Magna Carta. While not all of the pages are narrated, many are, and Scottish actor Paul Whitworth does the narration rather well. Rather annoyingly, the narration follows a script that is utterly different from the text on your screen, which I found incredibly distracting. Regardless, the Warfare section was rather engrossing at times with lurid details about massive battles and readings of testimonials from both sides of the conflict. This section delves into the details of how the real battles in the film unfolded and what the larger picture was leading up to them. On the other hand, the Society section was certainly "nice" because it provided a snapshot of what life was like during the time of the film's topic, but it felt like a box-checking exercise. Nothing there feels particularly helpful in fostering a better appreciation of the movie, nor does it feel deeply tied to its story or events. It's interesting, albeit fluffy background information.

That is the biggest the media player gets in this thing!

However, it's the "Movie" section that you're really here for, and in some regards, it delivers. I was impressed when I saw how the film used dummy horses on rails to perform cavalry charges, thereby avoiding injuries to the animals on set. I was equally enthralled to see the archery choreography use dummies for targets but still featured very realistic arrows. Man, remember when big blockbusters couldn't rely on CGI for stuff like that? There was even a section that reviewed how the pyrotechnics worked and Mel Gibson's approach to on-set explosions. That footage about the technical aspects of things was great, but unfortunately, it only accounted for about a quarter of all the watchable media. The vast majority of the footage is either clips pulled directly from the film or interviews with actors, filmmakers, or post-production staff. Obviously, this thing was going to have to show clips from the film, but the media player for Braveheart: Interactive CD-ROM is so small that you can't help but wonder what point this thing serves when people who bought it had such a better alternative for watching the scenes. Likewise, the interviews are often dry, dull, and poorly edited. I have no idea why this is an issue, but several times the interview subjects would be rattling off their answers to a question, and the media player would cut them off mid-sentence. That's not a glitch, by the way. The interviews are just edited poorly, and too many of the questions involve actors explaining who their character is and what they were thinking when filming a specific scene. The far more entertaining ones share details that can't be gleaned from watching the movie and instead share on-set learning experiences.

Is It A Video Game?

Wanna play concentration for twenty minutes to watch behind-the-scenes footage you paid to see?

There are two video game-like features in Braveheart: An Interactive CD-ROM that somewhat resembles having the base elements of what we would call a "video game." The first is a movie editor that allows you to manually cut and edit film clips and place them in any desired order. This feature is utterly worthless as it contains no new content, and why would you ever want to play things from a movie in an anachronistic or user-made order? Then there are the minigames, which are located in the "Games" section. The first of these is a simple trivia game, and the other is a Concentration-style game featuring low-resolution images of characters in the movie. Both of these minigames unlock additional behind-the-scenes footage, but neither is particularly engaging. The trivia goes beyond general knowledge of historical facts and delves into weirdly specific information that is incredibly difficult to find in the game's own encyclopedia. The matching game is just outright awful, but it is a much easier way to unlock additional clips.

Is This Worth Tracking Down?

The Braveheart CD-ROM going to great lengths to talk about the historical context of the film sure is ripe.

Eh, probably not. I can't deny that this interactive CD-ROM gave me a burst of nostalgia. It was rad seeing a film being made using practical effects, and Mel Gibson might be a racist antisemite, but he's someone who understands the craft of filmmaking. He genuinely cares about the fundamentals of framing and helping actors get into the right mindset during scenes. Yet, he's still a complete piece of shit, and I don't want to dance around that fact. It's absolutely absurd that Braveheart won an Academy Award for Best Picture over Babe and Apollo 13, but the '90s were a different time. Even then, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, and Titanic are exemplary films that represent the '90s filmmaking milieu in Hollywood. This interactive CD-ROM, on the other hand? It's a slog to get to the actual meat of it. While the effort put into the encyclopedia is commendable, it's essentially a distraction that serves no real purpose. Why take so much time talking about the real-world events surrounding Braveheart when the film itself takes more historical liberties with its subject matter than you can shake a stick at? And Jesus Christ, those minigames are just dreadful, and the fact that you have to play them to see the behind-the-scenes footage you bought this game to see in the first place is downright infuriating.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: An Interactive Trip to Verona Beach

What's In This Thing?

There's nothing wrong with your computer screen. This video player really is this poorly compressed.

Remember Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, also known as William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet? The Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes-led re-interpretation of William Shakespeare's play got millions of teen girls swooning and interested in Shakespeare, and generated a decent amount of revenue in the process. It was also a weird hodgepodge of ideas that critics at the time loved, but I never really enjoyed. I was never a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as Romeo, and to this day, I still find his line readings to be incredibly stilted and awkward. All that aside, Romeo + Juliet is a quirky movie, and the world it portrays is even more so. Therefore, it doesn't shock me to learn that there was a multimedia tie-in game to the film. What I did find surprising was that it wholesale copies and pastes text from its media junket, and also how much it feels like an attempt to exploit teen girls who were fawning over DiCaprio. This is a bizarre and awful thing, and it's challenging to put into words exactly why.

The "game" itself is an interactive slideshow that clocks in under two hours. The slideshow is entirely linear, starting with a slide that shows a scene from the film's opening moment. As you move from left to right, you progress through the film until you reach the end, which this CD-ROM doesn't hide, and there's nothing more to see or watch. In between the movie clips and pages of text on your screen, you can pull up a docket that has biographies of any characters seen or found during the scene you are presently in during the slideshow. None of these are narrated, and some are as brief as three to five sentences. Some of the biographies feature flashy film clips at the start, but the compression is so poor that it's sometimes difficult to make out what you're looking at if you haven't seen the film. However, one of the more unusual creative choices in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: An Interactive Trip to Verona Beach is that many of the scenes are conveyed through clip shows rather than film snippets. During these moments, characters speak to each other as static images, with a few creative embellishments in the background so you don't immediately realize you're watching something made using Macromedia Director, which gets an end-credit shout-out, by the way. The interface is a cluttered mess, but considering you only have a few options in terms of how you can interact with your screen (i.e., you either go left, right, or into the character biography screen), it's impossible to imagine anyone missing anything in this affair.

Because I know you're just dying to learn more about the police commissioner from this movie.

William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: An Interactive Trip to Verona Beach is hollow. The jarring use of music, accompanied by quickly cut and edited stand-in portraits, suggests a lack of quality. And considering how short this experience ends up being, even when you try to absorb the text as much as possible, it feels like an attempt to bilk girls who were gaga over Leo of their allowances. However, there is one aspect of this multimedia experience that made me crack a smile, albeit briefly. As is the case with any multimedia title intended to tie into a movie, there are encyclopedia entries that convey information about the film's broader worldbuilding. That's par for the course with one of these, but the result here is so much funnier. In text that I can only assume was from the movie's press junket, intended to explain its creative choices to the film reviewing circuit, it goes to painstaking lengths to explain how and why the world of Romeo + Juliet exists in our real world. It details why the people of Verona Beach speak Early Modern English, how Verona Beach maintained its feudal society even after California became a state in the United States, and how the United States that exists today still exists within the world of Romeo + Juliet. I get that this point is hinted at in the film, but reading the justification for how this small sliver of California was able to work around the ratification of the U.S. Constitution so they could still have Tudor England-inspired guilds and titles is just the funniest shit. It reminds me of when Star Trek: Enterprise explained why the cranial ridges on the Klingons were less pronounced in the original series than in later shows. It's dumb, nerdy shit, but I love that someone cared that much to think of a metatextual way to make it work.

Is It A Video Game?

Look... this makes perfect sense in the context of the movie.

No, and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet: An Interactive Trip to Verona Beach is even less of a game than Braveheart. You're only option is to move to a new slide, and what you need to do on each slide is accomplished with just a few mouse clicks. Nothing in this requires timing, strategy, or dexterity, and, as I mentioned earlier, the final experience ultimately proves to be hollow and incredibly brief. To a degree, I appreciate that this product allows you to avoid missing anything, as long as you follow its highly guided tour of the film's significant scenes. As we will review in future games, there's something unusual about how often multimedia games lock interviews, original footage, or general content behind skill checks when that content is something the developer painstakingly created to be enjoyed and seen.

Nevertheless, this thing promises to be an "interactive trip to Verona Beach," and it's barely that. With no new scenes, locations, or anything that isn't already seen in the film, there's no reason for this to exist besides milking people who loved the movie. And when I say there's nothing here that isn't seen in the film, I mean it. Every image or visual, whether it be an object or a character portrait, is a scan of something from a still from the film. Even weirder, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: An Interactive Trip provides the entire film's ending, which makes treating it as a companion piece even harder. Seriously, they show you the ending, wholesale. I get that the ending of Romeo and Juliet isn't a "secret," but it's still "a choice," and a bizarre one at that.

Is This Worth Tracking Down?

What a wild and wacky level of commitment to the worldbuilding.

ABSOLUTELY NOT! I went into this hoping to find at least one interview with Leo or his female lead, but there's nothing of the sort here. Halfway through William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: An Interactive Trip to Verona Beach, I still had some hope that it might live up to its namesake and provide an opportunity to explore the city of Verona. I wanted to see the sets while reading about how the film's world worked. And when I realized it wouldn't provide even that, it was over in the blink of an eye. Besides the wacky attention to detail, the most interesting aspect of this interactive CD-ROM is when it provides side-by-side comparisons between the screenplay and the original stage play during specific scenes. But that's about it. It's a messy, muddled, cheap cash-in that deserves to be forgotten.