Why are Interactive Credits so rare?
by bigsocrates
In thinking about the differences between film and video games as artistic media, one of the things that always surprises me is how rare interactive credit sequences are. The familiar modern movie crawl of credits may make sense in a theater where people are gathering their things and leaving, but they're just kind of weird in a living room, especially when, as is frequently the case, they aren...
In thinking about the differences between film and video games as artistic media, one of the things that always surprises me is how rare interactive credit sequences are. The familiar modern movie crawl of credits may make sense in a theater where people are gathering their things and leaving, but they're just kind of weird in a living room, especially when, as is frequently the case, they aren't accompanied by particularly interesting visuals or something as cool as the Comic Jumper credits music.
Why not give us something interactive to do? It doesn't have to be complicated or deep. Everyone remembers the little snatch of Galaga we got to play during Blades of Steel intermissions, so it can be something as easy as that. If it's a racing game you can give us an easy track to navigate around while the names fly overhead. If it's a shooter you can let us shoot the names, or dodge them, or whatever. Even letting us just look around with the right analog stick as we go through an environment with the credits in them would be better than a crawl that we usually can't even rewind in case we want to know the name of the third testing lead. Cut scenes are sometimes necessary to develop character or move plot ahead, but there's no reason why credit sequences for games can't be...gamey. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive to do something simple and black and white, and if nothing else it would make it more likely that people might actually look at the names. Give us a little Altair we can climb the credits with to avoid scrolling off the bottom of the screen, or a bunch of names we can skydive through, something. Just remember you're a game.