History
Gameplay sequences with minimal actual gameplay are not a recent invention. In the 1970s, The Driver, an action-racing video game released by Kasco (Kansai Seiki Seisakusho Co.), consisted of pre-filmed situations (recorded on 16 mm film) that required the player to match their steering wheel, gas pedal and brakes with the movements shown on screen, much like those seen in laserdisc video games that appeared the following decade.
In the 1980s, Dragon's Lair (Cinematronics, 1983), Cliff Hanger (Stern, 1983) and Road Blaster (Data East, 1985) were interactive movie laserdisc video games that showed video clips stored on a laserdisc. This gave them graphics on par with an animated cartoon at a time when video games were composed of simple, pixelated characters, but left little room for more advanced gameplay elements. Gameplay consisted of watching an animated video and pressing the correct button every few seconds to avoid seeing a (circumstance-specific) loss scene and losing a life. Compared to modern titles, games like Dragon's Lair would require the player to memorize the proper sequence and timing of their input, effectively making the entire game one continuous QTE. Such uses were also seen as giving the player only the illusion of control, as outside of responding to QTE, there were no other commands the player could enter; effectively, these games were considered the equivalent of watching a movie and responding every few minutes to allow it to continue. An improvement to the QTE mechanic was flashing the buttons that need to be pressed on the screen, which appeared in the laserdisc games Super Don Quix-ote (Universal, 1984), Ninja Hayate (Taito, 1984), Time Gal (Taito, 1985) and Road Blaster.
Die Hard Arcade (Sega, 1996) and most notably Shenmue (Sega, 1999) for the Dreamcast introduced QTEs in the modern form of cut scene interludes in an otherwise more interactive game. Shenmue's director Yu Suzuki is credited with coining the phase "Quick Time Event". Since this period, several other games on modern console and game systems have included QTEs or similar mechanics. Other early uses of QTEs include the role-playing video game Final Fantasy VII (Squaresoft, 1997), where, during Tifa Lockheart's Limit Break, she can do extra damage if the player presses the circle button at the right time; and the action game Sword of the Berserk: Guts' Rage (Yuke's, 1999), where different non-linear paths were revealed depending on whether the player succeeds or fails in pressing the displayed button quickly enough during a QTE, allowing different ways to complete the game.
Read more about this topic: Quick Time Event
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