This was the first and last of a major motion picture that was interactive with the audience. A kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure film if you will. It took lots of bad rap and because of that killed the potential market for these types of films that are interactive with the audience. Too bad. Half of the fun was everyone shouting at the screen how to vote when it came up, and using joystick fingers to machine-gun press the buttons to vote for your choice. It only gave you a couple of seconds to vote for your favorites, and it would tally the votes in real time on the screen. The theatres playing it (I saw it Burbank, California at a pretty swanky cinema) were outfitted with special laserdisc projectors, thus the picture and sound quality were very high. The voting buttons were built into the armrest. About the film: it was a pretty decent light comedy about a guy who would get payback for misdeeds of others in unique ways. Being able to control the movie kept the audience interested, and they even let us see it again after it was done because there are two initial scenarios to choose from. I wonder if it is still possible to get the original laserdiscs these were on and use them on your laserdisc player? Because laserdiscs were built interactive like that. They could also release it on CD-I which is the equivalent (originally introduced by Phillips) and that format would play on your DVD player. I don't know. But they did the same sort of thing back in the day with the arcade game Dragon's Lair.. it was also on a laserdisc and it was also interactive, yet it was considered a video game and was a cartoon. Nevertheless, this was interesting stuff and I hope they resurrect the format one of these days...
Review of Mr. Payback: An Interactive Movie
