A minor history of interactive movies: Brilliant Digital Entertainment and the dot-com bubble

This article conducts a genealogical analysis of Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s multipath movies as a minor history of videogames. Brilliant Digital Entertainment was a company that, from its formation in 1996 until the dot-com bust of 2001, released what they dubbed ‘multipath movies’. These were 3D animated interactive movies based on popular IP like Superman, Xena: Warrior Princess and more that allowed players to make decisions at key moments. These multipath movies emerged at a time of increasing synergy between Hollywood cinema and videogames in the 1990s. Through an analysis of Brilliant Digital Entertainment’s brief venture, this article examines the wider cultural, technological and economic forces that shaped the company’s trajectory. This article argues that Brilliant Digital Entertainment, through its adoption and integration of rhetoric and operating models from the dot-com bubble at the time, treated the media convergence exemplified by interactive movies as a ‘new economic space’ defined by its ‘novel’ combination of media forms, imagined audience and association with the internet.