Australian Cultural Policy and The Dame was Loaded (1996): A microhistorical account of a FMV movie game and the political promise of ‘multimedia’

‘The interactive movie as a genre holds a place in the history of video games for one main reason: it’s a well-known failure,’ wrote Bernard Perron (2007:127) after conducting a comprehensive survey of work using full motion video (FMV) – or live action sequences – from the 1990s. Despite presenting a catalogue of their failings, Perron urges us not to dismiss these works but rather consider them as ‘experiments worth examining on their own terms’ (Perron et al., 2008:233). This paper revisits one such experiment: The Dame was Loaded (1996), by the Australian studio Beam Software that drew on the Hollywood conventions for detective movies and cinema noir. In this discussion we do not address the rhetorics of videogame histories' winners and losers, or the analysis of the formal qualities of FMV movie games which Perron et al. have exhaustively examined. Rather, we approach the work in the context of its historical status as being once championed as ‘Australia’s largest multimedia production.’ We examine the interactive movie game within the context of the promise of ‘multimedia’ and Australia’s political ambitions for developing its digital cultural industries in the 1990s. This more micro historical approach focuses on the place that the full motion video interactive movie The Dame was Loaded held in the vision for a multimedia future and addresses the FMV interactive movie experiment in terms of the local context of an arts and industry policy.