The 1990s were, in retrospect, the first serious attempt by a major technological shift to produce a corresponding narrative revolution. The shift was digitization; the attempt was interactive cinema; the result was discontinuation. This paper reconstructs the decade's experiments and asks why they failed to generate a lasting form.
The answer, we argue, is not that the experiments were technically inadequate, commercially unviable, or creatively underdeveloped. Several of them were none of these things. The answer is that they arrived before the economic case for containing them had been fully articulated — and were contained anyway, by the ordinary operation of institutions that did not yet understand what they were doing.
The CD-ROM Moment
Between 1992 and 1997, major entertainment companies invested substantially in interactive narrative on CD-ROM. The titles produced ranged from simple branching narratives to genuinely complex experiments in multi-path storytelling. Some attracted serious critical attention. None achieved the scale required to establish the form as a mainstream alternative to passive cinema.
The standard explanation is technological: the CD-ROM was an inadequate delivery mechanism. This explanation is incomplete. The technology was sufficient for the experiments that were produced. What was insufficient was the industry's willingness to develop the distribution infrastructure, talent pipeline, and critical vocabulary that a new form requires.