Next to sandbox design and quasi-futuristic body armor, Cineractives are some of the hottest buttons in gaming. Resident Evil 4 supposedly introduced them, God of War supposedly refined them, and they are, supposedly, pushing games to new peaks on the evolutionary scale. If nothing else, cineractives certainly are a welcome relief from the high-school prose posing as proverbs of endless insight (Metal Gear maybe?). I hate to imagine what our beloved hobby would have become had cineractives not appeared in... 1983.

That's right Leon. You may have brought cineractives to the masses, but the honor of originality goes to, this guy-

Okay. Crediting Dragon's Lair with birthing the cineractive might be a bit of a stretch. Timed button presses were the only challenges, and it was closer to being a cartoon than an actual game. Still, it played a large role in paving the way into modern gaming. Without Dragon's Lair, would there have been a Space Ace, Hologram Time Traveler, or the subsequent FMV craze of the '90s?

FMV games are cringe-inducing by today's standards, but there was a time when the grainy images of Under a Killing Moon and The 7th Guest sought to push gaming into a realm that could only be matched by the visual and narrative power of the cinema. They succeeded to a degree, until the novelty of realism wore off and the desire for depth took hold. Designers hit the drawing boards, hired professional screenwriters, and interspersed traditional gameplay with cutscenes of cinematic potential. Eventually, the disjointed experience of playing and watching, as in Final Fantasy VII, lead to the cinematic interaction of modern times.

It seemed good at the time.

Who knows? If it hadn't been for Dragon's Lair, we might have never seen Kratos' beautiful mutilation of Greek mythology, let alone controlled it. That, or we could have skipped the FMV holocaust.