Long before Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch episode re-ignited an interest in interactive streaming content, some DVDs included complex bonus features that game viewers control of their favourite movies.
One of the best example that has become lost to history thanks to the near death of the physical media era is Final Destination 3‘s “Choose Their Fate” special feature which played the film in its entirety but allowed fans to change characters’ deaths, or make their favourites survive, and overall, just make different things happen in the movie.
How cool?
The “Choose Their Fate” features starts with a creepy woman’s voice explaining what will happen in the feature. Then the movie goes on and asks occasional questions about whether they want to change anything or not. Changing things will make characters have different deaths and different things happening to them.
You can see how this played out below. As the film progressed, binary choices were presented to the audience and they used their remotes to make choices.
Impressively, the filmmakers must have planned this out far ahead of the eventual release of the DVD as additional footage would have needed to be filmed to facilitate making choices.
The“Choose Their Fate” mode is even a bit of a lost art now with the increase of streaming media. Final Destination 3 may be available to stream in a number of places, but the “Choose Their Fate” options are only on the DVD.
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THE PULSE is out now on Google Play
