Games as Novelty
The cinematic tactic of opening a feature film with full-screen videogame play is continued in Penny Marshall's fantasy comedy Big (1988) with a fictional text adventure game called "Cavern of the Evil Wizard." The precredit opening of the film shows a 12 year old boy playing a video game on a home PC but he is interrupted before finishing it. After being transported into the body of a grown man, he later completes the game but is deprived of the satisfaction he would have experienced had his childhood gameplay not been interrupted by the (literal and metaphorical) intervention of adulthood. Except for the presumed novelty of beginning the film with full-screen game play, this bland but ultimately uncritical depiction of a PC game indicates that games were becoming increasingly integrated into the domestic life of white, suburban, middle-class Americans, but like the comparatively unsatisfying experience of videogame baseball in The Princess Bride, the crude animation and laborious text input of the game in Big, continue to serve as a reminder of the ultimate superiority of cinema for visual entertainment.