15 Video Game Firsts We Take For Granted
13. Quick-Time Events
The humble quick-time event, or QTE, really became a staple of gaming during the Xbox 360 and PS3 era.
QTEs are really quite controversial. While, yes, they can be a good way of increasing user interaction during cutscenes, basically all you're doing is pressing one or two buttons to make something cool happen.
They've kind of died off a bit in recent games, but the QTE still likes to pop up every so often (for example in PS4's Spider-Man) just to remind us it's still alive and kicking.
QTE's were first invented way back in 1983, when games such as Dragon's Lair and Cliff Hanger used a similar system. As interactive movie games, they used quick-time events to simulate the feeling of having an effect on the transitions between cutscenes; you simply watched a scene, then had to press the correct button every few seconds to avoid 'losing' the scene and losing a life too.
In more modern times, Shenmue, released on the Dreamcast in 1999, heavily used QTEs in cutscenes. Shenmue's director, Yu Suzuki, is actually the person who is credited with coming up with the phrase 'quick-time event'.
They were created to present a player with a 'fusion of gameplay and movie' and ever since, other games have regularly used this technique to bridge the gap between cutscene and gameplay.