1996 was peak CD-ROM confidence. The industry had collectively decided that Full Motion Video was the future, that putting actual celebrities in games was the logical endpoint of interactive entertainment, and that if you could fit a Hollywood director’s face on a disc and charge thirty quid for it, you absolutely should. Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair arrived in the middle of all that, and it is one of the more earnest and strange things to come out of that particular moment.
It is not really a game. It is not really a film. It is not really a tutorial. It is a CD-ROM product that exists somewhere between all three, published by DreamWorks Interactive with Spielberg’s direct involvement, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Quentin Tarantino, and Penn Jillette doing things that you suspect none of them fully expected to end up doing. It is absolutely worth your time, for reasons that have almost nothing to do with learning how to make films.
What It Actually Is
The premise is that you are a first-time director and Spielberg is mentoring you through the production of a film. You select a script (a mystery, kept deliberately simple), cast your actors from a pool of low-res FMV audition clips, head to the set to direct scenes, then edit the footage together and release the finished film to the public. Each stage is a mini-game of varying complexity and varying success, stitched together with Spielberg appearing on screen to offer guidance that ranges from occasionally useful to magnificently vague.
Jennifer Aniston appears in the casting sequences, which in 1996 would have felt like a significant get, given that Friends was in its second series and she was everywhere. Tarantino shows up as a film editor, characteristically over-animated, offering cutting advice with the energy of someone who has had a lot of coffee and opinions. Penn Jillette plays a publicist. The casting of Penn Jillette as a Hollywood publicist is either inspired or completely random and I genuinely cannot decide which.
The Directing Bit
The on-set directing phase is where the game earns most of its charm and most of its frustration in roughly equal measure. You choose camera angles from a limited selection, give your actors basic direction, and try to get usable footage out of scenes that are already written and partially shot. The control you have is real but narrow, which is either a faithful representation of what directing within a system actually feels like, or just a technical limitation dressed up as philosophy. Probably both.
Actors miss their marks. Lighting goes wrong. You will click on something and not be entirely sure what you clicked on or what it did, which is a recurring feature of the interface throughout. There are buttons inside menus inside other buttons, icons that do not obviously correspond to their functions, and a general sense that the UI was designed by people who understood filmmaking considerably better than they understood software navigation. Again: possibly authentic.
The Editing Bit
The editing mini-game is genuinely the best section and also the most undercooked, which is frustrating because it’s where the product comes closest to delivering on its promise. You can rearrange footage, adjust cuts, change musical cues to shift the tone of a scene. There’s real cause and effect here. A scene played as comedy with light music becomes something more sinister with a different audio choice underneath it, and the game lets you feel that, briefly, before moving you on to the next section.
If the whole thing had been built around the editing suite with proper depth, it could have been something genuinely interesting as a teaching tool. Instead it’s one section among several, limited in scope, and over before you’ve had time to work out what you could actually do with it. A missed opportunity in a product full of near-misses.
The FMV Problem
Everything runs on FMV, which in 1996 meant grainy, compressed, occasionally laggy video that looked like it had been filmed in decent conditions and then put through about four too many rounds of encoding before it reached your screen. Transitions stutter. Loading times interrupt the flow. The whole thing has the visual quality of a VHS tape that’s been recorded over once or twice, which is either a flaw or, given that you’re supposedly a first-time director with a limited budget, an accidental piece of atmosphere.
It is worth noting that this was not unusual. Every FMV game of this era looked like this. The technology and the ambition were not yet matched, and everyone was just pushing forward anyway and hoping the audience would meet them halfway. By 1996 they largely had stopped doing so, which is part of why the FMV format collapsed fairly quickly afterward. Director’s Chair arrived at the tail end of that particular wave.
What It’s Actually For
There’s no losing condition. There’s no score. You make your film, you watch it back, you either enjoy what you made or you don’t, and then it’s over. As a game it has almost no tension. As an educational tool it’s too shallow to be genuinely instructive. As a piece of interactive entertainment it falls somewhere in the middle of both, which was a common problem for CD-ROM “edutainment” products of the era and one that most of them never quite solved.
What it is, reliably and entertainingly, is a document of a very specific cultural moment. The year a major Hollywood director lent his name and face to a PC product aimed at people who wanted to feel like they were in the industry. The year Tarantino was famous enough to be a cameo but eccentric enough to actually do it. The year Friends was so dominant that casting Jennifer Aniston in your CD-ROM game felt like a coup. It’s a time capsule more than a game, and as time capsules go it’s a fairly vivid one.
Directors Chair Release Details
| Release Date | 1996 |
| Platform(s) | Windows / DOS |
| Genre(s) | Adventure, Simulation |
| Developer | Knowledge Adventure, Inc. |
| Publisher | DreamWorks Interactive L.L.C. |
Directors Chair Links
- Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair (1996) – MobyGames
- Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair (Video Game 1996) – IMDb
- Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair – Wikipedia
- Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Choices – Molleindustria (play the FMV bits online)
- Revisiting Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair Game – Den of Geek
