Cinematic convergence and the 1990s: Games, Hollywood, and the formation of a digital media ecology

Abstract

In the 1990s, videogames were increasingly in dialogue with Hollywood cinema. Technological innovation accelerated videogames capacity to draw on the audio-visual language of cinema while the entertainment industries underwent corporate restructuring that favoured media conglomeration. As a result, videogames and films came to share aesthetic ambitions, industrial infrastructures, and the creative technologies that made new forms of entertainment possible. Significantly, it was an era when game studies started to evolve its own discourses, but these were frequently positioned in response to, or in conversation with, traditional screen—especially film—studies and the emerging studies of transmedia. This special issue revisits the 1990s as a period of extensive experimentation in which the cinematic and the ludic co-evolved within the material, industrial, and ideological conditions of a new era of digitally led global capitalism. Looking back on this pivotal decade with the benefit of hindsight, the collected articles offer fresh perspectives on the period, revealing also how the technological aspirations, aesthetic conventions, and corporate strategies that characterised the convergences of the 1990s continue to shape our understanding of videogames within the landscapes of the twenty-first century.