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Quentin Tarantino and Jennifer Aniston’s lost 1990s video game has been rediscovered

‘Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair’ allowed players to cut together their own movie

Adam White
Wednesday 12 August 2020 09:25 BST
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Quentin Tarantino stars in the lost video game 'Steven Spielberg's Director's Chair'

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A lost video game that starred Quentin Tarantino and Jennifer Aniston has been rediscovered.

Released in 1996, Steven Spielberg’s Director’s Chair was a CD-ROM simulation game devised by Knowledge Adventure and DreamWorks Interactive.

It enabled players to make their own movie using supplied footage, while Spielberg himself offered helpful advice on filmmaking.

The movie footage you could edit was specially shot for the game, and features Tarantino in a rare acting role as a prisoner on death row. Aniston portrays his girlfriend, who is in a race against time to prove his innocence, while magicians Penn and Teller and Brazil actor Katherine Helmond also make appearances.

Once considered lost, the footage has now been unearthed and turned into a “choose-your-own-adventure” game similar to the Black Mirror episode “Bandersnatch”.

Game developer Paolo Pedercini developed the new incarnation, which allows players to click through footage featuring Tarantino and Aniston and decide what they should do.

Among the notable choices include shifting Tarantino’s delivery from “manic” to “calm”, or making specific scenes either comic or dramatic. You can also choose whether or not Tarantino’s character is executed.

In 1996, Aniston said that working on the project was a “last-minute thing”, explaining: “I was doing something in New York, and my agent called and said Steven had requested me.”

She also said that she had to improvise a “passionate kiss” with Tarantino, who she had never met prior to working with him.

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