Was skipping cut scenes a thing in 2002?

[keybladeblue6 72]

Kingdom Hearts is probably the oldest game that I own, so I don't know much about games before that. But was it possible to skip cut scenes in video games in 2002? If so why on earth did the creators forget to put this feature in the first game? Can you imagine the conversation with this....

 

Nomura: Our new game is perfect there are almost no flaws

 

Guy: um, shouldn't we make it possible to skip cutscenes?

 

Nomura: But we want the player to be also focused on the story so that they don't accidentally skip and important plotscene.

 

Guy: OK maybe we can make cutscenes unskippable the first time but make it possible the second time the cut scene plays that way players won't be forced to watch the same scene over and over when they die in these super hard fights we've made

 

Nomura: Shut up I said the game is perfect!

[Blackdrazon 19]

Squaresoft had skippable cutscenes as early as Vagrant Story in 2000, but they didn't standardize it until FFX-2 (2003 JPN).

 

Of course, Squaresoft also had skippable opening game demos at the start of many of its games going back even longer than that.

 

Others have pointed out that the PSX would (by necessity) skip cutscenes if you opened the lid, and I can't imagine that they didn't have a software means of interrupting cutscenes if the hardware can do it by itself?

 

And do you know what game does have a skippable opening cutscene?  Ultima III, from 1983, often considered the direct ancestor of Dragon Quest and the entire JRPG genre.

 

Square were just being jerks who weren't willing to provide a two-decades old common courtesy.

Edited March 14, 2017 by Blackdrazon

[Dustin Lübbers 933]

Yes i agree its one of those little things someone along the lines forgot to include. I remember how many hours went ny just necause id had to watch that cutscene with riku as he reveals himself to ne ansem over and over again...good times

[Connected 978]

 I remember how many hours went ny just necause id had to watch that cutscene with riku as he reveals himself to ne ansem over and over again...good times\

God that cutscene took so long... It was such a frustration to watch that scene over and over.

[The Transcendent Key 12,109]

Well, I played Kingdom Hearts II first than the first one, so I didn't know that I couldn't skip cutscenes in the first Kingdom Hearts! So when I got that game and found out that I couldn't skip cutscenes, I had to witness the Sora vs. Riku-Ansem confrontation a good many times, since I lost that fight constantly back then! (Not that I minded rewatching the cutscene, since it's always been badass!)

 

I think that other games did have the ability to skip cutscenes, but I honestly never took notice of that detail, ya know?

[InfiniteBatchan 0]

Unskippable cutscenes might be one of the worst things on console games. It's even worse when the checkpoints are before cutscenes