If you look back some 14 years today, you will find things among your memories that not only remain in your memory, but in a way that defined the time. For example, I was still a fifteen-year-old teenager at the time, who mainly enjoyed sports and video games. And logically, the viral phenomenon that was sweeping the Czech Republic at that time did not pass me by. I am specifically talking about Interanda as one of the most interesting experiments in Czech film and internet culture of the time. Of course, I forgot about it after a few "passes", only to come across it on the internet now - a good 14 years later, with thirty on my neck - and return to my youth thanks to it.
At a time when Android and iPhone were still catching their breath and the internet was still a place where people experimented without inhibitions and we certainly didn't take it for granted every day, something appeared that I'm not afraid to call "the original interactive film". Interande was not an ordinary film and it wasn't an ordinary game either. It was a dialogue between you and the story that took place in a club at night, where the main character approaches a girl and everything depends on your decisions. In other words, if you made the wrong choice, the date would go wrong. On the contrary, if you made the right choice, something could virtually begin that could have a happy ending for the hero.onec. So you were essentially a director in your own time zone, and that was something that had little parallel in the Czech environment in 2012.
Interande only had about 15 minutes of pure time, was free and ran directly in the browser. What was great was that it didn't require the installation of any large applications or Flash, but it still managed to draw thousands of players into its world. For example, we played it both at home and at school during computer science classes, which were otherwise dominated by Metin2 or Counter-Strike. And I have to say that it was really fun, which can still be interesting today. At key moments, you choose what the main character will do, and the story unfolds differently depending on your choices. This flexibility of the story and the feeling of power over the plot were for many of us the first real experience with interactivity "in a movie".
And what's the best? Interande remains online and still maintains a small community that remembers it as one of the important milestones of interactive creation in the Czech environment. It was never and was not supposed to be a big movie with stars on the red carpet. It was a small but significant moment when we could feel the difference between watching a story and co-creating it, and this was exactly the reason why we loved returning to Interande so much.
Looking back now, Interande feels like a drop in the ocean of media evolution, showing that the lines between film and game are thinner than many people think. Yes, it was more of a short interactive episode that many of us quickly got through and then forgot about. But it was still something we just played. And because of that, it became a small cultural milestone worth remembering from time to time. MiniAt least I thoroughly enjoyed this memory and I believe you will too.
