System Requirements: 486SX 25 MHz (or better) recommended, 4MB RAM (8MB recommended), hard disk with 5MB of free space for QuickTime for Windows and A Hard Day's Night, 25-color (or grayscale) 640x480 VGA display, MPC compatible CD ROM drive, MPC compatible sound card, mouse, MS-DOS 5.0 or later, Windows 3.1 or later.
Voyager's A Hard Day's Night doesn't qualify as a "new" interactive music title. It's been out for several years on the Mac (the PC version is about a year old) and may have, by the time you read this, sold nearly 100,000 copies. Its newness is also negated by the subject matter--it is a frame-by-frame study of a 30-year-old film based on a day in the life of the Beatles.
Aside from the film, A Hard Day's Night contains several essays about making the movie, the people involved, and the Beatles' music. It also includes the original script that runs concurrently with the action (a careful eye can see where dialogue was improvised). Additionally, there are some short films from director Richard Lester.
A Hard Day's Night can be enjoyed on several levels, and will be treasured by stray Beatlemaniacs and serious film students alike.
Upon its release, the movie was hailed for its spontaneity and attitude, as it became the mother of all rock videos. However, many of those with American accents found the dialogue hard to follow. And the lack of the plot made the random sequences difficult to remember. The disc overcomes both of these "problems." The dialogue is made clear by the running script. And due to the interactive nature, you can move back and forth between scenes at will (since there is no plot, these sequences matter little.) The interactive aspects of this program are limited, when judged against what is now available. You cannot, for instance, click on the young Patti Boyd during the train sequence to discover that she was the same person who married George Harrison and inspired Eric Clapton's "Layla." The history and background is provided outside of the frame, which makes the product less innovative.
The movie itself is small, less than three inches square on most screens. This is where technology causes compromise. As much as you may say that this doesn't matter all that much--and it doesn't, once you get used to it--subsequent versions with a larger viewing area will offer a great improvement.
So what? "A Hard Day's Night" was, in its first incarnation, primitive. The action was unrestrained, and its black-and-white nature made it less than state of the art. By interacting with a single aspect of the era through this disc, this disc provides a better glimpse into aspects of its time than reams of analysis about that fertile time.
