At a glance: Wirehead · Sega CD · developed by The Code Monkeys, produced by MGM Interactive · published by Sega · September 1995 · interactive movie · roughly 40 minutes per successful run · single player
By 1995 the logic must have looked impeccable in a boardroom. Interactive movies were the industry buzzword, MGM made actual movies for a living, and somebody else could be hired to worry about the game part. The result, built by The Code Monkeys and published by Sega as one of the Sega CD’s last releases, is a handsomely mounted little action comedy wrapped around design mistakes a first-year student should have caught. You are the unseen operator of Ned Hubbard, an ordinary family man who, after an accident the script never bothers to specify, has been fitted by Dr Oja with a brain implant that lets a remote guardian steer him. Villains want the technology in his skull. Ned wants to survive the afternoon. Steve Witting plays him as a man permanently one surprise behind events — which, as we shall see, is also how the player feels.
A Movie, Shot Like One
Credit first: MGM’s money is visible on screen. This was filmed on genuine locations with real stunt work rather than actors gurning in front of video wallpaper, and the itinerary is cheerfully absurd — a scramble through Ned’s own house escalates within minutes to a ship, an airliner, river rapids, car chases and a brawl in a Western town, before the plot gathers up a rescued doctor, a rescued family and a reporter ally (Leah Lail) for the exposure-the-villains finale. A successful run lasts about forty minutes, and as a piece of disposable Saturday-afternoon telly it passes the time pleasantly enough. Ned repeatedly turns to camera to plead for instructions, a direct nod to the dynamic of Innerspace, and the fiction of the implant neatly explains why a grown man stands frozen in danger awaiting your orders.
The Sega CD does its usual damage to the photography, of course. Outdoor scenes shot in natural light flatten into broad blocks of colour, fast-moving chases smear under compression, and the sound mix leans on stock effects and looping with lip-sync that occasionally wanders off. None of it is fatal. The film is coherent, varied and passable — which only throws the failure of everything around it into sharper relief.
Pick a Door, Any Door, Wrongly
Every few seconds the film pauses on a decision: a direction to run, a door to try, occasionally a punch-versus-kick call in a scuffle. One option continues the story. The rest end the scene badly. This is Dragon’s Lair territory, but Richard Donner’s famous arcade ancestor at least signalled its demands with flashes and telegraphed danger; Wirehead’s correct answers are routinely arbitrary. Three identical doors face you, and nothing distinguishes the safe one from the two containing guards. A punch floors one attacker while a kick is required for the next, with no readable difference between them. At one point survival means allowing Ned to be grabbed, because the script has decided he will then turn the tables — information the game shares only after you have died doing the sensible thing. At another, you are expected to open an aircraft door in flight on the off-chance that an inflatable raft makes a serviceable parachute. It does. How were you meant to know?
You weren’t. The only honest strategy is a notebook. Surviving the whole film takes in the region of ninety-four correct inputs, and the game rations your education through a battery meter allowing nine mistakes before the run ends — a budget I personally exhausted inside the first house, on doorways. Trial and error is not a seasoning here; it is the entire meal. Memorise the sequence and the film plays; until then you are sitting an exam in a subject that was never taught, pressing a button every few seconds to discover whether the examiner is feeling kind.
“Ninety-four memorised inputs stand between you and the end credits, and the game gives you nine mistakes to learn them with.”
There is a deeper structural problem underneath the guesswork, which is that the branching was never really branching. A film shoot cannot afford twenty versions of every scene, so every corridor of the story narrows back to the same guarded funnel: wander as you like within a location and the plot waits, but the exit is a single correct input, and the alternative takes are mostly capture or death. Compare the better Digital Pictures productions of the same years, which by then were layering observation and timing into their prompts, and Wirehead feels like a first draft of the form arriving in the format’s final season — a late release, dated September 1995 with a fancier 32X CD edition announced and quietly cancelled, playing catch-up against a standard its competitors had already moved past.
Ned Does Not Thank You
The design might have been forgiven if failing were funny, but Wirehead hides its slapstick behind its own punishment system: pratfalls and humiliations mostly occur on the wrong branches, so the comedy is rationed to players willing to burn battery charge for a gag that usually amounts to the pursuers bundling Ned into a car. Worse, Witting’s performance works against the material. He looks the part of the harried everyman and throws himself into the action willingly, yet his reaction shots to camera read as outright hostility — less “I cannot believe this is happening to me” than a glare at the person responsible. Since that person is you, the game’s central relationship curdles: you are rescuing a man who appears to despise you, about whose life, family and even injury the script tells you almost nothing, making him hard to root for beyond professional obligation.
The support cast cannot rescue him. Dr Oja exists to insist the implant is important without ever explaining it. The one memorable pursuer is Heels, an assassin whose stilettos sprout blades in a nod to Goldfinger-era villainy, and even she is gone almost as soon as she registers. Lail’s reporter fares little better, saddled late on with a distraction routine — remove jacket, wiggle shoulders — that two hardened guards apparently find irresistible. It is that kind of film: amiable, underwritten, and convinced that motion equals momentum.
One more small mercy deserves recording before sentence is passed: the game is at least honest about its length. Battery allowing, a determined first attempt teaches you most of the route within a couple of sittings, the film never pretends to be longer than its forty minutes, and the production values mean those minutes are spent looking at real places and real stunt performers rather than the same three corridors in different coloured light. Wirehead’s failure is not laziness or cheapness — money and effort are all over it — which is exactly what makes the design so frustrating. Everything except the game was somebody’s priority.
The Verdict
Strip away the interaction and there is a passable, good-looking B-picture here, shot with more care and location work than most full-motion video productions managed. But a game has to be judged on the playing, and playing Wirehead means rote-learning an un-signposted sequence of guesses, at nine mistakes per sitting, in exchange for the privilege of watching Ned survive ordeals he resents you for. As a museum piece from the Sega CD’s final months it fascinates. As entertainment chosen over almost anything else on the shelf, it does not survive cross-examination.
Verdict: a decent film strangled by pure guesswork design — 4.5, and bring a notebook if you insist.
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