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A widespread convention or trope in games is the use of black bars at the top and bottom of the screen during a cutscene or cinematic. I assume this is a stylistic choice, and/or a UX choice to indicate non-interactivity.

The analogy seems obvious—people are used to seeing movies in a wider aspect ratio than their television, so letterboxing is common as a visual shorthand for “cinema”.

But I’ve wondered how specifically this made its way to the gaming world and became ubiquitous as an indicator of gameplay interruptions. Is there a clear candidate for the originator of the letterbox=cutscene thing?

Ideally, I'm looking for the first game to do so intentionally. A few generations ago, when pre-rendered cutscenes were common, I imagine you’d get letterboxes just from playing at a nonstandard resolution. However, modern games rarely use pre-rendered scenes, and letterbox cutscenes are far wider than a standard monitor, making it clearly a stylistic choice to add bars. I’m curious when that became a style rather than a technical limitation.

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  • Are you looking for the first game to do so intentionally? Letterboxing generally happens when your cinematic isn't filmed in the same dimensional ratio as the screen it's being showed on. (The alternative being, of course, trimming the excess content, or stretching to fit and distorting the video.) So are we looking for first instance of intentional letterboxing as some sort of visual effect? Or something else?
    – Roddy of the Frozen Peas
    Commented Jun 29 at 2:12
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    Ideally yes, the first to do so intentionally. A few generations ago when pre-rendered cutscenes were common I imagine you’d get letterboxes just from playing at a nonstandard resolution. However modern games rarely use prerendered scenes, and letterbox cutscenes to far wider than a standard monitor, making it clearly a stylistic choice to add bars. I’m curious when that became a style rather than a technical limitation.
    – Caketray
    Commented Jun 29 at 2:40
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    @Caketray: I have even seen games apply letterboxing when playing in ultrawide resolution, which looks a bit silly.
    – Kevin
    Commented Jun 29 at 5:50

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It's probably Ninja Gaiden

Ninja Gaiden, released in 1988 on the NES, was famous and revolutionary for its use of cutscenes, which are all letterboxed on the top and bottom. I do not know for certain whether there might have been some, possibly obscure, earlier game that had such cutscenes, but Ninja Gaiden is surely the one that made it popular, if not the very first.

IGN says this about it, in this article:

Though early arcade games like Pac-Man and Donkey Kong had small story sequences accenting their play experiences, the true pioneer of the cutscene as we know it was Tecmo’s Ninja Gaiden.

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    The Castlevania series might have been an influence too, especially Castlevania III with its film-reel "letterboxing". But CV3 was the first one to have what you could call an actual cutscene that had that (it was just a title screen decoration in the first two games and Vampire Killer), and that came out a year after Ninja Gaiden.
    – Hearth
    Commented Jun 29 at 15:02
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    It doesn't look to me like Ninja Gaiden deliberately simulated a widescreen movie. Most images in the cutscenes are either small with huge borders on all sides, or are letterboxed but extremely wide (>4:1). I assume this was to save ROM space and not to simulate a super-widescreen movie (the widest common movie aspect then and now is 2.39:1). There are a few letterboxed ~1.5:1 aspect images, but that's narrower than most '80s movies, and it's identical to the aspect ratio of the level itself during play – the only difference is the status bar isn't shown and the image is centered vertically.
    – benrg
    Commented Jun 30 at 5:07

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