This is an idea that lurked in my head for more than eight years before I finally managed to put it together. I was learning about DVD authoring for my job, and got interested in how menus and branching worked. That led to thinking about taking advantage of that for a video.
It went through many, many iterations and source combinations in my head before I settled on the 80’s-retro feel (Full Metal Panic, Macross Plus, Evangelion, and many other sources were considered at various points).
For the audio, I settled on mostly using tracks from a set of royalty-free collections I had recently picked up, since it had options for 60-second versions of most of the tracks. That felt like a good length for each segment, as that would yield about a 3-minute run each time through the video. I also decided to use the same musical clip for each Bad End segment for continuity. For that, I used the Game Over clip from a video game I loved playing in high school, Renegade: Battle for Jacob’s Star, which I heard many, many times while playing.
I always intended this video for the Anime Weekend Atlanta Masters contest, since the format made it pretty much impossible to play anywhere else. It didn’t win, but did generate a decent amount of positive commentary. I did also send it to Anime Expo 2014 as a challenge, but it was disqualified under the “extreme difficulty of playback” rule.