Videos have been used frequently for all sorts of other stuff in games since the playstation, if not earlier. In StarCraft the portrait of your selected unit wa

Videos have been used frequently for all sorts of other stuff in games since the playstation, if not earlier. In StarCraft the portrait of your selected unit was a movie file (RAD smacker, I think? But I don't have a copy of starcraft lying around to double check). Supergiant Games' titles since Bastion all use RAD's Bink codec to store offline renders of their character models (as movies) instead of traditional sprite sheets or realtime rendered 3d models, so they're playing back dozens of movies at all times. As another reply mentioned, it's also standard at this point for loading screens to be movies.