It's a zombie movie. The protagonist has rescued his buddy from being attacked by a zombie, but he finds out his buddy's been bitten. Does he try to save him, or put him out of his misery?

This time, you get to decide.

The Outbreak is an interactive movie, a combination of good old "Choose Your Own Adventure" interactivity at key points combined with decades of frustration yelling at stupid horror movie protagonists. The idea, in retrospect, is very simple: construct a decision tree of events in a zombie survival scenario, film each option, then use the power of the Internet to show the options, allowing the audience to click at key points and make a simple but interactive zombie movie.

The site is surprisingly good quality and accounts for a lot of different ways to experience the movie. If you fail, you can start over from the beginning or try "Chapter Select" and get a tree of your previous decisions, and which ones are untried or led to your death (unlike, say, Dragon's Lair, which often kicks you back a notch and forces you to try again). As you go through, you'll see some similar scenes, but creative editing allows for subtle differences in certain scenes from time to time, and earlier choices can (and do) impact later ones.

The only downside I see is that the choices are fairly arbitrary. Move Furniture or Get Wood? Fuck, how do I know? There is a fair amount of clicking on choices at random and hoping they work out, but that's not too different from the source they're emulating (Choose Your Own Adventure books), so it's a minor beef. It's also really short -- I played through every option in about fifteen minutes. However, it's one of those head-slapping "why didn't anyone think of this before?" ideas that I'm hoping will take hold and propagate on the net.