CyberFlix

» see cyberflix.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Bill Appleton wrote World Builder, the Macintosh adventure construction system, and then SuperCard, the tool people moved to when HyperCard stopped being enough. Both were about handing the authoring apparatus to somebody who was not a programmer. On 28 June 1993 he founded a game studio in Knoxville, Tennessee, which was not a place the games industry paid attention to, and spent the next five years building software that did the same thing for full-motion adventure games.

The engine was called DreamFactory and CyberFlix wrote all of it. It rendered 3D environments and it let designers script characters that remembered what the player had done and behaved differently on the next encounter, which was unusual for a genre whose characters were mostly video clips waiting for a cue. The faces were the other trick. Rather than shoot actors on video, CyberFlix scanned multiple still photographs of each actor and overlaid them through in-house software called HeadShop to produce mouth and facial movement. The stated reason was disk space, because video took far more of it than the discs of the period could spare.

Dust: A Tale of the Wired West came out in 1995 and did well enough. Titanic: Adventure Out of Time shipped on 20 November 1996 after nineteen months of production, a first-person adventure set on a researched reconstruction of the ship, in which a British spy is sent back to the night of the sinking to fix a mission he failed. It sold 43,000 copies in its first month and passed 100,000 in the second, which the team was happy with and which was not remotely what the game would eventually do.

CyberFlix closed the same year I first got a dial-up line, which is roughly the worst timing available for finding it. The disc adventure was something you bought once and played alone, and the thing that actually arrived where I was came later and from a different direction: from 2002 onward the internet cafes were full of people playing the same match against each other on rented hours. I met the Titanic game long after it mattered, secondhand, the way you meet anything whose release window you missed.

~ the record ~

~ the funny part ~

Titanic was published by GTE Entertainment. On 7 January 1997, seven weeks after the game shipped, GTE announced it was folding most of that division, with final closure set for June. CyberFlix sent Erik Quist and Bill Appleton to GTE's offices, where they pressured management into signing the rights to Titanic back over and paying money out as well. Metro Pulse later reported CyberFlix as the only GTE client to get money back from the sinking distributor, which is not a pun anyone had to reach for.

The game then sat in limbo. No new copies were printed and stores that sold out stayed sold out. In May 1997 CUC Software signed on as the new publisher for a second print run, at which point lifetime sales were around 100,000.

~ how it landed ~

James Cameron's Titanic opened in December 1997. The two products had nothing to do with each other, and it did not matter. More than 200,000 new units of the game were printed and shipped in January and February 1998, and CyberFlix offered five dollar rebates in exchange for movie ticket stubs. The game entered PC Data's weekly top ten. Stores reported they could not keep it in stock, and CyberFlix noted an unusually high proportion of women among the buyers. Final sales went past 1.5 million.

~ what got buried with it ~

Ten months after the best sales figures the studio ever had, on 30 November 1998, CyberFlix announced it was closing. The catalog stopped at seven or so titles, among them Skull Cracker, Jump Raven, Lunicus and a Power Rangers game. Appleton started a company called DreamFactory the same year, after the engine. The CyberFlix trademark stayed registered until 25 November 2006, which is the actual date on the tombstone if you want a paperwork answer rather than a real one.

Nothing failed here in the way studios usually fail. The last game was a commercial success and the money came back. What went away was the format underneath: the single-player CD-ROM adventure with a research budget and a nineteen month schedule stopped being a thing anyone could fund about eighteen months after Titanic proved it could sell a million and a half copies.

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