Inscape

~ the last words ~

In July 1994 the Los Angeles Times reported that two Time Warner subsidiaries, Home Box Office and Warner Music Group, had put $5 million into a new CD-ROM publisher. The company was called Inscape and wrote its own name as iNSCAPE. It was run by Michael L. Nash, whose qualification for the job was a disc. The year before, he had executive produced Freak Show for The Voyager Company with the San Francisco art collective The Residents, and he described it to the paper as a cross between Sim City and Twin Peaks.

The Residents came back for Inscape's first title. Bad Day on the Midway shipped in 1995, set at the same traveling carnival as Freak Show, and it is what the company's name still attaches to. CD-ROM Today called it one of the top ten discs of all time, a sentence that reads strangely now mostly because of the unit it measures in. The Dark Eye followed the same year. In October 1995, Billboard reported that Inscape was absorbing two of Warner Music Group's own interactive divisions, Time Warner Interactive and WarnerActive, so within eighteen months of being funded by Warner it was eating parts of Warner.

Discs like these needed a drive and a sound card, and more than that they needed a retail chain willing to stock an art object next to the office suites. By 1998, my first year online, the whole category was finished. Whatever reaches me from this catalog now arrives through an emulator, long after the disc stopped being a format anybody keeps a drive for.

~ the record ~

~ five million dollars from hbo ~

The money was not a games investment. Newsweek described the company in May 1995 as a blend of talent from the entertainment and programming industries, and that was the entire thesis of the CD-ROM boom. Hollywood had the stories and California had the engineers, and the disc was the place they were going to meet.

Every big entertainment company made this bet at once, mostly on licensed tie-ins to films the parent already owned. Inscape spent its money on work that resembled nothing else being pressed. A carnival populated by characters from an art collective's existing universe is not a product anybody greenlights because market research asked for it.

The artistic achievement carried the commercial problem inside it. A difficult, beautiful disc had a smaller audience than a flight simulator, and both of them cost the same to press.

~ ten titles at e3 ~

On 16 April 1996 Inscape put out a release headed with the number: ten CD-ROM titles to be revealed at that year's Electronic Entertainment Expo, alongside an expansion of development, production and marketing. The slate was The Egyptian Jukebox, a first-person shooter called Assassin 2015, a conspiracy adventure called Drowned God, a 3D action demo called Squeezils, a science-fiction action adventure called Ravage D.C.X., plus two already announced: Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol, and Where's Waldo?: Exploring Geography. A company with The Residents on one shelf and Where's Waldo on the next is a company looking for a floor. Ten titles was a large slate for a publisher two years old, and it was announced ten months before the company was sold.

~ ignite ~

In February 1997, less than a year after that slate was announced, it was reported that Graphix Zone would acquire Inscape and run it as a division. The Los Angeles Times carried the story on 28 February under the headline "Graphix Zone to Acquire L.A. Game Maker Inscape". Variety followed on 7 March with the staffing: vice presidents Rob Sebastian, David Boss and Brock LaPorte moved across with the merger, along with project director Rebekah Behrendt. Nash went his own way, and gave an interview to The Atlantic that June for a piece titled "What Happened to Multimedia?". People had started asking that question in the past tense.

The division was renamed Ignite. Two and a half years earlier a television network and a record company had handed five million dollars to a man who wanted to make discs nobody else would make, and the surviving asset of that experiment was a word that sounds like a product name.

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