MetaCreations

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

~ the obituary ~

Software of this class reached Turkey on copied CDs with thirty other things stacked on them. You installed Bryce because it happened to be on the disc. One landscape came out of it, mirror ocean under a sky that exists nowhere on earth, and then the icon sat there for the rest of the machine's life. Kai's Power Tools was the one that stopped you. There were no menus you recognized and almost no labels, just dark curved panels with dials and lenses on them, and the only way to learn it was to turn something and watch. i was a teenager with a secondhand PC and no idea that any of it was in commercial trouble.

The company behind it was assembled in 1997 out of two histories. MetaTools, formerly HSC Software, was Kai Krause and John Wilczak, and it brought Kai's Power Tools along with Bryce. Fractal Design, started in 1991 by Mark Zimmer and Tom Hedges, brought Painter and Poser. Ray Dream went into the same pile, as did Specular and a research group called Real Time Geometry Lab. The result was headquartered in Carpinteria, California.

What that merger produced was a monopoly on the odd corner of graphics. Adobe had the professional center of the market and was not interested in a program for making imaginary planets. MetaCreations had every product that a person bought because it looked like fun, which is a real category and turned out to be a difficult business.

Wilczak left in 1998. Krause left in 1999, and with him went the argument that a program could look like an instrument panel rather than a document window. His interfaces are still divisive: people who loved them describe learning by touch, and people who hated them point out that a dial with no name on it is a puzzle standing between you and your work.

~ the case file ~

~ the pivot ~

On 14 December 1999 the company announced it was getting out of graphics applications entirely. Everything would go, and the future was MetaStream, a streaming 3D file format co-developed with Intel, meant to let online retailers put a rotating chair or a customizable shoe on a product page. A joint venture with Computer Associates had already been set up to sell it.

The trade press did not know what to make of it. Macworld ran the news twice under headlines calling the move strange and then puzzling, and The Register titled its piece MetaCreations switches horses. The logic was not insane in December 1999, when anything with e-commerce attached to it could raise money and shrink-wrapped creative software was visibly a shrinking trade. The execution meant selling a catalog of loved products to fund a format that needed a plugin nobody had installed.

~ where everything went ~

Corel took the flagship line in 2000, which meant Painter and Bryce in one transaction, with Kai's Power Tools and its vector effects plugin attached. Poser was sold separately to Curious Labs, a company put together by people who had been working on it the month before.

Canoma, which built usable 3D models out of ordinary photographs and was probably the most impressive thing in the catalog, went to Adobe and was quietly discontinued. Expression reverted to its original developer, Creature House, which later sold it to Microsoft. The consumer end of the Kai line, Photo Soap and Power Goo, was picked up by ScanSoft, where both of them stopped. Ray Dream and Infini-D were merged into Carrara, which went to Eovia and then to Daz 3D, and Daz eventually collected Bryce from Corel too.

The scoreboard in 2026 is not kind to the decision. Painter is still a current Corel product and Poser is still on sale at version 13, four owners down the line from the company that let it go. Bryce stopped at version 7 in 2010 and is still downloadable. All of it was judged the wrong business by the one company that had it under a single roof.

~ what it became ~

On 30 November 2000 MetaCreations merged into its own subsidiary and took its name, becoming Viewpoint Corporation. MetaStream was rebranded the Viewpoint Media Player, and most people who ever encountered it encountered it as a browser plugin arriving bundled with something else, which is a bad way to meet any piece of software. The ticker changed from VWPT to ENLV in January 2008 when the company renamed itself Enliven Marketing Technologies, and DG FastChannel bought Enliven for ninety eight million dollars in stock.

The domain is the last joke. metacreations.com answers today with an empty WordPress install. There are no posts and no categories, just a theme's default copyright line sitting at the bottom of a blank page. A company whose entire identity was that its software looked like nothing else now serves a page that looks like every other page on the internet.

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