Presto Studios

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

~ the goodbye ~

Presto Studios was incorporated in San Diego on 20 july 1992, several months after the thing that made it exist. In january of that year a group of young developers around Michel Kripalani carried a bare demo of a time travel adventure to Macworld and stood next to it. There was no publisher and no office. The first game got finished out of two suburban houses and shipped by the people who made it.

The Journeyman Project came out in 1993 for the Macintosh. It was a first person adventure built out of pre-rendered frames stitched together with QuickTime, which is to say the computer was not drawing anything, it was playing back pictures somebody had spent a week rendering. That was the technology of the moment and Presto used it better than most. Buried in Time followed in 1995 and Legacy of Time in 1998, each one heavier, each one shipping on more discs than the last.

In 2001 the studio got the job that put its name in front of people who had never heard of it. Cyan had finished with Myst and Ubi Soft needed somebody to make the third one. Presto made Myst III: Exile, which moved 75,000 copies in two weeks and passed a million inside a year. That is a large number and a small one at the same time, because the first two Myst games had sold over ten million between them and everyone in the industry could do that subtraction.

None of this was ever going to arrive where I was. Legacy of Time shipped in 1998, the year I got online at 33.6k, and it came on discs, which meant it was a shelf object in a country whose shelf for imported Mac-first adventure games was close to empty. A modem was not going to deliver two gigabytes of pre-rendered rooms in 1998, and by the time TTNet put a real line into the apartment around 2006, Presto had been shut for four years. I found the Journeyman Project the way most people outside America found it, which is late and by reading about it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was actually in the box ~

The pre-rendered adventure was a specific bargain. You gave up the ability to move freely and you got images the hardware of the day could not have produced live. A Presto game looked like something out of a workstation because it was, and the trade was that you moved through it one still frame at a time.

It aged badly and everyone knew it would. The moment consumer 3D cards arrived and a machine could draw a corridor while you walked down it, the entire premise of shipping photographs of a corridor stopped making sense. Presto had built its whole competence around a technique with a visible expiry date on it.

~ the Myst job ~

Taking over Myst is a strange assignment. The series belonged to two brothers in Washington state and its identity was inseparable from them, so the studio that inherits it has to sound like somebody else on purpose. Exile did that competently and got reviews to match. Its villain, played by Brad Dourif, is the part people remember.

What the sales figure told the directors was not that Exile had failed. It was that a million copies of the third Myst, in 2001, with a publisher behind it and a franchise on the box, was the ceiling now. The audience that had made the first one a phenomenon in 1993 had gone somewhere else, and no amount of craft was going to walk it back.

~ what really happened ~

In august 2002 Greg Uhler put out a short statement saying Presto Studios was discontinuing software development, and the reasons he gave were financial as much as personal. The corporation would keep existing on paper. A minimal staff would stay through the end of october and then that would be the end of it.

The detail that makes this grave different from most game studio graves is the balance sheet. Presto was not in debt and had not been dropped by a publisher. Its last game, the Xbox party title Whacked!, did not even reach North American stores until 15 october, two months after the studio announced it was finished. The people who ran it looked at the PC adventure market, decided it was going to keep shrinking, and got out while they could still choose the date.

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