by Gloria Stern

Bill Appleton, founder of CyberFlix of Knoxville, Tennessee, has followed his own sage advice contrary to that attributed to John Soule printed in the Terre Haute Express in 1851. And while we are mouthing folk sayings, a popular paraphrase works just as well when applied to this modern day defector. "You can take the man out of the west, but you can't take the west out of the man."

Bill has created DUST, the award winning CD, after leaving his niche in Silicon Valley just two years ago as a highly successful software designer. You may know him as the creator of the acclaimed software programs, Supercard, HyperDA, Video Builder, Course Builder and World Builder. World Builder is a currently found on the net. The title represents the first full blown adventure game for this dynamic company.

Bill was studying economics under a graduate fellowship at Vanderbilt when he quit school just weeks away from graduation to work on his Apple Mac computer in the basement of his parents' house twelve years ago. Within eighteen months, he produced World Builder, a highly respected authoring tool for creating electronic games. Armed with an auspicious reputation, he was drawn to Silicon Valley. After a stint with the electronic giants, Bill found himself at a disadvantage. I talked with Bill about his independent company and how he came to be in Knoxville producing CD's. Bill found that the only way he could have control over his own work was to put together a creative team under his own banner away from the exigencies of the motion picture industry.

Though his success was in the development of authoring software, he was also aware that the highest selling authoring programs sell no more than 50,000 copies. Putting that together with the figures for titles of upwards of ten times that amount (see Myst: Through the Myst: Another World, in the PULSE archives), it became obvious to him that the software could be kept proprietary and at the same time, it would be an advantage to him to turn his attention to producing titles.

Dust follows Jump Raven, a sci-fi game with movie quality sound and images, and, Lunicus another sci-fi game, both have achieved ratings among the top ten as seen by Variety Magazine, the entertainment industry weekly. His success with the three titles already released prove that his determination to cut from the west coast center has been a wise move.

While other game producers concentrate on the complexity and convolutions of the game, the look of Dust, along with its recognition as a truly innovative product, is directly attributable to the use of the authoring software that Bill calls Dream Factory. The caliber of this unique software is recognized internationally, licensed to Bandai, the Tokyo based toy and game producers of Godzilla and the Power Rangers.

The founding members of the creative team are Andrew Nelson, producer and writer; Scott Scheinbaum, music and sound director; and Jamie Wicks who does the graphics. Michael Gilmore is the Design director. Together they are a winning team and headed by Bill Appleton, the company's guiding light and programmer extraordinaire, they have made an impressive mark with just three releases.

Convinced that the attraction to the sophisticated game players weaned on Nintendo and Sega is the ability of a product to capture and hold the users' attention, all of CyberFlix' releases are created with the requirement that they will provide entertainment for 25 to 40 hours. Bill Appleton told me how this idea is integrated into the unique software that is at the core of the company's production.

"To be a truly interactive fiction story of the magnitude of a CDrom, there need to be at least a dozen characters. To do this in animation would require such an exponential number of cells that it hardly makes sense. We have taken real actors and animated their expressions resulting in a composite character that is fully mobile and expressive at the same time."

The technique of photographing a cast of 35 digital characters created by the use of Alias and SoftImage to enact the story. Placing them in fully developed sets gives CyberFlix control over the elements and enables them to come up with a unique playscript based on a great, distinctive look. The concept for production has been well thought out.

The eight divisions of Dream Factory are structured like those of a motion picture. Central Casting builds and animates the characters who appear in the environment. Head Shot amimates the close ups for expressive mobility. Set construction creates digital sets in 3D that allow the user to move through them in real time. The Prop department prepares the accurately scaled props that vary in size as used in the set. The Flat Painter builds frames, backgrounds and interfaces within the title and provides the hot bottons that power portablity from point to point. The Sound Track, Blue Screen and Movie Editor departments perform the same functions as in film production. The successful integration of all of these features can be attributed to the superior caching capabilities of Dream Factory.

Dust follows CyberFlix' prize winning, futuristic Lunicus and Jump Raven in a departure focusing on the early west. One of the particularly nice features of this disc is the main game panel containing a map of Diamondback, the location of the story. The guide gives you your location at any given time among the twenty buildings that constitute the frontier town of Diamondback in 1882. There is a help button and a store for the inventory acquired as the game progresses. The operative character is a cowboy who wanders into town, broke and unarmed. He meets up with Mountain Laurel, Ruby O'Dowdle, Oona Canute, Cosimo Macintosh (no disparagement inferred) and daughter Marie, Bloodstone Hayes, Santiago Bolivar, Buick Riviera and Jackalope Jones, for starters. It's no easy gig, moseyin' through the frontier town where loyalties melt with a roll of the dice. Twilight comes to the Hard Drive Saloon amidst a volley of gunshots as the player piano tinkles in the background. Poker table players rotate shifts and the barmaid offers libation served up with sage advice.

Among his adventures are card games in the bar with card sharks, matching wits with bounders, facing bank robbers and searching out treasures in the lawless country-side with a lovely Indian School Marm. Dust is billed as 4 Days, One Town, No Law. There are thirty characters presented in hi-res graphics who meet and interact with the main character. The player has the opportunity to play poker, blackjack, and slot machines, and checkout the target range. As the cowboy-stranger wanders around, he is met with town regulars: self seeking politicians, prostitutes, proprietors and gunfighters who alternately advise and obstruct the visitor.

Choices open to the player are the selection of which "townies" to speak to and what questions to ask. Relevant responses are given in real time spoken by characters photographed and in costume. Committed to real-time character animation, Cyberflix has incorporated 5,000 recorded strings (400 manuscript pages) of dialogue covering all possible situations and guaranteed to keep the play innovative.

Bill describes his story lines as braided threads, all different, but leading to the same eventual direction all the while providing many hours of fascinating play. While the software of Dream Factory is the engine driving Cyberflix' output, the conviction that story content is the key to a successful title, we can look forward to more great discs from Knoxville and Bill Appleton and his award winning team. Watch for RMS Titanic, a survival adventure on a doomed vessel, SkullCracker, a horror arcade game set in an alternate universe and Red Jack's Revenge, a pirate adventure, all due out this year.

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CyberFlix
4 Market Square
Knoxville TN 37902
(423) 546-1157

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