Word: silicones
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...most closely watched video-game event of the season is not a game at all, but the arrival of a new game player. Next week Panasonic will introduce a VCR-size black box called REAL Multiplayer, designed by the hot Silicon Valley start-up company 3DO. With a 32-bit processor, packing twice the punch of the 16-bit Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis systems, and two special-purpose graphics chips, the Multiplayer is the most powerful video-game system ever marketed to the home. That in itself is no guarantee of anything. Other companies have tried and failed...
Over the past 18 months, two groups, one representing Silicon Valley, the other Hollywood, have been meeting at trade shows, visiting labs and quietly ! cross-fertilizing. Several prominent executives have jumped ship -- most notably Strauss Zelnick, who quit his job as president of 20th Century Fox Film Corp. this summer to head a video-game company called Crystal Dynamics. This fall dozens of these ventures are at last starting to roll out real products. Among the attractions coming soon to a living-room screen near...
...Hollywood-Silicon Valley connection goes back to the early 1980s, when movie companies and video-game makers found it mutually convenient to license cartoon and film characters (usually for a modest 5% to 10% of net sales) for use in video games. At one point Atari had deals lined up to make video games out of Peanuts, Mickey Mouse and the Muppets. Then in 1982 Atari licensed E.T. for $23 million and proceeded to turn it into one of the worst video games ever made. The resulting disaster, known in the industry as "the crash of 1984," brought Atari into...
...remains to be seen which needs the other's talents more: Hollywood, with all it has to learn about computers, or Silicon Valley, with all it needs to discover about telling a story. But the tale of their meeting and their subsequent romance has all the makings of a terrific movie. And if someone can figure out how to make it interactive and put it on the info highway, it might even make a good game...
Hold on to your joysticks! Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the info highway are on a collision course, and it's going to be a bumpy ride...