In the small sound studio, a musician sits surrounded by synthesizers and computer screens.
Down the hall, an artist works at a storyboard, mapping out the basics of what appears to be an animated motion picture or television show.
Around the next corner in the low-rise, unassuming suburban office building, a long-haired man in bike shorts is programming a computer. And just down the hall, several young men and women are sitting at keyboards playing–what are they playing? It looks like a feature film but, with a click of the mouse, it becomes–a game!
These scenes are everyday occurrences at TerraGlyph Interactive Studios in Schaumburg, a year-old company that in the last few months has made a big splash in the brave new world of “interactive media.”
“We’ve been very quiet and secretive,” Dennis G. Defensor, TerraGlyph’s enthusiastic president and CEO, explained as he led a visitor through his domain. “We just recently showed our product at the Electronic Entertainment Expo . It was our debut show as a company and we just shocked everybody.”
The shock waves resulted in TerraGlyph’s CD-ROM games being named “Best of Show” by the trade publication CD-ROM Today and snared Defensor a luncheon meeting with director Steven Spielberg because Spielberg was so impressed with TerraGlyph’s use of his Tiny Toons characters in their new product.
What caused the stir was TerraGlyph’s technological innovations, which produce interactive computer games with movie-quality animation and original songs.
Michael Brown, reviews editor of CD-ROM Today, said that when he saw TerraGlyph’s products at the show, he was particularly impressed by the combination of high-quality animation and high-quality sound in the games. “The products that I saw especially impressed me with the quality of animation, which has a real Disneyesque feeling and is very smooth,” he said.
He added that while many CD-ROM games sacrifice sound quality because of the difficulty in combining both pictures and sound in a way the computer can retrieve them, “TerraGlyph’s soundtracks are very high quality. have a high-resolution audio, and really seems to have something special there.”
By Christmas, Defensor and the rest of the TerraGlyph team are hoping their first two offerings, “Hansel and Gretel and the Enchanted Castle” and “Rumpelstiltskin’s Labyrinth of the Lost,” will begin to make TerraGlyph as familiar to home computer users as Microsoft’s Windows programs.
Defensor, a Buffalo Grove resident, said the company’s plan is to create a new category in the CD-ROM market: family entertainment.
“Most computer products ignore the mother, ignore the father, ignore the younger sister and only focus on the 14- to 22-year-old males ,” Defensor said. “We wanted to focus on children and then create games so everyone can play. We need to find a way to develop products that pull the family together instead of spreading the family apart.”
The plan, Defensor said, is to have high-quality products with animation that rival the movies, instead of the squared-off, jumpy appearance of many video games. These games would offer users the option of joining the story. For example, in “Rumpelstiltskin,” the player explores a labyrinth to help the Miller’s daughter defeat the evil dwarf. The animation during the sequence rivals any video cartoon, but the game allows the player to alter the picture without stopping the high-quality animation. Other games do not continue animated sequences while the player interacts with the scene.
Defensor said the interactive nature of the stories sets them apart from other kinds of media experiences.
“When I’m watching a movie, if it’s very good, I’m pulled in for 10 minutes,” Defensor said. “When the user plays one of our games, it is immersive. It keeps the person in and involved, and each time you play, the outcome can be different–it has real cause and effect.”
Defensor started TerraGlyph in June 1994. He previously was head of ICOM Simulations, a Chicago-based video game publisher, which was sold to media giant Viacom. Defensor left Viacom shortly after that and he pulled together colleagues from various parts of the computer and video game industries to create TerraGlyph, which now employs 70 people.
“When we hire people,” he said, “they aren’t just technically talented–they are also creatively talented. We use our right-brains and our left-brains around here.”
TerraGlyph’s vice president of product development and technology, Joseph A. Gaucher Jr., was with Defensor at ICOM and Viacom. He said TerraGlyph is a new breed in the area of game development because “we were fortunate enough to find the right engineering people at the beginning to set down the technology base the company needs.” This, he said, is a change from earlier companies where computer hackers developed games based on existing technology. At TerraGlyph, he said, “we can design the technology that can grow around the creative product.”
The process for this is the company comes up with the idea first, then creates the technology that makes the idea possible, he said.
This assessment is shared by Holly Stein, vice president of licensing and marketing for Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment division, which has licensed Warner’s Tiny Toon characters to TerraGlyph for development in games, which will be released in early 1996.
“They are taking every element of product development–music, animation, storytelling–and putting it together,” she said. “It is truly an interactive studio, not just a CD-ROM publisher.”
The Tiny Toon license also ensures that TerraGlyph will continue to receive some attention from Spielberg, who still owns rights to the characters he helped create.
In creating a game, all elements are worked on simultaneously. One key component that TerraGlyph is developing is a “virtual backlot” of background drawings and other design elements. It uses a system built by TerraGlyph from a variety of hardware that can access vast amounts of information simultaneously from large numbers of CD-ROMs.
The virtual backlot, Gaucher said, “has been a dream of mine ever since the first time I saw Hollywood and the stage sets they build on their backlots.” He said that though traditional film studios have actually reproduced city blocks permanently using wooden structure and paint, the virtual backlots will create cities that can be infinitely rearranged by computer.
“With virtual worlds, I can reuse and rearrange them on the computer with the press of a button,” he said.
The virtual technology is being developed by other studios, but TerraGlyph has its backlot in place.
Gaucher, 46, of Long Grove and Defensor, 42, both came to the computer field in round-about ways, landing in an industry that, essentially, did not exist when the two were in college and making career plans in the 1960s and ’70s. Gaucher said he was a junior in college planning a conventional business career when he joined IBM part time after taking a computer aptitude test.
“I thought computers were just something you worked with to pay for college, not something you did when you got out of school,” he said.
Defensor, a native of the Phillipines whose college degrees are in genetics and law, said that when working on a genetics project as an undergraduate, he used a”state of the art” tabletop computer, which cost $30,000 and had 64K of memory.
“I played with computers as a tool, but not as a career path,” he said. “I used computers to put myself through law school, but when I became a lawyer, I realized I really didn’t want to do that.”
Defensor said that as he watched computers become smaller and less expensive, “it seemed that it was going to go into the home eventually.” And he credits his parents with helping him to see the possiblities of something new. “My parents didn’t see things in categories,” he said. “My father is very eclectic. He was an attorney and he was also a college professor teaching math, biology and the sciences.”
Both Defensor and Gaucher predict that the interactive entertainment market will become even more competitive and that computer-based systems will crowd out the plug-in style video games. “We are noticing now that Grandma and Grandpa are asking what kind of software they can buy the grandchildren for Christmas,” Gaucher said.
Defensor said he sees interactive CD-ROM as one part of the “communications convergence,” which will eventually unite the technology of television, telephone and computers into a new system that will break down the traditional walls between types of media. And, he said, he believes TerraGlyph is perfectly positioned to ride the wave into the future.
“The home product market is very different from other computer markets,” he said. “With word processors, you’d have to sell real hard to make me change my word processor, but if I have `Hansel and Gretel’ on CD-ROM, `Rumpelstiltskin’ won’t replace that.” The advantage is that consumers can add entertainment pieces as opposed to replacing the whole system.
Defensor said he expects competitors to emerge fairly quickly to challenge TerraGlyph’s family entertainment products, but “right now we have a year head start on them–maybe more.”
Meanwhile, the crew at TerraGlyph, which includes 40 persons in Schaumburg and another 30 at an animation studio in Ireland that transmits animation by modem, continues to work on their stories to develop games to lure the whole family. Recently, while watching a portion of the Hansel and Gretel game where Gretel sings a lullaby composed at TerraGlyph, Defensor nearly choked up.
“There will be tears on the keyboard when this song comes up,” he said. “Even when we work with this every day, we don’t get desensitized to it.”
