Holy Guacamole! Experimental MMO from 1999. DAVID mother-effin BOWIE!

[MadJackalope]

Dadgum this thing is insane. 

Worlds was an experimental MMO chat thingy that was started in 1995. It's like a chat thing? David Bowie was involved? It was meant to have like real time concerts take place in virtual space. and stuff. It was classic Metaverse pipe dream.  And it's still running today!

This video does a pretty good job of introducing it though it does have a little bit of that "lol random" Let's Player type humor in it. Still it looks really fascinating. 

Does anyone else miss the days of "multimedia"? Where there were like weird goofy experiments still being done with computers and games? Educational games, and weird interactive encyclopedias and other things that weren't "applications" but also not "games". I would like to see more stuff like that. I'd like to make stuff like that. 

I kind of hope the Oculus will spur that back into the light. I'm also kind of hopeful that the Facebook buy helps encourage that. Shit would be cool. 




 

[lizzyinthesky]

If I remember right, Worlds were also the company that was suing every MMO ever made because they had a dubious patent on server-client interactions for games.

With Oculus all I really want is the next generation Second Life that is currently in development

[Nachimir]

Does anyone else miss the days of "multimedia"? Where there were like weird goofy experiments still being done with computers and games? Educational games, and weird interactive encyclopedias and other things that weren't "applications" but also not "games". I would like to see more stuff like that. I'd like to make stuff like that. 

I kind of hope the Oculus will spur that back into the light. I'm also kind of hopeful that the Facebook buy helps encourage that. Shit would be cool.

 

 

It's happening, in part because of the 90s revivial. There are people working on FMV type games, a whole scene mashing DOOM into interesting new shapes, Twine finally making hypertext fiction viable and interesting (rather than an academic on stage talking about a wav file and an animated gif being interesting additions to a book), the Oculus is definitely already inspiring people to make things instead of games, and game development based communities like makega.me are springing up that aren't really that fussed about how much of a game something is or isn't.

 

Multimedia was a slightly crappy term at a time when the available infrastructure and processing power were too crappy to do it in anything but a rudimentary form. Transmedia was an attempt to make some of it cool again mainly led by ad agencies and academics. I'm not sure it needs a name at all, and such names will maybe all eventually look as weird and naive as companies having a separate "digital" department. It's just in everything and a fundamental part of what we do and how we make things now.

[MadJackalope]

Very much agreed. 

Also I like hypertext. I grew up with it so I didn't actually understand it was a special thing in academia until about 6 or so years ago, but even the basic added function of hypertext is cool. I wish I could talk in hypertext. 


I've been to a couple of VR jams here in Austin and it's pretty interesting. I see a lot of old Silicone Valley type guys who made their money in the 80s and 90s kind of get back into the game because they're excited for all this VR and AR applications. There's some pretty goofy projects being funded but still it's exciting to see. I think smart phones and tablets really helped open the door for that kind of stuff. Actually I think there's a good more that could be done on those platforms too. It's just very hard because there's a lot of theory and not a lot of best practices established. But people who grew up with digital media have a better intuitive sense for what works and doesn't I think, which also helps.

Oh yeah and I met a girl who does design at IBM and there's some crazy shit they're doing with Watson and interaction design. 
 

[ihavefivehat]

I nominate this for most intriguing thread title of the year!

[syntheticgerbil]

I don't have anything to say on the original game, but in terms of multimedia weirdness, I used to spend forever played 3D Dinosaur Adventure. There wasn't actually any adventure involved, it was just going through a gaudy 3D museum and sometimes playing educational video games. Then you may get rewarded with a 3D video starring a T-Rex. It even came with red and blue 3D glasses for some scenes.

Once I was looking through some junk in the backroom of the company that gave me my first animation job I got out of college in Houston and I saw boxes for 3D Dinosaur Adventure and I realized they did all the 3D graphics for the game twenty years previous. Was kind of neat.

[hedgefield]

David Bowie was hyped on video games in the nineties apparently. I remember him most notably as the weird blue guy from Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Great game.

[Ben X]

T-Rex.

 

Obviously the educational aspect didn't work too well!

[syntheticgerbil]

Haha, I didn't play the video and assumed the title wasn't referring to the intro but something in the museum, oops. I REMEMBER A T-REX THOUGH. They also never specifically state that the dinosaur in the intro is an Allosaurus.

[MadJackalope]

I don't have anything to say on the original game, but in terms of multimedia weirdness, I used to spend forever played 3D Dinosaur Adventure. There wasn't actually any adventure involved, it was just going through a gaudy 3D museum and sometimes playing educational video games. Then you may get rewarded with a 3D video starring a T-Rex. It even came with red and blue 3D glasses for some scenes.

Once I was looking through some junk in the backroom of the company that gave me my first animation job I got out of college in Houston and I saw boxes for 3D Dinosaur Adventure and I realized they did all the 3D graphics for the game twenty years previous. Was kind of neat.

 

Actually I saw that reviewed. I grew up in the middle of nowhere so I didn't get a lot of stuff for my computer, but recently I've been watching reviews about old DOS games and stuff, and they covered this specific game actually. 

I think a large part of it is that when the internet began to take off, it was just simpler to make a website than it was to make a fully executable program. Which is understandable but also disappointing. Now that we're getting more powerful and easy to use 3rd party engines, and more people using program specific interactions because of touch screen apps etc, I hope we'll see more of this kind of stuff come out. I'm actually considering pursuing grad school for this reason, since lately I've talked with a couple of people involved with it on the academic side of things. 

 

David Bowie was hyped on video games in the nineties apparently. I remember him most notably as the weird blue guy from Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Great game.

Ooooh yeah, I remember that. Bowie is an interesting person. He was into a lot of unusual things and didn't just nail himself down to one thing. I wonder if he plays video games today, or if he was just briefly interested in it. 

Anybody know of any current multimedia projects? I was at a VR thing and this guy was telling me about his companies educational VR and AR project. It sounded a little top heavy though, not sure how good it would actually be, seemed a little bit like it was designed by engineers, and not enough creative director or industrial design guys were involved. That tends to be a problem in game industry type stuff. You get specs decided by MBAs and then implemented by engineers, and then you get wonky ass things like the Epson Moverio glasses (which I tried at a con, and are total shit). The only people who put any effort at all into the aesthetic and industrial design of these kinds of projects are Apple and Google, and sometimes Microsoft. I guess it's just too expensive, or it's not easily quantifiable and therefore hard to pitch.  

 

[Gormongous]

Ooooh yeah, I remember that. Bowie is an interesting person. He was into a lot of unusual things and didn't just nail himself down to one thing. I wonder if he plays video games today, or if he was just briefly interested in it.

 

Complete tangent, but I remember buying a used copy of Low from a CD store and finding an insert inside advertising Bowienet, which ran from 1998 until the mid-2000s as the only ISP that gave you firsthand access to David Bowie through email and chatrooms. Good on him for figuring out how to get onboard the internet thing before a lot of people, but of course he lost interest in being the proprietor and figurehead of such a mundane business.

[MadJackalope]

Woah that is pretty crazy. In some ways we have that personal voice on the internet again, through social media, but it's also filtered more through PR strategists etc. The freewheeling, de-centralized nature of the internet etc, is sort of gone now.