Rise and Fall of CyberFlix - in depth article about the developers
http://monkeyfire.com/mpol/dir_zine/dir_1999/942/t_cover.html
GAME OVER
by Jack Neely
A lawsuit by former employees brings to light the last days of CyberFlix, the company of "garage band programmers" that was supposed to rule the video game world.
You could make a computer game about CyberFlix.
You approach the door at 4 Market Square, click on the wooden door, which opens to a narrow flight of stairs. You climb to the second floor, bluff your way past Blue, the receptionist, and begin gathering information from each of the widely various characters you see. You pet the dog, greet the Newsweek reporter, exchange blows with the guy in the mohawk.
Then, if you've done everything just right, you'll climb the narrow staircase, past the World War II poster that says Shh—Silence Is Security to the third floor, the dark, quiet lair where the Genius resides. The object of the game is to guess what he's thinking.
CyberFlix was never one of Knoxville's biggest businesses, but for three or four years, it was probably our most famous. Newsweek profiled these "garage-band programmers." Computer author J.C. Herz devoted a whole chapter to them in her 1997 book about the global computer-gaming industry, Joystick Nation. Experimental composer Laurie Anderson and former Sen. Howard Baker visited their offices. They earned flattering writeups in People (an article titled "Hollywood in Knoxville"), U.S. News & World Report, Variety and dozens of computer trade journals. And that was even before their biggest title, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, became a nationwide bestseller.
They made waves across the international computer-game world, and seemed to herald a high tide in their downtown neighborhood. CyberFlix inspired politicians to follow its lead, with catch-phrases of "technology hubs" and "digital crossroads." CyberFlix's pale young geniuses found themselves working as consultants to a city that tried hard to catch on, sometimes even seemed eager to convert downtown into a Greater CyberFlix. It's more businesses like this, many thought, that downtown Knoxville needs. At an ad-hoc meeting on the Square in 1997, City Council passed resolutions aimed at fitting out ancient Market Square with cyber-connections certain to spawn more CyberFlixes.
Just last year, Titanic was among the nation's best-selling computer games, and People and Southern Living ran profiles of this amazing young company. On Sunday talk shows, Mayor Ashe was boasting of CyberFlix as strong evidence of the rebirth of Market Square.
Anyone who spent any time on Market Square a year or two ago would recognize most of them. Rand Cabus, with glasses and a dark Van dyke, walking briskly to his Locust Street condo. Alex Tschetter, muscular, tattooed with a flat-top mohawk, smoking cigarettes. Slow-talking, blond-goateed Billy Davenport, usually in a trucker's cap, loping to his pickup. Polite, bespectacled Erik Quist, getting a bagel. Bill Appleton, short-haired, square-jawed, and basketball tall, walking his big weimeraner around the square.
Their impressive offices were unlike any others in East Tennessee: two levels of an old building, polished hardwood floors, bare-brick walls. In the well-lit lobby, clocks showed what time it was in cities around the world: Tokyo, Los Angeles, Knoxville. Beyond the lobby, the place was always comfortably dark, lit mainly by afternoon sunlight and dozens of flickering computer screens. With baskets of free candy, big-screen video games, ping pong, and billiards, it was the sort of office that little brothers loved to visit.
That was just a year ago—which, in cyber time, can seem like several decades.
Today, the upper floors at 4 Market Square are empty and silent, and there's no digital crossroads here. What happened to CyberFlix is unclear, and the subject of a lawsuit filed earlier this month by two of the company's founders.
CyberFlix started not quite seven years ago when an unlikely quartet of young turks got together in a basement on Wagon Lane, a forested neighborhood near the river in South Knoxville, and played computer games. "It looked like NORAD down there," musical director Scott Scheinbaum recalls, a dark basement with 10 computer screens flickering. Often working all night, they'd send out for pizza. He recalls the delivery man's consternation at seeing the place. "What do you guys do here?" he asked.
The basement belonged to Bill Appleton, a 31-year-old refugee from Silicon Valley whom some called a genius. Originally from Oak Ridge and son of ORNL honcho William Appleton, Bill was a 1979 graduate of Oak Ridge High before he studied philosophy, painting, and economics at Davidson. Studying grad-school economics at Vanderbilt, he discovered computers. Macintosh computers, to be specific, which became an article of faith. Self-trained, he became fascinated with cyber technology, especially as it had to do with designing computer games. He'd done a couple himself: one called Apache Strike, another called Creepy Castle.
He had sojourned in Silicon Valley and later Chicago, where he made a name for himself developing video games and a software process to create them. But he always returned to Knoxville, which he considered his home. He'd apparently run into business problems in both Chicago and California and admitted he was glad to be back in Knoxville, away from all that.
With him were three other guys you wouldn't expect to find sharing a late-night pizza.
Shaven-headed Scott Scheinbaum, 32, grew up in Chicago, but family ties brought him to Knoxville, where he graduated from UT in music composition. He worked at Turtle's Records on Cumberland, but he was best-known downtown as a nightclub rocker: a former keyboardist and vocalist for punkish bands like Proud Flesh and Ministry of Love. He was living in the Maplehurst neighborhood in the mid-'80s when a friend introduced him to a neighbor named Bill Appleton.
The tall, quiet one was artist Jamie Wicks. Only 25, he'd been trained in computer modeling; he'd known the older Appleton since his childhood in Oak Ridge. "He's the quiet guy who sits next to you in class and draws pictures of monsters," recalls a friend.
The guy in tortoise-shell glasses was Andrew Nelson. Originally from upstate New York, 34-year-old Nelson had moved here to work for Whittle Communications, where he became associate editor for a waiting-room celebrity magazine. Disenchanted with Whittle and smitten with the new CD-ROM technology, Nelson left Whittle in 1992, showing an early talent for escaping a doomed venture at the right moment. Scheinbaum had introduced him to Appleton.
"Bill inoculated us with his vision of becoming multimedia superstars and taking over the world," says Scheinbaum. Movies were old fashioned; video games were for kids. Appleton's interactive movies would be the new medium for all people.
His claims sounded grandiose. In 1994, he told a reporter, "By 2000, we'll be one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world."
Appleton started his campaign by releasing Lunicus in April, 1993, a futuristic tale about a lunar colony operated by the U.N. Though it was a shoot-'em-up as most video games were, Lunicus featured a first-person perspective, and stood apart with its attention to character personalities.
In May, 1993, the four—plus Eric Quist, attorney and childhood friend of Appleton's, who would become CyberFlix's business manager—incorporated. Bill had called the new business CyberSoft. Cyber, of course, is the '90s prefix suggestive of artificial intelligence. The Soft suffix may have sounded a little too derivative. Loath to dismiss their sophisticated creations "computer games," they preferred the term "interactive movies." Nelson suggested a suffix that sounded cinematic: Flicks. CyberFlix.
Nelson would write the scripts for these flix. Scheinbaum would handle the sound effects and music. Wicks would do the graphic design. Quist would handle the business. Appleton would make it all possible with the technology he'd developed.
In 1993, the multimedia disks known as CD-ROM were just a rumor to most Americans, and the rumor was that it was too slow to be much fun. The system Appleton called DreamFactory made significant changes to speed it up. This "authoring tool" was a complex network of computer functions which would be the main partner in what would become possible over the next five years.
In Appleton's basement, Nelson, Scheinbaum, Wicks, and Appleton commenced work on a new title, a post-apocalyptic shoot-'em-up called Jump Raven.
The took their product to a Macintosh trade show in Boston. They weren't granted even a real booth—but crowded around a corner, near the real exhibits, they stole the show. "How do you do that?" asked veteran engineers. Representatives from Paramount saw the exhibition and signed a multi-million-dollar deal for it.
Heartened, CyberFlix hired a couple more employees, including Robb Dean and Rand Cabus, and found a real office. In October, 1993, they moved into a spacious loft on the third floor of a handsome early-2Oth-century brick building at 4 Market Square.
They brought their sense of fun with them. One of their first hires was 3-D modeler Jay Nevins, then only 23. The third floor of 4 Market Square was "kinda like a treehouse," he recalls. "Everybody was buddy-buddy. We'd work until one or two, then every night we'd go down to Manhattan's. The next day we'd roll in at 10 or 11 or noon and do it all again."
"The general rule was 'Show up by noon, or call,'" remembers Michael Kennedy, a graphic artist who was another early employee. The policy changed little for the next five years. "When my family visited, I was embarrassed to tell them they pay me to play video games and eat Tootsie Rolls," says producer Bob Clouse, a later arrival. "I would take six hours to tell my grandparents what I did for a living. And then they'd say, 'Why don't you just get a job?'"
For downtown and for Knoxville's reputation as headquarters for a young business with a dynamic national reputation, CyberFlix seemed to promise everything Whittle Communications did a decade before. The first of several CyberFlix open houses, in the fall of 1993, coincided with one of the biggest layoffs at Whittle. Freshly unemployed Whittlites roamed the floor, transfixed by the flickering images on 20 computer screens. To some, Whittle's mantel of downtown savior and national innovator was being passed to an even younger, more dynamic company.
That was the first of their annual Nightmare Before Christmas parties. With live bands, free beer, and an open door, the first one reportedly drew over 1,000 people to the third floor of 4 Market Square. The fire marshal was not among them.
Scheinbaum remembers the final push to finish Jump Raven. "Me, Jamie, Robb (Dean), Bill stayed up all night, saying 'We've got to get this one out!'" Scheinbaum recalls. "All we did was play Jump Raven over and over, saying, 'This happens too much' and 'This doesn't happen enough.'" Finally, at 9 a.m., we burned a copy [i.e., inscribed the game on a CD] and sent it off to Paramount."
"There was a big problem," says Martha Hume, a former Whittle editor who helped CyberFlix in its early days. "Erik didn't know anything about business. At all." She says the Jump Raven contract had flaws which caused problems in distributing the PC version of the game. "I didn't get the impression they were crooked," she says. "I did get the impression they were inept." She says she tried to convince Appleton of the necessity of a business plan, suggesting a board of directors. "He absolutely would not listen. He would sit and seem to listen, and then he was off on something else. It was exasperating." She gave up.
Their cavalier, anti-corporate approach seemed to work, at first. Jump Raven soon won the Grand¼ Prix at the Apple-Japan International CD-ROM competition; it later sold nearly 100,000 copies. "Everybody loved Jump Raven," remembers Clouse. "It was the fastest thing on the Mac. And that was back when Mac was going to take over everything."
With help from Nelson, CyberFlix's indefatigable press-savvy promoter, the CyberFlix phenomenon caught the attention of Newsweek, which sent reporters down to Market Square in the summer of '94 to write a profile of these "Garage-Band Programmers." The article ran across two magazine pages, with a big photo of Appleton overlaid with a character from Lunicus. The article called Appleton "something of a legend" in Silicon Valley who'd come home. "Not only is the rent reasonable in a place like Knoxville, allowing CyberFlix to move into a 12,000-square-foot loft," wrote Newsweek, "but the low-key atmosphere spurs creativity." The article closed, "No matter what happens next, one move is not on the schedule: California may beckon, but they're staying put in their old Tennessee home."
Appleton was a Knoxville booster in the national press, though he didn't divulge details of what happened to him in California. "He got burned, big time," a friend recalls. "Maybe that's why he got to be so sneaky."
Rand Cabus, who ran Universal Printing, had worked as editor of a small, local magazine called Township Jive. He'd been part of the pre-history of CyberFlix back in mid-'80s Maplehurst. His interest in graphics brought him to CyberFlix, where he became first a producer, then marketing director.
His estimates of Appleton and Quist's business sense vary widely from Hume's. "Bill was truly a mastermind at pulling the sales. He could walk into a company and rule the boardroom table." He credits Appleton and Quist's navigation with CyberFlix's survival during the turbulent mid-'90s, when three different distributors went out of business beneath them, but CyberFlix remained intact. The ability to outlast these multinational corporations became an article of pride.