MediaVision

Project PURPLE aka "Hard Drive"
Interactive game simulation

 

Techno-thriller game based on David Pogue's "Hard Drive." MediaVision contacted Form and Function to develop a cross-platform game for the new publishing arm of the multimedia hardware company.

The scenario was a time-ticking simulation where players sits down to a futuristic computer environment {by the standards of the day} and gets familiar with their whiz-bang computer and new work-mate issues as they set about tracking a bug in the overdue product the player has been hired to get out the door. This bug hunt turns to a downhill race to beat an avalanche of cascading failures that leads to espionage, sabotage, and murder.
While tracking down the growing mystery a related virus has infected the player's office computer and it begins to malfunction. As windows start emptying themselves of needed clues, performance degrades as infected systems and vital files "go away" if care is not taken on all the fronts.

Home, where the art is To Top of Pagethe Purple windoid interface

 

Looking surprisingly dapper as some mutant Mac OS X-thang this decade old this design turned out to have marathon legs. Form and Function developed three different Looks and Behaviors for this near-term Operating System of the future - depending on the authoring tool MediaVision approved. With our designs many features touted by today's operating systems were described in our designs: ultra-rich color depth and transparency, a bias for Unix flavored widgets, soft-shaded drop shadows for windows; anti-aliased text; overly large icon options for the desktop, and other organizational devices.

Wikipedia article describing MacroMind DirectorWe organized it to run under Director for cross-platform playback and the most versatile and good-looking presentations engine we could use.F+F project description linkWe had long experience with this tool for simulating software prototypes and knew we could wave enough smoke and flash enough mirrors to stimulate players into believing they were running our forward-leaning Operating System in a wired-up and web-cammed office of the future {that is, today} needed to advance the story.

Home, where the art is Folio examples skills Timeline Vitae Contact Form and Funciton To Start of Page  

 

Wikipedia entry on the rise and demise of MediaVisionUnfortunately, the MediaVision mothership company became mired in a book-cooking scandal that took down the project before it could be launched. We were paid pennies on the dollar for outstanding invoices on services rendered which F+F still had to pay out for ... A noble effort by Mark of Safire Software tried to sift the legal pluses and minuses to jockey a new funding source under another corporate flag , but alas, naught came of it. In the end it was generally understood nothing could be made of this Intellectual Property except whomever ended up with the final Deed to the MediaVision crypt. As of the summer of 2005 I received yet more correspondence and I never formally fought this at any step of the way ... a decade later now.

Numerous Operating Sysytem simulations to prototype new featuresThe author of this novel went on to become the notorious New York Times columnist famous for his humorous takes on current technologies often codified in his Missing Manual series of technical guides.