Most multimedia applications today are created and controlled by teams steeped in information technology. Could that be a problem? What happens if, instead, you vest creative control entirely in a group of writers and performers steeped in video production equipment and get a group of smart programmers to implement the vision? An astonishingly good product, appears to be the answer in the case of You Don’t Know Jack, a collaboration between the codemeisters at Berkeley Systems Inc of Flying Toasters fame and the writer-performers at video production house Jellyvision Inc. Jack doesn’t sound promising. It’s a computerised quiz game, even worse it’s a hilarious and irreverent one where the contestants are placed in a television game show scenario. By some measures it can hardly be called ‘multimedia’ since there is no video footage and graphics are restricted mainly to rendering questions and answers in large, smoothly animated text. But the key to the package’s attraction is that it makes excellent use of sound – richly overlaid music, effects and banter. And the authors, with their video experience, have paced and directed the whole thing in order to suck the player into their world. Multimedia has developed contrary to every other form of mass communication says Harry Gottlieb, Jellyvision’s founder and president, with everything else, people write something that someone else performs or produces – but multimedia came out of people who wrote software tools and then said ‘hey we can do sound, we can do video. Jack, by contrast is writing-oriented he says. Berkeley Systems had the courage to stump up the funding and then invest their trust in the other company, signing away control of look, feel and content. Gottlieb himself is a film enthusiast turned hacker. At 13, according to his publicity material, he was making films on Super-8. Chicago-based Jellyvision was born ‘Learn Television’ in 1989, and continues under the original name to produce educational videos and films which strive to be entertaining as well as pedagogical.

HyperCard hacker

On discovering the Mac, he became a HyperCard hacker, and after years building his own bespoke personal organiser, went on to code ‘Funkmaster’ a HyperCard-based collaborative scripting and recording application that was used to write the words heard in the game. Jellyvision and Berkeley Systems first met some two and half years ago. In one of those quirks of fate, Harry Gottlieb, Jellyvision president, knew Berkeley’s vice-president of development, Igor Gasowski. Gasowski liked the company’s films and the two met up with Berkeley chief executive Wes Boyd. The group tossed around ideas, but in the end the companies’ conflicting work schedules meant that nothing concrete emerged. But as I was leaving, Wes said to me ‘what we wanted to figure out is the nature of interactivity’ Gottlieb remembers: …it was such a simple question, but it really focused on the problem. What it boiled down to, Gottlieb decided, was two things – pacing and personalising. The importance of pacing will be familiar to anyone who has been to see a movie where the director gets it wrong, the audience dozes off, the tension gets lost. It is a rarer to see its value recognised in multimedia titles. Personalising refers to methods of getting the player or user to forget that they are running a computer application and start believing that they are interacting with something that is talking to them specifically. In Jack the audio is simply but effectively tailored to take players’ past behaviour into account. A year ago, Berkeley’s Gasowski got back in touch – did Jellyvision want to go ahead with one of the projects that Gottlieb had outlined? I said ‘sure, but not until the spring’… and he said, ‘do you want it out for Christmas ’95 or ’96?’ By the end of January we had a finished prototype, Gottlieb recalls. This initial cut was done, not surprisingly, in HyperCard. The Jellyvision team considered adding video at the beginning, but when they showed the prototype to Berkeley their reaction was why would you want to put video on that? – the atmosphere was successfully invoked by the audio alone.

By Chris Rose

Anyway, Gottlieb contends that video really isn’t up to the job yet, either in terms of frame-rate or colours, particularly when you need interactivity. Berkeley’s programming and graphics team, led by director and producer Martin Striecher, wasn’t fully up and running until April and was charged with writing a game engine that would run on Macs, and Windows – NT, 95 and 3.1. We had to make compromises and trade-offs and sometimes we simplified stuff, says Striecher – the aim was speed – both in terms of development time and final execution of the product. The engine was designed specifically for Jack… the graphics are 1-bit depth only and it makes a lot of assumptions, that there aren’t any backgrounds, for example. It’s not that the application features any stunningly fast graphics, rather it was Jellyvision’s insistence on pace that made the speed critical. There couldn’t be any pauses while the CD-ROM whirred. At one point, where a pause looked inevitable, a Berkeley coder suggested popping a busy cursor on the screen, but Gottlieb was adamant – No! there are no cursors in this world. Gottlieb is particularly proud of the pre-loading technology that Berkeley implemented to get the large quantities of text and sound off the CD-ROM without pauses in the game play. The engine is coded so that data is loaded by sleight of hand – while the players are looking at the questions and pondering, the next sequence is being loaded in. There are times, however where the technology simply can’t deliver and at this point the scriptwriters needed to step in to divert attention away from what is going on. Towards the end of the game is a special round: the Jack Attack. The structure of this round is significantly different from the others and consequently there is a whole wad of data to be preloaded says Gottlieb. In fact, it can’t be done. Consequently there’s a part where the screen is absolutely black and silent for two seconds. In normal circumstances this would break the whole flow of the game, so instead, the Jellyvision crew made an asset of the problem, turning the gap into a breathless pause before the game changes tempo. The whole structure of the game also aided the pacing: at each point the user has a limited number of choices and the element of against-the-clock naturally keeps things moving. The engine was developed in parallel for Windows and Mac OS, the former using Borland International Inc C, the latter Metrowerks Inc’s; the whole lot was coded as a set of C++ objects. The toughest bit, says Striecher, was the getting the sound resources to work on both systems.

Mac weirdness

The amount of audio information in the game precludes putting two sets of files on the CD, yet the Macintosh handles sound compression completely differently from Windows. Since Jellyvision’s sound authoring kit is Mac-based, Berkeley ended up writing a little emulator for the Windows version that essentially reverse-engineered some of the Mac weirdness, says Striecher. Graphical sequences were first mapped out in Macromedia Director and then transferred into a form that could be used by the engine. Meanwhile over at Jellyvision, Gottlieb’s crew were writing the scripts and testing each of the 800 questions on guinea-pig players to see if they raised a smile. If they didn’t it was back to the drawing board, or rather the HyperCard stack. His HyperCard-based FunkMaster enables writers to suggest script ideas and circulate them around the workgroup, with amendments, comments and version control all handled by the software, important when you are trying to co-ordinate 10,000-odd separate samples. It also co-ordinates the actual sound recording process. This is a one-person job, the writer-actor sits in the sound-proof booth, with a Macintosh. The digitised sample is referenced to the stack, so clicking on a button next to the question script selects and pl

ays the audio. Both companies admit that the tight deadlines imposed restrictions on the product: Gottlieb says he would have liked to have had more time to humour-test his questions, Striecher says his team had to turn down some of Jellyvision’s ideas simply because they would have been impossible to code in time. Some of these ideas should emerge next Christmas when a complete refresh of the game is due. A simpler add-on question pack is due next spring – and a television studio wants to turn it into a real quiz show!