'Wavelet' of DVD Games Poised to Come Ashore?
06-17-98 13:50 EDT
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ÿÿÿÿ PROVIDENCE, R.I. (Reuters) - Imagine playing a complex computer game where you don't have to constantly switch CD-ROM disks when you jump between levels. Imagine playing a computer game with movie-quality video instead of jerky pictures or a screen interlaced with black lines.
ÿÿÿÿ That's the promise of DVD. But it's a promise that has been slow to become a reality.
ÿÿÿÿ For the uninitiated, DVD stands for either digital video disk or digital versatile disk, depending on whom you're talking to. A DVD looks like a standard CD-ROM or audio CD disk. However, it can hold more than seven times more data, which means a game that fits onto seven CD-ROMs can be compressed to one DVD-ROM disk, or you can have video segments in a game that look like they've come straight off a video disk, with twice the sharpness of a VCR tape.
ÿÿÿÿ So, given its potential, where are all the DVD games?
ÿÿÿÿ ''It's been a slow train coming,'' said Ted Pine, president of Infotech Inc., a marketing research firm.
ÿÿÿÿ Worldwide, there were only 59 DVD-ROM products of all stripes at the end of last year, he said. That number should grow to nearly 500 by the end of this year.
ÿÿÿÿ But only about 50 of those products available around Christmas will be games. Very few of those 50 products will be made specifically for the DVD format; most will be pre-existing multi-CD-ROM games that have been enhanced and consolidated onto a single DVD disk.
ÿÿÿÿ DVD versions of ''Riven'' (the sequel to ''Myst'') and ''The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time,'' both from Red Orb, are due out later this year.
ÿÿÿÿ Interplay has a DVD version of ''Virtual Pool 2'' and will put one of its ''Star Trek'' games on DVD. Ubi Soft Entertainment said it has four titles coming out by October, including a guitar tutorial and a juiced-up version of the action-adventure game ''Tonic Trouble,'' previously released in PC and console versions. Microsoft has a DVD version of its ''Encarta'' encyclopedia. The DVD version of the ''Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia'' is scheduled to ship soon.
ÿÿÿÿ A spot check of more than a dozen other software developers found that most had no immediate plans for DVD products.
ÿÿÿÿ Many of the 500 titles expected by year's end will be information disks for businesses, where companies have condensed 20 CD-ROMs of data onto 3 DVD-ROMs, Pine said. ''You'll see most of the encyclopedias, major reference works, edutainment titles, and directories like phone disks.''
ÿÿÿÿ ''The first wave of titles is going to hit during the third quarter and it will probably be a wavelet,'' said Pine, who predicts 6.5 million DVD-ROM drives will be sold this year.
ÿÿÿÿ Peter Black, president of Xiphias Corp., is more optimistic, especially when he looks past Christmas. He thinks DVD is a rocket that's about to take off.
ÿÿÿÿ With prices dropping, more and more DVD players going into computers, and a trend toward making them standard equipment, the move to DVD ''is going to happen, and it's going to happen quickly,'' Black said. ''It's been horrifyingly slow up to now, but it's going to be horrifyingly quick through January and February.''
ÿÿÿÿ Black has a reason to be upbeat. Xiphias was far ahead of the DVD curve, much to Black's chagrin, when it came out with the first DVD-ROM encyclopedia a year ago.
ÿÿÿÿ Access Software is another company that tried to ride the DVD wave a bit prematurely. Earlier this year it came out with the first adventure game specifically designed for DVD -- ''Tex Murphy: Overseer.'' Access ended up releasing both a DVD version and a five-disk CD-ROM version of the game, which wasn't as impressive as previous Tex Murphy titles.
ÿÿÿÿ Another factor holding back the DVD revolution is that there hasn't been a must-have product released on DVD.
ÿÿÿÿ ''It's too bad 'Riven' didn't wait and come out on DVD first,'' said Pine. ''That would be the killer app.''
ÿÿÿÿ A key question is whether the new DVD-ROM games will have new features that utilize the full potential of the medium.
ÿÿÿÿ Pine said he expects most manufacturers to enhance existing titles as they are converted to DVD-ROM. ''They'll go back to the original sources and re-encode it. ''Wing Commander'' (starring ''Star Wars''' Mark Hamill) is a good blueprint for what you'll see.''
ÿÿÿÿ The DVD version of ''Wing Commander'' is included in Creative Lab's DVD drive kit, and the video sequences are spectacular.
ÿÿÿÿ '''Wing Commander' was a good thing to bring over. It never really looked right'' said Pine. ''Here they could go back to the original film and make it look like something.''
ÿÿÿÿ DVD, with its ability to play high-quality video, has also fallen prey to another trend in the computer game industry.
ÿÿÿÿ A few years ago, developers thought computer games that played like interactive movies were the wave of the future, Pine said.
ÿÿÿÿ But hard-core game players didn't like the movies. They wanted arcade-style action and, for them, the video sequences, disparagingly called ''interstitial material,'' got in the way.
ÿÿÿÿ ''The bloom went off the rose, and all the attention went to 3-D graphics cards'' that made the arcade-style games play faster and better, said Pine.
ÿÿÿÿ Today, the interactive movie you play on your PC ''may be a discredited genre. But it will come back,'' he said. ''And that will jump-start the DVD industry.'' |
