Making a Vivid Impression With 'Scavenger' Games

by Tim Clark

vivid studios, a 5-year-old San Francisco design shop specializing in online media, is earning a reputation as the Web's chief designer of scavenger hunts.

Right now the company has two hunts running: The Rift billed as the first 3-D Internet scavenger hunt, for Silicon Graphics Inc., and "Bethany, TX," an interactive mystery game posted on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows95 launch site.

Both games involve cruising the Net for clues to solve a daily riddle. Players compete over the life of the game (two or three weeks) and amass points; top scorers win computer hardware, a $36,000 SGI workstation for the best Rifter. Packard-Bell has provided three desktop PCs for Microsoft's contest, which ends Sept. 11.

"Ultimately we want to create good experiences for people out on the Net," says Henri Poole, vivid's president. "That's the real market."

In The Rift, players use clues scattered around the Net to harness a deranged Rift Surfer, who is traveling in a time warp and wreaking havoc by introducing technologies at the wrong time in history -- an automobile in the Middle Ages, for example.

If The Rift breaks new ground -- beyond the 3-D, virtual reality stuff that SGI is plugging -- it is in vivid's attempt to turn scavenger hunting into a spectator sport.

"A lot of people don't have the time to play scavenger hunts," according to Poole.

"We wanted to create entertainment for a large group of people, to attract more people than just the hardcore players," says Poole.

Poole's people got their start in Net games with Johnny Mnemonic net.hunt for Sony Electronic Publishing, and Johnny taught them some lessons:

 

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