Computer Games

Multimedia • Chris Roberts

The name of the gamer.

Quiz Show

What in the world can make learning fun? Would you believe—the National Geographic Society? When the staid Washington, D.C., institution wanted to turn the database of questions from its National Geography Bee into a computer game that would appeal to parents and kids alike, it turned to Austin’s Human Code,

Fly-boy

A Wylie computer programmer flies high.

Mission Accomplished

The newest game from Dallas’ Digifx Entertainment is ready for prime time. In Mission to Nexus Prime, whose storyline has been crafted by Star Wars author Timothy Zahn, you command your troops through a series of battles to gain control of planet Nexus Prime and its complex network of wormholes

Game Daze

IF FILLING OUT YOUR TAX forms this month wasn’t complicated enough for you, Richardson’s 7th Level has a new computer game that may be right up your alley. In G-Nome, you can pilot a lumbering craft that looks like one of the Imperial walkers from The Empire Strikes Back. But

War Stories

Mexico’s recent political unrest is the subject of a new CD-ROM from the University of Texas at Austin’s Advanced Communications Technology Laboratory, or ACTlab. The Revolution Will Be Digitized uses video, animation, art, and music to dress up an academic analysis of the Zapatista rebel movement. Due out this spring,

Reality Bytes

Origin Systems founder Richard Garriott has sometimes lived his life like a computer game, but now that the multimedia industry is changing, he can’t play around anymore.

Shrink-Rapt

SMALL TIME HITS the big time in The Incredible Shrinking Character (Cyberdreams), a new CD-ROM written by Austin mystery novelist Jesse Sublett and designed by Go Go Studios of Austin. In this spoof of fifties B-movies, you play a private eye who’s been hired to find a girl kidnapped by

7th Heaven

What do Monty Python, the Lion King, Ace Ventura, and Howie Mandel have in common? They’re all part of 7th Level’s strategy to marry show biz with the computer-game biz.

Walken Tall

If you can’t get enough of creepy character actor Christopher Walken, boot up The Darkening, one of this year’s CD-ROM releases from Austin’s Origin Systems. Walken, like John Hurt and Amanda Pays, plays one of the fifty characters who meet up with the game’s hero, an amnesiac who roams the

Texas Twenty: Jay Wilbur

The prophet of ‘Doom.’

A Bloody Game