MTropolis
mTropolis (pronounced "metropolis") was an open-architecture multimedia programming application aimed at enabling rapid development of multimedia titles. It was developed by mFactory (pronounced "em-factory") and introduced in 1995. It introduced object-oriented concepts such as reusable objects, modifiers and behaviors into the multimedia authoring space dominated by Macromedia's Director software. mTropolis was bought in 1997 by Quark, which moved development from Burlingame, California to Denver and then cancelled the product one year later. Despite efforts by its fervent users to attempt to save their investment and beloved tool, negotiations and even a possible purchase offer never came to fruition. History mTropolis competed in the interactive multimedia product space dominated in the 1990s by Macromedia Director. The software's maker, mFactory, founded in 1992, variously positioned mTropolis as an alternative and as an adjunct to Director. mTropolis was bought by Quark ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Adobe Director
Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director, MacroMind Director, and MacroMind VideoWorks) was a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia and managed by Adobe Systems until its discontinuation. Director was the primary editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s. Various graphic adventure games were developed with Director during the 1990s, including '' Living Books'', '' The Journeyman Project'', '' Total Distortion'', '' Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou'', '' Mia's Language Adventure'', '' Mia's Science Adventure'', and the '' Didi & Ditto'' series. Hundreds of free online video games were developed using Lingo, and published on websites such as Miniclip and Shockwave.com. Director published DCR files that were played using the Adobe Shockwave Player, in addition to compiling native executables for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Director allowed users to build applicati ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Macromedia Director
Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director, MacroMind Director, and MacroMind VideoWorks) was a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia and managed by Adobe Systems until its discontinuation. Director was the primary editor on the Adobe Shockwave platform, which dominated the interactive multimedia product space during the 1990s. Various graphic adventure games were developed with Director during the 1990s, including '' Living Books'', '' The Journeyman Project'', '' Total Distortion'', '' Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou'', '' Mia's Language Adventure'', '' Mia's Science Adventure'', and the '' Didi & Ditto'' series. Hundreds of free online video games were developed using Lingo, and published on websites such as Miniclip and Shockwave.com. Director published DCR files that were played using the Adobe Shockwave Player, in addition to compiling native executables for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Director allowed users to build applications ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Day The World Broke
''The Day the World Broke'' is an adventure/puzzle game released by Houghton Mifflin Interactive in 1997. In the game, the player explores a city located in the Earth's core, achieving game goals primarily through conversations with the city's part animal part machine inhabitants. While the environments are hand-painted, the Mechanimals are sometimes rendered in 3D computer graphics, and the human characters in live action. References Adventure games 1997 video games Puzzle video games Video games developed in the United States Windows games Windows-only games {{adventure-videogame-stub ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Quark, Inc
Quark Software Inc. (founded 1981 in Denver, Colorado, USA) is a privately owned software company which specializes in enterprise publishing software for automating the production of customer communications. The company's original goal was to "create software that would be the platform for publishing", just as quarks are the basis for all matter. The company is best known for its desktop page layout and design software, QuarkXPress, although this has now become secondary to its other products and services. History Quark was founded with $2,000 in 1981 in Denver, Colorado, U.S. Between 1981 and 1985, their primary products were Word Juggler and Catalyst. Word Juggler was the first word processor on the Apple III. Catalyst was a program that was distributed bundled with the Apple IIe, and allowed users to run floppy disk-based applications from their hard drive. They also attempted a product line called "Quark Peripherals", but the market for storage devices at the time resulted ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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HyperCard
HyperCard is a software application and development kit for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers. It is among the first successful hypermedia systems predating the World Wide Web. HyperCard combines a flat-file database with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard includes a built-in programming language called HyperTalk for manipulating data and the user interface. This combination of features – a database with simple form layout, flexible support for graphics, and ease of programming – suits HyperCard for many different projects such as rapid application development of applications and databases, interactive applications with no database requirements, command and control systems, and many examples in the demoscene. HyperCard was originally released in 1987 for $49.95 and was included free with all new Macs sold afterwards. It was withdrawn from sale in March 2004, having received its final update in 1998 upon the return of Steve Jobs to Apple. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Obsidian (1997 Video Game)
''Obsidian'' is a 1997 graphic adventure game developed by Rocket Science Games and published by SegaSoft. It was released for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Based on a game design outline by VP of Development/Creative Director, Bill Davis, and written by Howard Cushnir and Adam Wolff, ''Obsidian'' is a first-person 3-D graphical adventure game, with a large puzzle element. The puzzles were designed by Scott Kim, Howard Cushnir and Adam Wolff. The soundtrack was composed by Thomas Dolby along with other composers at his company Beatnik, at the time known as Headspace. The game spanned five CDs, and features pre-rendered environments, audio, and full-motion video (both live action and CGI). The strategy guide includes numerous small essays, providing background on such subjects as nanotechnology, Jungian psychology, and the nature of artificial intelligence. Included is a minigame which uses a "twenty questions" algorithm (similar to what would eventually be used in 20Q). The g ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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QuickTime VR
QuickTime VR (also known as QTVR) is an image file format developed by Apple Inc. for QuickTime, and discontinued along with QuickTime 7. It allows the creation and viewing of VR photography, photographically captured panoramas, and the viewing of objects photographed from multiple angles. It functions as plugins for the QuickTime Player and for the QuickTime Web browser plugin. History QuickTime VR was conceived in 1991 by programmers Eric Chen and Ian Small of the Human Interface Group in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple, utilizing a Cray supercomputer to process images into panoramas. It was soon made prominent within the company by Apple's board member and former astronaut Sally Ride, who was fascinated by the demonstrated possibilities of 3D computer imagery. It was publicly launched in 1995 as part of QuickTime 2, by a dedicated group including Chen, Small, senior content engineer Ted Casey, and program manager Eric Zarakov. Apple sold the content authoring too ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data (such as software or digital video) is only usable on a computer (such as ISO 9660 format PC CD-ROMs). During the 1990s and early 2000s, CD-ROMs were popularly used to distribute software and data for computers and fifth generation video game consoles. DVD started to replace it in these roles starting in the early 2000s. History The earliest theoretical work on optical disc storage was done by independent researchers in the United States including David Paul Gregg (1958) and James Russel (1965–1975). In particular, Gregg's patents were used as the basis of the LaserDisc specification that was co-developed between MCA and Philips after MCA pur ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Scott Kim
Scott Kim is an American puzzle and video game designer, artist, and author of Korean descent. He started writing an occasional "Boggler" column for ''Discover'' magazine in 1990, and became an exclusive columnist in 1999, and created hundreds of other puzzles for magazines such as ''Scientific American'' and ''Games'', as well as thousands of puzzles for computer games. He was the holder of the Harold Keables chair at Iolani School in 2008. Kim was born in 1955 in Washington D.C. and grew up in Rolling Hills Estates, California. He had an early interest in mathematics, education, and art, and attended Stanford University, receiving a BA in music, and a PhD in Computers and Graphic Design under Donald Knuth. In 1981, he created a book called ''Inversions'', words that can be read in more than one way. His first puzzles appeared in ''Scientific American'' in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column and he said that the column inspired his own career as a puzzle designer. Kim ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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MindGym
MindGym is a surreal game about creative thinking. It was produced as a CD-ROM in 1996 by London-based Melrose Film Productions and NoHo Digital and published by Macmillan (UK), Simon & Schuster (US) and Ravensburger (Germany). Development A client-driven project, Mindgym was conceived and produced by Adam Gee, while working at video training company Melrose to create an "interactive training product that would teach corporate middle-management about the value of ‘creative thinking’". He approached NoHo with the idea as the company had the capacity to make games Tim Wright of NoHo designed the project with a specific vision to utilise the talents of Rob Bevan as art director, Adam Gee as producer and script editor, Jason Loader as 3d animator and comedian, and Nigel Harris as sound designer. After a script and demo were created, NoHo teamed up with Macmillan, having proven that the concept could be funnier, bigger, and have a broader appeal. Reception Critical receptio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Netscape Navigator
Netscape Navigator was a web browser, and the original browser of the Netscape line, from versions 1 to 4.08, and 9.x. It was the flagship product of the Netscape Communications Corp and was the dominant web browser in terms of usage share in the 1990s, but by around 2003 its user base had all but disappeared. This was partly because the Netscape Corporation (later purchased by AOL) did not sustain Netscape Navigator's technical innovation in the late 1990s. The business demise of Netscape was a central premise of Microsoft's antitrust trial, wherein the Court ruled that Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system was a monopolistic and illegal business practice. The decision came too late for Netscape, however, as Internet Explorer had by then become the dominant web browser in Windows. The Netscape Navigator web browser was succeeded by the Netscape Communicator suite in 1997. Netscape Communicator's 4.x source code was the base for the Net ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |