Cross a satanic New York cab driver with time travel and what do you get? Hell Cab, a colorful CD salad from the fertile imagination of Pepe Moreno, a Los Angeles-based comic book artist turned multimedia producer.
While Moreno's background is in comics and animation, he saw in interactive media's tumultuous beginnings the promise of "breaking through to a true art form."
In Hell Cab, Raul, a strikingly realistic cab driver, offers to take you from JFK to Manhattan. Well-placed ATMs allow you to withdraw plenty of money, but it's really your soul that's for sale. Thanks to a diabolical pricing scheme, you find you are always short on fare, so Raul offers to take you on a real trip, through time and space and into various morality tales in which you are the principal player.
As you travel from the battlefields of WWI to ancient Rome, you are presented with various situations that pit the well-being of others against your own. A meter tracks your choices and measures the overall net worth of your soul, thus determining where you wind up at the game's conclusion.
Moreno teamed up with Warner New Media to produce the $99.95 Mac CD-ROM, due early this summer. "A lot of the underground art scene is surfacing in interactive media," Moreno said. "It's sort of like the beginning of rock and roll."
Warner New Media: (800) 593 6334, +1 (818) 955 9999.
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