If you're a fan of British rocker Peter Gabriel's hallucinatory MTV spots - and who isn't - then check out his newly minted, much ballyhooed CD-ROM with the working title Xperience 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World. The disc crams four full-length videos from his latest album onto the first of a planned series of interactive CD-ROM titles. Threading your way through Secret World's interactive maze - helped along by Gabriel's talking head - you can tour the production facilities of his personal recording studio on a picturesque estate in the English countryside, or pair up various solos from musicians on the album. Choose the wrong pair, and Brian Eno checks in to warn you off.
Peter Gabriel's Secret World: Schmooze your way backstage or remix a song.
There's more, of course. A menu of color bars running down the left side of the screen allows you to access QuickTime clips of behind-the-scenes production of the videos, spots with Gabriel explaining each song, and complete lyrics and sound samples for all ten songs on the US album (you'll have to buy the album to get all the music, however).
Very much in the spirit of Gabriel's art, the disc offers a vivid, colorful, and quirky introduction to his ambitious aesthetic and political agenda, in a fashion that challenges your intuition. It's heavy on imagery and light on cumbersome interfaces. Especially ingenious is a section that permits you to play eight exotic instruments by using your mouse to click on strings and various surfaces. There's also a remixable version of one of the album cuts (you mouse the sliders on a mixing board) and for die-hard fans, alternative tracks to some of the songs that have never been released before.
To keep you motivated, you are encouraged to accumulate credits towards a "backstage pass" to one of Gabriel's world music concerts. By peeking into a drawer that contains various Gabriel-related objects and collecting them in a suitcase, you can work towards a mysterious "gift" - I'll leave it up to you to find out what it is. The Macintosh version now available will run on any color-capable Mac with 4 Mbytes of RAM and CD-ROM drive of any speed.
Xperience 1: Peter Gabriel's Secret World: US$49.95. Interplay: (800) 428 8200, +1 (714) 553 6678.
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