Can aging music-video artists and a 19th-century master of horror find a niche in the metastasizing market for multimedia? Can big business help make it happen? Michael Nash thinks so. Nash is president and creative director of Inscape, the out-of-left-field multimedia start-up that rattled industry types last summer when it hooked up with Home Box Office and Warner Music Group to launch what the partnership advertises will be the next generation of interactive CD-ROM games.
By the time the multimillion-dollar deal with HBO and Warner was inked, Inscape had already signed up underground San Francisco art-rock band The Residents to publish Bad Day on the Midway, its sequel to Freak Show. As twisted as Freak Show was, Nash says forthcoming Inscape titles will be even weirder.
The company signed with Devo co-founder Gerald Casale to co-develop Devo Presents Adventures of the Smart Patrol. The title deputizes players to combat a sinister power structure involved in a massive conspiracy: a big entertainment conglomerate - HBO? Warner? - is in cahoots with a national health company trying to suppress a cure for a crippling epidemic. In what sounds like a vintage Devo conceit, the disease destroys its victims' bone structure, forcing them to walk around in strange, skeleton-like suits. The object of Smart Patrol is to capture Turkey Monkey, which Nash says is "an insane, horrible freak mutant, the result of a rogue recombinant DNA experiment."
Inscape is also plunging ahead with The Dark Eye, an in-house project based on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe. OK, it might sound suspiciously like one of Voyager's Expanded Books, but hear Nash out: "It won't be more old stuff by dead guys."
"Titles like Myst and Seventh Guest have clearly established that the market for adult role-playing games is substantial," says Nash. "What we want to do is take what's happened in the development of role-playing games and bring it to a very sophisticated level of entertainment content and concept."
The key question, of course, is, Will Inscape's stuff fly off the shelves? Offbeat material is one thing. The Residents are all but unknown to general audiences (Freak Show, though the media loved it, has yet to prove itself in terms of sales), and Devo has outlived its mass popularity by at least a dozen years.
So what is it with these old art-rockers? Why not a Green Day role-playing game? Nash doesn't sound too worried. "We're not pinning our hopes on fringe music-video artists. In a few months, we'll be announcing titles that range from intelligent action games to bizarre interactive movies, several of them based on major recording artist and movie content."
It remains to be seen whether Inscape's skewed sensibilities will find an audience, but consider the partnership's publishing clout. HBO and Warners, though huge, are masters at capitalizing on innovative, creative, independent work. Inscape has also tackled the weak link in CD-ROM publishing - distribution. It has service agreements with WEA Corp., Time Warner's distribution company, which works with more than 50 labels in the music and multimedia businesses.
"There is a huge audience out there for radical alternative subversive perspectives, what I call transgressive work," Nash concludes. "And you see it manifest all the time when somebody plays his or her cultural distribution cards right."
Maybe, as long as Inscape is holding a good hand.
SCANS
Bringing Weirdness to the Masses
