Haight-Ashbury in the '60s is the first CD-ROM effort from Rockument Inc., a multimedia firm in Gualala, California, whose mission, according to president Tony Bove, is "to warp technology into a rock-and-roll machine." Haight, to Bove and crew's credit, is no dewy-eyed whitewash of the time when a San Francisco street corner was the center of the anti-establishment world. "We're not censoring anything. We can't go putting fig leaves on people's bodies," says Bove, who also directed and co-produced the CD-ROM.
"A lot of the material here could be considered radical. We're talking about a movement that involved freedom of speech." Bove and Haight associate director and co-producer Cheryl Rhodes have the computer and counterculture cred for the venture. The founders of Publish magazine, as well as the authors of several books on multimedia, they grew up in the era they're chronicling. "I came out of the '60s clearly a counterculture person," say Bove. "It's the old home-brew computer club mentality," notes Rhodes. "I'm also a music lover and a music fan. It was exciting to me to be able to research this area in more depth."
After years in the field of journalism, Rhodes says the idea of moving from writing about technology to making it had been at the back of both of their minds for several years. When the CD-ROM industry started to explode in the early '90s, "we just couldn't sit back and do nothing," she adds. An unflinching, nonjudgmental chronicle, Haight is divided into three parts: Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out. Of course. With Tune In, you can search through snippets of the CD-ROM and assemble them in a "roll-your-own" format. Turn On is "The Rise and Fall of the Haight-Ashbury," written and narrated by former San Francisco Oracle editor Allen Cohen. The section includes excerpts from the notorious underground paper in all its glory, as well as archival footage featuring the luminaries of the scene, set to the music of the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company.
After boning up on history, you'll be ready to Drop Out with a game that takes you to the Haight on a quest for enlightenment. Though some will wonder at the relevance of yet another look at this decade, Rockument's leader recognizes the importance of cultural context. "We're not stuck in the '60s, but it makes sense to start at the beginning," says Bove. "I see a progress from the media experiments in the '60s to the experiments in television, video, and film in the '90s. There's a direct lineage from hippies to hackers." And where they meet is the most famous intersection of all time.
Rockument: +1 (707) 884 4413, http://www.rockument.com.
