Tuesday, January 03, 1995
FUTRNeT and Cheyenne (Human Code)
Like almost everyone else who saw Blade Runner as a kid, I was blown away by the visuals and memorized the name of the man who designed it all -- "visual futurist" Syd Mead. So it was that years later I went to work for Human Code, where I was to have the extraordinary fortune to work on a computer game with visuals by Syd Mead and written by local science-fiction author Bruce Sterling. Working with Syd's assistant, Nick Pausback (who has since become a good friend), we managed to take Bruce's surreal head-trip of a story and Syd's otherwordly designs and pound the whole thing into what would have surely been a mind blowing game: FUTRNeT, a trip into the future of the information society with stops at a cyberspace playground, a Kafka-esque virtual nightmare, and finally a nanotechnologically enhanced Wonderland overrun with plague. Unfortunately, the client for the title ran into financial problems and FUTRNeT was lost. Nothing left now but a few GIFs I managed to save (and which Syd has been kind enough to let me display here).
A similar disappointment was Cheyenne, a title that was intended to be a hybrid episodic computer game/television series. My original concept was a riff on the whole sci-fi trope of "generation ships," huge ships meant to house whole societies over the centuries required to travel between stars at less than light-speed. While this eventually metamorphisized into another project after I left the company -- one that unfortunately never got off the ground either -- you can still read my original script for what would have been the intro to the game/TV show.
Content
- FUTRNeT Logo #1 (Syd Mead)
- FUTRNeT Logo #2 (Syd Mead)
- FUTRNeT Background #1 (Syd Mead)
- FUTRNeT Background #2 (Syd Mead)
- FUTRNeT Cyberspace (Syd Mead)
- Cheyenne Intro Script [PDF]
Links