Dreamsteep

In the domain of electronic media the job of the writer has always been a challenging and evolving craft. Traditional media presents its own demands, but the writer of interactive content must not only possess the skills of a good wordsmith, but also have a keen understanding of the multimedia production process itself. The interactive writer must be a designer, adept at creating stories, design documents, treatments, scripts, proposals, outlines, sitemaps, walkthroughs, and any other material related to the concept, theme, and development of a project.

It’s a safe bet that many of today’s multimedia developers found their first inspiration for the possibilities of combining computers with audio-visual elements in the hit video arcade games of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dave Theurer developed two of those game classics, Missile Command and Tempest, while a programmer at Atari. As one of the superstar game designers of that era, Theurer encountered first-hand the challenge of preparing thousands of images for use in games. That, plus the needs of his computer artist friends, led him to develop DeBabelizer, a software tool that, since its commercial release by Equilibrium Technologies in January 1993, has become indispensable for working with images in multimedia development and other graphical applications. Equilibrium recently released a low-priced version of the program called DeBabelizer Lite. Morph caught up with Dave Theurer in San Francisco to talk about the challenges of programming with graphics and other multimedia elements.