It was, appropriately enough, an idea that dated back to those wild-and-free 1980s. Tunnell knew exactly what small but innovative game he wanted to make first. So, he recruited Kevin Ryan, a programmer who had worked at Dynamix almost from the beginning, and set up shop in the office next door with just a few other support personnel. If Tunnell hoped to innovate, he had come to believe, he would have to return to the guerrilla model of game development that had held sway during the 1980s, deliberately rejecting the studio-production culture that was coming to dominate the industry of the 1990s.

In the world of movies, and now increasingly in that of games as well, smaller, cheaper projects were usually the only ones allowed to take major thematic, formal, and aesthetic risks. When he stepped down from his post at the head of Dynamix in order to found Jeff Tunnell Productions and make smaller but more innovative games, he was making the sort of bargain with commercial realities that many a film director had made before him. How ironic, then, that in at least one sense comparisons with Hollywood continued to ring true even after he thought heР Р†Р вЂљРІвЂћСћd consigned such things to his past. As we saw in my previous article, Jeff Tunnell walked away from DynamixР Р†Р вЂљРІвЂћСћs experiments with Р Р†Р вЂљРЎС™interactive moviesР Р†Р вЂљРЎСљ feeling rather disillusioned by the whole concept.

The incredible machine