Well, ideas have to start somewhere, and The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum started when a friend of mine showed me a cd-rom computer game called 'Spaceship Warlock,' which made a great impression on me, and said 'you could design one of these.'

To cut a long story short; I did. The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum was released in 1993, and we produced four other completed titles as well as dozens of draft ideas and game proposals that never got off the drawing board.

At the time, I was working as Creative Director at an ad agency in Portland, Oregon. The agency and its parent company merged, and my position was dissolved. It was announced in a company meeting, in fact, a low blow. So I quit, and embarked on the adventure called The C.H.A.O.S. Continuum Partnership.

Of course, I had no idea where to start, but one thing that we knew we needed was money, and computer equipment, neither of which we had. We pitched the game concept I'd written to local cd-rom pioneer publisher Creative Multimedia Corporation (CMC). Our proposed budget was somewhere north of $100,000.00 and while we weren't laughed out of the office, it was clear to them, and us, that most of our budget was for the acquisition of the computer equipment we needed to create the project, so we had to find another way to start.

Through the help of an associate, we managed to acquire the necessary Macintosh II fx s (two of them) and a couple SGI workstations with ALIAS 3-D software. We had our toys! We had our publisher backing, now with a whopping budget of $30,000.00. And we had space to work: the tiny offices of Dash Digital (owned by our associate who had provided the toys), hidden at the back of Northwest VideoWorks in a quiet corner of Goose Hollow, just west of downtown Portland.

And so the Chaos began, starting a 3-year run which eventually morphed into my company Off-World Communications and about half a dozen more games including Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (Byron Preiss Multimedia 1994) and Isaac Asimov's Robot City (Byron Preiss 1995). I'll add more to the story sometime, here's some answers to frequently asked questions. Drop me a line if you loved or hated C.H.A.O.S. Continuum, and are interested in hearing or seeing more!