Preview of the Andrew Nelson papers

For our paid members, we have another early preview for an upcoming collection: the Andrew Nelson papers, from the writer and producer of Titanic: Adventure Out of Time.

Nelson was one of the co-founders of Cyberflix, a company based in Knoxville, TN that produced interactive movies. Nelson was brought in as the creative director and wrote several of their games, including Dust: A Tale of the Wired West and, of course, Titanic. A while back, Nelson send us a box containing a mixture of promotional and development materials from his time at Cyberflix... so let's dig in!

Design materials

While working on Titanic, Nelson kept extensive research and brainstorming notes. Our collection includes multiple revisions of draft scripts for the game, copies of documentation about the layout and history of the Titanic, and other documents and correspondence ideating on the design and marketing for the game. Seen above is an excerpt from the design phase for Titanic, when Nelson was determined whether they can (or should!) depict the actual sinking of the ship.

The draft scripts for Titanic will also be fascinating for fans of the game. Early revisions would have allowed the player to choose their gender, a feature that Nelson tell us was cut for scope.

Clippings

Nelson also kept a ton of news clippings from the period, not just about Cyberflix but about what was happening in the multimedia business in general. Everybody was in the process of figuring out what this new era of media-rich games would be like—especially from a business perspective—and Nelson's clipping show what that looked like.

One highlight (above) is a special section of the Wall Street Journal from 1994 that covered the rise of the multimedia industry. In addition to having articles about the state of the business and predictions about the future, it also has interviews with notable executives like Edward McCracken (Silicon Graphics), Trip Hawkins (3DO), and Olaf Olafsson (Sony).

Cyberflix history

Nelson's collection also includes flyers, press releases, press kits, and other promotional items from throughout the history of Cyberflix. This goes all the way back to 1993, when Cyberflix hosted a party to celebrate their publishing deal with Paramount Interactive.

My (Phil here) personal favorite promo item is a fold-out for DreamFactory, the authoring tool used by Cyberflix. A big part of the Cyberflix story is that they wanted creatives like Andrew Nelson to be able to design games without needing to know how to program. It's interesting to see that play out in the promo foldout, which directly compares its features to film production. For instance, "CentralCasting" is a module that manages the game's "actors" (ie., it manages character animations).

And there's more!

Right after we got all of this lined up, Andrew Nelson told us how found another box of materials... so we'll have an additional accrual coming to the collection in the future.

The Andrew Nelson papers launch on October 29th alongside a special episode of the Video Game History Hour with Nelson and guest co-host Alex Greenberg (who recently organized the FMV Zone exhibit at Portland Retro Gaming Expo).