TIME: Dec. 25, 1995, painfully early in the morning.
SCENE: A living room somewhere in America.SETUP: Twelve-year-old kid opening his Christmas presents smiles gamely at Mom and Dad, thanking them for the socks, underwear, encyclopedia and pen and pencil set.
CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON DAD: "Why don't you open that package there, son," he says casually, "the one at the back of the tree."
CAMERA PANS TO KID: A look of desperate hope crosses his face. Could it be? He rips off the red Santa Claus wrapping . . . Yessss! It's the new Sony Play-Station, the Japanese electronic giant's better-late-than-never answer to Super Ninendo and Sega Genesis. Kid looks up expectantly at Dad, who is smiling indulgently.
CAMERA MOVES BACK ON DAD: "I guess you'll want to open that one, too," he says, pointing to another gift wrapped in the same paper.
CAMERA PANS BACK ON KID AS HE FRANTICALLY TEARS OFF THE WRAPPING: "Way cool!!!" the boy shouts. He is holding "Twisted Metal" and "WarHawk" the two hottest CD video games in the civilized world, developed specifically for the new Sony machine.
CAMERA PULLS BACK FOR WIDE ANGLE SHOT: Kid is hugging Mom and Dad, promising he won't play the games on weeknights until his homework is finished.
FADE TO BLACK: Roll credits over theme music, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas."
OK, so it's not "It's A Wonderful Life," but it will be pretty wonderful for Salt Lake City-based Single-Trac Entertainment Technologies if this scenario is played out in a few million American homes this Christmas. Video games are like movies: If you have a hit, it's a license to print money.
"Many people don't realize that the video game market is $10 billion - larger than the movie business," said Todd J. Kelly of Sin-gle-Trac, a 15-month-old company with 28 employees busily programming the next generation of CD-ROM games on the second floor of the Herald Building, 165 S. Main.
That next generation of games is described in the industry as 3-D. In 2-D video games, the action usually scrolls across the screen from left to right. The characters can move left or right, up or down, but not "in or out," and the scene doesn't change with their perspective.
"The difference in 2-D and 3-D is the difference between looking at a picture or looking out the window," said Michael A. Ryder, pres-i-dent.
In the latest CD-ROM video games, the characters or vehicles can turn and move in any direction
and the scene changes just as it would in "real life." This isn't the kind of 3-D that you see when you put on those cardboard glasses with one red and one blue lens, but it is a quantum leap forward in game technology.
Hoping to leap further forward than their competitors are Ryder, who is chairman and president; Kelly, vice president and chief financial officer; and Mike Bartholomew, vice president and chief technical officer. All three were formerly with Evans & Sutherland, the Salt Lake City-based software firm that develops computer graphics and flight simulation programs.
The three men founded Single-Trac in March 1994 to create a new generation of software for home video games and later to take the technology into arcades, theme parks and other entertainment arenas outside the home.
In typical fashion for start-up high-tech companies, SingleTrac was launched in Kelly's dining room on seed capital. Their breakthrough came when Sony Electronics Publishing Co. made a sizable investment in the fledgling firm last summer.
Ryder terms the relationship with Sony a long-lasting one that goes beyond the single contract for "WarHawk," a 3-D flight combat game and "Twisted Metal," a game of battling vehicles set in Los Angeles in the year 2010.
Not surprisingly in an industry where obsolescence is measured in months, the new games will not work on existing players. Sega has already introduced its new Saturn 3-D machine, and Nintendo is scheduled to launch its Ultra 64 version next year. Sony is set to enter the arena with its $299 Play-Station on Sept. 9.
SingleTrac won't be the only software company offering titles for the new Sony machine. Ryder expects "Twisted Metal" and "WarHawk" to be two of some 20 offerings available for Christmas sales.
The computing power required for the new generation of games has escalated tremendously, said Ryder. Everything in the program is modeled on a three-dimensional object and everything takes place in "real time." That means, that the computer (game machine) must create the environment on com-mand, instantaneously.
That's tougher than it sounds. Ryder points out that the astonishing special effects in the film "Jurassic Park" were not created in real time. Rather, it took weeks and months to create a realistic illusion of a T-rex chasing the Jeep. Conversely, SingleTrac's software running on the PlayStation (or home PC; SingleTrac will produce computer CD-ROMs as well) must update images at the rate of 30 times per second.
This technology is not limited to SingleTrac, of course. There are hundreds of companies developing software for the interactive market. But Ryder believes there are few who have his firm's core technology and experience in producing these sophisticated kinds of games.
"We have a total of 125 years of experience in 3-D graphics," he said. "That's our competitive advantage and that's what separates our company from the competition. We think our games are at the leading edge of the next generation of software."
Ryder said the company has other games in development but, for obvious reasons, doesn't want to discuss those projects at this time.
Until "Twisted Metal" and "WarHawk" show up on the shelves of retailers this fall, Single-Trac will have no revenues, a daunting prospect considering the fickle tastes of the youth market. Besides, the video game industry has been given up for dead more than once - just ask Atari and Coleco.
But Ryder is confident that 3-D technology will inject new life into the business, and he has no doubts that video/computer gaming is here to stay.
"Kids don't talk about cars anymore," he said. "They talk about computers.
While SingleTrac's focus right now is on entertainment, Ryder says the future applications for the technology his company is developing go well beyond games. Architecture, medicine, courtroom and industrial applications are just a few of the possibilities.
Computers are still viewed as exotic and inexplicable by a large segment of the populace, but Ryder agrees with Microsoft founder Bill Gates who has said that by the turn of the century they will be just another household appliance.
And when that happens, said Kelly, the kind of graphics seen in "Jurassic Park" will also be routine on video.
"It's going to be a lot of fun going from here forward," he predicts.