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PROVO - Cloistered amid the flickering screens and character sketches adorning their 19th century downtown sandstone walk-up, Donald and Geremy Mustard plot the next giant step in video gaming evolution.
And, the brothers say, they will do that by going back to the roots of home entertainment: cave-dwelling ancestors inventing the tales that set imaginations ablaze, even as their campfires warmed them and kept nocturnal predators away.
"Telling stories is how we began," says Donald, the older, artistic half of the two founders of Chair Entertainment Group. "It really hasn't changed, at its core, from 6,000 years ago. But all that time you couldn't interact with the story as it progressed. Now, you can."
And, the Mustard boys say, the digital canvas upon which they combine story, art, sound and cutting edge graphics is about to grow exponentially with the new XBox 360. The latest in game consoles, which debuts in stores Tuesday, is the first of a new generation of powerful three-dimensional, multimedia gaming systems.
Donald calls the XBox 360 - which also plays DVDs, MP3 music and broadband video - "a massive leap forward" in the $12 billion video gaming market, which will rely on such products to triple its profits over the next few years.
"It's definitely an evolutionary step, just going from 2-D to 3-D," Donald says. "Up to now, changes in video gaming have been more incremental. Each level has been better visually, more complex in game play and detail, but still basically the same experience."
It is Geremy who translates his brother's artistic visions to myriad lines of programming code. In all, Chair Entertainment consists of just six people. Along with artistic and technical assistants, the brothers call on their CEO uncle, Ryan Holmes, to keep the dreams on budget.
"With XBox 360, we have a lot more realistic physics to play with," Geremy says of a complex, ultra-secret game project his company is rushing for release. "If a box or a rock falls now, it looks real enough. But in this next generation of video games, it will be an avalanche of boxes and rocks - and each one will look and behave realistically, and all is real time."
In Utah, which joins San Diego, San Francisco and Orlando among the nation's top video gaming development sites, perhaps dozens of companies - an exact count is not available - count on the eye-popping graphics and complexity of the new technology to bring them profits and growth.
One is Steven ZoBell's fledgling Indie Built Inc. Located in the former Microsoft Games building west of Salt Lake International Airport, Indie - acquired from Microsoft last year by 2K Games - is casting its fortunes on "Amped 3."
Designed for XBox 360, "Amped 3," one of the new console's 18 launch titles, aims to be much more than just the latest in a series of snowboarding games. ZoBell, Indie's president and CEO, boasts it has all the fun of the franchise's ancestors - leaps, tricks, deep powder and mountain scenery - but rides the new technology to a richer, more complex experience.
It also has a story line that takes a snowboarding ace over the slopes of seven of the world's most famous resorts - including a highly detailed, realistic Park City - in a quest to prove he's not a thief. Players can even design their own terrain and obstacles, all to the sounds of more than 300 new tracks.
Fighting to meet the deadline of the XBox 360 release, ZoBell and his staff of 90 animators, artists, engineers and writers know long hours and working weekends intimately. Yet, the atmosphere and decor of Indie's offices are funky and casual; snacks and toys, such as a frequently busy foosball table, abound.
"Sometimes play is work," says ZoBell, at 36 a lifelong computer game player, as well as a developer who worked on Microsoft's 1990s milestone "MS Golf" and "Links" games.
Indie continues to develop new versions of "Links," and attention to detail is paramount. Before presenting a golf course or a ski resort to its players, the company first sends out teams to photograph, map and play on the greens and slopes. Aerial surveys, even satellite-created maps, are consulted,
"Our golf courses especially are accurate to within inches," ZoBell says. "But the underlying idea always is to make it beautiful and make it fun. That takes a lot of data and a lot of work."
While the likes of Chair Entertainment and Indie Built focus on producing complete video gaming experiences, another Utah company, Fonix Corp., works on the most primary form of interacting with those games: speech.
The Salt Lake City company's speech division has forged a growing relationship with Microsoft over the years, and the computer giant turned its way again for XBox 360. The possibilities presented by the new console's advanced technology has Fonix games vice president Tim Hong excited.
Fonix, which already boasts eight previous model XBox titles, is providing more complicated voice recognition for XBox 360. "In the past, it was basically 'go left, go right' commands. Now we are working on [implementing] full sentences," Hong says.
Such range will immediately enhance play for such squad-oriented games as the Tom Clancy's "Rainbow Six" and "Ghost Recon" series. And as Fonix's expertise spreads, Hong hopes to see further growth in the company's initial forays into educational software, automotive and wireless communications devices.
As speech-recognition goes, so goes the ability of video game participants to interact with the stories playing out before their eyes.
More pressure, then, to make those tales riveting, multilayered and complex enough to warrant the investment not only of dollars, but an industry target of 14-16 hours play time - per session.
"It's the battle for the living room," ZoBell says. "The story aspect of games, the entertainment experience, will be the future. It will be something different than a movie - an experience your are part of that emotes something from you."
The Mustard brothers agree, but their vision goes beyond the game. Their most previous endeavor, "Advent Rising," is an indicator of things to come. Shipped for personal computer play in August by Majesco Entertainment Co., it was created with the help of famed sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card.
"Advent Rising's" strong story line is just what the Mustards like best. Players become part of an intergalactic quest, enriched by myth, created cultures and a cosmic threat that can be overcome only by awakening besieged humanity's secret, supernatural potential.
"You are literally creating worlds in this business," Geremy says. "It's hard work to create the scenes and lives of the people living in those worlds, but seeing the fun, excitement and joy people get from playing our games is a thrill, the real payoff for us."
Though the Mustards, like all privately held tech companies, hold details of their XBox 360 creations as sacrosanct as their finances, they will share their dreams for future product development in general terms.
"Where do we go from here? More innovative game play, but also telling better stories," Donald says. "For us it has become a matter of creating the story, and then the game, to extend that experience. Being able to write well is as important as good programming."
Beyond the game, the story will tap into other media, too. A novel may precede the game in a future marketing campaign, and then be expanded into comic books and movies that advance the tale.
Who knows? That might even prompt the most dedicated of gamers to turn off the video console and curl up with a book or graphic novel by the fireplace, warm and protected from and intrigued by the primordial night.
Video game timeline
Coin-operated video games have been around since at least 1971, when Computer Space appeared to lackluster interest. The first runaway arcade video hit came a year later with Atari's table tennis-based Pong, which reportedly sold 19,000 machines and spawned numerous imitators. Taito's Space Invaders and Asteroids, another Atari hit, debuted in 1978.
The first home video games appeared in 1972 with the likes of the Magnavox Odyssey console, connected to a television set. Home gaming systems didn't really take off until Atari released Pong for Christmas 1975. Where earlier home systems had games burned onto an internal microchip, the late '70s saw the advent of a growing library of game cartridges for systems such as the Atari 2600 and Odyssey 2.
The jump from 8-bit processors to 16-bit game consoles dominated the late '80s and early '90s with the advent of such systems as Sega Genesis and Nintendo Super NES challenging a fading Atari. In 1995, Nintendo, Sega and Sony (PlayStation) released 32-bit consoles. Nintendo upped the processing-speed ante in 1996 with Nintendo 64, which sold out in the United States in three days - and triggered an ongoing cycle of ever more powerful processors and the games to go with them.
Industry estimates are that video games today are a $12 billion global market; 75 percent of the players in America are heads of households with an average age of 30.
In 2004, 248 million computer and video games were sold in the U.S., about $10 billion worth. Two of the top 10 sellers were XBox titles (Halo and Halo 2). The top seller last year was Take2's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
l Microsoft expects to sell up to 5.5 million XBox360 consoles during its 2006 fiscal year. The first of the XBox line was launched just four years ago, in September 2001.
Sources: Forrester Research, NPD Group, Entertainment
Software Association, Bloomberg, interviews.