The Next Magic Box?

By PATRICK E. COLE LAS VEGAS

ANYONE WHO OWNS THE USUAL cumbersome assortment of home-entertainment gadgets -- CD players, game-playing computers, Cable TVs, videodiscs, and VCRs -- will immediately appreciate why the consumer-electronics industry is panting after something called the "universal box." What that box should do is act as an electronic one-stop shopping center, unifying all the different functions, . from cable to highly sophisticated interactive games, in one place with one set of controls. What has prevented such a box from being produced commercially is the wildly proliferating assortment of electronic gadgetry, all of it clever but not always compatible.

Until now, that is. Or so claims hyperactive computer salesman Trip Hawkins, who last week wowed a packed house at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with a little black box he hopes will be the "format" -- what VCRs and video cassettes were to home video in the 1980s -- that will run home systems in years to come. Ten years ago, when Hawkins vowed to build an entertainment- software empire with unorthodox technology, he had few believers. Today, after his Silicon Valley company, Electronic Arts, stole a huge chunk of market share from giant Nintendo with popular games like PGA Golf Tour, Chuck Yeager Air Combat and John Madden Football, he is taken seriously indeed.

On the stage in Las Vegas the flamboyant Hawkins unveiled what he calls his Interactive Multiplayer. On a mammoth projection screen, the machine had spheres bouncing, rectangles spinning and facial images twisting in full motion, while Hawkins explained that it is a VCR, slide projector, king-size Game Boy machine, CD-interactive box and laser disc video player all wrapped into one package. Hawkins says there are Multiplayer applications on the drawing board that can turn the television set into a magic monitor straight out of a Star Trek episode. Suppose you turn on L.A. Law late, and you want to know what's going on. Merely push a button, and a bubble will appear explaining the plot. Push another, and it will even tell you the brand of Michael Tucker's suit. "My aim was to move the technology so far forward that there would be no debate about its worth," he says.

Though the black box has many applications, the most immediate and attractive use is to play sophisticated games. Its revolutionary architecture allows it to process images at 50 times the power of conventional video-game computers, which is a huge improvement over Hawkins' own state-of-the-art games like PGA Golf Tour. Hawkins says he intends to use electronic games collectively as a Trojan horse to gain access to American homes. On the strength of that idea, Hawkins has managed to persuade several of the largest and most powerful hardware and software companies in the world that his box is viable. His new company, 3DO, based in San Mateo, California, successfully wooed Matsushita, whose Panasonic subsidiary has developed a prototype of the machine under license from Hawkins, which will sell for around $700 this fall. He has also formed partnerships with MCA, AT&T and Time Warner, which stand to reap large rewards selling their software if Hawkins' system does become the format for the 1990s. "The graphics are so spectacular, it's unlike anything I've seen," says Geoffrey Holmes, a senior vice president of Time Warner, which plans to make video games, CD-ROM, interactive games and other products for the Multiplayer. Hawkins, says MCA president Sidney Sheinberg, is "a major visionary in this area. We obviously see the Multiplayer as a platform to create new products."

Is the Multiplayer a sure thing? Not quite. For all his confidence -- his sales projections for 1993 are 500,000 units -- Hawkins admits that success for 3DO isn't quite carved in stone. "I'm feeling pretty good about the technology, but," he quickly adds, "the $64,000 question is, Does the consumer want it?"

Hawkins' success also depends on the willingness of software producers to make products that will run on his machines. Says Robert Kleiber, a games analyst at Piper Jaffray, in Minneapolis, Minnesota: "No matter how good the hardware is, you need a quantity of quality titles to get consumers buying. But Trip has a lot of friends in the industry. If anyone can do it, he can." Hawkins, of course, is not the only one with designs on the market. Game makers Nintendo and Sega, computer makers Apple and IBM, Microsoft, Sony, Commodore International, Tandy and Philips Electronics N.V. are all coming to market with their own formats.

Hawkins says the real payoff will come when the industry embraces the Multiplayer and all music, video games and how-to videos are crammed onto discs. "There's all this confusion, and we've got this incredible opportunity to have this Trojan horse that rides a wave of synergy into the home," says Hawkins. "Once consumers buy it, they get all the other things that the technology does." Someone, clearly, is going to make a lot of money at this. Hawkins is hoping that the 3DO Multiplayer does not turn out to be the eight- track tape player of the digital era.