In January, I picked up another game — Myth, by Bungie Inc., a real-time tactics game set in the context of a fantasy world war. I began playing compulsively. I finished off the single-player levels in one weekend and then hopped online to wage war on Bungie.net, a free service for arranging games. Six months later, I’m still playing Myth — addicted by the immediate payoff of winning a battle, the increased challenge of human opponents and the compliments of fellow players after a particularly clever tactic.

I have the five CDs of Riven close by, too, but these days I think of it more as an inspiring art object than as a game. Riven is the kind of game I dream of creating. But Myth is the kind of game I want to play. Without consciously choosing to do so, I’ve crossed over to the side of the hard-core gamers.

And it isn’t just me. The whole genre of immersive-environment exploration games that Myst and Riven represent — which once looked like the future of computer gaming — now looks like a dead end.

Myst and Riven raised the promise of a mass market for computer gaming that has never been fulfilled — something that developers are finally beginning to admit. Instead of yearning for more games in the Myst-Riven immersive genre — where lushly beautiful environments and hidden puzzles are themselves the stars — perhaps the general audience Myst appealed to really just wanted some eye candy for their new CD-ROM drives.

At the same time, the rise of Internet multiplayer games has galvanized the hard-core gamers. Now they can fire up the latest generation of first-person shooters (games like Quake II or Unreal) or real-time strategy games (like Starcraft or Myth) and not only get the visceral thrill of fighting human opponents but also share stories and bragging rights with players anywhere in the world. They can form clans and guilds, create rivalries and organize their own tournaments. In short, they are making their own dramas and histories — and unlike the general audience, they buy more than one game every Christmas season.

And where they go, game developers willingly follow. Graeme Devine, the founder of Trilobyte and creator of the bestselling immersive mystery 7th Guest, is currently working on a multiplayer science-fiction war game called Extreme Warfare. He conceived the idea before making 7th Guest’s sequel, 11th Hour, and once finished with that game chose not to keep extending the franchise. “I could write the next codec,” said Devine, “and throw in even more puzzles next time, but I couldn’t answer [the question] ‘How were we moving the medium forward?’ So I went back to my other game design.”

And so, without a mass market to justify spiraling production costs, and without the traditional gamers to buy them, immersive games have tanked. Sure, Myst has sold nearly 4 million copies to date, raking in almost $150 million in gross revenues, but the equally worthy Obsidian, from the deceased studio Rocket Science, sold just 80,000 copies and took in perhaps $4 million, barely recouping the roughly $3 million Rocket Science poured into it.

Obsidian wasn’t the only immersive flop. The Curse of Monkey Island and the Last Express were other critical darlings that lost fortunes. It turns out that the only big immersive hits were those with established brands — Cyan’s Myst and Riven and Trilobyte’s 7th Guest and 11th Hour. And both of these studios’ creative teams have broken up: The Miller brothers at Cyan had an amicable split, and Graeme Devine and Rob Landeros departed from Trilobyte. So now what?

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The traditional gamers aren’t exactly dabbing at their cheeks. They have a long list of reasons for holding immersive games in contempt. The annoying practice of dropping puzzles directly into the story path is one. The utter lack of other characters floating through these worlds is another (and not just because you can’t shoot them). Denny Atkin, features editor at Computer Gaming World, says his magazine doesn’t cover immersive games because his magazine’s audience just isn’t interested in them.

What they’re still interested in, apparently, are the same game genres that have dominated the market for the last few years, only now with an online twist. The most successful publishers of multiplayer games, like Blizzard Entertainment, which makes Starcraft, and Westwood Studios, of Command & Conquer fame, have erected huge online clearinghouses where literally millions of games are arranged between hundreds of thousands of players, who fill the time in between with impassioned chat room discussions. According to Blizzard producer Bill Roper, the company’s free Battle.net service has played host to 1.2 million unique users in the past 90 days. Since its creation in January 1997, Battle.net users have logged 25 million hours online — 19 million in games and 6 million in the chat rooms. The killer app of the gaming industry, it turns out, is chat.

“People really go out there to just talk,” said Roper. “Almost 25 percent of hours logged on are people sitting in chat rooms. They’re trading strategies or talking smack. It brings us gamers this sense of community. You can be sitting down and talking to people on three continents. Players have formed these clans and guilds with their own Web sites. In Diablo, you can walk into a building and talk to someone waiting to ask you to join their clan.”

Steve Wetherill, vice president for research and development at Westwood, reports a similar phenomenon, with over half of members’ online time spent in chat. “The interesting part is that with all those games being played, Westwood Online members actually spend more time in the chat rooms than in actual game play,” he said. “We’re learning more and more that gamers want a community almost as much as they want a great game.”

It’s just that sense of community — really just the sense of other people involved in the game — that is obviously missing in an immersive game like Riven. The most desirable atmosphere for playing a game by the Miller brothers seems to be a dark, empty room, with headphones wrapped around the player’s ears. Contrast this with the rousing game of Myth, where the satisfaction of executing a clever flanking move that wipes out an army is accompanied by the self-reflective knowledge that someone is yelling “Arrgh!” on the other end of the telephone line.

“They want to prove themselves as competitors,” said Wetherill. “They want to see themselves move up in the rankings. They want the respect of fellow gamers. They love to win and hate defeat. And after a battle, they like to relive it and tell the war story, either in a chat room or live with friends.”

Not everyone in the gaming industry believes that the era of immersive games is over. Ted Simon, director of marketing at Red Orb Entertainment, points out that immersive games are still the industry’s all-time top sellers. Red Orb, a division of Brxderbund, publishes both Myst and Riven, along with the Journeyman Project series and the Last Express — making it the preeminent publisher of immersive games.

Simon has a point. But Myst is also the reason statisticians invented medians for calculating averages: It’s an “outlier,” a data point lying so far off the scale that it skews the average. Remove the revenues of the pioneering Myst and 7th Guest — which built their brands at the dawn of multimedia computing — and the sequels that capitalized on these brands, and the sales average for immersive games drops precipitously. That raises the question of whether Myst actually doomed the genre it helped create by fooling publishers into thinking everyone could sell as many games if they created products of the same quality — hence the price wars and disappointing returns.

But perhaps the publishers have finally wised up.

“Obsidian is a good product for us,” said Gary Griffiths, president and CEO of Segasoft. “It is still out there selling, and I’ve just seen that Fry’s has re-ordered it. [But] the typical immersive adventure appeals to a smaller audience. We share the opinion that Myst is an anomaly — there is no logical reason to explain its success. All you need to do is look at the customer base to know that. They’re people who’ve never played a game before, who bought Myst when they bought their CD-ROMs because everyone told them how good it was. They’re not the people who buy five games a year.” In short, not the kind of the people who drive the industry.

Chris Charla, the editor in chief of Next Generation, one of the industry’s leading magazines, shares Griffith’s pessimistic outlook. “From what we can tell it doesn’t make sense to make an adventure game unless you’re Cyan and Red Orb,” he said. “I went to a conference where they showed a chart with the top 18 adventure games over the past year, and it was really depressing. The Last Express didn’t make back half the money spent on it. In terms of strictly traditional adventure games, I don’t think there’s a market there anymore.”

To be fair, many of the most successful multiplayer titles are also extensions of franchises — Quake II, Starcraft and the forthcoming C&C: Tiberian Sun. But the Internet, besides breathing new life into old genres, has also given birth to its own, native multiplayer genre — the “massively persistent game.” This ugly moniker was coined by Richard Garriott, the mastermind behind Ultima Online, the first true example of a massively persistent game.

Ultima Online resembles the tradition of online MUDs — or a digital version of the fantasy role-playing games of old, like the paper-based Dungeons & Dragons, that’s open 24-7. You can turn the computer off, but out there on the Internet (on the servers of Garriott’s company, Origin, actually) the game keeps playing. All of the roles played by the software in the original Ultima games — townspeople, peasants, villains — are now filled by other human players. You can talk to them, kill them, ally yourself with them, stab them in the back. Just do something — because if you don’t, nothing will happen. The “plot” is all player-generated.

“In a solo-player game,” says Garriott, “the entire world space and the entire efforts of the development team have been created just for you, one player. That’s true for each player who buys it. A massively persistent game is an environment and a set of experiences shared by thousands. In that case, it is very difficult for them to feel they are the hero. Players are now creating a set of experiences that they chart their life through.”

Garriott believes that as technology improves, designers will gain the capability to add more purposefulness to players’ lives without disrupting the ebb and flow of the game. He wants to borrow the most familiar aspects of immersive and other solo-player games to make multiplayer worlds even stronger. But even still, he predicts the radical newness of massively persistent games to be their biggest strength. “These experiences are unlike any others in [computer] gaming,” said Garriott. “The only thing gamers have to compare it to is solo-player games. That’s why they’re so enraptured with this paradigm. I’m a devout believer that players will have extremely flourishing histories here. There will always be something to I-am-the-hero games, but there is something magical about these shared experiences.”

It probably isn’t incidental that the scenario Garriott envisions is more of a publisher’s dream than a player’s: Build one big game that appeals to everyone in every market — the bloodthirsty 13-year-old Quake player, the original Ultima role-playing gamers and maybe even some of Myst’s audience.

The last group is least likely to be seduced, at least according to Garriott. But while he’s mindful of the “massively persistent” genre’s limitations — he also thinks the players lose perspective on their world if more than 10,000 play at once — his competitors aren’t. For this Christmas, Segasoft is preparing to ship its own massively persistent game — the enigmatically named “10six,” which stands for 10 raised to the sixth power. The title of this game about the colonization of a new world by its players refers to the 1 million people who can play it simultaneously. In Sega’s view, the more people you add, the more fun the game becomes.

But if Garriott’s right about there being an upper limit of players that, once surpassed, leads to alienation and chaos, then the entire enterprise is doomed. Developing multiplayer games isn’t just about finding better methods to round up smarter opponents; what elevates the genre is the feeling of shared experience, the sense of personal drama, the retelling of past battles — in a word, storytelling.

The struggle between immersive and multiplayer games for glamour status in the game industry comes down to which form of storytelling gamers prefer. Obviously, the hard-core gamers have made their choice: They prefer making and telling their own stories to experiencing stories told by others.

But Myst co-creator Rand Miller is unsure whether the multiplayer, massively persistent approach can ever appeal outside the hard-core gamer niche. “The success or failure of those games will be in their ability to provide an illusion of being somewhere else — of having an adventure, instead of playing a game,” he said.

“There is huge potential in the multiplayer gaming arena to accomplish just that. But the first iterations have been more oriented toward gamers, who have a greater desire to suspend disbelief during their gaming experience. The average person doesn’t want to have to work too hard to have their vacation on a desktop — they would like the developers to do the work for them. When developers (ourselves included) can accomplish that with multiplayer game design and implementation, then people will come home from work and log on, instead of channel surf,” Miller added.

Miller has a valid point — but he also has the luxury of knowing that the only games that most “average” people have ever played are his. How can most game developers be expected to pour big money and years of effort into topping Riven’s technical excellence and chart-topping sales without an audience they can count on to buy their product? Miller responds by asking, “Has ‘Titanic’ put success for other movies out of reach? Not to put us on par with ‘Titanic,’ but the point is that there is room for many levels of creative storytelling.” Still, didn’t Obsidian and the Last Express try on those levels and fail?

The decline and fall of the immersive genre actually benefits no one. It is simply a sad reality check: The artistic pedigree of these games is too expensive, and their audiences too small, to justify them as commercial software. Meanwhile, the developers, publishers and hard-core gamers who drive the industry have discovered other forms of storytelling they’d rather build upon. And so the market for Myst’s successors shrivels.

This is not to say that the world will never see another Riven or 7th Guest — but when those do emerge, they’ll probably leave out the puzzles and give up pretending to be games at all. They’ll just be stories — electronic novels, if you will — and their creators will no more expect them to be blockbusters than the Miller brothers ever thought Myst would be.

How could I take applications with copyrights from 1991 seriously? And these machines were from 1987; how could they be anything other than toys? To me these were inevitable questions, but they didn’t seem to trouble anyone else: I had entered the Church of Amiga, and Mass was underway.

While most operating systems profess to have fans zealous enough to form a religion, they fail the fundamental test of faith. It takes no faith to be a Windows user; every application, it seems, will make its way to the platform, and the number of hardware manufacturers who cater to Wintel grows by the minute. Even the Macintosh’s “Evangelistas,” who were staging their own tent revival at the MacWorld Expo in New York last week, can expect new versions of Photoshop to arrive via FedEx at about the same time Windows users’ will. But Amiga users never receive reassurances like these. They’re on their own.

Who are they? “They tend to be not average, not mainstream, not in the bell curve,” says Joe Torre, senior hardware engineer at Amiga Inc. “Not ho-hum. They’re the mavericks, the secret weapons. The entrepreneur, the one that gets the worm. Not the one in the herd. The one that does his homework, and is quite proud of his prowess. They’ve turned their machines into personal creations. The users have by now filtered out their weak. The ones that remain are an elite club. We’re not all in detention hall; we’re the honor students.”

They purchase machines from as early as 1985 and run applications from 1988. They bear the judgment from the world-at-large that theirs is a dead platform, a relic, the Tucker automobile of their industry. (The last new Amiga model shipped in 1992.) To be an Amiga user is to know that everything Windows and Mac users know about processor speed, memory requirements, bigger hard drives and application upgrades is wrong. It’s to know that an Amiga 500 with a 16MHz processor and 4 megs of RAM — the raw equivalent of an outmoded Intel 286 machine — can run circles around a Pentium II PC. You just need to believe.

I can’t. The world-at-large doesn’t seem to, either. But Amiga devotees still do. And now, for the first time since Amiga’s original parent company, Commodore, went under in 1994, there’s hope their platform might rise again with its new owner, Gateway.

After Commodore went bankrupt, it sold the Amiga division to the German company ESCOM, who thought it could turn a profit in Europe — where Amiga has traditionally flourished among hackers and in the demo scene (in which whole conventions of kids show off animations and mini-music videos they’ve assembled for fun). ESCOM, in turn, went bankrupt in 1997, and sold Amiga to Gateway for a fire-sale price of $16 million. Gateway finally announced earlier this year its plans for new versions of the Amiga operating system: AmigaOS 4.0 (a developer-only platform due this winter) and AmigaOS 5.0, available Christmas 1999, running on a new chip with new software foundations — in short, an overhaul of everything.

Amiga Inc., Gateway’s subsidiary, had little to announce at AmiWest, but that didn’t seem to particularly upset the attendees. They were older men, mostly — undoubtedly a few were retired hobbyists who enjoyed hacking their Amiga boxes and pondered over lunch whether to add a PowerPC accelerator to their machine. I was told repeatedly that this is one of the identifying traits of Amiga fans: Their machines are things to be picked apart, fine tuned and put back together — not tools to be placed on the desk and booted only to run Microsoft Word.

A quintet of older men I found resting in the lobby of the Ramada Inn in Sacramento during a break at AmiWest included three math professors and a pair of software engineers. As one of them put it: “We are the ones who have been around long enough to know what we want. We know what we’re looking for and we know how to put these things together. You won’t find a higher degree of computer literacy among users of a particular OS.” Another added, “We simply have less tolerance for inferior technology. We don’t like the operating system’s programmers making performance decisions for us.”

They quickly switched topics to Microsoft, the “other OS” that they often had to use at work and whose inelegant design and slow performance irritated them. “A PC needs all that processing power to overcome its bottlenecks,” said one. “It works fine when you throw enough hardware at it — 400 MHz Pentium IIs, 128 megs of RAM. An Amiga can run multiple applications well on 1 megabyte of RAM … A Pentium II running Windows is like a Corvette pulling a house trailer.”

Unlike its rivals at Apple or Be, who are eager to embrace Microsoft or coexist with it, and even more so than the flag-wavers of Linux, Amiga fans readily display their contempt for the “Evil Empire” and its Intel ally. Amiga magazines (there are still 30 or so, more than a few of them glossies, according to Amiga Inc.) are the only trade publications that spell Windows “Windoze” with neither quotation marks nor irony.

Thus, when Amiga Inc. announced that AmigaOS 4.0 — a “bridge” OS released for developers working on the consumer OS 5.0 — would run on Intel-compatible chips, the Amiga clan acted as if the devil himself had suddenly been appointed the new chairman of Gateway. My posts to several Amiga newsgroups asking for feedback on the port to Intel chips yielded indignant responses like “AMIGA WILL NEVER RUN ON X86!!!” The feedback to Amiga Inc. was equally vociferous.

“It’s basically ‘Satan Inside’ as far as they’re concerned,” says Bill McEwen, Amiga Inc.’s head of marketing and software evangelism. “We’re not even saying we’re using Intel chips. We might use Cyrix or AMD chips. But we are developing OS 5.0 on an Intel reference platform. That’s where all the coding and debugging tools are. For instance, what do you use to develop a Sony Playstation title? You don’t use a Playstation — you use a reference platform.”

But Amiga users are not simply passive-aggressive about hating Microsoft: They refuse to just complain without doing something. “[Amiga users] are an eclectic group and a passionate group,” says McEwen. “And they’re great with a hacksaw. Once I couldn’t fit a PCI card into my Amiga 4000. So a friend produced a hacksaw and sawed off the end of the card. It fit right in.” On most PCs and Macs, doing anything more ambitious than opening the case practically voids the warranty.

“Some will never use a Windows box,” McEwen continues. “Others will never admit to it. You’ll see in the full headers of their e-mail that it was sent via Outlook98, and they’ll say, ‘No, no. It’s a friend’s machine.’ They get very defensive about their choice of platforms, but they’re very proactive. I regularly get entire marketing plans, complete with full-color charts and animation. Along with the passion and sometimes the abuse, there are people who really want to help.”

Amiga users’ attitudes toward community and support are also holdovers from the ’80s, before the giant, institutionalized technical support staffs of Microsoft and PC makers came into being. The bankruptcy of Commodore only made them depend on each other even more. Amiga user groups — local communities of fellow Amigans — have grown over time even as the user-group phenomenon has faded among users of more popular computer platforms. Making its debut at AmiWest was the User Group Network (UGN), a fledgling worldwide organization of user groups trying to meld an Amiga news agency, a technical support database and community into a single organization.

Robert Hamilton, UGN’s North American coordinator, blames the fall of user groups on the ’90s vision of computers as “information appliances”: “They think a computer is a microwave. But Amiga users still have the original focus. It’s more than just a video toaster machine — it’s a lifestyle for us. The whole demo scene in Europe, where Amiga is very popular, is something so totally different from the corporate structure of support. If someone sees you wearing an Amiga T-shirt or holding an Amiga key chain, they’re going to come up to you like a friend.”

Wayne Hunt, UGN’s administrator, adds, “You don’t see that enthusiasm on any other platform. Guy Kawasaki [Apple's former "Chief Evangelist"] is manufactured enthusiasm. But Robert and I are bonded by Amiga. If Robert comes to Huntsville, he knows he can sleep at my place. And I know vice versa is true.”

Hamilton also stresses the tinkering nature of Amiga fans, a trait so deep-rooted that it eventually worked to the frustration of Commodore. “When Commodore tried to release a set-top box [a device for making a TV set more like a computer], the response from users was, ‘What’s inside?’ They were busier hacking it than trying to use it,” says Hamilton. “Imagine if all the microchips in cars today ran on Amiga; think of the hacks — people would be adding spare gas tanks, ethanol converters, DVD players,” he laughs.

But a more appropriate car comparison is with the automobiles of Cuba — where 40-year-old pre-Castro cars have been ingeniously fixed over the years to keep them running. Being shut out in the cold has left more than a few Amiga fans embittered. The flip side of their community is often a communal bunker mentality.

I ask Torre, who’s also a former head of the Atlanta Amiga User’s Group, about what it’s like to work with a “ghetto” OS. “I don’t like to use ‘ghetto.’ I use ‘underground’ or ‘resistance,’” he says.

Gateway intends to bring Amiga up from the underground. According to McEwen, the next-generation Amiga planned for 1999 will be priced in the $1,000 range; the promise is a high-end machine for a low-end price. McEwen also said that Amiga has plans for releasing a set-top box soon after for around $300-$500. As for the machines themselves, none will have Amiga Inc.’s name on them; the company’s only product is the operating system. The right to build hardware will be licensed to any interested parties — Gateway presumably among them.

The licensees come later, and the OS plans have been announced, but the choice of processor remains under tight wraps. Its unofficial name in the Amiga community is the “Magical Mystery Chip,” and McEwen says that the manufacturer is neither Intel nor Motorola, nor any other top-10 chipmaker. Its specifications have been released, however: By the time of its release at the end of 1999, this chip is supposed to be able to decode four MPEG streams simultaneously — in other words, play four movies at once, if need be. And it’s also supposed to do this five to 10 times faster than the Pentium II line.

Dave Haynie, a former Amiga hardware engineer from the early days and now a VP of German computer manufacture PIOS, says that any number of “media chips” could possibly deliver this performance by 1999 — including chips by Chromatic, in which Gateway is a 20 percent investor but that has fallen on hard times; Phillips’ TriMedia, which was once slated to be added to PowerPC chips; and VM Labs, recently the subject of a favorable Wired story.

But are these chips really going to be faster than a Pentium II? “Is the thing really a CPU?” Haynie asks. “Oh sure, you could take any MPEG-2 chip and say it’ll decode video five to 10 times faster, but what about doing ordinary mix stuff?” McEwen says that the chip will be announced in January 1999.

How do the Amiga faithful feel about this impending shakeup of their world — are they yearning for “world domination” like Linux’s legions? “I think every Amiga user wants in their heart for it to become mainstream,” Aaron Ruscetta, another former president of the Atlanta User Group, says. “They cannot understand why anyone would want another computer. For myself, I would be very comfortable with a substantial market of 500,000 or a million people — although that’s getting very difficult to do, the way Intel and Microsoft are holding guns to the heads of peripheral manufacturers.”

But some Amiga connoisseurs look darkly on the notion of their beloved platform becoming Everyman’s computer. Torre says: “The average, and by definition, mediocre user will use a PC with Windows. If the average user is using an Amiga, then I think it’s time to switch to another platform.”

Besides the phone number, Tipton has other connections to Wells and the Our First Time site.

Tipton is a co-founder of M.O.V.I.E., a Web site dedicated to helping finance independent film projects, which was accessible until late Thursday afternoon. Also listed in the site’s “founders” section is attorney Mark Vega of the Los Angeles firm Daniels, Baratta & Fine. Vega describes his work in his bio as “represent[ing] independent filmmakers who are pursuing their dreams. I only take the clients I like with projects I like and am 150 percent committed to the spirit of independent films.” Vega is also the legal counsel for Oscar Wells and Our First Time’s site host; he was quoted extensively in the Reuters story on Our First Time, but has not returned multiple phone calls from Salon. Neither has Tipton — whom we attempted to reach at the same phone number from which Wells had previously returned our calls.

Soon after Salon left messages for Tipton, the entire M.O.V.I.E. Web site disappeared from its directory and is no longer on line.

Another connection between Wells and Tipton can be found in old Usenet postings. The domain name Tipton is registered for — the one that shares Wells’ phone number — is moviefund.com (the site exists but has no content).

But a message posted to alt.censorship on June 17 pointed to moviefund.com as the home page for Tipton’s film “Eye of the Beholder” — which he writes is “not to be confused with the Ashley Judd/Ian Magregor [sic] movie of the same name.” Tipton’s movie is ostensibly about his fight against “Rev. [Donald] Wildmon’s religious forces” over his decision to stock “The Last Temptation of Christ” on the shelves of his video store chain. Salon was unable to confirm whether this movie exists or whether Tipton has ever owned video stores.

Tipton paints a portrait of persecution by members of the Christian Right, and contained within his post is an allegedly intercepted e-mail message from Wildmon’s American Family Association with the subject line “BOYCOTT THIS BLASPHEMOUS MOVIE!” It contains hyperbolic expressions like “That is proof of the power of the Lord !!!”

In an interview with Salon, Our First Time’s Wells mentioned he had received death threats from “religious nuts” and mentioned an e-mail petition to shut down “Our First Time.” This e-mail, which was sent from the faked address “stopthis1@juno.com,” displayed similarities to the e-mail Tipton displayed, including the hyperbolic language (it urges readers to “‘SHUT THIS OBSCENE WEBSITE DOWN’ !!!”).

Our First Time is registered under an address in Toluca Lake, Calif. There is no listed phone number in that area code for Wells, Tipton or Wells’ production company, First Time Productions.

Salon was pointed to this information by Dutch journalist Francisco van Jole of the zine Daily Planet. He uncovered the connection between Wells and Tipton, along with Tipton’s home page and his posts to Usenet, and ran his findings in his Wednesday edition (in Dutch).

The webmaster of the Entangled Web, which is hosting Our First Time, said he knew nothing about Ken Tipton, and that Wells’ phone number (the one listed in Internic) was a rented voice-mail box. Laughing at the possible implications, he said, “How ironic. Here they are trying to pull this off on the Internet and it was the Internet records that bit them in the butt.”

But there’s an awful lot that’s suspicious about Our First Time, too. Why would these kids go through with their first, perhaps clumsy, no doubt anxiety-ridden sexual encounter on the Internet, of all places — their embraces captured by Webcams and streamed to hundreds of thousands of lascivious spectators?

The site’s HTML code includes search keywords like “voyeur, forbidden, tasteless, gross, naked” that aren’t exactly going to draw an audience seeking educational fare. The photos currently displayed on the site aren’t pornographic, but they are somewhat cheesy in a pin-up kind of way — and black bars cover the faces of “Mike” and “Diane,” as in an old-fashioned pulp. And then there’s the matter of an e-mail spam of suspicious origin “protesting” the site; it hailed from a spoofed Juno.com address and was supposedly signed by the Christian Coalition, but that organization has disavowed any involvement. So has Our First Time.

Are “Mike” and “Diane” sex-ed crusaders? Virginal exhibitionists? Performance artists? Or is this some new permutation of “barely legal” porn?

On the one hand, no one has before proposed to lose their virginity online in a tastefully shot way –”This won’t be shot any different than on ‘NYPD Blue,’ except they don’t have a script and are going to be nervous as hell,” Wells says.

On the other hand, video feeds of people having sex aren’t exactly scarce in the Web’s red-light districts.

Wells says that the idea for Our First Time arose in a chat-room discussion with Diane in the wake of the live Internet birth of baby “Sean” on June 16. Wells recalls trying to access the site during that media event — and being turned away because of the site-traffic overload. “It referred me to an area about family planning,” he said, “and there were people bitching and moaning about this event, but there was one woman who was the voice of reason, and she was Diane. She said it was educational and beautiful and it pissed her off that if this could be shown live and considered beautiful, then why not Step One of the conception process? And why are people so spastic about it?”

“Then she said, ‘If I could, I would lose my virginity on the Internet,’ and I, being a programmer, contacted her,” he said.

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Wells says that Diane and her boyfriend, Mike, who apparently agreed to go along with Diane and Wells’ proposal, are both virgins who finished high school last May “and plan to get married after college in four years.”

On the big night, scheduled for Aug. 4, Wells will give the Southern California couple “their honeymoon,” albeit one in front of nearly 200,000 onlookers (the number of viewers Wells says he hopes for, and the maximum capacity of his site’s servers).

Along the way, he promises, site visitors can read about the pair’s first AIDS test, follow their trip to purchase condoms, discuss the ethics of the act in bulletin boards and vote in polls. The bulletin boards and polls are on the site already, although the journals kept by the pair won’t be made available until Saturday, says Wells.

So much secrecy surrounds Our First Time that it’s impossible to take it at face value. Who are these kids? Are those pictures really them? Are they really virgins? Is it really going to be Webcast free? And why are they waiting for 18 days from the Saturday opening until Aug. 4? To chronicle their sexual journey — or to let the media build up their hype? And why is “ourfirsttime.com” registered with Internic under Wells’ production company, “First Time Productions”?

Wells says he’s received death threats from “religious nuts” who have forced him to exercise extreme secrecy about the location of Mike’s and Diane’s act, and about the technologies that will be deployed to broadcast it. And both he and his site host say the site is under constant attack from hackers. That might explain why the site was unreachable all day Wednesday — or maybe its servers were simply overloaded in the wake of widespread media coverage.

About the production company, Wells says, “My attorney said, ‘You’ve got to do something to protect yourself personally.’ And I’m hoping that A&E or someone might be interested in this project later.” Wells says his personal interest in Diane and Mike, beyond altruistic reasons, is self-promotion for his Web design skills.

The pair’s identities, Wells says, will be revealed Aug. 4. “I just hope they don’t start following me to find Diane and Mike … We’ve gotten e-mail that says, ‘You are Satan’s spawn and it is my duty to make sure you don’t spawn yourselves.’ On the 18th day, everything will be open. [Diane and Mike] just want to get there.” He also says that because of the hostile reactions, he is giving the pair until Friday night to decide whether they really want to go ahead.

But Wells would not show us that e-mail, nor allow us to interview Diane or Mike before the site’s opening, nor see any other sites he has designed. His secrecy could be justified — or it could conceivably be the cover for a scam. He takes such skepticism in stride, saying, “As for legitimacy, I don’t know how to prove this any more than to just do it.”

Wells says he’s trying to keep a low profile — but he and his attorney have already talked to Salon, Wired News and Reuters. The first mention of his site in mainstream media came last Friday, when Conan O’Brian made a joke about how the first event would be followed shortly by the first live Netcast of a murder — by the girl’s father. That night, Wells said, hackers exploited a security loophole left by a “hit counter” on the site’s front page — and deleted the entire site. It’s been under attack ever since, he said.

Wells’ Web host is The Entangled Web, a one-person hosting service with experience in running pornographic live video feeds. Wells explained that other service providers rejected him, forcing him to work with someone unfazed by the nature of the content. The Entangled Web’s owner, who asked not to be named, confirms Wells’ story: “I want to support him, and get this thing up and running. To me, this is no different than the feed I run from Amsterdam.”

About the hacking, he adds, “We learned last Friday not to put up any [Microsoft] FrontPage extensions. I can’t believe someone managed to pop the counter.” He said on Tuesday the site was under continuous threat from “SYN flooding” — a technical attack to overwhelm the site’s server and make it inaccessible. At the time, the site was functioning normally, but by Wednesday morning, its servers were not responding. The webmaster said he’s currently reading three books on network security, and is prepared to delay the unveiling should hackers interfere.

That is, if there are hackers. The obsessive need for security that Wells and his Webmaster invoke for everything from the kids’ identities to the technical methods of streaming video and sound to a target of 200,000 people makes large chunks of their stories unconfirmable. As a result, healthy skepticism is the order of the day. Visitors to the site are leaving cynical predictions on its bulletin board, like “come back in two weeks and this will be a pay site.”

If they are to overcome the swirl of doubts that surround Our First Time, it looks like Mike and Diane and their impresario, Wells, will simply have to “just do it” — and prove that their motives are as unmercenary as they claim. At this point, the most far-fetched scenario is that everyone involved is telling the truth. But stranger things have happened on the Net.

Unreal is the latest, greatest “first-person shooter,” following the well-worn trail that Carmack blazed. The game play is similar to Quake’s — you are looking through the hero’s eyes with a gun protruding in front of you — but the graphics, monsters and sound are souped way up. The game was released just over a month ago to universal praise. The editors of Next Generation magazine, which is regarded as the gamer’s bible, were so awed that they decided to launch the magazine’s first series of awards — just so they could hand the first prize to Unreal.

But no box blurb better described the point of Unreal than the one that says “R.I.P. Quake II.” For almost everything that Quake II does, Unreal makes it a point to do better. From the opening screen’s fly-by of an ominous-looking castle, it’s obvious you’re witnessing a new peak for graphics. Unlike the Quake knock-offs that used a licensed version of Carmack’s engine, the engineers at Epic spent years building their own — which, when run with enough 3-D acceleration, has richer colors, more fluid movement and more realistic textures. Clouds float by, water ripples, limbs spatter messily and the flies buzzing over corpses look startlingly real.

Gore is the point of Unreal, and there are plenty of monsters to provide it. The story line is simple: Your character (who, in a Tomb Raider-ish twist, is a buxom bad-ass named Gina) was being transported to a prison colony when the ship crashed on an unknown planet. When you come to, everybody on the ship is either already dead or screaming from around the corner. Gradually, you learn you’ve landed on a planet occupied by the Skaarj — aliens who look like they might well be the species of malicious hunters from the “Predator” movies. They and their allies are oppressing the natives of the planet, the Nali, and you’re just trying to escape that rock.

As backstories go, it’s more cogent than Quake’s or Duke Nukem’s, but it still isn’t vital to playing the game. In most ways Unreal plays just like its predecessors: You punch every control button you find in hopes of triggering secret doors, and the floors are littered with random packs of ammo and medicine. At least the monsters are smarter. Unreal’s highly touted Monster AI (artificial intelligence) — designed by Stephen Polge, who wrote the AI for Quake’s Reaperbot — features creatures that run when you hurt them, chase you when you’re hurt, call for reinforcements when outnumbered and even lay ambushes for the unwary player.

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