Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective: A Study in DVD - Company Business and Marketing

Emedia Professional, March, 2000 by Marla Misek

Much more than a higher-shortage successor to CD-ROM, DVD has dwarfed its antecedent at everything it's tried, from video to audio to handy TV-attachability. Its visual and sonic punch packs a feast for the senses. But where's the fun? Where are the titles that engage and challenge the mind, instead of simply dazzling the user with supersonic audio and sharper imagery? The answer is elementary, dear Watson.

Since 1992, gaming enthusiasts have been able to test their sleuthing skills by working with Sir Arthur Corian Doyle's literary icons--Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson--to solve a host of murder mysteries set in 19th-century London. Originally released as a three-volume series on CD-ROM, Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective made apprentice detectives of its players, immersing them in nearly a dozen original mysteries that tested their powers of logic and deductive reasoning. The series' video simulations were designed and developed for CD-ROM by a company called ICOM, which was later acquired by Viacom. When Viacom closed its new media division in 1997, Eugene Evans--president of Infinite Ventures and former employee of both ICOM and Viacom--purchased the rights to the Holmes titles and characters. Two years later--on November 2, 1999--Infinite Ventures released the first volume on DVD-Video.

The story behind the conversion, however, isn't as elementary. In December 1998, Evans asked interactive multimedia producer Dynamic Media, Inc. (DMI) to develop a prototype of the game on DVD. As DMI's Duane Tucker--who served as producer--recalls, "The goal was to have a functioning game that covered all the major threads, up to and including keeping track of the score" as the user vied with Holmes to solve the mysteries first. He continues, "The prototype phase doubled as the design phase, because we were learning advanced authoring techniques as the need arose." Nearly three months later, DMI was satisfied with the prototype and began work on the final version, creating more than 1,700 new graphics and 30 animations, as well as tweaking roughly 75 video clips, to enhance the previous series.

Once development was completed in August 1999, Tucker, Evans, and the rest of the production team began testing the new title. "Eugene actually spent three days at DMI going through the entire game," Tucker explains. "With 5,400 buttons, it takes a long time to go through all of the possible iterations! Because of the hardware emulator on our Daikin Scenarist authoring station, we were able to fix bugs as they were discovered." The project then went to Cinram for its first production run in late September. More bugs were fixed, and a second run was completed in October.

All told, Tucker estimates that his development team spent about 80 hours doing video editing and about three months doing graphics work on the Holmes project. "We had a full-time graphic artist working in Photoshop, a part-time video editor using After Effects and Matrox DigiSuite, a full-time DVD developer working with Minerva's encoding equipment and Daikin Scenarist, and two 30 animators using 3D Studio Max to complete this job. At every step of the process, DMI relied on Eugene and his experience in the entertainment industry to provide guidance for the user interface."

Since its completion, Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective has won two industry awards for excellence in interactive digital media titles, including a silver medal at the New York Festivals Interactive Media competition, and gold in the Home Entertainment category at the Interactive Digital Multimedia Association (IDMA) and DVD Association (DVDA) Annual Summit.

Indeed, the title's sheer entertainment value is obvious. Using only their powers of reasoning and their DVD player's remote control, amateur detectives compete with Holmes--sorting through clues provided within the casebook, newspapers, and interviews of various suspects and local townspeople--to solve some of London's most baffling "whodunits." Fans of the Holmes CDs will be disappointed to see that the series' mysteries are the same as in the CD-ROM editions--primarily, says Evans, because "the market currently isn't big enough to support the development of new mysteries from scratch." But the title is noteworthy nonetheless, because it "takes the largely untapped interactive features of every standard DVD-Video player to the extreme."

Specifically, the DVD incorporates a sophisticated user interface and digitally remastered footage from the old series, as well as 15 extra minutes of exchanges with the local judge (who determines whether users have beaten Holmes and Watson in solving the crimes), to give players an entertainment experience not found in most DVD titles. Moreover, like all DVD-Video titles, the disc will play in any DVD-ROM-equipped PC with an MPEG-2 decoder and proper graphics card, which makes it as accessible to users accustomed to playing the game on their PCs as to those trying it for the first time on their TV-attached players.