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Nuon
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
Once the dominant force in home and arcade video games, Atari fell out of favor with home consumers and similarly lost its strength in arcades. Cleaved into two pieces in the 1980s, Atari all but disappeared in the 1990s as its home division floundered in competition against Japanese giants Nintendo, Sega and Sony, and its arcade division was absorbed by one-time competitor Midway. But Atari had a loyal base of fans, and a handful of even more loyal employees who stuck around until the very last days of the home division. When Atari's assets and name were sold off by their owner, these employees remained together, started a new company called VM Labs in late 1994, and developed a product that they hoped would meet their long-standing wish to dominate the home entertainment industry.
When everyone else was pursuing peak polygon performance at all costs, VM Labs made a conscious decision not to compete in polygons, and rather to develop a chipset with features that they believed would have more mass-market appeal. Those features? Competitively priced, full-featured DVD playback melded with Dolby AC-3 audio and graphics hardware roughly comparable to a 1998 or 1999 personal computer. The technology was named Nuon, and VM Labs commissioned former Atari superstar Jeff Minter to develop one other impressive feature - built-in software that automatically creates psychedelic visual effects to accompany standard music CDs and DVDs. Rather than marketing the Nuon technology in a game console, VM Labs hoped to license out the technology to a number of DVD hardware manufacturers while convincing DVD movie makers to include Nuon-specific features in their products. The lure would be the opportunity to distribute a single DVD containing a Hollywood motion picture, enhanced interactive menus, game software and perhaps related Internet features as well. For traditional game companies, the development lure would be to offer their products on a format that might stretch beyond the limits of the console games market. And consumers, of course, would benefit from using the same device to play all of their media - DVD movies, music, and games.
Just to make the VM Labs plan totally clear, Nuon software won't just run on any DVD player, and it's not going to be available as an add-on peripheral for the DVD players people already own. You'll have to buy a DVD player specifically equipped with a Nuon chipset, and if enough companies build DVD players around Nuon technology, Nuon could become an industry standard. The only hitch? Sony and the other Japanese game companies. While VM Labs was working on a way to blend DVD movie technology with decent gaming hardware, Sony was engineering a chipset so powerful that DVD movie functionality would be the least impressive of its features. Nintendo, committed to beating Sony, announced itself ready to use a Panasonic DVD drive in its next console, and even though Sega had decided on a proprietary format for the Dreamcast, it too claims that a DVD accessory is in its future. What remaining allure does Nuon possess, then, considering that all of its competitors offer superior gaming technology and system-exclusive software? Arguably, Nuon may appeal to Hollywood simply because use of Nuon features lets movie studios develop games and interactive content related to their movies without any obligation to pay Nintendo, Sony or Sega. And only the Nuon is guaranteed at this point in time to be a full-featured DVD player; persistent rumors suggest that neither the PlayStation 2 nor Nintendo Dolphin will offer some now-standard DVD player bell and whistle capabilities (multi-angle viewing, multi-story access, subtitling).
Nuon developers can also produce discs that contain only games and nothing else. To that end, a handful of Nuon games have already been publicly demonstrated, including the cartoony driving game Merlin Karting and another Jeff Minter psychedelic update to the classic wireframe arcade shooting game Tempest. Unfortunately, none of the games presently ready for Nuon release are going to set the world on fire; most, including an unedited translation of the aged PC title Myst, are so old hat as to be irrelevant to today's gaming consumers, and speak badly of VM Labs' efforts to recruit third-party software developers. On the pure movie side, only one major movie studio, New Line, has publicly announced support for the Nuon platform, but has not announced any Nuon-equipped DVD titles as of yet.
A handful of noteworthy companies have, however, announced plans to release Nuon-equipped DVD players - Motorola, Raite Optoelectronics, Samsung,, and Toshiba have displayed varying levels of commitment to the format, ranging from Samsung's planned first-quarter 2000 release of a $499 Nuon DVD player, to Raite's planned $299 Nuon DVD release in April- perhaps for sale in Asia only - to Toshiba's May 1999 announcement, further unsubstantiated, that they would release a Nuon device at some point in 2000. Most intriguingly, Motorola intends to use Nuon technology in a series of all-in-one entertainment devices that could blend DVD playback, gaming, Internet access, cable television and video-on-demand into a single piece of hardware - a concept frequently referred to as a "set-top box" that many companies have proposed but none have succeeded in popularizing. Perhaps not surprisingly, it's still entirely unclear as to whether and when Motorola's devices will be available.
Practically speaking, there's not a lot of reason to believe that Nuon is going to take over the world any time soon - if anyone's going to popularize a chipset that blends DVD movies and games, it's more likely to be either Sony alone or Nintendo partnered with Panasonic. But even if the Nuon technology fails to win popular support, video gamers will benefit if mainstream DVD manufacturers start thinking about a universal entertainment format for films, music and video games. Whether that format will ultimately be VM Labs', Sony's, or Nintendo's is anyone's guess, but what a story it would make if the lifeblood of Atari was once again dominating entertainment after all of these years...
