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.