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But right now, it's the video-game designers who have the electronic ball. The rapid advance of technology in the past decade has given them a set of tools with almost unimaginable power: high-speed computer-graphics chips that can create millions of bright colors and flash them on a screen in a fraction of a second; digital compression schemes that can squeeze the equivalent of a complete set of an encyclopedia onto a single silver disc; fiber-optic cable that can beam limitless quantities of data around the world at nearly the speed of light; simulation techniques that can immerse players in a three- dimensional world of illusion.
Like children with a new box of crayons, video-game makers are taking up these tools and using them to transform the cartoonlike earlier hit games -- Super Mario Brothers, Sonic the Hedgehog, Street Fighter II -- into something with lifelike action and plots. Meanwhile, the programmers have been joined by a new generation of Hollywood executives who, having tasted the power of computerized special effects, are eager to create a whole new form of entertainment that can be beamed over a cable line, bought in a cartridge or played from a compact disc. Both sides talk excitedly about making interactive movies with synthetic actors, of allowing players to take full control of the character's action and even, with the proper equipment, to enter a virtual reality in which they are the character.
Over the past 18 months, two groups, one representing Silicon Valley, the other Hollywood, have been meeting at trade shows, visiting labs and quietly ! cross-fertilizing. Several prominent executives have jumped ship -- most notably Strauss Zelnick, who quit his job as president of 20th Century Fox Film Corp. this summer to head a video-game company called Crystal Dynamics. This fall dozens of these ventures are at last starting to roll out real products. Among the attractions coming soon to a living-room screen near you:
-- Mortal Kombat, whose release last week in a $10 million Hollywood-style media blitz set off a nationwide debate about the escalating violence in video games (see box). The brutal kick-and-punch game is expected to bring in more than $150 million by Christmas -- roughly equivalent to ticket sales of a hit movie like The Fugitive.
-- Aladdin, which may be the most beautiful video game ever made, features the first game characters hand-drawn by Disney's studio artists. Aladdin's release will be closely tied to that of the home-video version of the movie, which Disney predicts will be the best-selling videotape in history.
-- Voyeur, a kinky murder mystery created by the Hollywood production company that made Madonna's Truth or Dare, stars Hollywood veterans Robert Culp (from the old I Spy series) and Grace Zabriskie (from Twin Peaks). A true hybrid, it shows real motion pictures on the screen while players control which of hundreds of twists and turns the plot will take.