Before Second Life ever existed, heck, before DVDs ever existed, there were companies making amazing video cassettes of computer-generated animation. Some foolishly passed them off as novelties of the age, but as would soon become apparent in the years to come (remember, it's been just over a decade since Toy Story was released), such imaginary landscapes would become an ubiquitous, and at times, even unfortunately banal part of our world.
Sometimes to be fresh, you have to revisit your roots. And so —
I'm doing followup on something incredible I've mentioned before: one of the things that led to my interest in online worlds was Beyond the Mind's Eye (and Gate to the Mind's Eye to a lesser extent). Marrying then-state-of-the-art computer imagery with the soulfully synthetic tunes of Jan Hammer (yeah, the same guy behind the Miami Vice music!), memories were seared into me. For a kid with big interests in cyberpunk & virtual reality, there was no question I wanted to fully explore, immerse, and outright dive into a sea of digital nations like the ones shown to me on the screen.
Besides the flagship "Seeds", another ostentatious fave of mine was "Theater of Magic" (on the CD soundtrack it's called "Magic Theater"). I did find a brief clip, but much to my sheer delight, byte150m on YouTube fulfilled my special request and UPLOADED IT IN ITS FULL GLORY!
Watch, please, you must!
It's stood the test of time, and it's no less emotional for me today. The soprano-saxish catchy melody played by the statue-Hermes-guy, the carousel with a liquidly metallic angelfish flying out of it, the traversing of the metallic labyrinth, and the checkerboard islands in the sky with gyrating discs floating past, etc. *sheds joyful tear*
If you like this kind of thing, be sure to check out more videos that byte150m's uploaded — he's got some of my fave music vids in there too (that I used to watch on MTV Amp), and more classic computer animation.