Interplay Digs Deep to Develop Discs

After a decade of producing computer games on floppy disks, the head of Interplay Productions Inc. in Irvine gave the order last year to shut down all new production of such titles.

Instead, company President Brian Fargo invested $3 million in new computer equipment and diverted all development money to CD-ROM games. He feared a drop in sales as the company shifted, but the trough never appeared.

“I believe it’s going to be a CD-ROM world, at least by Christmas,” Fargo said in an interview at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. “CD-ROM is steaming ahead.”

Even with 20 CD-ROM projects already being developed, Interplay is digging deep into its pockets for money to do more. Last week, the company announced that it has invested in Northstar Studios, a new Palo Alto company headed by video game industry veteran Ronald Spitzer. Fargo said the investment was a strategic move that will generate CD-ROM games and games on other platforms for Interplay over the next several years.

With an estimated $60 million in 1993 sales, Interplay is now Orange County’s second-largest video game company behind Virgin Interactive Entertainment Inc. Half of its revenue comes from CD-ROM game sales, Fargo said.

Besides creating new titles, Interplay is making money by converting older floppy disk titles to the CD-ROM format. In the next several months, the company plans to release a new version of “Sim City”--a popular game that simulates the growth or decline of cities--on CD-ROM with video and enhanced computer animations.

An added incentive for such conversions is that the CDs are a read-only format, so they can’t be pirated easily. The data is permanently encoded and can’t be erased or modified.

Fargo estimates that for every floppy-disk game his company sold, eight to 10 illegal copies were made.

Some rewritable discs are being made, but the CD-ROM drives necessary to play them are expensive. Yamaha Corp. of America in Buena Park plans to introduce one such product this spring for about $3,000.

“We don’t want the industry to create a rewritable CD as a standard,” Fargo said. “If that happens, then we’re back to the drawing board.”