Long Journey to Reality : Entertainment: After five years of misadventure, Irvine company’s ‘Stonekeep’ CD-ROM game is due out next week--really.

The imaginary worlds of CD-ROM computer games are populated by legions of “stalwart adventurers,” and the latest to assume this mantle is Drake, the stubble-faced hero of “Stonekeep,” a glossy adventure game scheduled to be released Wednesday by Interplay Productions.

Drake’s challenge is awesome. Before he can rescue the periled goddess Thera, he must navigate 22 levels of competition in a dimly lit dungeon, searching for clues, battling disembodied foes and liberating a dragon from bondage.

But Drake’s trials might seem like tea parties compared to the brutal tests confronted by Michael Quarles and the other Interplay employees who created “Stonekeep.” Quarles, 32, has spent the past five years--about 15% of his life, he readily points out--shepherding this troubled project from concept to compact disc.

Filming the game’s movie-like live action sequences proved so difficult that scenes had to be re-shot three times. Nerves became so frayed that the game’s chief programmer and several key artists walked out last year. Along the way, two release dates--Christmas of both 1993 and 1994--came and went.

Now, on the eve of what Interplay insists is the final release date, the company says it has already shipped 175,000 copies of the game, its biggest shipment ever, and expectations are soaring. But the ultimate test is still to come for Drake and Quarles.

Will “Stonekeep” be the biggest hit yet in the privately held Irvine company’s 12-year history, topping the success of its popular “Descent” spaceship-simulation game? Or will it be the cyber equivalent of “Waterworld,” the notorious Kevin Costner movie that cost more than any other Hollywood production in history, but slowly sank at the box office?

The 15-hour days and seven-day workweeks are over now for the “Stonekeep” team, and Quarles appeared fresh on Halloween day as he talked about the game’s development.

“It was disappointment after disappointment,” said Quarles, a compact man who speaks in a soft voice. “Every time we turned around, we thought the next solution would be the final one, and then it wouldn’t work.”

*

Outside, in a courtyard below his office, employees wearing costumes capped off a rowdy, midday Halloween party by lighting a firecracker inside an empty two-liter soda bottle. Quarles pointed to the corner of the courtyard, where a wooden post stretched into the sky, like a forgotten shipwreck’s mast. That post, Quarles said, has become a symbol of the “Stonekeep” saga.

In September, 1992, employees hung a 50-by-50-foot blue screen from the post to serve as the backdrop for filming the game’s special effects footage. The game’s creators had big dreams of making a three-dimensional computer world, with characters that had complex behavior, reacting differently depending on the actions of the hero.

But the technology to produce such creatures wasn’t there yet, so Interplay hoped to film live actors in costumes, convert the images to computer graphics, then place them on top of the 3-D dungeon background. This approach wouldn’t be necessary today, with new computer systems capable of rendering lifelike characters. But at the time, Interplay’s plans were on the cutting edge.

When filming started, the “Stonekeep” project was already two years old, nearly twice as long as it takes to produce a typical game, because the company had to search for a way to create the 3-D dungeon. But employees were playful as they donned monster costumes to take part in scenes to be incorporated into the game’s fight sequences.

The first to go before the camera was an animator outfitted in a blue suit and wearing a fake skeleton strapped to the front of his body. With a few charges toward the camera, and a few swings of a sword, one fight scene was filmed and ready to be transformed into digital computer images that could then be loaded into the game. One by one, similar scenes with different creatures were filmed over the next five months, until most of the game’s live-action sequences were completed.

Then came the first major setback.

When the footage was loaded into the computer and replayed, the characters flickered like wind-blown candles. The “Stonekeep” team had filmed the scenes in the outdoor courtyard because it was easy, but they failed to account for the fact that natural lighting changes by the day, and sometimes by the minute.

“You’d have creatures walk down the dungeon flash bright and then flash dim,” Quarles said.

Everything would have to be re-shot, this time in an artificially lit Hollywood studio.

Two months later, more problems surfaced. The game’s fight scenes, viewed through Drake’s eyes, take place at such close range that the attacker is seen only from the knees up. So, naturally, when the scenes were being filmed, the actors were filmed only from the knees up.

Trouble was, when Drake backed away from a fight--as the programmers had enabled him to do--the creatures had no ankles or feet. Again, everything had to be re-shot, this time with a wide-angle lens.

Within the “Stonekeep” team--which generally included about 15 programmers, artists and other contributors--tensions were starting to rise, as the excitement so prevalent at the start of the project began to fade.

“The beginning of a project is almost always the most fun,” said Quarles, who had begun sleeping in his office two nights a week. “You’re creating everything new. By the end, you’re just fixing things that didn’t work, trying to get it out. To keep a team motivated when they have to keep redoing work is hard.”

After giving up on a Christmas, 1993, release, Interplay began eyeing Christmas, 1994--with such confidence that the company placed ads for the game in magazines, bought space in computer catalogues and launched a “Stonekeep” contest with a grand prize trip to Scotland.

But this time, the team was undone by technology itself. “Stonekeep” was originally planned to be sold on floppy disks, but by 1993, bigger, faster CD-ROMs were becoming increasingly popular with personal computer users. Suddenly, Interplay had a much bigger canvas to fill with new sights and sounds, and little time to do it.

In October, 1994, after a morning meeting that stretched into the afternoon, the team realized a Christmas release was hopeless. Quarles--known as “Q” by his co-workers--left to deliver the bad news to the company’s chief executive, Brian Fargo.

“I said, ‘We’re not going to make it for Christmas,’ ” Quarles recalls telling the boss. Fargo’s face turned to stone as he replied, “This is very disappointing, Q.”

Quarles had been the eighth employee hired at Interplay, a company with 400 workers now, and had always been close friends with Fargo. But the “Stonekeep” project strained many relations at Interplay, and this was one of them.

“I felt like I’d done a poor job, and he felt I’d let him down,” Quarles said. “We’d look at each other in the halls, but talked only by e-mail. I thought for a long time I’d be fired after ‘Stonekeep’ was done.”

Fargo, who had come up with the original “Stonekeep” concept in 1988, says he is thrilled with the finished product and chuckles at Quarles’ fears, but admits that he was exasperated when the second Christmas deadline was missed.

“I don’t yell and I don’t cuss, but I had to show my frustration,” Fargo said. “We were running contests, my sales force has relationships with buyers. There was a tremendous amount of pressure on everybody.”

It was about this time that the project’s lead programmer left. Peter Oliphant, 41, had written the original three-page script for the game, and had done the bulk of the programming ever since.

But by the end of his fourth year on the “Stonekeep” team, Oliphant was clashing with Quarles over the direction of the game. A breathtakingly creative project had become little more than an endless series of programming repair jobs and scrambles to meet deadlines.

“Originally, the whole project was supposed to last nine months,” said Oliphant, now an independent game designer in Santa Ana. But as December, 1994, approached, “I knew we weren’t going to make Christmas, and I couldn’t take another year.”

After some fine-tuning in recent months, “Stonekeep” finally hits store shelves Wednesday. Experts say it’s not the blockbuster it might have been, but it’s good enough.

“If this game had come out two years ago, it would have really knocked people for a loop,” said Arnie Katz, who reviews games for Fusion magazine in Las Vegas. “It’s still one of the best new products, and I believe it will easily sell half a million copies.”

With the game priced at about $50, that would mean $25 million in sales, more than enough to cover the $5 million it cost Interplay to make the game, plus all the marketing, manufacturing and shipping expenses.

Quarles is confident “Stonekeep” will be Interplay’s biggest seller yet, but he acknowledges that releasing this game, this “15% of my life,” still makes him feel uneasy.

“I feel like a proud dad,” he said, then paused to correct himself. “No--maybe it’s more like when your son graduates from school. It’s like I’m giving it to the world.”

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‘Stonekeep’ Saga

After five years in the making and two missed release dates, “Stonekeep,” Interplay Productions’ new role-playing game, is due in stores next Wednesday. Here’s how the game developed:

November, 1990: Michael Quarles joins Interplay’s “Stonekeep” team as producer and begins experimenting with 3-D renderings.

September, 1992: Full-scale filming begins in courtyard outside Interplay’s offices.

February, 1993: Team discovers improper lighting has rendered major portion of digitized 3-D film footage unusable. Five months of work must be redone; Christmas release date is scrapped.

April: Second filming efforts fail, and footage must be shot a third time.

October, 1994: After nearly two years of setbacks, company morale reaches all-time low. Lead programmer Peter Oliphant leaves project, as do several artists. Christmas, 1994, release date scrapped.

March, 1995: Final scripting and programming completed.

Source: Interplay Productions; Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times

Interplay at a Glance

* Founded: 1983

* Headquarters: Irvine

* Founder and CEO: Brian Fargo

* Employees: 400, including 350 in Irvine

* Product: Entertainment software

* Popular game titles: “Descent,” “Mario Teaches Typing,” “Battle Chess,” “Star Trek 25th Anniversary,” “Buzz Aldrin’s Race Into Space,” “Out of This World,” and “Stonekeep,” due out next week.

Source: Interplay Productions;

Researched by JANICE L. JONES / Los Angeles Times