Disney Ride Exec Moves to Cybergames

Moving from one fantasy realm to another, the producer of Disneyland’s lavish Indiana Jones Adventure ride has left Walt Disney Co. to oversee an online “world” being developed by the creator of computer games Myst and Riven.

Former aerospace engineer Susan Bonds, who recently produced another “E-ticket” Disney ride simulating a space voyage, will Susan Bonds

work on a Cyan Inc. project code-named Mud Pie, a multiplayer game set in an ever-evolving Internet world.

Cyan founder Rand Miller said Bonds and other employees will be given ownership stakes in his company as it gears up for Mud Pie, which will cost more than the $10 million spent to develop Riven.

While not a sequel to Myst, the new game is expected to emphasize similarly surreal mysteries and lush environments, instead of the bloody confrontations and dark surprises that are standard fare on many computer games.

“What has always been important at Disneyland is to leave the real world behind and find a whole new one to explore while being safe,” Bonds said. The same thing is true of Cyan’s manufactured worlds, she said. “No one’s going to try to kill [players] around the corner.”

In hiring Bonds as design and production chief, Cyan is seeking her experience in balancing budgets as well as in creating the fantasy environments that Disney park designers pride themselves on. Officials said the post also will send a message to other game developers.

“It just reinforces that what we’re doing is real,” Cyan spokesman Jeff Oswalt said from the company’s 45-employee offices in Mead, Wash., near Spokane.

Bonds’ resignation from Walt Disney Imagineering, effective last Friday, illustrates how new-media companies are luring away star storytellers from older media, looking for an edge in the crowded computer-game arena and other new ventures.

Others drawn to computer games include novelist-screenwriter Stephen King, who recently worked with Presto Studios in San Diego on a teen-oriented horror game named Stephen King’s F13. Authors Michael Crichton (“Jurassic Park,” “Andromeda Strain”) and Douglas Adams (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”) have gone a step further, setting up their own new-media companies.

Previous Disney Imagineering departures include the unit’s former president, Kenneth Wong, who now heads an online entertainment company backed by filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard, and former executives Eddie Sotto, Bran Ferren and Danny Hillis, all of whom left for high-tech start-ups.

Bonds, a former engineer at Lockheed Corp.’s top-secret Skunk Works, said Doris Woodward, producer of Hong Kong Disneyland, also worked her last day at Imagineering on Friday. Woodward couldn’t be reached for comment.

Disney spokesman John Dreyer didn’t respond to a request for comment on the departures of Bonds and Woodward.