A Fork in the Tale is a five CD live-action adventure game shot with a first-person perspective. Fork offers lightning fast action, a whole cast of characters with whom the player will interact, and a variety of challenging game-play elements. Adventure gamers are right at home with Fork's inventive puzzles, plus new game elements including magical gestures, defensive weapons, chase scenes, and an interactive fist fight add a new dimension to the category.
Fork was shot over a period of 28 days across 8 locations in Marin County, California. A total of fifty actors and extras were involved.
ARi has created a solution, a technological breakthrough called the "Immersion Engine." The result allows "A Fork in the Tale" to feature seamless branching video with spontaneous interactivity. The system takes video clips, mixes them with sound, allows graphics to be overlaid, and creates complex scripts in which multiple paths move the player from video clip to clip -- and makes it all flow like a movie, except that it is interactive as well. Another feature is that the engine remembers what the player has already seen, and presents only new materials based upon the story development. Normally, a computer will proceed in a linear fashion, finishing one task before begining the next -- and on a CD, this can mean a delay of up to a half-second with no action while the read-head repositions itself. The Immersion Engine takes a different approach utilizing asynchronous searches. When the game player clicks on a desired action, the program initiates an immediate search to the new clip while it continues to play buffered data of the current clip. By the time the current clip has finished playing, the next clip is ready to go--creating some of the smoothest audio/video ever captured on a CD ROM.