The video below is a brief walk-through of The Mackerel Stack 2.0, which was our digital brochure, created in 1993.
Fun Fact:
The Mackerel Stack 2.0 was made in SuperCard, which is basically HyperCard with some extras, like glorious 8 bit colour.
Fun Fact:
The Mackerel Stack was filled with fun facts, like: Mackerel are fast! They’re capable of bursts of speed of up to 5.5 metres per second.
Fun Fact:
The Mackerel Stack made quite a splash in 1993. It spread far and wide on the pre-web internet. We won many awards, and got calls from all over the world; I even did an interview for BBC Radio about Virtual Bubble Wrap, (which is an easter egg within the Mackerel Stack, but you saw that if you watched the video).
Fun Fact: I invented Virtual Bubble Wrap. Actually, that’s more of a brag than a Fun Fact but it’s true. The Mackerel Stack 2.0 contains the very first instance of Virtual Bubble Wrap, a mini-game that has been copied so many times that it’s hard to believe that it even had an original creator.
Concept and Game Design: Dave Groff
Graphics, Interaction, and Programming: Karl Borst and Kevin Steele.
Here’s an easy lesson: animated transitions are useful and relevant UX tools. Every screen in the Mackerel Stack loads in a controlled way with a brief animation. Apart from being more fun, this served two practical purposes:
1. Computers were slow! It took a few seconds to load all the pieces from the disc to the screen. It looked laggy and ugly when things just appeared haphazardly as they loaded. However, if we pre-loaded elements off screen and brought them on stage with a snappy animation, it suddenly felt faster and cleaner, (even if it took an extra second).
2. We could also control the order that we brought things on stage. As a rule of thumb, we tended to load the most important things last. If you have a look at the opening screen, the last thing to load is a giant question mark, which, when clicked, will load the main menu. We got a lot of usability mileage out of screen-builds.
Screen-builds are still relevant today, because web pages also feel ugly and laggy when things load haphazardly, (we just got used to it). Loading words and pictures in a certain order is a powerful device that enables storytelling; without this control there is just visual noise and waiting. We lost a lot of nuance and fidelity when we lost the ability to control how things loaded onto the screen, and it remained lost for a long time.
Designers regained that control with CSS animation. The animated screen-build at the top of the home page is a nod to this decades-old interactive design tool that died, and now has a new life.
Since you're still reading, I'd like to talk about a bigger lesson learned in the early ninties.
I’ve often said that 90% of the knowledge I use every day, I learned in the last five to seven years. This industry moves very fast, and you have to be adaptable. But it’s equally true that if older knowledge has managed to stay relevant, it must be pretty important. So before we leave 1993, a few words about what new media was like when it was new.
It’s no exaggeration to say that artists in the early nineties transformed software from a tool, to a bona fide communications medium. We were telling stories that were untellable in previous media, and we were blowing our minds in the process. Through the rear view mirror, Digital Media seems inevitable now. Even at the time, when it was just getting started, we believed, like religious converts, in its inevitability. I read my share of McLuhan, and some of the digital prophets like Timothy Leary, Stewart Brand, and Nicholas Negroponte. They said to look for the convergence of computers, the telephone, and television. I was primed and watching for it.
But importantly, none of us knew what this convergence would actually look like until we started making it happen.
By 1993, I had been working 60-80 hours a week for three years, literally giving form to a new medium. Over that time I almost never repeated myself with my design, because, with so much to explore, it would have felt like cheating. I made very little money, but my mind was blown by something new almost every single day.
Here’s the big lesson: after three years of staring at a screen all day, I found myself in an art gallery, looking at a painting — a Dutch master, I don’t remember who. And my mind was blown again. I thought “Oh my god! This image is made with actual pigment, applied directly by human hands, with a brush. It was smelled and felt. What alchemy is this?” It felt brand new to me, as if painting itself was being created ex nihilo right in front of my eyes.
That insight was an important one for me, that painting, (or music, or poetry), could be a new medium, with no pre-existing form or cannon. I forget and struggle to regain it every few years. I’m not sure if I could have learned this lesson if I hadn’t been part of the actual birth of another new medium, but I know it must be possible.
I know it’s possible, because surely every artist, writer, musician or designer of worth has known in their bones that they were inventing their medium, from scratch. You know that your medium is not a language that you learn, not something you’re taught. It is created by YOU and OWNED.
It’s always new.