Gus: So, I'm going to ask you the question every journalist does, and you're going to give me the blank answer: what are you doing now?

Rand: Yeah, yeah! It's an easy one to answer, because we don't know. The fact of the matter is, we are not a very good business - or maybe this is the way to run a business, I don't know - but we were so focused on Riven we didn't break off another team of people during Riven and say 'you go figure what we're going to do next' and then we'd roll right over into it. We put all our energy into Riven, there was no one working on anything else. And whenever we tried to hire someone else, they ended up working on Riven. It happened several times.

So it came to the end of the project and it was like, 'woah, take a breath'. And I think that was wise because we'd burn out. Had we made a decision earlier on what we'd do next, that attitude would have affected it. Maybe when you step back, cool off and take some vacations and also catch up with technologies that other people have done. And then make a decision that is obviously going to affect our future. So you've had a glimpse of some of the things we've been looking at. We're looking at the realtime thing. Intel has some announcements of new hardware that's going to do things, and rumours of consoles coming out. I don't have privy information, but I'd sure like to know.

Gus: That seems strange, to put yourself in that position. Your previous games, although technically demanding in one way, you have one still selling quite strongly that isn't a hostage to technology fortunes that other publishers are. You get into realtime, or developing for Katana or whatever, you get into that rat race which you are out of.

Rand: In one way yes, in another way no. It depends on how you design. We are always in that rat race. You are right, we have some benefits. The ultimate benefit is like making movies, where the delivery technology never changes. That must be like a dream. All you have to worry about is the movie, not delivering it. To some extent we wrestled with that all along. And we may decide hey, let's do it just the same. But I don't want to make that decision in a vacuum.

When we looked at doing Riven, we looked at 'virtual bubbles' and VR [360 image techniques] and honestly did some tests that way before we decided, 'no that's not as good, that's not doing the job'.

Gus: VR bubbles like those in Zork?

Rand: Yeah. There was too much distortion, the picture would move, snap, blur and a lot of the detail was just blown out. We wanted DETAIL. We wanted every image where you could see the detail we were putting in. It was a conscious decision in Riven, I want to make sure it's a conscious decision again, whatever we work on: we're doing it because we've seen everything, we know where it is and we're doing it this way. I'm only being vague because we really don't know what's coming next. It's nice to have the luxury of examining things.

Gus: You've expanded quite a bit. Will you ever be more than a one-project company?

Rand: Good question. This was really big for us. We got up to 25 people. We're actually down again, because a lot of the artists on Riven went on to bigger and better things. But that was huge, controlling that size company and still maintaining the integrity of your product. It's like the bigger you get, the less control you have, and it's got to be like that with multiple products at the same time, you lose a little bit. It's just not a decision we've made yet.

Now, Robyn has gone on to look at other things, more worlds, other worlds. He's kind of out of the Myst and Riven thing. He's the visionary, or at least one of the visionaries. So his goal is to jump ahead and define whole new worlds. And I'm saying 'I like the Riven world, I'm going to stay with that a bit and see what happens'. So we have the potential to do a couple of things at once, but whatever we do I think we'll do it together.

Gus: Thank you very much.