Ex-Espn Exec To Help Cyan Get Connected Evey, A Former Getty Oil Vp, Will Lead Strategic Planning

The 30-something designers of Myst and Riven have hired a 66-year former cable television executive to lift Mead-based Cyan to global prominence.

After earning wide praise and huge profits with those landmark CD-ROM games, the 30-person company plans to take a giant step into 3-D interactive game design.

To move the company forward, Cyan founder and CEO Rand Miller recently named Stuart W. Evey as director of strategic planning.

Evey is the first person given that position in Cyan’s 15-year history.

“We’ve done all right so far, but all of us here (at Cyan) are either tech people or artists,” Miller said in an interview Friday.

“The key to the next phase of our company is building key relationships in the industry,” he added.

“And Stu will help us do that,” said Miller. “He’s extremely well connected.”

Evey, a Spokane native, was a vice president with Getty Oil Co. until it was sold to Texaco in 1984. While there he helped Getty underwrite the creation in 1979 of ESPN, now the top cable sports network.

He served as ESPN’s chairman from 1982 until it was bought by ABC-TV/Capital Cities in 1984.

“My role is to be the person who’s been there, making contacts in the industry and helping Cyan keep itself a significant and incredibly creative company,” said Evey.

His salary was not disclosed.

Myst, released in 1993, and Riven, produced in 1998, sold more than 7 million copies.

Gearing up for its next effort, Cyan has remodeled its Newport Highway building to add work space for 10 designers and artists hired in the past several months.

Their full-time project is Cyan’s still-untitled next game.

Code-named “Mud Pie,” Miller said the game will go beyond the CD-ROM technology used in Myst and Riven and rely on broadband high-speed Internet connections.

Players also will be able to interact in real time with other players across the planet, via high-speed video and audio connections.

Visually, “Mud Pie” will push online gameplaying to the cutting edge of 3-D technology. “It’s amazing how fast the technology is changing,” Miller said.

Miller said he’s reluctant to describe the new game too fully.

“It will provide entertainment, so I guess it’s a game,” he said.

But he said he’s not sure whether the word “game” fully captures the product’s intent and layers of action.

“Mud Pie” will also resemble Myst and Riven in being a detailed, sensory-rich environment with multi ple layers and complex characters.

“That’s what we’re still doing - building large worlds that people are drawn to explore,” said Miller.

Evey said he’s sure Cyan is at a “springboard” moment in the evolution of digital entertainment.

The planned merger of Time Warner Inc. and America Online demonstrates the vast investment being made in online and home-cable entertainment, he added.

Those high-speed systems, using cable TV, fiber optics or high-speed phone lines, will eventually require more content, analysts say.

Both Miller and Evey agree that Cyan’s next project will fill that content need.

“Mud Pie” is being designed from the start for that type of interactive, high-speed technology.

“From our standpoint,” said Miller, “the best way is to develop a unique product targeted just for that medium.

Cyan has a schedule for the completion and release of “Mud Pie,” Miller said, “but I don’t want to give out that date yet.”