Cyan Designer Rides Disney Experience Into Mudpie New Project For Spokane Company Will Be Web Game

Two months ago, Susan Bonds quit a dream job, designing theme park rides for Walt Disney Imagineering to take on a new challenge.

Now she works at Cyan, where her job is to fashion a different sort of wild ride, a breakthrough 3-D entertainment game using cutting-edge media.

Bonds, 39, has joined the 45-person company as its first-ever chief design and production officer.

Her goal is making sure Spokane-based Cyan, which scored megahits with Myst and Riven, produces the game industry’s Next Really Big Thing.

During 12 years at Walt Disney Imagineering, Bonds used her engineering background to help design and produce two major rides - the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland and the yet-unfinished Mission: Space ride at Epcot Center.

She will use the same skills in her new job, Bonds said in an interview.

But instead of masterminding a ride-through experience in a theme park, her new focus will be coordinating the design of a software-based environment.

The Disney job meant controlling riders in a car or machine, whirling them along a track in a series of positions, where they encountered assorted noises, objects and video projections.

At Cyan she’ll help complete the company’s massive, unfinished game project, code-named Mudpie. That name is meant to have no specific meaning, said Cyan officials.

The game is expected to involve multiple players, all connected via broadband Internet connections, moving as themselves through a world dense with sounds, people and mysterious challenges.

Cyan hopes Mudpie changes the notion of what can be done in an online game, said Bonds. Its designers will make it richer with texture, more realistic and more visually complete than any other online game, Bond added.

If most games are just colors and images on a screen, Cyan is hoping Mudpie erases a gameplayer’s notion of looking at a computer screen.

“The best way to describe it, it will be like being in a movie,” she said.

Like Riven and Myst, players must explore, discover and gradually develop an understanding of how to navigate the world, said Rand Miller, Cyan’s president and chief executive.

Miller first met Bonds three years ago while she was still with Disney Imagineering. At that time, Rand and his brother, Robyn Miller, were exploring development of a Myst-like environmental system that might resemble rides Bonds was creating. That project never materialized. But Miller liked Bonds, and, earlier this year, asked her to work at Cyan.

“The logistics and creative energy necessary for this next project are mind-boggling,” said Rand Miller.

“Susan has a phenomenal history of making very big things happen,” he said.

Bonds decided she wanted to be involved in something no one had ever tried to do before.

“We’re definitely forging into the future of how people will use broadband entertainment,” she said.

Neither Miller nor Bonds would disclose her salary.

Bonds graduated with a degree in industrial engineering from Georgia Tech University. She worked at Lockheed in Southern California before moving to Disney.

As challenging as the complicated theme park rides were, the Mudpie project might be a more complex challenge, Bonds said.

The theme rides last only three or four minutes. Mudpie, meant to be open-ended, will allow users to change the way things turn out.

“It’s designed so that the user has a lot of control, a high level of interactivity,” said Bonds.

“In both (theme park rides and Mudpie), it’s a matter of integrating an experience that has high degrees of technology with something that has a high degree of visual storytelling,” she said.

The hard part of the new job, she added, is not knowing every element of the project as the Cyan team moves ahead with development.

“An engineer looks at an idea from all angles and then has that comfort of knowing pretty much all there is about the project,” said Bonds. “But we’re starting with a new idea. We have to realize we’re doing something that just hasn’t been done before.”

After meeting the work team at Cyan, Bonds has no doubts the project will succeed.

“We have a talent base here that can do the impossible,” Bonds said.