AT WORK WITH: Trip Hawkins; A Visionary On the Border Of Movies And Microchips

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October 27, 1993, Section C, Page 1Buy Reprints
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ON the day word got out that the Bell Atlantic phone company would buy the cable giant Tele-Communications Inc., offering a grand vista of a data superhighway coming to town around the turn of the century, a glimpse into that future was on display in a meeting room in a San Francisco hotel.

Trip Hawkins, founder and president of the 3DO Company, a Silicon Valley start-up, was demonstrating a piece of hardware that he hopes is the forerunner of the "smart box" that will be in homes in the coming interactive age. That is, the day when we will all talk back to our televisions, renting movies by remote control, grazing news broadcasts and, should we admire Connie Chung's zircon earrings, buying a pair after pressing the "shop" button.

Mr. Hawkins wears a perpetual half smile and has the assurance of someone who has repeatedly bucked conventional wisdom and come out much the richer. At 39, he's amassed a fortune of $200 million by managing, at several junctures, to be at the right place at precisely the right moment. Just now, he's standing at a very hot corner: the intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Having been called "the guru of interactivity" by Billboard magazine, Mr. Hawkins has promoted his vision of a two-way news and entertainment future at industry seminars for years. Now, he has something to show for it: the just-released Interactive Multiplayer designed by 3DO and made by Panasonic. When plugged into a television, it partially reveals what will be on in the zillion-channel future.

Demonstrating the machine with the aid of an overhead screen, Mr. Hawkins, joystick in hand, made his way through a spoof of a television game show called "Twisted," which combined video footage of actors with gaudy computer-generated sets. Next, he inserted a Kodak still-photo compact disk and zoomed in to enlarge a human eye to screen-filling proportions. With a graphics chip similar to the one used to create the lifelike dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," the Multiplayer can wrap a person's face around a ball and send it caroming around the screen.

The roomful of middle-management types representing the computer establishment offered polite applause. When Mr. Hawkins called for questions, there were none. Afterward the sharp-tongued Mr. Hawkins complained that the crowd was "clueless about what's going to happen."

"I've been doing this for a long, long time," he said. "I remember talking to crowds back in 1979 about personal computing, and saying: 'Guess what? There's going to be a computer on every desk. You're going to buy them in retail stores.' And they said, 'Hah! Get out of here!' "

Like many Silicon Valley executives, Mr. Hawkins's proudest asset is his vision of a high-tech gizmo-laden future. Almost in direct proportion, he rejects the traditional symbols and perks of corporate power. As soon as he finished his speech and returned to the company offices in Redwood City, 20 miles south of San Francisco, he ripped off his tie and suit jacket. Tall and slightly built, he strode through the corridors where employees were dressed in khaki shorts and baseball hats.

Mr. Hawkins claims he has never flown first class on business, and he doesn't even have a private office. When a job candidate arrived for an interview, Mr. Hawkins led him into the board room for privacy, but even that was a glass-windowed fishbowl.

In 3DO, he has put together one of the first alliances of companies from Hollywood and Silicon Valley: Time Warner and Universal Studios, which will help develop interactive software titles for 3DO machines, and his own Electronic Arts, the hugely successful computer-game maker he started in 1982. There, he began to develop software along the lines of a film studio's creative process. He began calling project managers "producers" and the freelance hackers who submitted game ideas "artists."

At 3DO, where 200 people work, the reception table is piled not with copies of Info World magazine but with Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

Mr. Hawkins's desire to import a bit of Hollywood glamour to Silicon Valley is earnest and a little nerdy. A "Do-er's Profile" of Mr. Hawkins adorning a wall, an in-house knockoff of the Dewar Scotch ads, lists his dream job as "movie star." With rugged features and swept-back hair that laps the top of his ears, he bears a slight resemblance to the actor Harry Hamlin, late of "L.A. Law."

If Mr. Hawkins seems a bit star-struck, Hollywood is hardly sniggering. A procession of industry muckamucks, from Barry Diller of the QVC home-shopping network to Michael Eisner of the Walt Disney Company, has sought his counsel, he says. Other studios have taken appraising looks as well. While no one is about to give up traditional film making, the day seems not far off when films and television shows will be shot with multiple plot lines and endings, allowing viewers to shape the actions by manipulating the controls of interactive players.

"The difference between now and two years ago is that almost all the studios believe it's a business they will be in in the future," Mr. Hawkins said.

He has found himself at the frontier of what he calls the New Hollywood through a decidedly non-A-list media: video games. More than three years ago, he began plotting a new generation of game machine that would offer what he claimed to be 50 times more graphic realism than machines from the likes of Nintendo. With such a leap in technology, he believes, the machines will reach beyond their core audience of "Beavis & Butt-head" fans; adults will buy them to listen to CD's, watch movies, learn from educational software and, eventually, sail smoothly through the shoals of hundreds of channels.

For the moment, however, the machines, which arrived in stores this month, must survive as stand-alone video-game players. That is far from certain, given their price of $699, more than three times as much as the lower-tech competition. Many other companies are also in the race to provide the technology for the digital future.

On speculation that the company could set the multimedia format of the 90's, 3DO's stock price doubled, from $15 to $30, after it went public in June. Yet, Mr. Hawkins claims that the prospect that he could wind up richer than Croesus, like the founder of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates, doesn't interest him. He is acidic discussing Mr. Gates, who he says he believes acquired his billions through monopolistic practices.

"I think the difference between me and Bill is I sometimes wonder what happened to Bill's humanity," Mr. Hawkins said. "I don't know if he is still able to connect a social purpose to what he's doing. I mean, someday Bill will be dead and all that money will go to somebody else. I don't buy into that process."

In this context, it's helpful to know that Mr. Hawkins is a former employee of Apple Computer Inc., a bitter corporate rival of Microsoft. Perhaps what is really on view is Mr. Hawkins's struggle to reconcile vast wealth with the idealism he and Mr. Gates both shared in the early change-the-world years of the personal-computer boom.

Mr. Hawkins predicts that he will leave 3DO in the not-too-distant future and spend his money in "clever, socially useful ways." He especially wants to develop software to improve the ways children learn.

"I'd like to spend all the money I've made," he said. "I don't think it would be healthy to burden my child or children with a vast estate and the feeling they're set for life."

So far, the reaction of his first child, a daughter born a month ago, is unrecorded. Mr. Hawkins and his wife, Diana, a consultant in interactive television and virtual reality, met several years ago at a conference at which they were speakers. They named the girl Savina, and to hear Mr. Hawkins tell it, their motive was similar to that of the father in the song "A Boy Named Sue": the odd name will force her to develop character.

Mr. Hawkins knows whereof he speaks. Born William Hawkins 3d and raised near San Diego, he acquired the nickname Trip when a grandmother remarked, "He's a triplicate."

"Actually," Mr. Hawkins revealed, "I was called 'Trippy' as a child. How about you?"

An interviewer who has the same adult nickname was forced to admit to the awful truth.

After graduating from Harvard University and the Stanford University business school, Mr. Hawkins in 1978 became Apple's 68th employee and its first M.B.A. Steve Jobs, the co-founder of the company, asked him to figure out how to market the first Apples to business customers.

Today, Mr. Hawkins hardly leads an extravagant life. He drives a Lexus with 60,000 miles on it and lives in a two-bedroom house whose main indulgence is a $20,000 home entertainment system. At the office, he works in a neat rectangular space with shoulder-high walls and no door. Its main feature is a vast Rolodex.

"A few years back, I decided I needed to know everyone in the industry," he explained. "I spoke at every industry event on the face of the earth to promote my concept so that even before I talked about 3DO publicly, people would be primed and ready."

It is when he is talking about the blue-sky interactive future that Mr. Hawkins best lives up to his billing as a guru.

"Why not be able to walk into your house in the evening and say, 'O.K., I want to know what happened in the Chicago-Toronto game today,' " said Mr. Hawkins, a die-hard baseball fan who once spent two weeks attending one game at every big-league park. "The TV starts giving me the highlights from the game and I say, 'No, no, no. Give me Ricky Henderson's first at-bat.' "

But the most exciting innovation, he believes, will be movies shot to be interactive.

Yet, given the choice, do viewers really want to interact with their entertainment? Watching, say, "Jurassic Park," wouldn't they prefer to have Steven Spielberg spin the tale of dinosaurs munching on their keepers in an island theme park?

Some viewers might. But not Mr. Hawkins. "I want to be on the island," he said with the characteristic assurance that he'd prevail where others were led astray. "I want to show that I could have done better than those idiots did. I could have gotten out of that situation."