Eat or Be Eaten, a hilarious and byzantine comedy adventure, is one of the few surviving artifacts of a time when the Firesign Theatre was somehow both blazing a technological trail ten years ahead of their time and nearly breaking up for lack of work.
The four founding members of Firesign--Philip Austin, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and Philip Proctor--had spent their first ten years as a group on Columbia Records under contract: a handy thing that insured there was a big company paying them to make records. That went away in 1976 when their deal went unrenewed. For five years they scrambled to find new ways to keep the band together. Geographically, they all still lived nearby--Ossman in Santa Barbara, the others in greater Los Angeles--but Firesign only existed as long as they could manage to will it back into being. They did local gigs, they did short national tours, and they recorded a series of EPs and LPs for local indie Rhino Records. Rhino was a reissue label with a big sense of humor but without the corporate bankroll, so a record contract was not in the cards.
In 1981 Firesign and engineer Fred Jones recorded The Pink Hotel Burns Down, an album pilot developed by Firesign for Warner Bros. Driven in no small part by Bergman's love of gaming culture, Pink Hotel was the first scene of a potential larger work in which a lackadaisical player (Ossman) encounters lunchworms and Halflings, and gets his car stolen by some trolls from Oedipal Wrecks Garage: all in an environment that mashed up video games, role-playing games, and virtual reality. It was brilliantly forward-looking and had some of the juiciest production values in the group's history. Warners didn't buy it. Shortly thereafter Ossman left the group for the East Coast and a job with NPR.
Austin, Bergman, and Proctor jointly decided to go on without Ossman, to keep calling themselves Firesign Theatre, and to court Hollywood more aggressively. They started a production shingle, Pyro Playhouse, and rented offices on the Warners lot. The works that followed were crucially missing Ossman's voice, but the writing and performances were strong as ever. Their re-voiced, re-edited Republic Serials piss-take Hot Shorts was a home video hit, and remains Firesign's most-bootlegged product on YouTube. And the first Firesign "Three-Atre" album, a Nick Danger piece for Rhino called The Three Faces of Al (1984), was the world's first comedy CD and was nominated for a Grammy.
In a music industry dominated by record sales, the compact disc was a comer; the Japanese got their first taste in 1982 and Europeans and Americans the following year. One influential advocate for CDs in America was Stan Cornyn, the former #2 at Warner Bros. Records and then-Senior VP of Warner New Music Group. In 1984 he was made CEO of Warner New Media, a division in charge of exploring the extra-musical possibilities of the new digital realm. "I was interested in the fact that CDs could be interactive, and Firesign had an office in our building," Cornyn says. "I was determined to use them in our projects. We paid them very little, but we liked them."
Warner New Media made an alliance with Philips, the Dutch electronics giant that had invented the home video recorder, the compact audio cassette, and (with Sony) the compact disc. The technologists were particularly interested in exploiting an existing but little-used feature of the format. The data on an audio CD is arranged in frames; each frame contains 33 bytes--24 for audio, 8 for error correction, and 1 for subcode. The subcode byte has eight bits, or channels: P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, and W. Under Red Book standards, P and Q are used to store timing information. The rest are unused. Most CD manufacturers leave them blank, and most CD players don't read them. To which creative engineers everywhere responded: Hey wait a minute...
"Stan Cornyn was a great seer, a kind of Ray Bradbury of the business," said Phil Proctor in a 1995 interview, "who was basically predicting this form of interactive entertainment before it even existed." What Cornyn and company had in mind was a new format, CD+G: just like regular CDs but with 4-bit (16-color) graphics encoded into those oh-so-available subcode channels R through W. With 99 tracks available on a disc, theoretically one could design a game where players had to navigate tracks in the right order to solve puzzles, with sound and pictures to guide them. Cornyn hired Firesign to do some brainstorming. Starting in September 1983, Firesign presented Cornyn with a series of pitches, including "Dungeons and Gangsters", "Labyrinth of Time", and "The Seven Levels of the Mystery Maze".
From July to September 1984, Firesign wrote and recorded 64 minutes of game audio for their project, now retitled "Eat or Be Eaten". Fred Jones was again the engineer. Austin brought along two creative partners: artist Bruce Litz and radio announcer Laura Quinn, both former collaborators from his 1977 Sunday night KROQ show Hollywood Nite Shift. Litz designed subcode graphics, plus a game board, maps, playing cards, fake ads and more. The game had four levels, which had to be solved in order: a map of Kudzu County, a rebus game with cards, a Colonial America adventure, and a crossword puzzle. In each level, the player collected a few keywords, which at the end could be plugged into a fill-in-the-blanks sentence to complete the "Phrase that Pays". Players would then write the phrase on a SASE and mail to to Firesign for a change to win some signed merchandise.
"Peter and I got interested in the idea of games coming right off 1982," says Phil Austin. "I have his old TRS-80 in the attic somewhere. Suddenly computers were accessible enough that we saw a glimmer of an entertainment future in it. What we were really interested in doing was making an entertainment out of programming." More than gaming, though, Austin was in love with world-building. "We started out with a map of what we were doing," he says, "and then tried to piece something together out of that. We're creating Labyrinth, and the worlds, and the towns, and that's more interesting to me than the game itself."
Then in October 1984, Cinemax called. The network had been getting ink for their Cinemax Comedy Experiment series where they invited established and up-and-coming comics--Harry Shearer, Martin Mull, Emo Philips, et al--to produce a half hour on the cheap in exchange for being left to their own creative devices. Firesign pitched "The Gimmes", a fake awards show wherein Hollywood's best and brightest would vie for a Gimme: a golden statuette of an actor on his knees begging. In the end, though, they repurposed characters and situations from their "Eat or Be Eaten" scenario into a new narrative told from the point of view of two newscasters, Hee and Shee, as they witness the citizens of Kudzu County sacrificing a virgin to their county's titular climbing vine.
Given permission from Cornyn, and network approval for their story pitch, Firesign started their first script draft in June 1985. With Austin directing, they shot the special in six days in August, with a final budget of $165,000. As Austin edited the special, Bergman took charge of adapting their game audio into a comedy album for Philips' Mercury/PolyGram label. In this new rendition, Player (Bergman) goes to Wimpy's Software and picks up a new game, Eat or Be Eaten, which, he's warned, is being recalled due to bugs. He pops it in his car's CD player and enters the world of Kudzu County, and when he takes a wrong turn, he gets sucked into the software; his only way out is to save a golden-voiced Sphinx named Hawkmoth (Laura Quinn) and to win the game. Most of the audio came straight from the game version, with Firesign and Quinn going back into the studio to record new wraparounds.
By the time the Cinemax special aired in October, the game idea had begun to fade. In July 1985 Bruce Litz mailed Firesign a newly revised game map; it's the last time the game is mentioned in Firesign's correspondence. Eat or Be Eaten the comedy album debuted in early 1986 on LP and CD--the CD being the world's first in CD+G format. The November 1985 issue of Digital Audio magazine noted ruefully that consumers would need both a CD+G player and a standalone decoder to see the graphics. Interestingly, the article doesn't mention the Cinemax special, but the writers give a glowing review of...the game. They played it! They loved it! But what was it? Firesign saved the full game audio session tapes (a generous sampling of which is included here as bonus tracks), but, although a game maps and cards survive, plus seven pages of dot matrix-printed instructions, a lot of detective work and testing would be required before a working game could be reconstituted.
In the years that followed, CD+G never caught on as a game format; instead it was repurposed to provide low-res graphics and lyrics on karaoke CDs. (If you can score an original Eat or Be Eaten CD, you can pop it into any karaoke player, not to mention many brands of DVD players, and behold those oddly charming subcode graphics in their original sixteen-color, 1980s-tastic glory. For your convenience we've captured that experience in a Quicktime movie file, which you can view by popping this disc into your computer's drive.)
Philips, meanwhile, took a left turn and joined with Sony to develop new Green Book standards for their multimedia CD-I format. CD-I software ended up being dominated by educational, self-help, and music-related titles, and the gaming option was eclipsed by more popular platforms like Nintendo 64 and PlayStation. The first Philips CD-I player appeared in 1991, and by 1998 it was discontinued.
Eat or Be Eaten was the last new material Firesign Theatre officially released until Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's Back from the Shadows CD in 1994. Austin, Bergman, and Proctor spent 1986-8 developing a series of never-produced scripts for Lorimar, including a pilot for a Ringo Starr / Billy Connolly TV show. Eat or Be Eaten morphed into a pitch for a "Kudzu Country" soap opera, and the last item in the project archive is a note on a legal pad written just after a phone call on 10/1/1987: "Stu Bloomberg (ABC) says no and...DON'T come back at him soon."
Why was the game never released? Maybe that's the wrong question considering how, statistically, the percentage of projects that DO get released in this business is close to zero. Austin is sanguine, and notes that technology cuts both ways--new hardware brings new possibilities, but it also leads to format wars. "The Betamax experience has unnerved everybody", he says. "Caution was entering in. You're still in an era in 1985 where basically most of the population doesn't have a computer in the home. And no internet. It's the last vision of the old world, the fact that this thing would have a game board. But it was an exciting and interesting time looking back on it, and God knows we were in the thick of it on the audio end."
--Taylor Jessen
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