It's backed by a million-dollar marketing campaign and generates a fevered buzz in well-traveled chat rooms. It offers at least one technological first. And its earnings are likely to exceed the box office of some major motion pictures. It's Activsion's new, hybrid animated-and-live action offering, Zork Nemesis.

Okay, but numbers aside, does this latest installment of the ongoing Zork saga have something to say about the role and destiny of animation in the world of CD-ROM entertainment?

Alexandria Wolfe holds a secret that players must uncover to solve the mystery of Zork Nemesis. © Activision.

At Activision's headquarters in Los Angeles, producer Cecilia Barajas sits surrounded by magic posters from the turn of the 19th century and a spate of merchandise spawned by the title. Besides her producer's credit, Cecilia shared in the writing and directed the adventure's interactive segments. No rank newcomer to the Zorkian underworld she: As Associate Producer of the company's successful forerunner, Return to Zork, Cecilia has, for now at least, traded in her previous role as a Los Angeles deputy district attorney to serve as Activision's interactive alchemist.

For all the richness of the game's environment, it's built on good, sound three-act bones. The petite and understated producer turns out to be less an advocate of the newest and the latest than an admirer of books and literature.

First, a bit of orientation: Zork's Forbidden Lands universe includes five uniquely different worlds, hitherto unexplored: Temple, Monastery, Castle, Asylum and Conservatory. They're decidedly well fleshed out, as alternative worlds go: Zork Nemesis occupies a lot of space--three CD-ROMs worth, including thousands of 16 bit animations and nearly an hour of live-action video in a "prerendered" game environment. The Nemesis ' soundscape, too, is omnipresent. With the toot of a fleezle, we enter...

The original Zork is generally acknowledged as the grandaddy of all interactive adventure games. Why has it survived?

The early Zorks were text adventures. This is a very powerful medium because it is words. With words we can convey nuance and tone. With Zork Nemesis, we took those givens and started to expand upon them. Two years ago, Return to Zork was such a big deal because it was a CD-ROM at a time when CD-ROMs were new to the marketplace--and the first graphic adventure within the series.

Up until very recently, at least, it seems CD-ROM animation has too often happened without serious art direction...

I was going for something that has generally been very underused: a sense of visual authorship. It's done in film all the time--production design is really, really important to establishing a great movie. Underusing visual authorship represses a way of creating emotions. In the game experience, visuals are incredibly important. So, with my art director, Mauro Borrelli, I tried to maintain a way to imbue the image with a sense of emotional content. So, rather than the image saying, "Oh, here's a temple," it feels desolate and stark and barren--in a very particular way.

Also, by borrowing some of the same postproduction technology that film and television use, we created a greater realism than computer games usually have. We could add to the established animation incredible details--flames leaping from a book, the real time flicker of a candle, the planetary system that glows brighter and brighter, spinning rings--some pretty cool stuff. Combined with Mauro's background as a production designer, director and illustrator on major motion pictures, we were able to hone in on the environments.