Digital Pioneers

Pop Rocket Inc. founders Joe Sparks, his wife, Maura, and friend Kent Carmical have been holed up in a San Francisco Victorian for two years. They quit good jobs, drained their bank accounts, and borrowed money--all to make Pop Rocket a big name in a new category of entertainment software. They're about to unleash on the world their brainchild: a CD-ROM called Total Distortion that is an altogether different breed of software cat--part video game, part Hollywood movie, part music video. Says Carmical: "We're going to be big and famous."

Forty miles south, in Silicon Valley, Strauss Zelnick, the former head of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp., is making his bid for the same fame. He quit Hollywood to lead a band of computer jocks at startup Crystal Dynamics Inc. The company's goal: to become the first "interactive studio of the future." One of its first programs is The Horde, a medieval adventure starring actor Kirk Cameron of the TV sitcom Growing Pains. Says the 36-year-old Zelnick: "We're on the cusp of doing something extraordinary here."