By Burr Snider Think thumb candy. In the carnivorous world of videogames, a lot of smart people spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to appeal to a market consisting mainly of a lot of fidgety, fickle adolescent boys. It's what generates buzz - and buzz, it goes without saying, is what sends 'em dashing down to the mall, allowance hot in the pocket. It's the difference between shelf-clearing megahits like, say, Mortal Kombat, Myst, and 7th Guest, and any one of the hundreds of expensive failures littering the video landscape. The only trouble is that nobody can accurately formulate sure-fire game hits on a consistent basis.
Trends change, kids' tastes evolve, the moon enters a new phase.
One day it's goofy Italian plumbers, the next it's gouts of spouting arterial blood. And with sales of PC CD-ROM hardware expected to double by the end of the year, the potential just keeps on ballooning. The results, they hope, are games increasingly more theatrical in presentation and appearance - movies, in effect, to control and move around in. But so far, no one's really pulled it off. All the hype surrounding Rocket Science may be glaringly premature, of course, since the ultimate jury is composed of those hordes of twitchy-handed teenagers, but a lot of very smart money is betting that this audacious upstart with the glittering pedigree might just hold the secret recipe for some of the tastiest thumb candy to come.