Media Station
Media Station employee Newton Lee became one of the lead software and title engineers for "The Lion King Animated Storybook." As he recalled in the book "Disney Stories: Getting to Digital", "Media Station used a number of 'proprietary strategic software technologies' that made it easier for the developer to create large animation multimedia and the user to play it back, impossible until that time". A playback engine was created to provide high quality playback from a CD-ROM of large animations. WinToon, which Media Station previously developed for Microsoft, aided the projects by "reduc[ing] the amount of data actually required for larger animation playback". The software improved performance of playback in Windows by reducing the amount of data that was required", arguing that it was necessary because "unlike other interactive storybook developers who used a palette of 256 colors throughout the entire title, Media Station used 256 colors per screen; this resulted in very large animation files". In 1994, Lee created an object-oriented scripting language similar to Macromedia's ActionScript that allowed developers to create interactivity for animation quickly and easily, and a cross-platform multimedia compiler to allow the software to run on both Mac and Windows. Media Station also used a cross-platform language, Interactive Media File Script, Title Compiler, and Asset Management Systems, among others. These new tools enabled production for a "Disney's Animated Storybook" game to be between three and six months.