Shining Flower: an appreciation

Exemplary Work,
7/27/07

Pictured at right: the cover of one of my all-time favorite digital experiences, the almost completely non-interactive Shining Flower (aka Hikaru Hana), developed by Maze Inc. and published by The Voyager Company, with concept and illustrations by Kikuko Iwano. My niece (those are her cornrows you see at the bottom of every page) recently returned to me the Power Macintosh 8500/120 I lent her when she went to college, and with it I regained the ability to run Shining Flower, to my delight.

Shining Flower was published in 1993 while I was working at Voyager as an audio commentary editor for the Criterion Collection. I have vague memories of seeing it demoed at one of the monthly open houses Voyager held at their offices on the beach at Santa Monica. Love at first sight; that immediate feeling of creative jealousy you get when you see something you wish you’d made. I bought it.

Shining Flower is beautiful, contemplative, quiet, and makes excellent use of limited resources. It’s not pretending to be a movie, or cel animation, or anything other than an 8-bit Director piece (with exemplary use of the lost art of color cycling, I might add). A single character holding a glowing flower makes his/her way through a series of surreal vignettes, on a kind of spiritual journey. Interactivity is limited to basically choosing which several-minute-long sequence you want to watch next.

I remember some grumbling at Voyager about the lack of interaction; at a company which was pioneering the application of same to content of cultural significance, why publish this? On the surface, it did appear to be a misstep, but if you caught the spirit behind this piece—the total commitment to expressing something in this medium, approaching it with the same respect afforded to cinema or literature, fully embracing the technology of the day without harboring self-defeating disdain for its limitations—the appeal of the work was undeniable.

Now when I watch it I find myself wanting to write code that makes it all dynamic, semantic, syntactic and syllabic…

Enjoy: the “beach” vignette of Shining Flower.