No matter how you look at it, these are two of the most complex DVD titles on the market today. Even in 2004, seven years after the introduction of DVD, we remain one of the few companies in the world that has mastered the internal programming language used by DVD players, and it’s this knowledge that was necessary to produce these two special titles. It’s worth noting that "Sherlock Holmes - Consulting Detective" was the winner of four awards in 1999.

Here are a few facts which help explain why these two titles are so special:

1. They both are DVD Video games - played using your DVD remote control on your home television. They are not computer games.

2. They both provide a visual means of saving and restoring your game, allowing you to play the games over a period of time. Only one other DVD (that we know of) exists in the world with this highly sophisticated feature.

3. Both games push the DVD specifications to their absolute limits, taking advantage of many advanced features that most DVD authoring companies don’t know how to use, or don’t have access to through their authoring software. The vast majority of DVD authoring software doesn’t allow access to these advanced features.

“Sherlock Holmes - Consulting Detective” was a large production effort. Over 120 animated moving menus and transitional videos were created for the user interface. The game contains more than 5,000 menu buttons that had to be individually programmed. More than 1,500 still graphics, mostly menus, were created for the game. At least 130 video clips from a few seconds to a few minutes in length comprise the central elements of the game. It took over six weeks of intensive authoring to tie all these elements together through programming.

“Dracula Unleashed” contained only a fraction of the number of still graphics and buttons that Sherlock had, but Dracula was vastly more sophisticated in terms of its internal programming. Using the primitive DVD authoring language, the programming of Dracula closely resembles that of computer assembly language programming. Here is an example which represents a portion of a subroutine that calculates ‘time’ within the game. The comment following the semicolon describes what each line of code is doing:

So, what’s so special about the programming example above? (a) most DVD authoring software doesn’t even allow access to this language, (b) only a few people know that this type of programming is possible, and (c) even fewer ‘DVD experts’ would have a clue what the programming above is trying to accomplish. Quite literally, only a handful of DVD’s in the world have ever exploited DVD programming capabilities to the extent that we have. Dracula took several months of authoring experimentation and prototyping to perfect and we mastered the language in the process.