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Scheinbaum remembers the final push to finish Jump Raven. "Me, Jamie, Robb (Dean), Bill stayed up all night, saying 'We've got to get this one out!'" Scheinbaum recalls. "All we did was play Jump Raven over and over, saying, 'This happens too much' and 'This doesn't happen enough.'" Finally, at 9 a.m., we burned a copy [i.e., inscribed the game on a CD] and sent it off to Paramount."

"There was a big problem," says Martha Hume, a former Whittle editor who helped CyberFlix in its early days. "Erik didn't know anything about business. At all." She says the Jump Raven contract had flaws which caused problems in distributing the PC version of the game. "I didn't get the impression they were crooked," she says. "I did get the impression they were inept." She says she tried to convince Appleton of the necessity of a business plan, suggesting a board of directors. "He absolutely would not listen. He would sit and seem to listen, and then he was off on something else. It was exasperating." She gave up.

Their cavalier, anti-corporate approach seemed to work, at first. Jump Raven soon won the Grand� Prix at the Apple-Japan International CD-ROM competition; it later sold nearly 100,000 copies. "Everybody loved Jump Raven," remembers Clouse. "It was the fastest thing on the Mac. And that was back when Mac was going to take over everything."

With help from Nelson, CyberFlix's indefatigable press-savvy promoter, the CyberFlix phenomenon caught the attention of Newsweek, which sent reporters down to Market Square in the summer of '94 to write a profile of these "Garage-Band Programmers." The article ran across two magazine pages, with a big photo of Appleton overlaid with a character from Lunicus. The article called Appleton "something of a legend" in Silicon Valley who'd come home. "Not only is the rent reasonable in a place like Knoxville, allowing CyberFlix to move into a 12,000-square-foot loft," wrote Newsweek, "but the low-key atmosphere spurs creativity." The article closed, "No matter what happens next, one move is not on the schedule: California may beckon, but they're staying put in their old Tennessee home."

Appleton was a Knoxville booster in the national press, though he didn't divulge details of what happened to him in California. "He got burned, big time," a friend recalls. "Maybe that's why he got to be so sneaky."

Rand Cabus, who ran Universal Printing, had worked as editor of a small, local magazine called Township Jive. He'd been part of the pre-history of CyberFlix back in mid-'80s Maplehurst. His interest in graphics brought him to CyberFlix, where he became first a producer, then marketing director.

His estimates of Appleton and Quist's business sense vary widely from Hume's. "Bill was truly a mastermind at pulling the sales. He could walk into a company and rule the boardroom table." He credits Appleton and Quist's navigation with CyberFlix's survival during the turbulent mid-'90s, when three different distributors went out of business beneath them, but CyberFlix remained intact. The ability to outlast these multinational corporations became an article of pride.