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Reactions varied with personality. "It was a complete surprise," says Michael Kennedy. "A complete sense of having the rug yanked out from beneath you. But I'm one of the lucky ones. I didn't have a wife and kids."
"I did not feel slighted," says Clouse. "I felt liberated. I felt I'd pulled off some kind of coup. I was ready to get out. I was tired of it." He's much more understanding of Appleton than most of the others. "It's his decision, it was his company. He can do what he wants."
"Legally, he [Appleton] might be in the clear," Kennedy says. "I'm just disappointed in Bill as a person. It's sad it had to end that way."
Cabus did not join in the lawsuit because he thinks what Bill did was probably legal. "That's what he could do," he says. "How many times in your life do you see a chunk of change you can just put in your pocket? All the IRS can say is, 'You made a big salary that year, Mr. Appleton.'
"No, it wasn't the nicest thing," allows Cabus, the old PR man who, in a two-hour conversation, had said only extravagantly complimentary things about Appleton. "Morally, what Bill did was reprehensible. It pretty much sucked."
"He always sold the business as a 'family,'" Nevins says. "Family members can get pretty bitter when you leave and don't offer an explanation."
Several were upset with what they see as Appleton's sense that DreamFactory gave him title to CyberFlix itself. "We made the movies," says Scheinbaum. "Bill built the projector."
According to the Scheinbaum-Wicks lawsuit, about one week after Black Monday, Appleton and Quist awarded themselves additional bonuses of $1,700,000 and $450,000, respectively. The lawsuit alleges that these bonuses emptied the company coffers, denying Wicks, Scheinbaum, and the other stockholders their fair share. Scheinbaum and Wicks each theoretically owned 4 percent of the company, a small portion, but the same amount they claim Quist owned. By a severance agreement drawn up by Quist, they were offered $10,000 to forfeit their claims—which they did, but now allege the agreement was fraudulent.
Most only heard about Appleton's departure. He didn't say good-bye to several of his longtime colleagues. "I don't think he said good-bye to anybody," Nevins says.
Some wonder if Appleton had lost confidence in DreamFactory's ability to keep up with current technology; others think he was just tired of running a business. "Bill was an artist, and liked to think of himself as an artist," says Clouse.
"I think he was burnt out," says Nevins, saying Appleton sometimes seemed uncomfortable having responsibility for 30 employees.
However, several of Appleton's old colleagues say the fate of the company may have been as simple as the fact that Appleton's new girlfriend Jennifer, a former bartender at the brewpub, wasn't as charmed with Knoxville as Appleton had once been. She wanted to move to California.
They're there now; the Appletons were reportedly married earlier this month, and live in a big house together, in San Jose. Appleton's Knoxville attorney, Brian Quist (Erik's brother) declined to divulge his current pursuits, but said he'd have no comments to make either on the lawsuit or on any other aspect of the company's history.
The "independent studio," ACME, eventually became Atomic Studios, but after failing to gain contracts, never really got off the ground. Nevins recalls the phone call they got from a prospective client in New York who admitted they were going with a company of lesser talent merely because they were located just down the street. Now half-owner of a video-production company called Gone Postal, Nevins is now the only CyberFlixter still on Market Square.
CyberFlix itself seems to have vanished with Bill Appleton. There's evidence it still exists as a corporation. Titanic, Dust, and RedJack are still on the market, but distributed by a company called Barracuda. Appleton still owns DreamFactory, and most assume he's still retooling it, as he has been for over a decade. Attorney Brian Quist declines to answer questions about the company's status, and about his clients' current pursuits.
Contacted at her Manhattan office, where she's now computer-game critic for The New York Times, author J.C. Herz assesses CyberFlix as "certainly an interesting company. They did things that were different, with the limited means available to them, that is, CD-ROM."
Then she offers a line that sounds like a retelling of "The Emperor's New Clothes": "The weakest part of the games, I think, was the architecture used to build them. The strongest part of CyberFlix was the artistry and storytelling," she says, which were unique in an industry characterized by cliché. "Jump Raven, Dust—they seemed unusually good in spirit and attitude. There was a sense of humor there you don't see often."
DreamFactory, she says, is at best a struggle with aging technology. "It's like a kit car in a world of Indy 500 performance vehicles," she says. "What Bill Appleton did was walk away from the truly valuable part of the company."
Meanwhile, musician Scott Scheinbaum and artist Jamie Wicks are asking for a combined total of $20 million in compensatory and punitive damages from Appleton and Quist. The case is now in the discovery period, and may come to trial sometime next year.
Scheinbaum and about half the former CyberFlixters still live in Knoxville, many of them working in computer graphics at companies like IPIX, Digital Discoveries, and Atmosphere Pictures. Others are far afield; Eric Whited, art director for RedJack, is now doing something similar for the prime-time, animated FOX show Futurama.
Michael Kennedy and Rand Cabus work for the same 3-D modeling firm in Atlanta. "This weekend I was in a mall in Atlanta, going through the store, and they had a copy of Titanic on the cheap rack," says Kennedy, laughing. "It's still around. But it's kind of sad to see it there."
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