What happens when you graduate from Microsoft? Alex St. John, once the public face of DirectX, demonstrates WildTangent at Siggraph 99, and the value of a good Redmond education.

Talk of SGI, and Sony's PlayStation II technology dominated Siggraph 99. I've covered the main features of the show in another section of this site. For me, another one of the highlights of my trip to Los Angeles' Convention Center was a brief conversation that I had with a guy that many of you who read the game press may be very familiar with.

WildTangent was founded in 1998 by former Microsoft evangelist and DirectX creator Alex St. John and his partner, Jeremy Kenyon. I first saw Alex give a speech on the stump at one of the first Game PC Consortium meetings in 1993, or 1994. Can't remember the exact time, but it was the beginning of, what went on to become, a raging debate mostly against Microsoft, and DirectX. To give Alex his due, he was candid, frank, and entertaining the times I saw him, but I never had to deal with him any further than that. Before leaving Microsoft in 1997, he also worked on creating Chromeffects, which was supposed to give Internet Explorer 3D graphics and real-time interactive animation capabilities that would take it on step up the multimedia ladder, over its competitors. For reasons that I don't understand, or profess to even know in full, Chromeffects never got off the ground, which is a shame because, it was a hell of a good idea.

Well, it may have proven fortuitous for Alex and his partner because, at Siggraph 99 we met to talk about WildTangent's web driver technology. In June, 1999, WildTangent released a public beta 2 of its web driver, which basically allows developers to use JavaScript, Visual Basic, or Java, and create DirectX accelerated multimedia content within a Web site. If you go to the WildTangent site, you can download the player, and some examples of content to get an idea of what's going on. Any budding developers or game neophytes can probably whet your appetites on the technical stuff there, too.