ALAMEDA — When computer entrepreneur Gilman Louie awoke one day last fall to the news that media baron Robert Maxwell had vanished from his yacht, he knew he'd be in for some interesting times.
But Louie, whose up-and-coming computer game company, Sphere Inc., was 89% owned by Maxwell, never imagined the surreal odyssey that would follow, involving shadowy Lichtenstein trusts, desperate Maxwell family members, determined bankruptcy investigators and destitute pensioners.
For 10 months, the 32-year-old Louie fought a daily battle to keep Sphere alive amid the rubble of the collapsed Maxwell empire, with the goal of arranging a buyout that would keep the company intact.
And now, Louie has finally gained his prize. Sphere, which is being re-christened as Spectrum Holobyte, is expected to announce today that a blue chip investment group--including the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, AT&T, Silicon Graphics Chairman Jim Clark and Stanford University--has acquired a controlling interest in the company for $4 million.
The transaction clears the way for Spectrum to take full advantage of its highly regarded game technologies, which place it squarely at the intersection of the computer and entertainment industries. The company has major ambitions in "virtual reality," an emerging technology in which people are immersed in a computer-generated world. Spectrum is working with Paramount Pictures to develop virtual reality centers based on the "Star Trek" movies at shopping malls.
Louie, a cheerful, unpretentious San Francisco native, is still incredulous when he recounts his company's ordeal as it was caught up in the last-ditch maneuverings of the faltering Maxwell empire. "We can't quite believe this really happened," he says. "It was like watching a movie."
The Sphere story begins in 1982, when Louie started the computer game company while a student at San Francisco State University. His parents took out a second mortgage on their home to finance the firm, and early employees were paid in stock instead of cash. The first big break came in 1984 when ASCII Corp., a major Japanese software company, hired Louie's firm to write a flight simulation game that became a major hit.
