Bryce: A seriously cool blast from the past
In addition to Power Goo, which has been reborn on the iPhone and Kai’s Power Tools, MetaTools was also known for its 3D synthetic environment creator Bryce, a product that created and defined the category for a number of years. It was the kind of application where you’d spend most or all of a day setting up and tweaking a landscape or world, only to let it render over night or over the weekend just to see what it looked like, and the anticipation was often quite delicious.
Thereupon, days of rendering could be lost if a single “bad” application, control panel or extension caused your Mac or Bryce to crash. These were the days of Quadras, Mac OS Classic, “cooperative multitasking,” day-long debugging sessions and application specific system configurations (i.e. lots of restarts).
Whatever happened to Kai’s PowerGoo?
The MetaTools trademark and a few of the company’s old software titles have been purchased by former CEO John Wilczak. Thereupon, he’s had Power Goo recoded for the iPhone and iPod touch, and is now selling it on the App Store as Making Faces [aka Power Goo] comes to the iPhone, iPod touch
As MetaTools slid toward oblivion in the early part of this decade, Bryce was sold to Corel, which tried rather unsuccessfully to turn itself into a major independent software developer on the scale of Adobe or Microsoft. The company’s multiple failures let Bryce in the lurch.
Today, Macs are vastly faster and more stable, and Bryce lives on at Daz 3D, which purchased the application back in 2005. The company made good faith efforts at developing Bryce, pushing out several major updates starting with v5.5, though no new versions or patches have been released since Bryce 6.1 back in March 2007.
You can purchase Bryce 6.1 for $100 (view the demo reel
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