"As they were getting ready to roll out," creator Jim Bumgardner explains, "they suddenly realized they had a lot of shopping channels and what-not, but not much in the way of games." As the lead architect of their in-house multimedia authoring system (not to mention the developer of a CD-ROM time-capsule soon set to go to Mars aboard a Russian space probe), the FSN group asked Bumgardner to submit some proposals for interactive gaming.

"I'd been kicking around the idea of The Palace for about a year before that," he says. "Basically, I wanted to do 2D virtual reality. I was seeing all of this work being done on 3D VR, but there was this huge leap from text-based chats to fully realized VR." Bumgardner soon realized that for the kind of socialization environment he envisioned the traditional virtual reality model was all wrong.

"It seemed like an incredible waste of effort," he continues. "Because the whole point of these spaces is for people to communicate and express themselves. And all of this effort was being expended on these really tough technological problems that didn't really seem to have a lot to do with the things that I considered important. Finally," he explains, "I realized that if I just eliminated 3D from the equation, and made a 2D space, that I could then concentrate on the interactivity, and do some really interesting things."

And that he did. While The Palace proposal never did fly with the Interactive TV group (not sufficiently game-like, they said), Bumgardner ultimately found enough internal funding to facilitate a quick and dirty prototype. "Within several weeks," he says, "I had an initial version up and running using AppleTalk on the Macs around the office -- 90% of what's there today."

In today's incarnation, the Palace is both a place and a technology. The facility consists of a Web-like client/server setup. The Palace is the name of the Time-Warner client software package -- available for both Windows, Mac, and Unix boxes. Meanwhile, a Palace is any particular site running the Time-Warner Palace server software. The client software comes free from Time-Warner, along with a guest login -- but with limited powers and props. To really experience The Palace in all its glory (or to become a server site), you have to shell out your $20. and become a full-fledged member. And you'll need a direct Internet connect (SLIP/PPP/ISDN), none of those weenie services like AOL, Prodigy, or Microsoft Network here.

The burgeoning realm of The Palace exists in a similar, but parallel technological universe to that of the World Wide Web. Rooms are connected via "hyperdoors" which act very much like HTML hotlinks. Click on a hyperdoor (which could be an actual door, a mouse-hole, a fireplace, or any defined area in space), and you're instantly transported into whatever room that spot links to. A special key outlines the hyperdoors within a given room.

Hyperdoors can link to other rooms within a given Palace site -- or even off to entirely separate sites (as with the Web and HTML). In fact, the realms of The Palace and the World Wide Web are even inter-connectable. A Web page can contain links to a Palace site (as with Time-Warner's Palace Directory page). Click on an entry, and your browser fires up The Palace client software and transports you off to that site. Meanwhile, a Palace room can even contain HTML links -- just click on that book lying there on the night stand and find yourself suddenly reading the works of Shakespeare from the Library of Congress Web site.