If all of that wasn't enough, the Wiz of Radio Free Oz was on a matuda roll and finished out the summer of 1996 cuddled up with his cohorts, working secretly behind the curtain.
"I'm producing a comedy CD-ROM and its an interactive parody of a famous game. It's coming out for Christmas and its gonna be a hoot. It should be in the stores officially for October 15th. I'm doing it with a group called Palladium Interactive. I'm using David Ossman and Phil Proctor on it, Melinda Peterson, and some of the other RFO Players, that were at the Internet broadcast are going to be on it. I'm using Mike Sansonia to do music.
"Fred Newman is going to doing some voice tracks on it. He's like the famous mouth sound effects man. He does all kinds of voices, he's all over the TV. He does all the voices for 'Dave', a lot of stuff on Nickelodeon, the most amazing sound effects. He develops these sound effects right out of his own mouth, and his own little Foley kit.
"John Goodman is on it. John and I've been working together for a while now. He's an old radio head. He's really a radio man, originally came out of WBAI in New York. I've been working with him in a radio context for years now. He's also done some of the "Proctor and Bergman Comedy Service" series.
"I'm a little bit under raps. The marketing people at PI are going to sequester the information. That's what I'm working on very hard, so it's kind of hard for me not to tell you what I'm doing, which is unusual for me."
Bergman remained muzzled even under our dogged attempts to jerk his chain enough to get him to unleash his ideas to Firezine about his new CD-ROM. Undaunted in our pursuit, we went way under his head and secretly secured an embargoed press release from Palladium Interactive about his much hushed about project, just before we went to press.
It's called PYST, an obvious take-off parody of MYST, the best selling CD-ROM game of all time, and one of the hardest to solve. Many of us have become pissed giving up on trying to finish the damn thing, and the beautiful graphics and music have ended up being more annoying than satisfying. The object of MYST, I suppose, is to try to get off this island you're dumped on, or at least figure out what you're supposed to do there. The computer generated scenes in MYST are splendidly rendered.
When Firezine received the box art and several slides of the various screens contained in PYST it became painfully obvious that Peter Bergman was more perturbed at MYST then we ever were and decided to vandalize the game with comedic spray paint. The familiar MYST screens are rendered all right, like hogs strung up, butchered and stamped with Bergman's seal of disapproval.
It appears that the millions of virtual visitors that have been trapped in MYST have trashed the place and some low-life entrepreneur has built up an dentertainment Dorian Grey money making scheme. This badman Barnum appears to be John Goodman as King Mattruss who also sings the PYST theme song on an enhanced CD single that comes along with the package.
How the audio portions featuring Bergman, Proctor and Ossman fit in with these scenes reminiscent of the last shots of heaps of hippie trash from the movie Woodstock, or themes developed and expanded from Proctor and Bergman's original script for the movie Americathon is anybody's guess at this point. By the time you read this, Bergman's PYST will be out, a companion website and 900 number phone site will be up and running and the mystery, if there is one, will be solved.
Whatever the case, Peter Bergman continues to survey America's culture and obsessions like a maniacal monitor reflecting the absurdness of it all, while casting his iconoclastic eye to read the entrails of the present coarse and our delirious future.