A digital pioneer’s day in the sun   Harvey Harrison had ‘epiphany,’ and ended up playing hardball over ‘Riven’   Harrison, relaxing beside a pool in Southern California, dove into digital media as early as anyone. By Emory Thomas Jr. MSNBC  If there is such a thing as a dean of new-media agents, Harvey Harrison is it. With a newscaster’s look and an almost childlike enthusiasm, Harrison has been pursuing interactive-entertainment clients for most of two decades, since long before interactive was cool.

		Agents to the stars ... of new media?

			HARRISON REMEMBERS WELL the moment he thought interactive-entertainment might amount to something big someday. It was around 1982, and Harrison was representing clients in the animation industry, which was busy turning game icons like Pac-Man into cartoon characters.
	Ignorance and apathy are the two greatest drags on digital's development, Harrison says.		Then one day, a couple game developers walked into Harrison’s office with an Apple floppy disk. What they showed him on the small screen that day was an adventure game, not unlike a very “primitive” version of “Myst,” he says.        “It was an immediate epiphany,” says Harrison. “I just had this sense that the media were going to converge ... in retrospect, I am absolutely astounded at the intensity of my confidence.”        Harrison signed the game developers, and he hasn’t quit pursuing such clients ever since.        Easily Harrison’s highest profile digital deal was negotiating the sequel to “Myst,” the biggest-selling computer game of all time.
	‘I just had this sense that the media were going to converge ... in retrospect, I am absolutely astounded at the intensity of my confidence.’ — HARVEY HARRISON		Chris Brandkamp, vice president of operations at Cyan Inc., the Spokane, Wash., company that created both “Myst” and its hit sequel “Riven,” can’t recall precisely how he and other Cyan officials came across Harrison.        “Harvey may have contacted us,” Brandkamp says, “when we were talking about possible movie deals” incorporating “Myst” story lines. Or maybe, he allows, it was Harrison’s familiarity with executives at Broderbund, one of the interactive entertainment industry’s most prominent companies.        Harrison, on the other hand, recalls that Cyan contacted him. In fact, he says he remembers the very words he spoke upon receiving the message that Cyan had called: “I said to the people in my office, ‘Boy, I’ve been working for 10 years for this moment.’ ”        However the two linked up, Harrison seems omnipresent in the new-media community, as visible as any of the agents focusing on the digital domain. “It just seemed to be the logical choice,” Brandkamp concludes.        As it turned out, landing one of the game industry’s biggest-ever deals also proved to be one of Harrison’s biggest-ever challenges. Negotiations with “Myst” publisher Broderbund Software creaked along at times, contentious and difficult.
	‘I make sure to have enough of my business spread around. Otherwise, I’d be living out of a box.’		“It took a number of months of some of the most intensive work I’ve ever done,” Harrison recalls. “I think at the end, everyone was satisfied.” No one will reveal the details of the deal, whose final terms were settled directly by officials with Cyan and Broderbund. But Brandkamp claims Harrison’s efforts substantially improved Cyan’s position.        Like his cohorts, even Harrison finds he must split his time between new media and old media. The agent shops scripts as well as games.        “The revenues from [new media] can be just fine, but they’re very unpredictable,” Harrison says. “Therefore, on an ongoing basis, I make sure to have enough of my business spread around. Otherwise, I’d be living out of a box.”

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