In the Beginning - There was Human Code, the Austin-based interactive media developer that opened its doors in 1993 and closed them roughly seven years later after being acquired by Sapient Corp., a leading business and technology consulting outfit with an office in Austin.

Many of the videos, animations, and artworks mentioned in this article can be viewed online, in whole or in part, at We highly recommend that you seek them out as you read along (if you have a browser handy) because, as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words, and so therefore a 24-frames-per-second animation is worth, well, more words that you have time to read before dinner. And to a smaller degree, it's about something that could only happen in Austin, right now, right here, slightly left of center, where unlikely option Q bests likelier options A and B every time, blindfolded, with its one diminutive arm tied behind its back.įirst things first: This is a story about animators and their animations. This is the story of HorseBack Salad Entertainment, the (very) little animation house that could, did, and wants to, really, really bad. It's also a story about, in declining order of specificity, Salvador Dalí's great, lost masterpiece the implosion of Austin's dot-com bubble (and the resulting tsunami of free talent that - even as this is being written - has resulted in Austin being flooded with cheap geniuses) animated trivia games for interactive film geeks and some of the most impressive animated music videos you're likely to ever see.

They have managed, over the course of two short years, to build and maintain the most creative and completely independent animation ministudio ever, in a town where it sometimes seems you can't drive your car down the sidewalk without running over a half dozen animators/Web designers/computer-graphics experts. This is an interactive story about four young, interactive animators in Austin who interact in some awfully interesting ways.

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