mTropolis (pronounced "metropolis") was an open-architecture multimedia programming application aimed at enabling rapid development of multimedia titles. It was developed by mFactory (pronounced "em-factory") and introduced in 1995. It introduced object-oriented concepts such as reusable objects, modifiers and behaviors into the multimedia authoring space dominated by Macromedia's Director software. mTropolis was bought in 1997 by Quark, which moved development from Burlingame, California to Denver and then cancelled the product one year later. Despite efforts by its fervent users to attempt to save their investment and beloved tool, negotiations and even a possible purchase offer never came to fruition. History mTropolis competed in the interactive multimedia product space dominated in the 1990s by Macromedia Director. The software's maker, mFactory, founded in 1992, variously positioned mTropolis as an alternative and as an adjunct to Director. mTropolis was bought by Quark in 1997. The use of behaviors in mTropolis spurred Macromedia on to introduce behaviors in Director 6.0. I was there when Seery, Shepherd, meself and probably Greggy went over to the Mtrop user meetings. We straight out stole [behaviors] from them. - Alex Zavatone (ex Macromedia) on the Direct-L Mailing List, Tue, 9 Sep 2008 While multimedia CD-ROM authoring has largely been rendered irrelevant by online content distribution, mTropolis remains an interesting study in application design, and held a loyal following for many years. Paradigm The development environment was very different from the other tools around at the time - Apple Computer's HyperCard, Pitango Clickworks and others had a card based metaphor, and Macromedia Director had a film metaphor (the content area is called The Stage, the time line The Score, an assets library named The Cast, etc.). In mTropolis there were sections, subsections, and scenes. Assets would be placed onto the scene, and then combinations of behaviors and modifiers would be dragged onto the assets. Powerful interaction and animation could be created by making different modifiers send messages to each other, allowing a user to create something impressive fairly quickly, without any typing. There was a simple programming language, accessed via a Miniscript modifier, but most of the programming was achieved by attaching standard behaviors and modifiers, and making selections within the modifier pop-up menus. Technical Issues According to Starship Titanic author Douglas Adams, his team had originally selected mTropolis 1.0 for its development platform but it had to be abandoned for unspecified technical insufficiencies in favor of an in-house tool.