James Cameron's Titanic Explorer

April 8, 1999

(Fox Interactive; $29.98; Windows 95 and 98, Power Macintosh.)

three-disk package from Fox Interactive, James Cameron's Titanic Explorer: A Historical Journey on the Ship of Dreams, makes two clever promises on its cover: "Historically accurate unreleased 'Titanic' film scenes!" and "3D virtual tour!"

To keep his film under four hours, Cameron had to excise great chunks of celluloid, including the tale of the Californian, a nearby ship that probably saw the Titanic's distress rockets but did not come to her rescue.

As for the promise of a visual tour, anyone who has dreamed about sailing on the famous liner has imagined exploring her from stem to stern.

When you enter Titanic Explorer, you have two options: the Timeline and the Browser. The Timeline employs archival photographs, documents and brief clips from the movie, accompanied by narration, to recount a series of short segments of the Titanic story. (I hope the audio hiccups that blanked out many pieces of the narration were unique to my copy.) If you simply played the Timeline from the beginning of disk one (Ship of Dreams) to the end of disk three (The Legend Comes to Light), you would get a nice visual and verbal summary of the history of the ship; the story of the maiden voyage, the shipwreck and the rescue, and what has happened since, notably the discovery of the wreck in 1985 and the issues surrounding the salvaging of thousands of artifacts.

The Browser functions like a Titanic archive, a modest archive but fascinating nonetheless. It includes no video clips but many images and much information: a complete passenger and crew list, for example, with an X beside the name of every person lost, builders' plans for every deck and biographies of many passengers and crew members, both prominent and obscure. In the Browser for disk one you will also encounter the "virtual tour" of the ship touted on the cover.

Alas, the virtual tour is a real disappointment. It promises 64 separate sites on the ship, but who knows how you get to them all. Nothing on the CD-ROM itself explains how to move easily from place to place or from deck to deck, and the instruction booklet included in the package is equally unhelpful.

Sure, it's neat to visit one of the D-deck parlor suites, with their gorgeous bouquets of fresh-cut flowers, and examine the details of the paneling around the fireplace. Even better is to stand in the grand first-class dining saloon and, by dragging the cursor across the image, rotate your view 360 degrees (a feature that is available at all tour sites). But if you try to walk through the doors that lead into the pantry, you are out of luck. And try as I might, I couldn't get below D deck, which meant I never made it down to see the huge reciprocating engines or the giant boilers -- assuming they are among the sites included. I found no index to tell me what the promised 64 sites were.

Another letdown came when I returned to the Timeline and jumped forward to disk two (Tragedy Strikes), eager to see some of the promised missing scenes from the movie. I scrolled down the Timeline choices and clicked on The Californian Officers Watch Rocket, only to be met by a group photo of the ship's captain and her officers (unidentified) and a series of rough stop- action views of the Titanic as she might have looked from the steamer stopped a few miles away at the edge of an icefield. Maybe Fox Interactive would have had to pay the actors extra to include these outtakes. I never did find any unseen movie bits, although I am sure some minor outtakes are there. Somewhere.

Anxious to discover if Titanic Explorer included any information about my special interest, the cuisine on the Titanic, I tried a search on the word food. The search yielded two items, Cargo List and Transcripts. These are edited transcripts of the two inquiries held after the sinking, one American, the other British. When I went to that page, however, my only recourse was to read all the transcripts in search of a few food references.

A search on menus yielded better results, actual menus for all three classes. But if you are hungry for information on what the food was like or how it was prepared or served, you will search in vain -- unless you link to Books, Images and Films, where I was happy to find my book listed, but less happy to find my name misspelled. Glaringly absent from the list of further reading, however, is the best book about the heyday of the trans-Atlantic liner, John Maxtone-Graham's "The Only Way to Cross."

Despite such disappointments, Titanic Explorer works well for its intended audience: movie fans who want to know more about the ship. The software is at its best when feeding the insatiable appetite for Titanic trivia. One of my favorite Browser options was the topic Unbelievable Truths, which recounts, among others, the delightful story of Baker Charles Joughin, who survived two hours in the freezing water supposedly with the aid of an antifreeze known as Scotch whisky. (Since alcohol actually helps to lower one's body temperature, a more likely explanation of this remarkable feat is that Joughin never stopped moving while in the water.) In the same section, you can learn how the wireless operator aboard the Carpathia, Thomas Cottam, received the Titanic's distress call just as he was about to close down his Marconi set for the night (standard practice in the early days of shipboard wireless -- until the Titanic sank).

And it was here that I first learned about Rosa Abbott, from third class, the only woman to be saved from the icy water.

The Cargo List may not shed much light on Titanic cuisine, but it did provide a detailed accounting of passenger cargo, with its tantalizing hints about the lives of those on board. Highlights include Robert Daniel's champion French bulldog and Ella Holmes White's four roosters and a hen. After the sinking, Daniel claimed $750 for his lost pooch (more than a year's salary for a North American worker in 1912) and Mrs. White claimed $207.87 for her drowned poultry.