In the sixties, disenchanted folks variously seeking peace, enlightenment, drugs, sex, and rock ’n’ roll all crossed paths in San Francisco, usually at the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. Compton’s Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties hopes to recapture the passion, poetry, and politics of that time, and throw in a game besides.
Having been to the Haight in the sixties (when too young and suburban to grasp its significance), I was looking forward to this double-CD-ROM set. My anticipation was matched only by my disappointment — it’s almost impossible to mine this technically and graphically aggravating CD’s enticing nuggets of cultural history.
Disc 1 is divided into two parts: Turn On and Tune In. Turn On is a neat reference device. When you click on it, it plays a documentary titled The Rise and Fall of the Haight-Ashbury, which combines all the stills, posters, and music that make up the CD — except, surprisingly, the 17 video clips; those you have to access separately.
The Tune In section is a random-access index of the material, but for some unknown reason it spills over onto disc 2, where some of the topics on disc 1 are listed again. The other part of disc 2 is a game called Drop Out; it’s kind of a combination of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly’s Community Chest cards, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s interested in cultural history asking three friends over to pass around the mouse.
For a pair of multimedia CDs, they have a surprisingly limited layout and amount of information. For instance, the CDs contain the text of the San Francisco Oracle newspaper, but when you click on the issue or article you want, the text appears in a 4-by-3-inch box in what looks like 9-point Arial type.
You can listen to nine music clips. While they include selections from the music of Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, and Jefferson Airplane, you also get Allen Ginsberg tunelessly reciting poetry.
Even worse are the video clips. You get only 17 clips, duplicated on both discs. Many are badly reproduced and scarred with vertical lines. In some cases the sound is deplorable. And one clip of actor Peter Coyote (whose work with the anarchic Diggers long preceded his appearance in E.T.) is only 11 seconds long. Even more disappointing, the clips play on a blank screen with no contextual information.
The Last Word While the content of Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties can’t be faulted for its depth and authenticity, its presentation is wholly disappointing. I was hoping for a trip back in time, but instead I got a really bad trip.
Baldwin, Howard. (December 1995). Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties. Macworld. (pg. 84).
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Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
