Kai's Power Goo.

It's kinda tough to describe what exactly made this program so enjoyable

back when it released in 1996,

because while its features were unique at the time,

they're almost pedestrian nowadays.

The entire front of the box here is literally

just a screenshot of the program,

which indicates what you most need to know.

Power Goo is all about doing gooey things powerfully, to photographs.

Smoosh up the Mona Lisa,

twist around your friends' faces.

and make short animated video clips of the chaos.

(laughs) Believe it or not,

this was a big deal in '96!

Goo was "realtime liquid image funware,"

as the MetaTools marketing states.

And yeah, that about sums it up.

And okay, I admit it seems silly to have an application

dedicated to what effectively became Photoshop's Liquify tool,

But trust me, there was more to it than that.

Kais' Power Goo traces some of its origins

back to Kai's Power Tools,

initially released in 1992 for Macintosh and later Windows.

KPT was a popular set of API plugins for image editors,

like Corel Photo-Paint and Adobe Photoshop.

And thanks to KPT's underlying software and the faster CPUs of the '90s,

filters like twirling, planar tiles,

spheroids and page curls were more accessible than ever,

and no longer bound to graphic workstations.

However, it wasn't cheap at around $200,

and still required you to have something like Photoshop,

so it limited its audience quite a bit.

Then in 1996,

shortly after the release of KPT 3,

MetaTools released their first standalone consumer-oriented image editor,

Kai's Power Goo.

Combined with the existing pedigree from Power Tools,

Goo sold well enough at the initial price of $50

but it really found an audience

once special editions of it ended up being bundled

with digital cameras, scanners and imaging products worldwide.

These partnerships even found their way into the retail box

with ads for Kodak's Digital Processing service.

Digital cameras still pretty much sucked in 1996,

so film cameras ruled and digitizing photos,

slides and negatives were an exciting business.

And also exciting were the new processors Power Goo took advantage of,

like Intel's Pentium MMX.

Another thing that made Goo stand out was its overall presentation,

from the user interface itself

to the point of forgoing a traditional manual

and using this big foldout poster

showing all the features at a glance.

Now if you're like me, you might be thinking,

okay, well this is all well and good, sure,

but who the heck is Kai?!

His name's on everything, so he must be special.

Oh, he is!

Say hello to Kai Krause.

Embrace his gaze.

He is an absolute legend in certain circles.

Not just for his software contributions, but his overall life story.

Kai left his home country of Germany in 1976

to move to California at age 19,

proceeded to work on synthesizer and vocoder audio

for over two dozen albums and movies,

won a Clio award for his sound design on ads

for the first Star Trek film,

sold off all his equipment to Neil Young

and started over in 1982,

co-founded several companies, including HSC and MetaTools,

attended the Brooks Institute and earned a master's degree in image processing,

was the recipient of the first Davies Medal from the Royal Photographic Society,

and now owns and resides in the 1,000-year-old tower

near Rieneck Castle in Germany

that he calls Byteburg.

Oh, and along the way, he found time to work on software milestones

like Poser, Bryce, Kai's Power Tools,

and Kai's Super Goo,

propagating what he called

"padded cell" graphical interface design.

KAI: The interface is also, I call it the "padded cell."

You just can't hurt yourself.

LGR: Kai's interfaces proved to be hugely influential over the years

being designed from the ground up to be friendly and organic

with soft shadows, rounded corners,

animated feedback and translucency effects.

You could see his legacy in all sorts of software,

most notably operating environments like Microsoft's Windows XP,

Apple's OS X,

and various flavors of Linux.

But, back to Kai's Power Goo

which makes full use of the Krausian UX philosophy

by starting with a map screen clearly laying out

the program's features in the form of rooms.

There's the Goo Room,

Fusion Room,

In Room, Out Room,

and spots for options and help.

Let's start with the main draw of Goo,

which is... Goo.

It always booted up with the Mona Lisa by default,

but by using the In Room, you could select from pre-made pics

or open any image from your hard drive,

then use the bubbly buttons to gooify to your heart's content.

And yeah, it was absolutely wild back then to see your computer

performing this kind of image manipulation in real time so effortlessly,

even though it really is just the software equivalent

of taking a blob of Silly Putty and stretching it around.

It was a novelty at best,

but it's a novelty we wanted and we bought,

and it was fun.

They way this worked is due to its underlying graphics engine called Amazon,

which generated an intermediate version of your image

and applied it as a texture to a polygonal grid

consisting of over 100,000 triangles.

And that's why you get this weird geometric effect

when you look closely at any gooified images.

But I didn't care about any of that technical stuff as a kid.

All I knew is that this cracked me and my friends up to no end.

It was just too much fun, man.

You could goo by directly clicking on the photo

or by using the built-in filters and sliding back and forth

between goo and ungooed for quick results.

Or you could drop in several gooied images

into the timeline at the bottom and animate the result.

MetaTools called these Goovies.

And in the days before widespread cheap animation software,

this was pretty mind-blowing to me.

Finally, moving your project to the Out Room

allowed you to save and share your monstrosity

in a variety of mid-'90s ways,

including exporting to video files

which could be viewed by anyone regardless

of if they owned Power Goo or not.

But as much fun as I had squishing things around,

I probably enjoyed the Fusion Room even more.

That's because here you had access to more involved image tools

like layering, rotation and transparency.

And the main idea of this was that you could fuse together the features

of two different people, or objects or whatever.

I liked this for the same reason I liked Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover.

Even if I had no interest in giving makeovers,

I had a growing interest in digital image manipulation

and it's programs like these that

influenced me to pursue graphic design in later years.

Goo's Fusion made it ridiculously simple to mash up faces

in ways that were increasingly unproductive

but all the more amusing.

You know how face-swapping is so popular now?

Yeah, well it was a hit in the '90s, too,

through the one and only Power Goo.

And it was glorious.

And horrifying.

Obviously, the results aren't always convincing,

especially if you're using your own photos

with different lighting, skin tones and angles.

But when it works, the result is just as good as any

modern-day face-swap app, as far as I'm concerned.

And it only got better in Kai's Super Goo,

the sequel from two years later.

Its Goo module is still basically the same,

but it features several additions and improvements to the classic filters,

as well as a more capable graphics engine underneath

that lets you do some delightfully trippy visual effects and animations.

Again, though, it was the Fusion mode that I played with the most.

Super Goo's Fusion made it super-simple

to drop in props, clothing and body parts

and further manipulate your existing images

to fit in with the pre-made faces and items.

If YouTube existed in the '90s,

you can bet we'd probably be using Super Goo

to make our stupid, clickbaity thumbnails.

And yeah, those are Kai's Power and Super Goo programs.

A nowadays often overlooked

but highly memorable bunch of software

that epitomizes image-editing silliness in the late '90s.

It's a shame that MetaTools, and later MetaCreations, doesn't exist anymore.

Kai Krause left the company in 1999,

and the rest of the company split apart while its various products were acquired

by the likes of Corel, Microsoft, Minolta and Adobe.

And while most features from Power Goo

now reside within programs like Photoshop,

there's something to be said about Goo's presentation and ease of use.

The experience just not has been duplicated

since the original programs and

if you come across a copy,

I would say it's totally worth revisiting

to make some ugly portraits,

1990s-style.

(organ music)

Oh, hi there, you're still here.

Well if you enjoyed this video, then thanks!

You might like some of my others.

I have new ones going up every Monday and Friday here on LGR,

so all the activity is appreciated.

And as always, thank you very much for watching.