a guy named Chris Landreth once watched a play, “Disregard This Play,” by Chicago’s Neofuturist Theater Co.
and because he was an animator at Alias|Wavefront, he thought this would be a good story to create a 3d animation to test their (at that time new) renderer, Maya. it was around 1998.
it was presented at siggraph 1998, where incidentally, Geri’s game was also shown.
1998 it seems, was a great year for computer animation