The responses flooded in -- many bearing notes of praise, like "the coolest ad in years!" And they came not just from systems engineers. Torn from the magazine, the "Pentica Loves Puzzles" ad was faxed and photocopied and distributed from friend to friend and coworker to coworker. Baccei claims he sat bolt upright in bed at 4 one morning during the summer of 1990. "If they're going to send me letters, they'll send me checks," he realized. Working nights and weekends in Pentica's offices and on the company's computers, Baccei began a satellite business to create and sell the '90s incarnation of 3-D.
He called his new company N.E. Thing Enterprises, in keeping with his pinball-like career odyssey, which had already inked him a most distinctive rÉsumÉ: college dropout, coffeehouse singer-songwriter, teacher in an alternative school, bit actor (fully clothed) in a soft-core porno film, cabinetmaker, and massively bearded bus driver for the Green Tortoise bus company, famous for its pull-down bunks, communal meals, and unscheduled, 200-mile side trips terminating in bus-emptying skinny-dips in somebody's favorite swimming hole. Baccei spins some pretty good Tortoise stories of brushes with Hell's Angels and Southern police officers. He compares those days to an Outward Bound-like crucible of problem solving.
Good thing. For as the '70s came to a close, Baccei realized he was pushing 40 with no bead on any sort of remunerative career. Looking for a toehold in the corporate world, he imposed upon his roommate, who owned a software company, for a short-term position. Taking a deep breath, he parlayed that into a job as a technical-support manager for a commercial software product at a big military/industrial company. He learned on the fly. That job led him to Pentica Systems Ltd., an English company that hired him away in 1986 to set up a subsidiary in the United States.
"People ask me what I do. I'm a learner," says Baccei, a classic classroom underachiever who now reads mathematics books for relaxation. "I'll take on anything -- except maybe foreign languages."
Although well-apprenticed in the school of the unknown, Baccei realized that controlling the 3-D fad would be the challenge of his life. For openers, he wasn't peddling an instantly recognizable sight gag like a Wacky Wallwalker. Most people come up goggle-eyed and frustrated the first time they try to see into a 3-D illusion. But the party effect gave him hope.
Wherever he went, he handed people what he was then calling Stare-e-os, Amazing 3-D Gaze Toys. "If you have 10 people together, you're almost always going to find 2 or more who can see the image easily, and as soon as they go, 'Ahhhh,' everybody else has to find it, and people begin to help each other. There's a nuclear-chain-reaction effect," says Baccei, who decided to proceed on that basis: "If I could introduce this neutron into enough nuclei and if each nucleus gives me more neutrons, I'm going to get a chain reaction." He'd seed the fad himself -- and then try to cut deals with corporate America.
He began in 1991, like a caterpillar destined to metamorphose, as a mail-order company, contracting out the printing of three posters and a 1992 calendar. Mail order, however, was a business he did not want on an ongoing basis. "My goal in life is not to own a forklift," he says. "Nor do I want to worry about losing $80,000 worth of paper inventory if it gets wet." But mail order provided easy entrÉe into the marketplace. Having scored with the Pentica ad, Baccei placed similar ads in Games magazine and Omni, both of which ran features about the new twist on 3-D viewing, and in the American Airlines in-flight magazine. The airline ad pulled the real weight. Tokyo-bound businesspeople had plenty of time to stare at his Stare-e-os, and Baccei was soon turning out images for books and jigsaw puzzles in Japan, sharpening his creative techniques, developing a style, and building up an inventory of images, rather like a minor-league ballplayer honing his skills in Triple A before stepping up at bat in "the show."
"My biggest fear," he says, "was lighting the fuse and then missing out on the bang." Although he can copyright his individual images and has applied for a patent on the computer program, Baccei realized that his fad-to-be had few barriers to entry. Consequently, he was constantly looking over his shoulder. "Where are they?" he wondered.
As it happened, Baccei's most worrisome competitor entered the fray in a fashion that undoubtedly cost N.E. Thing sales early on and threatened to grab the reins on the fad but may have actually helped Baccei in two very specific ways. NVision Grafix Inc., in Irving, Tex., sold its first 3-D poster in July 1992. The company was started by two fraternity brothers in their late twenties, aerospace engineer Paul Herber and software engineer Mike Bielinski, who was no stranger to Baccei. Bielinski, too, had been inspired by that Stereo World random-dot image and had written a program to permit enthusiasts to design their own 3-D illusions on their home computers. In fact, Bielinski persuaded Baccei to add his software to N.E. Thing's list of mail-order offerings. Later, Bielinski called Baccei to tell him he planned to be a bit more active in the field.
