by Brian Dear
Hours of addicting fun awaited players. Even more than solitaire, Mah-Jongg relied on memory and strategy. Speed got you nowhere, and usually nowhere fast. A wise player carefully examined the entire layout of tiles on every play. Mah-Jongg was not an action game, and though it required concentrated effort, the gameplay was deeply meditative.
The game monitored your every move, with enough Self-Pacing and Immediate Feedback that Skinner himself would have been proud. “Touch a tile,” the game would say. When you touched a tile, it told you to now find a matching tile and touch it. The program instantly evaluated whether the two tiles were indeed legal by the rules of the game, and if so, the two tiles disappeared, bringing you one step closer to winning. However, the game was quick to identify a tile that was not “free,” meaning it was somehow blocked. What might feel like an easy, quick game could turn into a half hour, an hour, or more, the last thirty or forty tiles seemingly unmatchable. This is where the game’s addictiveness revealed itself: just when all appeared lost, players drunk on the gambler’s fallacy—I’ll figure it out this time—found a surge of motivation and then, having discovered all was indeed lost, rather than quit, they’d load a new game and start all over again.
If you ever managed to remove all the tiles, the screen would erase and in large letters at the top would appear CONGRATULATIONS! and below, YOU WIN!, but neither of those were what caught your eye. In between the two headlines lay Brodie’s pièce de résistance: a sigil-like drawing of a particularly scary Chinese dragon. Thanks to the slow phone lines of the day, it took about twelve seconds for the terminal to draw the dragon with its bug-eyed, berserk face, long tongue jutting out from an open toothy jaw, jagged-edge claws on four feet, and long arching back and tail, but the delay didn’t matter. It was a rare moment, it was the fireworks earned through an achievement that might have taken a long time to reach, but it was worth it all just to watch the great, mad, bug-eyed beast come to life on the screen.
In one way—reminiscent of the architecture lesson he’d coded back in Arizona—the dragon was that “enemy” that appeared behind the “edges” of the Mah-Jongg tiles. But in Mah-Jongg, when you encountered the dragon it meant victory.
But in another way, this was the monster that lay beneath the crash pit that had so changed his life back in a Stanford gymnasium. He had found a way to conquer that monster, and through the game he gave the world a way to conquer it as well. But he was far from done with this game. Soon, he would figure out how to take Mah-Jongg to an entirely new level.
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Meanwhile, there was the matter of liability. Was Stanford University liable for Brodie’s accident? Should the university have made more of an effort at providing a safe environment for its athletes? Was the homemade crash pit insufficient and lacking? Did that translate into any form of culpability for the university, for the Stanford athletics program, for the coach? These were questions percolating among the Lockard family.
“The first thing Stanford’s athletic director told my parents,” Brodie recalls, “was that Stanford would not pay a dime unless we sued. Not to be mean, at all—he was just telling them how the process worked.” It may have been how the process worked, but it wasn’t a process that appealed to Brodie. “Suing was the last thing any of us wanted to do,” he says.
Nevertheless, the family got a lawyer, who brought suit against Stanford, requesting, according to one source, $18 million. “It was a horrible time,” recalls Jeff Chung. “Suddenly all the guys on the team were now either implicating Stanford gymnastics or not helping Brodie. And that was a terrible position to be in. I remember when they called me to the witness stand, and I just said, listen, the way I’m going to do this is just tell the truth, whatever they ask me, but people are going to have to ask me the right questions….I don’t think his legal team really asked enough probing questions.”
Marcy was also called as a witness and, of course, Coach Hamada. A friend says that years later Hamada told him that Brodie’s accident and subsequent trial were the worst time of his life.
Brodie was conflicted, embarrassed even, as the suit created an adversarial relationship with the very university he so loved, at which he was still, despite his physical hardship, in the middle of taking classes in pursuit of a degree. “This was my coach, my school, my teammates. The trial was beyond horrible.”
For Brodie the ordeal felt like it went on for decades, although it was over in less than a year. It felt, he would say years later, as if “everyone within fifty miles of the gym” was asked to testify. In the end, Brodie, his family, and his legal team settled with Stanford for undisclosed terms, and the university agreed to pay his medical expenses.
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After Brodie left the hospital, Cindy Poulos helped him enroll in a program Control Data offered called HomeWork, designed to give PLATO terminals to disabled people so they could work productively at home. If there was one thing Brodie had proven, it was that he was productive on PLATO. He developed something of a name for himself on the CDC PLATO systems. He hung out in some of the notesfiles like =sots=, the literary home of the “Save Our Tongue Society,” and =forum=, an open forum for discussion about current affairs and issues.
While Brodie was working on Mah-Jongg on PLATO, he had resumed pursuing his bachelor’s degree at Stanford, often having fellow classmates take notes for him for classes he wasn’t able to physically attend. It didn’t take him long to realize how handy a PLATO terminal could be for classwork—most students in the early 1980s still didn’t have personal computers, or if they did, they weren’t very useful. PLATO had text editors that, while not ideal, were better than what was usually available on micros. So he did a lot of homework on PLATO, printing out reports that often included very complex mathematical formulas, all relatively easy to produce on PLATO. By 1984 he not only finished a double bachelor’s degree in mathematical science and English, but also finished a master’s degree in interactive educational technology. True to form, the professors in the master’s program—this being Stanford, i.e., Suppes’s turf—steered clear of PLATO, but it did give him a broader understanding of computers in education. Brodie devoted his master’s thesis to developing for his architect-professor father another PLATO lesson, this one called “Perspec,” which taught students how to draw in perspective. Even after the accident, Brodie managed to attend Stanford gymnastics events as a spectator. “Brodie never lost his devotion to the gymnastics program,” says Andy Geiger, “and I can remember him coming in his wheelchair and marveling at how well he could manage with a tongue-manipulated device to get around.”
When in 1983 Brodie finally finished Mah-Jongg, he wanted to redo the game for another computer, thinking he might make money doing so. Was there an affordable microcomputer with a display close enough to PLATO’s high resolution? He couldn’t find one. Then in January 1984, Apple’s Macintosh appeared. It raised the bar. As Alan Kay once famously quipped to Steve Jobs, the Mac was “the first personal computer worth criticizing.” Any PLATO user would have probably felt the same. The screen resolution wasn’t quite PLATO, but wasn’t too shabby either, at 512 pixels wide and 342 pixels high. At least it matched one of PLATO’s dimensions.
Sometime in 1985, Brodie got a call from a producer at the gaming company Activision named Brad Fregger. Fregger recalls getting Brodie’s name from a recruiter, Caretha Coleman, the wife of his boss, Ken Coleman. Brodie recalls sending his résumé out in 1985, looking for work, now that he had finished his two Stanford degrees. Caretha suggested that Fregger might want to hire Brodie. “I often worked with creative programmers who had ‘day jobs,’ ” says Fregger, so it was routine to get a tip about talent he should try to recruit.
He and Brodie agreed to meet the next day at a wheelchair-accessible restaurant for breakfast. Brodie arrived, waited, waited some more, and finally gave up. Fregger never showed. For Brodie, something as simple as meeting someone at a restaurant was a nontrivial logistical operation involving helpers gettin
g him prepared for the day, getting him into his wheelchair, into a car, then driving him to the restaurant, and helping him out of the car and into the restaurant. And then Fregger was a no-show. Says Fregger, “I forgot the appointment entirely.” Brodie called Fregger later that day, asking what happened, conveying his annoyance in plain terms, and Fregger, mortified, apologized as best he could. They agreed to reschedule a new appointment on the Stanford campus later that very same day. It was Fregger’s first face-to-face meeting with Brodie, complete with all the realizations of what Brodie’s confinement to a wheelchair entailed. After a wide-ranging conversation, including Brodie’s interest in computers in education—he was just wrapping up his master’s degree—Fregger told him that while he didn’t have an opportunity at the moment at Activision, he encouraged Brodie to call him if he ever developed a game, and that Activision would take a look and see if it was something they might want to publish.
On April 15, 1985—he remembers the exact date even now—Brodie got a full-time job at Stanford University as a programmer. The first thing he did was go to the university’s bookstore and, utilizing Apple’s educational discount, bought himself a Mac. His job made him productive, and got him interacting on a professional level with colleagues. “I worked seventy hours a week,” he says. “And I loved it.”
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Almost as soon as he got his Mac, Brodie started writing a Mac version of Mah-Jongg. Between April and December 1985, on top of the seventy hours a week he spent working at Stanford, he spent nights and weekends building the new game.
That year he also got a Personics HeadMaster—a device that freed him from the mouth stick for many tasks with the computer. The HeadMaster consisted of a lightweight headset that sent ultrasonic beams to a little box that fed signals to the Mac. The HeadMaster software worked with the Mac’s operating system in such a way that virtually all programs became accessible, enabling Brodie to move his head just so, causing the cursor to move in a corresponding manner on the screen, and then, with the help of a little strawlike tube at the side of his mouth, puff into it to click or “type” a key. With this and, from time to time, continuing to use the mouth stick, he designed, wrote the code for, and drew all of the graphics for the new Mah-Jongg.
By 1985 there existed programs on PC and Macintosh that emulated a PLATO terminal. For Brodie this meant he could use his Mac to dial up to a PLATO system and get back in the community, with its notesfiles and TERM-talk. While connected to PLATO he would copy the TUTOR source code for Mah-Jongg, then paste it into another text window on the Mac. It was a time-consuming process but still a huge time-saver, as it meant he didn’t have to type the game in from scratch, and the Mac’s editors had scrolling, something PLATO lacked, so it was far easier to move through the code. He also made screen grabs of the exquisite PLATO artwork he’d designed for the game tiles, and then, pixel by pixel, cleaned them up and converted them to the Mac version of the game. Once the code was all moved over, he converted every line of TUTOR into the C language environment of the Mac. By mid-December 1985 he felt the game was ready, and took up Fregger’s offer from months earlier to get in touch if he ever developed a game.
“I have a game I want to show you,” he told Fregger over the phone. On the morning of Christmas Eve, Fregger drove over to the house Brodie’s mother rented in Redwood City, where Brodie had moved after being released from the hospital. She’d moved to be near him when he had his accident. She greeted Fregger and showed him in. Brodie was inside, in his wheelchair, with his Mac, but the Mac had been set up not facing Brodie but in a way that Fregger could sit down to use it and get a personal demo. But there was something else. Brodie had set up an arrangement of Mah-Jongg tiles on a table. They’d been arranged in the “turtle” formation, much like they were displayed in the PLATO version of his game. He referred to the version of the Mah-Jongg tiles on the table as The Turtle, and Fregger assumed that was the name of the game.
“The Turtle appealed to me immediately,” Fregger would later say. “The game was simple but wonderful, a compelling challenge people would probably want to play again and again. I said as much to Brodie.”
Fregger wanted a copy of the game so he could play it more and check it out thoroughly. Brodie was hesitant to let his baby go away with an Activision producer. He asked Fregger for a personal promise that he would protect the game, and he also asked him to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Fregger agreed to both, and watched as Brodie’s mother helped Brodie get positioned in front of the Mac and set up with his mouth stick. He deftly fired up a word processor program, made some tweaks to the document, and finalized the nondisclosure agreement while Fregger stood and watched in amazement.
“It was at this moment,” Fregger would later write, “that the immensity of his accomplishment hit me. He had developed The Turtle in just this way—pressing one key at a time with a stick he held in his mouth. He had programmed the entire game, created all of the graphics, done it all…one keypress at a time. I was amazed. Later I would see a picture of Brodie taken before his accident. He was in position on the parallel bars, his form perfect, his body healthy. I felt a sadness he couldn’t have always been that way, but I didn’t feel pity. Brodie didn’t allow pity. He had programmed The Turtle as therapy. He had seized the moment, he had accepted this unexpected, unwelcome turn of events, accepted the facts of what he could no longer do, and began discovering what he could do.”
Fregger took the game home and let his wife try it out on their Mac. At five in the morning, he found her still glued to the Mac, playing Brodie’s game. “I began to think we might have something here,” he says.
The next day at work he shared the game with a colleague at Activision, under strict rules that he try it at home and that he not show it to anyone other than his wife. The colleague agreed. A few days later, he heard that the colleague and his wife had spent the entire weekend glued to their Mac playing Brodie’s game.
Fregger suggested to Brodie and to colleagues at Activision that they call the game Addiction, which Brodie was not a fan of. Nor was Activision’s marketing department, who instead suggested the name Shanghai. That’s what they decided to go to market with.
The private reactions to Brodie’s game, all positive and citing how addictive it was, smoothed the way for Activision to green-light the project. The major remaining hurdle was a contract. Fregger produced a contract for him to sign. “The contract was sixteen pages long, which floored me,” says Brodie. “I was expecting two or three.” Reading it through, Brodie noticed its provisions were stacked in Activision’s favor. He describes it this way: “We get this. We get this. We get this. You get…that.”
For Brodie it was not a good start. The two went back and forth haggling over the contract for a few rounds, but in the end Activision got most of what it wanted. It also got something it really wanted, much to Brodie’s regret later. “I was naive enough to say, Sure, have the copyright,” he says. “What am I gonna do with it?” What he hadn’t considered was that color machines were coming; many more makes and models of computer beckoned as potential future platforms for the game. Plus, potentially lucrative sequels to Shanghai—a potential business franchise with a revenue flow for years. All of those things were tied to the copyright, and whoever owned the copyright owned a lot of interest in future versions, and derivations, of the game. Says Brodie years later, with a tinge of regret, “I just handed that over to them.”
Then there were the ports, the work of translating (“porting”) a computer program from one computing environment to another. Activision wanted to port Brodie’s game to five other personal computer platforms, including the IBM PC, Amiga, and Apple IIGS. “The porting thing,” he says, “was a little stingy as well.” Activision would take about $5,000 out of his royalty payments, in advance, for each port they did, “to pay the guy doing the port.”
The net result was that Brodie would not see a dime from Activision for nearly two years from the time Shanghai was initi
ally published in 1986—peak years for the game’s sales. Despite the fact that it became an overnight bestseller, winning every sort of award and media recognition in 1986 and 1987, Activision held on to every penny for a good long time. The reviews from that era praised the game for being not only deceptively simple but also addictive, not only to the reviewer, but also to his or her family and sometimes even to co-workers at the magazine that published the review. One reviewer bragged about how many times he’d been able to “see the dragon.” The game’s simplicity initially seemed to turn some people off, as if the game was a mere trifle, but then if they actually played it, it was another story altogether. Hours would pass quickly, as if the game put you under a spell. “We were both overwhelmed,” wrote one reviewer of his and his wife’s experience playing the Amiga port of the game. “Then the children were similarly affected. As of this writing, our Shanghai mania is of such proportions that I am beginning to fear for our health.” In the June 1987 issue of inCider, Shanghai was written up as an Editor’s Choice for the Apple IIGS port of the game. The editors explained that they ordinarily would not list a game as an Editor’s Choice pick, especially since Shanghai “isn’t even a new game, though it’s new to the Apple II—it was a smash hit on the Macintosh last year…[b]ut our objections to Shanghai faded once we started playing—and playing, and playing….The trouble is, Shanghai is unbelievably addictive.” One inCider editor put it this way: “I don’t know how a game with no spaceships, lasers, spies, villains, violence, bats, or balls could be so habit-forming, but Shanghai is. Once you get going, it’s hard not to put the mouse down.” In 1987, Amiga World gave the game an Editor’s Choice Award, saying that one editor at the magazine “plans to name his first-born child after Shanghai author Brodie Lockard.”
