Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  “Get it to a filmable state,” they said. “Something we can sell. Then we’ll talk money.”

  It sounded shady, but no one else was banging on my door. By July, the script was finished and sent to everyone involved. The next day, I awoke to two text messages. The first was from one of the producers: “This is great. I think we’re officially in the movie business”—which was surprising, as I thought he already was in the movie business.

  I texted back, “Glad you like it. Let’s draw up a contract.”

  Response: “I like that you’re serious about your career, but this kind of talk can scare away good opportunities.”

  I knew it was bullshit, but part of me held out hope. I wanted to believe this could be my big break. Unfortunately, the summer was halfway over, and money was getting tight. I didn’t have the luxury of waiting around for them. I needed to find a way to turn words into cash. If screenwriting was the highest rung on the professional-writing ladder, I would go a few steps lower and try again.

  Comic books seemed like a viable path. I’d been a fan my whole life, ever since my older brother left me a box of Swamp Thing and Marvel Age issues, but what really got me hooked was reading my first Spider-Man comics while home sick with the flu. Peter Parker, the man behind Spider-Man’s mask, was a lot like me: smart, socially awkward, and picked on by others. In other words, we were nerds. I’d always been drawn to characters like Peter. Donatello from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Egon Spengler from Ghostbusters were great fictional role models. Their bookishness didn’t exclude them from groups; rather, it made their inclusion vital. Spider-Man, however, was not a team player. He and his secret identity, Peter Parker, were both outcasts, shunned no matter what they did. Not a great example for a budding young mind, but certainly more relatable. Reading Spider-Man comics didn’t make me any less nerdy, but the inspiration I found in them made me confident enough not to care. When I ended up an aspiring writer in Manhattan, it seemed only natural for me to get a job at Marvel, work my way up the ladder, and repay the favor by writing The Amazing Spider-Man.

  This was 2004, four years before Marvel would release the first Iron Man movie, beginning their transformation into a multibillion-dollar cinematic juggernaut. They had the X-Men and Spider-Man franchises at Sony Pictures but were still mostly known for their comics. Even so, I knew they had to receive hundreds of CVs every day. If I was going to stand out, I’d needed to do something drastic, like walk straight into their office and ask for a job.

  You’d be surprised how easy it was to do that.

  With a freshly printed résumé in hand, I hailed a cab to Midtown. On my dad’s advice, I wore a suit—slightly wrinkled, but nothing too horrendous. All my life, he’d told me to always wear a suit when meeting a potential employer. He should know, having worked a few summers at his brother’s suit store. In the fifties. I’d have bet good money no one at Marvel wore a suit to work. It seemed wrong to show up in one, but no more wrong than showing up at their door unannounced, without an appointment.

  After what felt like the longest elevator ride of my life, I found myself standing outside the Marvel office. I tested the door: locked. I rang the bell. A moment later, the door opened just enough for a very tall, very muscular man to peer out. He was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. I silently cursed my father.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked. His tone made it clear this was just a figure of speech.

  I launched into the speech I’d practiced on the ride up. “Hi! I’m Walt Williams. I was wondering about any job openings you might have. I recently graduated from college and have always wanted to work at Marvel, so I thought I’d stop by and introduce myself. I’m a hard worker and a fast learner, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to learn the ropes, even if it means starting in the mail room.” That’s right; my entire plan amounted to working my way up from the mail room. Why? Because that’s what I’d seen people do on the tee-vee.

  The man stood up straighter. “I’m the mail room.”

  I got the hint; I just didn’t take it. I had paid for the cab ride there, so I was damn sure going to see it through. “Well, like I said, I’m willing to do any job. Whatever it takes to be part of the Marvel family. Is there anyone here I can talk to?”

  “Everyone’s at lunch.”

  “That’s okay.” I pushed my résumé through the cracked door. “If you could just pass on my résumé, I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh.” Okay, he was done. He shut the door in my face.

  I still haven’t heard back from them.

  Over the next couple of weeks, I crept further down the writing ladder. I was too long-winded for short stories, but didn’t have enough to say for a book. Essays and articles were too dry for my taste and left me wanting to shove a pencil in my eye. I submitted reviews for restaurants, plays, books, and films. Not a single one earned a response, and with good reason—I was a terrible critic. If I hated a play or a restaurant, it was easy to rip it apart with words, but I lacked the thoughtfulness to analyze and celebrate the things I loved. It’s a good thing there was no market for clickbait and hot takes back then, or else I never would have learned there is a big difference between being a writer and being an asshole.

  My writing options were exhausted, my bank account nearly depleted. I needed to make something happen soon, or the whole adventure would have been for nothing. I was now desperate enough to do what I should have done from the beginning.

  * * *

  IT IS A TRUTH universally acknowledged that wherever hangs a Lone Star flag, Texans will gather beneath it. I consider myself a Louisianan, but the truth is I’m one-quarter shit-kicker on my father’s side, which was enough to draw me to the Lone Star Bar in Midtown one July night.

  Having exhausted all avenues, I had chosen to deploy my nuclear option. There were two fellow NoZe Brothers living in Manhattan—Saltzman and Groverfield—both of whom had graduated from Baylor a decade before I arrived. We had never met, but I knew them by reputation. Saltzman was a screenwriter; Groverfield was an editor at a publishing house. If anyone could help me, it would be them. I knew a job offer, or even a recommendation, wasn’t guaranteed. Our shared brotherhood bought me a few rounds at the bar and the chance to state my case, nothing more.

  If this were a story, now would be the point where the hero is granted a vision of his or her possible future, as personified in an older, more successful acquaintance. Our hero would then express bright-eyed eagerness, along with moral flexibility, signaling his or her willingness to do whatever it takes to succeed. This would be enough for the elder statesmen to take a shine to our hero, having recognized they are the same on some primal level.

  None of that happened, because this isn’t a story; it’s my life. I am not a hero so much as I am a collection of insecurities and paranoid delusions molded into the shape of a pudgy doughboy. Saltzman and Groverfield were polite, generous with their bar tabs, and willing to answer any and all questions. I was utterly intimidated by their niceness. Unable to engage with me on any meaningful level, they broke off into their own conversation, leaving me to get acquainted with their friend Wayne.

  “What do you do?” he asked.

  “At the moment? Jack shit.” I hated that question—not because it was small talk but because answering it felt like a lie. “Though theoretically I’m a writer.”

  “That’s cool. Working on anything?”

  “Nothing worth talking about.”

  “Well, if you’re looking for a job, I might be able to help. Ever heard of Take-Two?”

  Not even once. Wayne wasn’t surprised. Take-Two Interactive was the third largest video-game publisher in the world. The name didn’t ring a bell, but they owned Rockstar Games, makers of the wildly popular Grand Theft Auto series. Things weren’t going great for Take-Two. They were embroiled in a scandal dubbed “Hot Coffee.” Someone had dug into the code for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and discovered assets for an unfinished sexual minigame
in which players could have clothed sex with their in-game girlfriend after she invited them in for coffee. This content wasn’t accessible to players; Rockstar had cut it from the game. But the code and assets still existed on the disc, and sophisticated programmers combing through the code had found it. They created an unsanctioned modification, or mod, that activated the unfinished code and replaced clothed characters with naked models. That’s what mods do: alter a game’s content so it functions differently than the developers intended. Mods can swap out art, introduce new gameplay systems, or, in the case of Hot Coffee, unlock an unfinished minigame that was never meant to be seen by the public. When the Hot Coffee mod was released, nongamers who had never heard of mods misunderstood what had happened, and the company got unfairly raked over the coals.

  “You can probably guess things are tense right now. It’s still a great place to work, though. And we just opened a new publishing label, 2K Games. I know they’re hiring for some entry-level positions. You should send me your résumé. Who knows? There might be a match.”

  Two weeks later, I stood in Take-Two’s lobby, dressed in my best and glistening with sweat. I was interviewing for a game analyst position. The job would require me to play games currently in production and provide feedback on how to make them better.

  When Wayne arrived in the lobby, he took one look at me and stopped. “You wore a suit.” It wasn’t a question or statement; more of an involuntary expression of disbelief.

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “It is if you want the job. Listen, just take off your jacket and tie, untuck your shirt, and roll up your sleeves. No one will hire you in games if you wear a suit to your interview. It shows you don’t know anything about the industry.”

  “I don’t know anything about the industry.”

  “Please don’t tell them that.”

  I followed him into the building, shedding my clothes as we went. “Are you sure about this? I’m really, really sweaty.” August in New York was brutal. Summer had turned the city into a giant brick pizza oven. Everything carried the familiar, sickly-sweet scent of rat death. The smell didn’t bother me, but the heat was unbearable. Growing up in the South had done nothing to prepare me for summer in the city. I would sweat all the time; not profusely, but enough to look eternally moist. That’s a great look for a cake, but terrible for an interview.

  “Maybe they won’t notice.”

  We stopped outside the conference room where my interview would take place. I was sweaty and disheveled, and I had a red tie sticking out of my pants pocket. “I look like I’m stumbling home hungover after senior prom.”

  Wayne refrained from giving me a reassuring pat on the back or even a handshake—a valid call on his part—but he gave me a sincere smile. “Just be yourself. You’ll do fine.” Then, he opened the conference room door and introduced me to the Fox.

  I knew nothing about the man who now stood directly in front of me. He was small in both height and frame, but also lean and strong. He dressed in a style best described as Victorian sailor chic. His eyes were two different colors: one blue, one brown. When he spoke, it was with a thick French accent, making it hard to parse his words.

  I later tracked him down online and learned he began working at Ubisoft in 1997, where he was credited as part of the Internet team for a driving game called POD. Four years later, he was a vice president with a slew of hit titles under his belt—Rayman, Splinter Cell, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It’s impossible to know how much the Fox contributed to the success of those games, but it appears to have been a substantial amount.

  In the years since we met, I’ve heard many rumors: He was once a stand-up comedian. He was either a secretly devout Buddhist or he abhorred all religion because, as a child, he witnessed a murder committed by a holy man. He’s Italian but claims to be French, simply because he likes France more. He’s an American pretending to be French because it lets him get away with saying outrageous things. Based only on my personal experience, I am willing to believe any of them.

  “So, this is a QA job?” QA stands for quality assurance, denoting testers who play in-development games, finding and logging bugs for the team to fix.

  The Fox shook his head and tutted. “No no no no no. The game analyst is a creative job. You would be comparing our games against those of our competitors and coming up with ideas on how to make them better.

  “We make games for every platform,” said the Fox. “To do this job, you will need to be familiar with PlayStation, Xbox, PC—all of those. Which ones do you own?”

  “Oh, I don’t own any video-game systems.”

  He recoiled at that. “What do you mean you don’t have any?”

  “I have a laptop, but it’s kind of old. I’m not even sure it could play a game.”

  “You do realize you’re applying for a job at a video-game company.” Any interest he had in me was quickly fading. He was looking for someone with an understanding of modern games—what was good, what was new, what people enjoyed. “Well, I used to own an Xbox and a PlayStation, but I sold them when I moved here. Now that I’m out of college, I kind of thought I was supposed to stop playing games and get a job.”

  He laughed. My quaint naïveté had won him back. “Would you be willing to play games again, or is that nonnegotiable with you?”

  “If you want to pay me to play games, I won’t say no.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said the Fox. “Do you have any questions for me?”

  I hate asking questions during an interview. My ADHD-raddled brain can listen to someone for only about three minutes before it starts looping Muzak and my brain goes into energy-save mode. Luckily, this trait is balanced out by my narcissism, which allows me to remain focused for a good hour and a half, so long as we’re mostly talking about me. It’s a great combination for staying focused during a job interview, but it’s terrible when it comes time to ask questions, because I probably haven’t picked up enough information to form any reasonable inquiries. At best, when someone asks, “Do you have any questions for us?” the most honest response I could give is “No?” or “Can we keep talking about me?” Neither of which is appropriate.

  Something was different on this particular day. Maybe I was feeling especially full of myself, or I was feeding off the Fox’s natural French elitism. Who knows? Whatever it was, something possessed me, and for the first time ever, I asked a question during a job interview.

  “When you say you’re looking for feedback on your games, do you mean honest feedback, or do you just want a yes-man who will tell you everything is great?”

  My brain didn’t catch on to what I was saying until it was halfway out of my mouth. I had just enough time to regret everything before speaking the final word. Before the Fox had a chance to respond, I heard my dad’s voice in my head. “When will you learn to shut the hell up?” It was something he’d been saying to me for two decades. For once, I agreed with him.

  The Fox and I have never spoken about this moment. If I had to guess, he was likely thinking, “What the hell sort of question is that? Who does this kid think he is?” He should have laughed me out of the room, shouted me down and put me in my place. Instead, he offered me a job.

  Wayne and the Fox gave me a couple of days to think it over.

  Was this really what I wanted to do? I moved to New York to become a writer. So far, that had been a nonstarter. That didn’t mean I should give up, right? No doubt working in video games would be fun. But it wasn’t writing.

  I sent a text to the director of my Jamaican crime script. “Hey. Any word on the movie?”

  His response: “Let’s talk tomorrow. Have a new idea to run by you. What if Scarface drove a bulletproof Rolls-Royce? Bring weed.”

  On second thought, I could definitely work in video games until my writing career took off. Even better, the salary and health insurance would keep me alive until it happened.

  I emailed Wayne: “I’m in.”

  4

 
* * *

  EAT SHIT OR DIE TRYING

  When I joined 2K Games in August of 2005, the company was just beginning to stretch its legs. We were small, no more than forty people. 2K’s sister company, Rockstar Games, was an unstoppable juggernaut. Even in the aftermath of the Hot Coffee scandal, there was little concern people would stop buying their games. For Rockstar, controversy was—and still is—little more than a bump in the road. You need only look at their sales figures to see the truth of that. It’s difficult to get accurate sales figures for video games, but Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the bearer of Hot Coffee, has sold almost 21 million units since its release in 2004. The franchise’s most recent installment, Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, sold 32.5 million units within its first six months.

  As newcomers, we weren’t looking to attack the throne. 2K was building something new that could stand proudly beside Rockstar and leave its own mark on the industry. However, we didn’t have a franchise like GTA. Our schedule of upcoming games was, to put it lightly, schizophrenic. The most immediate projects were licensed games based on movies and TV shows, such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Da Vinci Code. Further down the line were releases from acclaimed developers Firaxis and Irrational Games. Peppered throughout were various sports titles—tennis and boxing were already in development, with racing and lucha libre possibly to come. For a catalog, it was scattershot, unfocused. But that was the point. We’d cast our net wide, looking for the game upon which our house would be built.

  Our offices were located on the third floor of a small building in SoHo. The elevator opened onto a waiting area, where Miriam, the receptionist, would greet you from behind a desk. From there, you passed through a locked door into the main office. A dim, wood-paneled hall led you past the glass-walled conference room, where a statue of a knight wearing a red clown wig stood guard over the meeting table. From there, you emerged into a long, bright room whose windows overlooked the corner of Broadway and Houston.