Significant Zero

by Walt Williams

  It was an open floor plan: no cubicles, only long, thin desks placed back to back. Each workstation was decorated as you might expect—action figures, swag from old projects, Japanese brochures about the apparent evils of pubic hair—you know, the usual stuff. The office walls were classier, bearing framed art that managed to look both uninspired and expensive. If you’re familiar with the work of Damien Hirst, you know what I’m talking about. The art wasn’t ours, by which I mean 2K’s, but rather from the personal collection of Ryan Brant, founder of our parent company, Take-Two. I don’t know the effect it had on anyone else, but for me it was a daily reminder that I wasn’t in Louisiana anymore. This was the big time. New York City. Corporate America at its best.

  Seated at the desk next to mine was D. T.—real name unimportant. To get the measure of this man, all you need are the initials D. T., for a tattoo he planned to have inked on his taint as a symbiotogram. Viewed from one angle, the tattoo would read “Dickhead.” Flip it upside down, and it would read “Twatface.”

  D. T. had removed his belt and wrapped it around his forehead as a means of holding a telephone receiver to his ear. He was listening to the weekly marketing call while playing one of our upcoming games. For the last half hour, he’d been firing a gun at two enemy corpses, trying to nudge their hands onto each other’s crotches. He had almost achieved this goal and wasn’t about to stop just for a phone call.

  “Walter,” he called to me, without turning his head. “Hey, Walter.” I didn’t respond. “Guh! C’mon, Walter.” I tried to shut out D. T.’s voice, but he wouldn’t stop. “Walter! I’m dying over here, and you’re ignoring me? You’re an animal, Walter! An animal!”

  D. T. was getting himself worked up. He wouldn’t stop until I acknowledged him. Best to get it over with.

  “What do you want, D. T.?”

  “Do you ever worry that someday you’ll be walking down the street near Central Park and you’ll pass one of those horse-drawn carriages and the horse will accidently step on your foot, and you’ll scream so loud it’ll spook the horse, causing it to rear back and take a massive dump in your screaming mouth, and then you’ll literally eat shit and die?”

  This was my neophyte brother, the yang to my yin, the PR assistant to my game analyst. We were the new guys, employees #40 and #41. The entry-level grunts straddling the aisle between Production and Promotion.

  Product development, or PD, was my domain. Our job was to interface with the studios developing our games to ensure they were on time, under budget, and up to quality. D. T. was on the promotion side—marketing and PR, two similar but very different things. Marketing is consumer focused. It’s their job to sell you something, whether you want it or not, so they handle commercials, ad campaigns, and the like. PR is focused on the press. It’s a job built on relationships. They organize events, manage press tours, set up interviews—everything journalists want to provide their readers and publishers need to promote their games.

  D. T. and I interacted with each other’s departments. As the rookies, we were the catchall. We reviewed builds, provided milestone feedback, made beer runs, took screenshots, captured videos, carried heavy boxes, and filled out submissions for the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the organization responsible for assigning games an age-appropriate rating based on content. That’s what it’s like when you’re starting out in a creative field. You do everything so that one day, if you rise to the top, you understand how it all works. Sure, you shovel a lot of shit, but that’s because there’s a lot of shit that needs shoveling, and the people above you are too busy to do it themselves. It’s called paying your dues. Come out the other end and you’ll be hardened enough to handle the pressures of the real job. Crumble under the weight of menial tasks and you’ll be gone in no time, your expulsion a mercy killing. If you can’t handle the shit at the bottom, you’re not cut out for the job at any level.

  * * *

  D. T. AND I were playing Serious Sam 2, the fifth—not second—game in the Serious Sam franchise. The game was nearing completion, soon to be shipped around the world, and we were looking for game-breaking crashes.

  Crashes are bad. A crash means your game has broken in such a way that it needs to be restarted. Every game is full of crashes before it ships. In fact, most games ship with some crashes still in the code. These crashes are usually triggered by an almost impossible set of circumstances. A game might crash if you start the second stage with the rocket launcher equipped and then throw a grenade at the exact moment you open the first door. We weren’t looking for these. Our goal was to find any game-breaking crashes—the kind that make it impossible to complete the game. For example, if the game reboots every time you enter the first door in the second stage, that’s a game-breaking crash. If we could make it to the end without a crash, the game would be one step closer to reaching gold. (When a game “goes gold,” it’s ready to be released.) Once that was achieved, Serious Sam 2 would be sent to manufacturing. Discs would be pressed, boxed, and shipped across the globe.

  We’d been playing for two days and having a hell of a time. I’d never heard of Serious Sam, but from what I could tell, the series was about “Serious” Sam Stone, a muscle-bound man from the twenty-second century sent back in time to ancient Egypt to defeat Mental, an alien overlord who wanted to rule the universe. In Serious Sam 2, Sam visits the planet Sirius, home of the technologically advanced Sirians, where he must locate the five pieces of an ancient medallion needed to defeat Mental. The story was ludicrous; not even worth our attention. The gameplay, however, was fun and frantic; every stage was a madhouse that only escalated until we reached the game’s final stage—a vast, grassy field underneath a clear blue sky.

  A pyramid stood in the distance. This was the Mental Institute, where we would finally face off against our mortal enemy. All that stood between us and victory were a series of impassable walls and an enemy force bigger than anything we’d faced before. Waves of enemies broke against us: albino cyclopes, green-skinned footballers, cyborg dinosaurs, giant robot spiders, demons with tank treads for legs and cannons for hands, bodybuilders with bombs instead of heads, even clowns riding unicycles. Yes, we fought them all.

  At the entrance to Mental’s pyramid, we faced one last foe—a life-size, wind-up rhinoceros. It charged from across the field. We stood our ground and opened fire. Mere seconds after the mechanical monstrosity had fallen to our bullets, the screen faded to black. We gripped tight our controllers. Together, D. T. and I had survived the gauntlet. It was time for the final battle, the ultimate boss fight. We were ready to face Mental in deadly combat.

  We waited a very long time.

  The publishing producer on Serious Sam 2 was a man we called Geekjock. He was Jersey to the bone—sleeveless tee, store-bought tan, and finely sculpted facial hair. But the muscles and bravado only served to hide his inner nerd. Comic books, fantasy games, Dungeons & Dragons—this guy was the Vin Diesel of video-game publishing. At a party, I once saw him stop talking midsentence, look around the room, and ask, “Are all the ladies gone?” A guilty smile spread across his face. “Who wants to play some Magic: The Gathering?”

  As publishing producer, Geekjock had one job—ship the game. This is a gross oversimplification, like saying a plate spinner’s only job is to not chip the fine china. With Serious Sam 2 waiting to go gold, Geekjock was well into the weeds. If he could ship the game on time, that would be great. Within budget, even better. If he could pull off both while also ensuring the game wasn’t a steaming pile, he’d be a goddamn miracle worker.

  To maintain focus, he’d recently enacted a “no questions” policy. Whatever you needed to ask, you had to first ask yourself, “Could this wait until later?” Sitting on Geekjock’s desk was a medicine ball. If he didn’t think your question was urgent, he wouldn’t answer. Not until you sat down, spread your legs, and let him roll that ball at your junk.

  “Are you sure this is the gold candidate?”

  Geekjock looked
up from his desk. He saw me eyeing the medicine ball, my hands lingering over my crotch. I didn’t relax until he’d placed the ball under his desk. The question was approved; my testicles were safe.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Did the game crash?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just there’s no final boss. You play through the final level, reach the bad guy’s pyramid, and that’s it. Cut to the final cut scene, roll credits, the end.”

  “That can’t be right. There has to be a final boss. The developer said it was going to have the biggest boss fight in video-game history.”

  “There’s a wind-up rhino.”

  “Please tell me it’s a giant wind-up rhino.”

  I shook my head.

  You don’t expect to watch a man’s heart break when you tell him the wind-up rhinoceros you just killed was only normal size, but that’s the sort of thing that happens in this industry.

  “This is bullshit.” Geekjock yanked his phone receiver from its cradle and dialed a number, pausing long enough to say thanks. “I appreciate you catching this.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I’m going to find out what went wrong. Then, I’m going to figure out how we can fix it without changing anything.” Ah—the publishing motto. Fix everything, change nothing. Improve a game without causing new problems. It sounded like nonsense, the kind of bullshit platitude one aspired to but could never actually achieve. It only took Geekjock thirty minutes to prove me wrong.

  Turns out the issue with the final boss was timing. The development team had planned to create the biggest boss ever, but they unfortunately ran out of time and decided it was better to have no boss at all. They’d meant to tell 2K, really they had, but somehow it fell through the cracks. As a sign of good faith, they offered to resolve the issue by implementing a final boss, posthaste. Sure enough, Serious Sam 2 would ship with the biggest boss ever—Mental’s pyramid. They turned the giant pyramid at the end of the game into a boss by having it rise up on tank treads and roll toward you while launching fighter jets and pummeling you with assorted weaponry. Problem solved, nothing changed.

  “That should solve everything,” said Geekjock. “Now, you have a passport, right?”

  Once the final boss was implemented and the game was deemed bug-free enough to ship, Serious Sam 2 would be sent to the manufacturer so it could be pressed onto discs and sold across the world. The problem is, there is a whole community of pirates who would love to get their hands on a gold master so they can crack it, rip it, and upload it to torrent sites. At the time, we were terrified of handing off our games to a random courier service, not knowing what might happen to them during transit. That meant someone from 2K would have to hand deliver the gold master to the manufacturer, all the way in London.

  To make it fair, D. T. and I would both show up to work with our passports and a carry-on bag. There, we’d draw straws. The short straw would climb into a town car waiting downstairs and head straight to JFK airport. Seven hours later, he’d disembark and place the gold master directly into the hands of Klaus, a man you’d swear was the bastard German son of Lemmy Kilmister, who would then get the courier nice and drunk before putting him on a flight back to New York.

  “My girlfriend’s gonna be pissed,” said D. T. “I have to go home tonight and tell her I might be flying to London. We were supposed to get dinner with a friend, or a coworker, or someone. I don’t even know where my passport is. I’ll be up half the night trying to find it.”

  “It’s okay if you don’t have one,” said Geekjock. “Walt can go to London. But you’ll have to run demos with Bruce at a convention this weekend.”

  Bruce was a product manager in the PR department and D. T.’s direct superior. His real name was Roose, but whenever he gave his name, people usually thought he said Bruce. After years of correcting people, he finally decided to just roll with it. He made the mistake of telling this to the office, after which we refused to call him anything else. The only person who didn’t use it was D. T. He had a different name for Bruce.

  “On second thought, London sounds great,” said D. T. “Anything’s better than spending an entire weekend with that Persian goat snake.”

  It was a surprisingly pointed insult from D. T. It almost would have struck me as racist if Bruce hadn’t silently appeared from behind a cubicle wall and said, “I have had many names: the Carpathian. En Sabah Roose. Daddy. Now, Persian goat snake. I certainly wouldn’t classify myself as underhanded and devious, but I understand why lesser beings would see it that way.”

  As Bruce walked away, he kept his eyes on us, making sure never to blink.

  * * *

  IT WAS AGREED THAT D. T. would ferry the gold master to London, and I would accompany Bruce to a comic convention in Chicago, where we would demo a forthcoming game. The plan was to meet him at the office on Friday morning and leave from there to the airport.

  I found him waiting in the lobby with one large suitcase and two bulging duffle bags.

  “I’ll let you carry these,” he said, motioning to the bags.

  “You’re not going to help?”

  He shook his head. “One of the perks of being a product manager. I don’t have to carry things anymore.”

  I grunted as I slung the bags over my shoulders. “What’s in here?”

  “Just swag. T-shirts. Maybe some posters.”

  Swag is promotional junk masquerading as sought-after collectibles: hats, stickers, patches, posters—anything someone might wear or display. Swag is great. You reward fans with something they can’t buy in stores, and in return, they agree to be your walking billboard. You might wonder who’d want this shit.

  “Am I allowed to take a shirt?” I asked.

  It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in—never pass up a free T-shirt, especially if it’s one you can wear to work. Clothes cost money. Swag is priceless.

  * * *

  DEMOS, LIKE MANY ASPECTS of promotion, are a lie. A demo may look like a game, and it may play like a game, but it is not a game. The game is still being built and is in no position to be shown to the public. The demo is a separate entity, designed to represent what the final game will be. It’s highly scripted digital theater, meant to be seen and not played.

  Developers hate demos, mainly because production must come to a grinding halt to create these promotional experiences. We don’t build one level to final quality before moving on to the next; most levels are built simultaneously. For a demo to look its best, a team has to shift their attention away from the main game to focus on a fake one. And no, once a demo is finished you can’t just put it into the final game. Demos are so specialized and scripted that in order for them to work in the final game, they would have to mostly be rebuilt from scratch.

  Presenting a demo usually requires two people: a driver who plays and a presenter who talks. Every moment has been scripted, even those built around uncertain outcomes. This helps maintain the illusion that the demo is representative of the final product. When you see someone playing a game, you assume that game is playable, and that whatever happens on screen will be present when you finally get your hands on it. It’s a simple manipulation that works almost every time. Follow the script, and the demo will show viewers exactly what you want them to see. Attempt to deviate, and it all falls apart.

  Demos suck.

  “I was thinking you could do all the demos this weekend,” said Bruce. We were at the convention, setting up our booth before the first wave of attendees came through the door. “You’d drive and present, and I’d just stand here, talking to people. How’s that sound?”

  I could tell he was joking, so I ran with it. “Fine with me.”

  Maybe my delivery was too deadpan, because Bruce took me seriously. “You’d do that?”

  “I will if you buy me something from the convention.”

  “Well, I mean, I dunno . . .” Bruce began to waffle. I expected him to back down. Instead, he said, “We’ll need to
set some ground rules. It can’t cost more than fifteen hundred dollars.”

  It took every ounce of self-control to keep my mouth from falling on the floor.

  Fifteen hundred dollars? Are you kidding me? I was hoping for twenty-five. And all I have to do is play a video game all weekend? If I were home, I would have done it for free.

  I rolled my eyes and tried to look annoyed. If Bruce found out he’d overshot the mark by a few miles, he might renege on the deal. “I guess that’s fine. But I’m going to need at least a five-minute bathroom break every few hours. And thirty minutes on Sunday to look around the convention and decide what I want.”

  Bruce held out his hand. “You got a deal.”

  I spent the majority of the next two and half days hidden behind the thick black curtains of our promo booth, where the demos took place. From start to finish, the demo took around ten minutes. Whenever I finished, my audience of fifteen to twenty people would file out, and then a new audience would be sent in. With five minutes between each presentation, I usually ran through the demo four times an hour.

  Outside my dark room, our booth workers drummed up excitement to ensure I always had a packed house. In the past, it was common for the booth workers to be young, attractive women in scanty outfits, colloquially known as booth babes—the idea being that the only thing a bunch of geeks wanted more than comic books and video games was sex. All you had to do was stick a few booth babes outside your stall, and the boys would come running. Some companies still use them, but the practice has become less common. As our industry has grown more mainstream, it has slowly moved away from objectifying women as a marketing strategy. Some conventions actually ban the use of booth babes. I’m glad, because it was always a cynical move. If your game is good, you don’t need flesh to convince people they should check it out. More importantly, the gaming demographic has grown beyond the stereotype of nerdy, white males. Our consumers, developers, and gaming press are more diverse than ever before. Events and conventions should be inclusive; no one should feel out of place or uncomfortable.