When I ran a game, the splash screen would give the name of the hacker who cracked it, names like Mr. Xerox, the Time Lord, Mr. Krac-Man. Who were these people who cracked games? Who made them, for that matter? How on earth did you get that job?
It was time to find out. It was time to say something. I had an audience of four or five people now. People had been shuffling in and out of the conference room all day, to listen or ask a few questions. All men, though, until Lisa, the third founder of Black Arts, came in. She looked as I remembered—pale, with a big forehead that made her look like a cartoon alien. She’d ditched the flowery dresses for a tentlike oversized black T-shirt. I remembered her from high school, from car rides home at two or three in the morning. In winter she drove with the window rolled down and the heat going full blast.
“The Ultimate Game,” I said. “I can do just… anything?”
They nodded. I felt ridiculous. Was the Ultimate Game the one in which I ride a hundred-foot-tall pink rhino through the streets, driving my enemies before me? The one where the chess pieces come alive and talk in a strange poetry? Is it just the game where I always win?
“Relax, guy,” the short guy said. “It’s just whatever you’re into. Your game.”
It was hard to say what was so particularly odd about the two of them. Maybe it was that even though everything about them screamed “loser,” they didn’t seem to care. In fact, they carried themselves like kings in T-shirts.
“So… okay, okay. You’re playing chess, right, but all the pieces are actual monsters, and when you take one you have to… actually fight… it?” Why were they looking at me that way?
“You mean like in Archon? For the C64?”
“Um. Right.” Lisa scowled even a little more. A bearded guy at the back rolled his eyes, as if in disbelief at what a loser I was; he was wearing a jester’s hat. It had come to this.
I’d wanted to say, but couldn’t, that what I really meant was the way it felt getting out of the car on that chill September morning, first day at Dartmouth, first day when I had a chance to be a new person and get it right this time after the hell of high school. How badly I wanted that moment back. Simon and Darren had chosen to be, well, awesome, and I hadn’t, I’d been a good little soldier and tried to be an adult, and up until today I’d forgotten that woman and the PET computer and what it felt like to be offered the future.
Before I left I had to stop off and see Don, the company’s fourth founder and current CEO. Unlike the other employees, he had an actual office, a side room with a picture window looking out on the dark expanse of the work area.
“Good to see you again.” He shook my hand firmly, a grown-up hello. “KidBits, right? How’ve you been?”
He was even taller than I remembered. He’d grown a beard, which suited him.
“Good, good. Is Darren around?” I asked.
“Still in Nepal. He’s the same guy he was. So you really want to work here?” he asked. This was the moment I’d rehearsed more than any other, actually done it in the mirror. Eyes averted, I slid into the faux-casual delivery.
“I kind of do, Don. Law’s getting a little boring—I’m on to the next thing, you know?”
“Design? Programming? Assistant producer?”
“Design, I guess. Or producing. I’m not sure. My programming’s as shitty now as it ever was.”
“Did Jared ask you the ultimate game question?”
“Yup. It was a good question.”
“It is, isn’t it? I guess we’ll call you.”
“Thanks, man.” We shook hands again.
On the way out Lisa brushed past me, apparently on her way back from the snack machine. “Nice one,” she said. “Archon.” They didn’t have things like Asperger’s in the eighties; probably they’d have given her something for it.
“Thanks,” I answered. “See you later.”
I wanted to linger and get more of a look at the games, but there was no pretext for it, so I let myself out into the chilly evening. Outside, I kept on thinking about the game, the game this would be if my life were a game. The lamest computer game of all time.
“You are standing in a half-empty parking lot beside an office building in suburban Massachusetts. The interview is over, and the sun is setting. What do you do next?”
LOOK
“You can see cars turning on their headlights as they crest the hill of Route Two and start the slow plunge toward Cambridge, then stack up through the Alewife traffic circle. It’s getting cold. You have nowhere to be.”
INVENTORY
“A worn leather wallet.
“Directions to the office, written on the back of a flier for an open-mike poetry reading.
“A navy blazer. You were incredibly overdressed this whole time.”
WEST
“You walk along the bike path. You pass behind seafood restaurant. Most of the land around the parking structure was never developed. Lilac, small oaks, and tall grasses grow out of control here. Where exactly do you think you’re going?”
WEST
“You can barely hear the highway behind you, and soon it fades out altogether. You can still see the sun through the branches overhead.
“Oddly enough, you find railway tracks crossing the path. Since when was there a railway line here? It hasn’t been used in a long time, but you follow it anyway. The walking keeps you warm. Oak seedlings are growing up from in between the ties. In some places you can barely find the rails among the dirt and leaves.
“Sooner or later you’ll round a bend and find Mass Ave. and catch a bus back into Cambridge and that will be that. No idea. Why, you think, did you have to play this character anyway?”
WEST
WEST
WEST
“God, you’d walk forever if you thought it would get you out of here. The tracks take you uphill, and then you see, through a line of trees, a swing set. It’s the back of an elementary school.
“And that’s when the memory hits you, the thing that’s been bugging you the whole time. It’s been years since you thought of it, but it comes back all the way, breathed in like the burnt-carpet smell of the car Darren used to drive you around in.”
Chapter Two
The five of us as we were then. Darren, a hyperkinetic burnout. Lisa, dark, inward, wry. Don watching everybody else in the room. Simon, pale, distracted, intense in a place you couldn’t reach. He was smart, really smart, math-in-his-head, perfect-scores-without-trying smart, the way I fantasized about being. I could be valedictorian of my class—and I was—but I would never come off that way, the way he did. He just didn’t seem to care that much about it. He didn’t even take Honors courses which made it doubly annoying.
We all were friends although not in the way where anyone wanted it said out loud. Our project was finished, at least the letter-grade part of it. Maybe we kept meeting out of habit, or not wanting to go back to our respective homes again. We’d go to pointless movies or on Friday night expeditions into Cambridge or to a stupid street fair or bowling. We were too young to get into a bar or a proper rock show or anything else remotely cool.
Sophomore year, definitely, early spring. Darren held an ice cube to his ear and the rest of us waited around in his garage. It was an extremely ordinary evening, and we were wasting it in an ordinary way.
“Can you feel anything?” Simon asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t even know if I can. Let’s just do it.” Darren’s voice trembled just a little.
“Okay.”
Simon lit a match and ran it up and down the needle. “Where does it go?” he asked.
“Just in, like, a normal place. Do it already.”
“Okay, okay.” Simon fidgeted. His hand was shaking. “Just turn your head toward me. Hold still.”
He bent close; their heads were close. A convulsive moment, and Darren cried out. “Shit!!”
“Jesus, you moved.”
“It fucking hurt! I’m going to do just one more minute.” He
put the ice back on. Water dripped a little pink onto his Rush T-shirt. “Just do it right this time.”
“Don’t move.”
“It’s going to wear off!” Darren said.
Simon pushed, hard. There was a very slight popping sound.
“It’s through!” he said. Darren started to reach up and Simon grabbed his hand. “Don’t touch it it’s through it’s through. Don’t touch it.”
“Okay. Okay. Okay.” Darren shook his head. “Let me look.” He looked in the mirror and nodded. He’d gotten a beer from somewhere and sipped it, holding the cloth to his ear.
Darren’s parents’ room was above the garage and they always kicked us out around ten, and we needed to get out before they asked what was wrong with the side of his head. So we drove around for a while, but we didn’t even have a plan, so as usual we ended up at Hancock Elementary. It was still cold, but Simon spat on his hands and climbed one of the swing set’s metal legs all the way to the top, cold rusty steel burning against the palms of his hands. He hung there a few seconds, then dropped heavily into the sand, having made his point.
We climbed a low brick wall, then hoisted ourselves onto the school’s flat tar-paper roof.
“Why are we doing this?” Lisa asked.
“Life experience,” said Darren. “Shh!”
A car passed down the road at the far end of the field, and we all lay down until it was gone before climbing down.
“Jesus this is boring,” Lisa said.
“So what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Something… God, something that doesn’t suck.”
Go to college? I don’t know what I would have said. We looked out across the back parking lot to the chain-link fence and the woods beyond. I remembered how in the fall we’d ordered a Japanese ninja star from a mail-order house that advertised in the back of an issue of Alpha Flight. It came in a padded envelope, wrapped in plastic and stiffened with cardboard, return address a sporting-goods store in Alabama, five dollars and ninety-eight cents plus three fifty shipping. It was a shiny metal disk incongruously inlaid with a flower pattern looping around the central hole. There was a booklet showing, in sequential black-and-white photographs that seemed to date from the 1960s, how to hold it by one of its arms and hurl it with a sidearm motion. Which when Simon tried it sent it first into the grass, and then curving up over the chain-link fence and into the woods. We kicked through damp leaves looking for it until it was almost dark. It must still be there, I thought.
I honestly don’t know who brought up the issue of the ultimate game. It was just one of those topics, like whether the plot of The Terminator makes sense, or if magic can ever be real, or if it would be better to have a robot girlfriend or a real one.
But at some point we got around to the question of what would be the most amazing video game you could possibly make. It had a bunch of different names—Real D&D, the Dueling Machine, the Matrix. The word holodeck hadn’t been invented yet, not until Star Trek: The Next Generation happened four years later.
Darren jumped on the question. It would have to be in 3-D. No, maybe it would all be holograms, like they had in the chess game in Star Wars, or Larry Niven’s novel Dream Park, or maybe something weirder, like Neuromancer, wired into your skull.
“You’d do things just by doing them!” Darren said. Simon nodded vehemently, sharing the same dimly imagined picture. An electronic world springing up around us, a neon Eden.
“And you could do anything you wanted,” Don added. “You wouldn’t just follow a track. If you wanted to go on adventures you could, but you could stay home, or talk on the phone, or get a job if you wanted.”
“Why couldn’t there be a game where…” I began, and everyone started in. It was always the question—why couldn’t there be a game where you could solve problems as you would in the real world? Cut the ropes holding a bridge up, or start a forest fire if you needed to, or make friends with a monster instead of fighting it, or go out into the forest and catch a horse and tame it, and then you could ride around? Why couldn’t there be a game where you could go exploring or go into a town or be evil instead of good, or kill the king and take his place?
The conversation was edged with frustration. If only the hardware would get faster, or interfaces would get better, or graphics, or if only time itself would just go faster so they could get to the future already. At the time, even Wolfenstein 3D, our earliest crudest harbinger of real-time 3-D gaming, was nine years away.
But, Simon argued, forget about the technology challenges, the full-body interface, the 3-D display, all the inexhaustible problems of graphic detail, counterfeiting the bottomless complexity of human facial expressions, interpreting natural human speech beyond the subject-verb pidgin used in traditional text adventures. Let those problems be solved or not. It doesn’t matter. There was still and always would be the problem of storytelling. You—you in the game—should wake up in a world with total choice. Go searching for a legendary jewel, stay home and make paper dolls, or run out into the street and punch a stranger in the nose. Somehow the computer copes. In a normal game, a real game, you couldn’t do it. The world is a narrative channel, a single story that you can follow but never escape. Or maybe there’s an open world, but only a specific range of actions you can perform—you can punch strangers in the nose but you can’t talk to them; you can’t make a friend or fall in love. Or you can talk to strangers but they can only say a few things—they’re not really people, just shallow repositories of canned speech. At some point, sooner or later but usually very, very soon, the world just runs out of stories it can tell. And every time you run into that point, there’s a jarring, illusion-breaking bump that tells you it’s just a game.
What is the thing we need?
There’s a story, but you choose what it is and make it yourself, and the world is full of tools for doing that. You can follow the path into the forest if you want, or you can turn around, go home, and cut the king’s head off because you decided you always hated the old bastard and you’re sick of this story and want to be someone else for a change. Cut the forest down, use the wood to build the highest possible tower, and reach the sun. Build a dam and try to flood the kingdom and kill everybody, then let the water out and collect all the treasure. Maybe that’s not a great story, but it’s yours. What was wanted was the storytelling engine that kept building the world as you made your choices, and made sure that it felt like a story. That when you picked up the phone and dialed that number, you reached a widow in distress or a private detective agency that was hiring. Or if you walked outside and broke a branch off a tree and tied a string to it and walked until you got to a lake, the third fish you caught would have in its stomach a ring engraved with strange writing.
And all the time, you’d be rapt, absorbed in the story in the gently paradoxical, bootstrapped state of semibelief that video games can create, where you’re enough outside yourself to be someone else and enough in yourself to be living the story as if it were real life. It might be a naive way to think about computer games, but it doesn’t make the need for it any less real. And it was impossible to make, but they’d already started and impossible was no reason not to go on a bit further. Realms 1.0 was just the beginning: they would build and build into 2.0 and 20.0, into cities and kingdoms and systems within systems and interfaces within interfaces and princesses and starships and submarines and grassy fields and volcanoes and floating cities and laughing gods and blackest hells and on and on, because you were never satisfied, ever, and you didn’t have to be because there would always be something else there over the next hill, beyond the turning in the road, down the dark hallway and into the next room, and somewhere in there you’ll escape at last, escape yourself and forget and forget and forget and live in a story forever.
We drove around town until it was past midnight. It was then that I first clearly remember Darren declaring, “We have to do this.” This was our rebellion. We could walk out on reality itself and t
he raw deal it gives even the luckiest of us. Fucking leave it and go on an adventure. In the dark of the station wagon I couldn’t see faces but I felt sure everyone had the same thoughtful expression. Everyone knew and nobody had to say it. How Simon’s mother was kinda crazy and poor, and Lisa’s parents were rich but had no interest in her whatsoever, and Darren was terminally pissed off at the world, and how I—well, no one ever seemed to be able to put a finger on it, but I was never going to be as happy as I was supposed to be. Everyone had a reason to want out.
People with any sense of the dramatic would have shared a drink or said a vow, cut their palms and made a blood pact. Spoken or not, it’s the only vow I ever made, or ever would, the only true moment of lunatic ambition. But it didn’t seem to matter—who needed to share blood when we’d shared the exact same thought from the moment we saw what a Commodore PET could do?
Like the Lumière brothers seeing the flickering image of a locomotive pulling into a railroad station and sensing the enormity of the moment, we recognized that this miracle illusion would be currency of the imagination of the next hundred years or more.
And so, two weeks after the interview, I rented an apartment and dragged my futon, computer, and a box of books left over from college back to Massachusetts. I was an entry-level game designer, whatever that was, earning thirty-five thousand dollars a year. I guess in the end they couldn’t not give it to me.
I thought about mailing the Dartmouth alumni magazine, but I’d told them about law school, and before that about the Fingerlings Improv troupe, and before that about an internship in L.A. at a talent agency. I didn’t even tell anyone I was going for an interview as a video game designer. I didn’t want to see the blank looks.
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