“Birthday party.”
“Nice. Chandler or Madison?”
“Mine.”
“Cool. Wish them a . . .” Blake stopped texting and looked up. “Oh, shit, your birthday? Dude, I totally blew it. I just told Adiklein’s office I’d go to this VC thing the same night. Shit!”
“Don’t worry about it; it’s not a big one.”
“No way, dude. I missed your birthday last year, and that’s not going to happen twice. Tell Jane I’m coming, okay? Now rock those zombies!” With that, Blake headed back through the Cave, tapping on his phone all the while.
As much as Adam sometimes resented Blake, his anger never lasted long. Throughout the years Blake had done so much for him. Without Blake, Adam knew his life would be a hopeless mess.
Swiveling back around, Adam clicked the mouse to awaken his screen. Today’s work would be mechanical: fixing bugs, problem solving, cleaning up one little wrinkle after another. He would hold off on the zombie game for at least a day or two. That code would require a completely different level of concentration, a kind of personal sacrifice Adam offered up to his screens only on rare occasions.
As he was about to dive in, he noticed the open search window on his laptop. He stared at the words: Ocean cliffs. He had told Blake it was research, but that was a lie. Why was I looking at cliffs? he wondered. Something to do with that flickering yellow light? Adam gave his head another Etch A Sketch shake. There was no point in trying to figure it out now. Swiveling back to his monitors, he took a deep breath. Then, as he had done countless times before, Adam disappeared into the glowing screens before him.
CHAPTER 4
LUCID LARRY, A UKRAINIAN VAMPIRE, AND DR. M.
They met in the fall of 1990, Adam’s sophomore year at San Francisco State University. Adam wasn’t a nerd in the traditional sense, but he was odd enough to fall into the nerd category by default. Throughout his freshman year, other students avoided him as if he were contagious. And he did always seem to be ailing from one thing or another—allergies, asthma, stomach problems, eczema, or a head cold that never seemed to go away. Then there was his fashion sense, which didn’t help matters. His uniform was a pair of tan corduroy pants and a puke-green Windbreaker zipped up to his neck. As a result, no one came close enough to learn much about Adam beyond his name.
That changed when a stoner named Blake Dorsey entered the computer lab 10 minutes late and, relieved to find someone still without a lab partner, sat down next to Adam. “Blake Dorsey, professional gamer, future billionaire,” Blake said, sticking out a hand to shake. He seemed utterly oblivious to Adam’s status as a social untouchable. “I bet you’re a total hacker, huh?” Blake flashed a wicked smile.
Assuming the question was the setup for a humiliating prank, Adam responded, “Uh, not really. I’ve never really—”
“Yeah, you are! Total hacker!” Blake laughed, violently shaking Adam’s hand. Turning serious, he added, “Just to warn you, I suck at Pascal and 8086 Assembly. Was raised on an Apple II, toyed with a neighbor’s GS once. But if you wanna make video games, gotta hop on the PC bandwagon, right?”
“Right.” Maybe this isn’t a prank, Adam thought. Maybe this guy, crazy enough to wear flip-flops and Bermuda shorts at SF State, isn’t repulsed by me like everyone else.
“By the way, dude, I’m totally unbeatable at Sonic the Hedgehog.” Again Blake flashed his award-winning smile. “In case you ever want to challenge me.”
Back then Adam had no serious interest in video games, and he was by no means a hacker. But encouraged by his Odd Couple friendship with Blake, and with no other social life to maintain, Adam did more than just learn how to code. By the end of the first semester, he had devoured DOS, Pascal, and 8086, and was even digging into C, a programming language that wasn’t even taught at the university. To impress his new friend, Adam began to make simple PC games—mazes, puzzles, Dungeons & Dragons–style adventure games, and arcade knockoffs. Blake loved them all. He made a few games himself, but nothing as advanced as Adam’s.
After the semester break, Blake walked back into the computer lab to find a floppy disk waiting for him with the words Lucid Larry written on it. Lucid Larry was a game Adam had spent his entire break working on, and it was light-years beyond anything he had created so far. Modeled after SEGA’s Sonic the Hedgehog, which Adam knew Blake loved, Lucid Larry was an adventure game in which Larry—a pelican wearing an ugly, green jacket—ran through a forest collecting orange peels while avoiding stinging nettles and dragonflies. Occasionally magic doorways appeared in the side of redwood trees, allowing Larry to enter a dreamlike world superimposed over the game’s normal environment. In that dream landscape, nothing harmed Lucid Larry, and if the player continuously hit the Jump button, Larry began to fly up into a night sky, where strange and unusual creatures floated about.
“Holy shit. Holy shit. HOLY SHIT!” Blake said the first time he got Larry to go through a magic doorway and float up into the stars. While Blake pounded on the space bar to keep Larry afloat, Adam noticed his own hands were shaking. To complete the game in time, he had worked for days without much food or sleep.
“Dude! This is insane!” Blake yelled after finishing the last level. “How the fuck did you pull off side-scrolling?”
“Find Poland?” Adam asked, his brain woolly.
“No, dude, side-scrolling. It’s just like a real console game! You realize that’s never been done before? Not on a PC, not even on Apple IIGS! How the fuck did you do it?”
Adam had a tough time finding the words. “I had to rewrite . . . Well, basically, I tricked the graphics card.”
“Dude, you could sell this shit! I mean it. You could go straight to Origin or Sierra On-line with this!”
“Well, I was just thinking we could play it. I mean, I don’t know how to sell stuff.”
“Dude, selling stuff is easy. I’ll totally help you if you want. Right now everyone’s drooling for PC games, and they all suck. Not this, though. This is totally rad!” Blake turned back to the game. “Of course, we might want to tweak it a little before showing anyone . . .” Blake started scanning through the levels. “Make the design elements a little sexier. Maybe add some more bad guys, a little more action.”
Adam nodded happily through his haze of exhaustion. “Sure, Blake.”
They agreed to meet back at the computer lab the following night to start reworking the game—changing the orange peels to gold dollar signs, adding a few alien spaceships to the night sky for Lucid Larry to zap, and so on. Once the game was sexy enough, Blake would approach game distributors, and if they were interested, negotiate a deal.
Adam had seemed excited by the prospect of having Blake as a partner, but the next night Adam never showed up. Nor did he show up for the next class or for the rest of the semester. Blake never saw Adam Sheppard at San Francisco State University again. His brilliant lab partner simply disappeared without bothering with explanations or good-byes.
Thinking back on that period of his life, Adam still felt terrible for leaving his friend hanging like that. Blake was a popular guy who had reached out to and befriended him, and helped him discover something he was good at. Blake was willing to help Adam make something of that talent, but Adam had ditched him without a word.
Thankfully two years later the Odd Couple lab partners ran into each other at a Longs Drugs—Adam picking up medication, Blake picking up condoms. Adam apologized for his sudden disappearance, mumbling something about his stepmother and having to drop out of college. Quick to forgive and forget, Blake was more interested in what Adam was up to now, and if he was still interested in programming games. Blake explained that he had landed a job at Softools, a company in San Rafael that created boring office software, but agreed to let Blake develop a few games on the side.
Adam was doing nothing at the time besides caring for his stepmother, who had suffered a stroke, so he eagerly accepted Blake’s offer to program some games. Blake even talked his boss into hi
ring Adam. And at first, the owners of Softools seemed impressed with him, but after two months, Adam got fired. It was due in part to his unusual work habits; Adam sometimes didn’t leave the office for days on end, and at other times, he didn’t show up at all.
Adam felt bad. Not for himself but for Blake, who had gone out of his way to get him hired. Blake, however, refused to give up on Adam and devised a way for him to work freelance from home. That way he could just focus on the programming side of things. Blake handled everything else, and sometimes worked on the games as well, usually at the inception phase, nudging Adam’s ideas in more commercially viable directions.
Their arrangement proved to be surprisingly effective. Soon Blake was able to buy himself a faster, new car, and Adam a faster, new computer. With his more powerful rig, Adam began to play around with 3-D graphics, trying to simulate the first-person perspective of some of the new console games. “Each portion of the height map is transformed into a column of pixels,” Adam explained to Blake at one of their midnight meetings at Biff’s diner in Oakland. “Then it draws them using the corresponding color from the texture map.”
“Screw Softools. This new one is going to be too badass to share with those losers,” Blake said, gulfing down a steak fry followed by a swig of Corona. “Look, it’s time for us to take a chance and go big. Tomorrow I’m telling Softools that I’m leaving. We can still port some of our old games to Amiga and Apple IIGS, just to keep some cash coming in. Meanwhile I want you to go balls-to-the-wall building out this code. I’m talking night and day.” Blake gave Adam a serious look. “Every cell in your body, Adam, focused on this.”
“What kind of game you thinking?” Adam had a few ideas, but he also knew that Blake had a better sense of what gamers really wanted.
“Not just a game, Adam. I’ve got an idea that is going to blow people away. A friggin’ franchise.”
Adam sneezed. His allergies had been especially bad this year. “What genre?”
“Something no one’s even touched. No more tired spaceships and played-out aliens, no more D&D fantasy rip-offs. No, this game is going to be scary and bloody and sexy all at the same time. We’re going to introduce the gaming world to a new kind of hero.”
Adam waited.
“Vampires.”
“Vampires?”
“Yeah, baby. You heard me. Vampires.”
Blake explained that his inspiration for what would become the original Lust 4 Blood came by way of a hot Ukrainian chick he had been dating. Blake had met the brooding waif in San Francisco at Café du Nord, where she and her coven of friends drank cheap red wine, listened to Morrissey, discussed the latest Anne Rice novel, and reveled in their collective ennui. At first Blake assumed it was all a joke, a sort of extended Halloween, but as he was exposed to the depths of Goth subculture, he saw its appeal—not to mention its potential as the basis for a video game. Dangerous, misunderstood, rebellious, sexy, and violent—vampires seemed tailor-made for the American teenager.
Building out the first Lust 4 Blood game took 11 months. Blake put a team together under the new company name, Pixilate. There were two level designers, a graphic artist, a story consultant (the Ukrainian vampire), and Adam. The team worked out of a converted garage in San Francisco’s Mission district with the exception of Adam, who continued to do most of his work at his stepmother’s house in West Oakland. Adam’s job was to create the engine, the guts of the game, and because much of what they were trying to pull off had never been done before, he had to write all of the code from the ground up.
Fueled on Mountain Dew and pizza, Adam worked night and day, rarely leaving his computer. Things got even more “balls-to-the-wall” when Blake announced that he wanted to preview the game at that year’s Game Developers Conference (GDC). To pull off the nearly impossible task of having the demo ready in time, Adam pushed himself to physical and mental limits he had not approached since the days of Lucid Larry. Creating something truly original required a kind of personal sacrifice beyond his ordinary efforts. To bring something new into the world required leaving the world. And so, like Lucid Larry, Adam needed to pass through a secret doorway in his mind and float untethered into unknown realms.
Blake previewed the game at GDC, and Lust 4 Blood instantly became the talk of the gaming world. It was unlike anything anyone had seen before. The vampire concept got mixed reviews, but the 3-D graphics and the dreamlike game play were considered by all to be sheer magic. Arriving back in the Bay Area after the conference, Blake knew he had a major hit on his hands. He also had a major problem—Adam had gone missing again. No one at Pixilate had heard from him in two weeks.
After hurrying down the driveway of Adam’s stepmother’s house to the back house where Adam lived and worked, Blake used the key under the mossy lawn gnome to unlock the door. Inside he discovered stacks of empty pizza boxes, flies, and piles of unwashed clothing, but no Adam. Braving the main house, Blake knocked on the back door. He had never actually been inside before, or even met Adam’s stepmother, Gloria.
When an older man opened the door, Blake at first assumed he must be Adam’s father, but then recalled Adam telling him that his father had passed away when he was a teenager. The elderly man turned out to be a caregiver, and he led Blake into the living room where Gloria lay in a hospice bed watching Divorce Court on TV. She glared at Blake with half her face, the other half drooping like melted wax. Once Blake explained that Adam had gone missing, Gloria picked up the small notepad at her side, wrote something on it, then pushed the pad toward Blake.
Dr. Ronald Mendelson.
Next to the name was a phone number.
Blake used the house phone. Dr. Mendelson’s secretary answered and, after placing Blake on hold for five long minutes, she came back on to give Blake an address where she said Dr. Mendelson would meet him at 3:00 that afternoon. It was a hospital, one Blake had never heard of before. While waiting for Dr. Mendelson to arrive, Blake inquired about Adam at the front desk, and was told they couldn’t give out information without permission from the patient’s doctor.
Dr. Ronald Mendelson—Dr. M., as he would later be affectionately nicknamed by Adam’s wife, Jane—was a tall, scholarly man with a meticulously trimmed beard and pale gray eyes.
“Hello, Blake. I’ve heard a lot about you. Please, sit. We have several things to discuss.”
Over coffee Dr. Mendelson explained to Blake that the police had found Adam two days ago, sleeping under a hedge in Half Moon Bay. “He doesn’t remember how he got there,” Dr. Mendelson said, “or where else he’d been. But he’s safe now. No injuries, thankfully. It seems that stress from work, along with lack of sleep and forgetting to take his medications, triggered the episode.”
“Episode? Like a nervous breakdown?” Blake asked anxiously.
“Not quite,” Mendelson replied. “As you know, Adam is a very intelligent young man, but there is another side to him, a more complicated side. I’ve been treating Adam since he was quite young. Do you know much about his family or his upbringing?”
“No.” Blake shook his head. “Nothing, really.”
“I know that you’re close to Adam, so I feel comfortable telling you that there is a history of mental illness on his mother’s side of the family.”
“I thought she just had a stroke?”
“That’s his stepmother, Gloria.”
“Right, yeah, of course.”
“Gloria is quite sane, I can attest to that. She was, in fact, a rather celebrated psychologist in her day, and a former colleague of mine, which is how I came to be treating Adam.” Dr. Mendelson sipped his coffee. “No, his biological mother was not well. She committed suicide about a year after Adam was born. A drug overdose.”
Blake exhaled loudly, not knowing what to say.
Dr. Mendelson continued. “Adam’s father was in no shape to raise Adam on his own, so he left him in the care of Adam’s maternal grandmother. Unfortunately she was not in good psychological health either. Child se
rvices weren’t what they are today, otherwise Adam would have been pulled from those ungodly conditions up in . . .” Mendelson scratched his neatly bearded chin. “Somewhere up the coast, north of San Francisco—the name of the town escapes me at the moment.” He took another sip of coffee. “When Adam was six, his father remarried. Luckily for Adam, his new stepmother had the good sense to rescue him from his grandmother, but the traumas he suffered during those formative years, along with his genetic predisposition, left Adam with some significant issues.”
“But he’s not, like, dangerous or anything?”
“Lord, no.” Dr. Mendelson gave a dismissive snort.
“He never seemed like he was in real trouble.” Blake searched for the right words. “I mean, he’s always been unusual, but not like crazy crazy.”
“Well, thank you. I’ll take that as a compliment.” Dr. Mendelson smiled carefully. “We’ve come a long way with Adam, and despite this unfortunate episode, I am confident that he can live a normal, productive life. It’s been more difficult since Gloria’s stroke, but with the proper care in a healthy environment, and assuming he remembers to take his medication, Adam can stay on an even keel.” Dr. Mendelson put out a level hand. “But if he gets too stressed, if he’s pushed too hard at work, say, then he’ll start to do this.” Dr. Mendelson began undulating his hand up and down like a wave. “And that, we don’t want.”
“But you do think it’s okay for him to keep working, right?” Blake asked. “I don’t mean right away, but eventually? Once he’s better?”
Dr. Mendelson looked at Blake pensively. Then he smiled and nodded. “Don’t worry, Blake. He can keep programming for you. That is, assuming you’re comfortable keeping him on.”
“Of course.” Blake didn’t try to hide his relief. “I’m just concerned for him, that’s all.”
“Of course you are. We all have a shared interest in Adam’s recovery,” Dr. Mendelson said with a reassuring nod. “And the work he’s doing, in a way it’s the ideal job for someone like Adam, don’t you think?”
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