Jay was hanging on the doorway, his fingertips gripping the frame. “Eh, come on,” he said, chortling. He’d seen Romero’s giddiness before. It was an enthusiasm that bordered on hyperbole. Romero got this excited when he won a round of Pac-Man. He was a human exclamation point.
Romero froze, hands in the air. “Dude,” he said gravely, “I’m totally serious.”
Jay stepped in and shut the door behind him. Romero explained his rationale. First off, this was a robust, sixteen-color game; Softdisk was interested only in doing four-color games that appealed to the lowest common denominator of users. Second, this was essentially the Nintendo-style game made for a PC, something on par with the bestselling console title in the world: Mario. That meant the game was sure to sell, because everyone was getting a PC and, naturally, everyone would want a fun video game to play. It was perfect.
They already had the ideal team: Carmack, the graphics guru and resident Whiz Kid; Romero, the multitalented programmer and company cheerleader; Adrian, the artist and dark visionary; and Tom, game designer and comic book surrealist. Although Romero was still displeased with Lane, he was willing to give him one more chance to pull through. Regardless, the core chemistry was potent. Carmack’s steadfastness balanced Romero’s effusive passion, Adrian’s grisly tastes countered Tom’s cartoon comedy. All they needed was someone to do the business side—handle the finances, balance the books, manage the team. Everyone looked to Jay. “Dude,” Romero told him, “you’ve got to be a part of this too.”
Jay gave them his biggest bartender smile and agreed. “Here’s what I think we should do,” he said. “This needs to be taken right to the top of Nintendo. Now!” If they could get a deal to do a PC port of Super Mario Brothers 3, they could be in business, serious business. They decided to take the weekend to make a complete demo of the game, with a few added levels as well as the inclusion of the Mario character, and Jay would send it off.
There was only one problem, but it was sizable. If they were going to moonlight this game, they didn’t want Softdisk to know. This meant they couldn’t do it in the office. They would have to work on it at home. Thing was, they didn’t have the computers they needed to get the job done. The five of them sat quietly in the Gamer’s Edge office, pondering the problem as Dangerous Dave looped across the screen.
Carmack and Romero had both been without the computers they wanted earlier in life. So this wouldn’t be the first time they came up with a way to get them.
The cars backed up to the Softdisk office, trunks open, waiting in the night. It was late Friday night, long after all the other employees had returned home to their families and television sets. No one would use the PCs from the office on Saturday and Sunday, so they might as well make use of them, the gamers figured. They weren’t stealing the computers, they were borrowing them.
After loading Softdisk’s computers in their cars, Romero, Jay, Carmack, Tom, and Lane caravanned out of downtown. They drove away from the run-down buildings, down the highway, until the scenery began to change to low-hanging trees and swamps. Late-night fishermen lined a bridge with their lines in the purple-black murk. A bridge led them to South Lakeshore Drive, the border of Shreveport’s main recreational front and main water supply, Cross Lake.
Carmack, Lane, Jay, and an Apple II programmer at Softdisk named Jason Blochowiak had scored a enviable coup not long before when they found a four-bedroom house for rent right along these shores. Jay had bought a cheap boat, which they docked there and used for frequent outings of kneeboarding and skiing. In the large backyard was a swimming pool and a barbecue, with which Jay, a cooking enthusiast, grilled up Flintstonean slabs of ribs. The house itself had plenty of windows looking out on the scene, a large living room, even a big tiled bathroom with a deep earth-tone-tiled Jacuzzi tub. Jay had installed a beer keg in the fridge. It was a perfect place to make games.
Over the weekend while making the Super Mario demo, the gamers put the house to the ultimate test. They hooked two of the Softdisk computers up on a large table that Carmack had been using to hold all-night Dungeons and Dragons sessions with the guys. Romero and Carmack sat there programming together. Tom did all the graphics and Lane animated the familiar little turtle. Earlier they had videotaped the entire game play of Super Mario Brothers 3. To capture all the elements, Tom kept running back and forth, pressing pause on the VCR so he could copy the scenes.
Over those seventy-two hours, they fell into crunch mode. No one slept. They consumed huge quantities of caffeinated soda. Pizza deliveries came repeatedly. Jay worked the grill, churning out a stream of burgers and hot dogs, which often went uneaten. They got the game down to a T: Mario’s squat little walk, the way he bopped the animated tiles, sending out the coins, the way he leapt on the turtles and kicked their shells, the clouds, the Venus’s-flytraps, the pipes, the smooth scrolling. By the time they finished, the game was virtually identical to the bestselling hit in the world. The only noticeable difference was the title screen, which, under the Nintendo copyright, credited the makers, a company name the guys borrowed from Romero and Lane, Ideas from the Deep.
With the game done, Jay put together a letter explaining who they were and how they wanted Nintendo to take the unprecedented step of licensing Super Mario for the PC. Hopes high, the boys taped up the box and sent it on its way to Nintendo. When the response came back a few weeks later, it was short and sweet. Nice work, the company said, but Nintendo had no interest in pursuing the PC market. It was happy where it was as the world leader in consoles. It was a disappointment for the group, especially following the elation of the lake house programming marathon. But it was not the end by any means. There had to be someone out there who would appreciate their accomplishment. Romero knew just the guy.
Not long before, Romero had received his very first fan letter while working at Softdisk. It was typewritten and cordial. “Dear John,” it read, “Loved your game. Just wanted to let you know it was a great game and I think you are very talented. Have you played The Greatest Pyramid? It is almost the same as your game. I was wondering if you made that game too? Or if you were inspired by it? I can send you a copy if you want. Also what’s your high score for your game? Have you been programming long and what language did you use? I am thinking about writing a game and any tips you have would be helpful. Thanks from a big fan! Sincerely, Byron Muller.”
Romero, the pack rat, had immediately taped the letter up on his wall and showed it off to Carmack, Tom, Lane, and Adrian. A couple weeks later, he got another fan letter, handwritten and a bit more urgent. “Dear John,” it read, “I loved your game (Pyramids of Egypt), it is better than another pyramid type game that was in Big Blue Disk a few issues ago. I finished the game after staying up until 2:00 a.m. last night! Great fun! What’s your best score on the game? Is there a secret key that advances to the next level automatically? Do you know of any similar games? Please call me collect if you want . . . or please write. Thanks a million, Scott Mulliere. P.S. I think I found a minor bug (undocumented feature?) in the game!”
Wow—Romero beamed—another fan! He taped this letter up on the wall next to the other one and, again, bragged to Carmack and Adrian, who rolled their eyes. Soon after, Romero was flipping through PC Games Magazine when he came to a brief article about Scott Miller, a twenty-nine-year-old programmer who was having great success distributing his own games. Intrigued, Romero read to the bottom of the article, where it listed Scott’s address: 4206 Mayflower Drive, Garland, Texas 75043.
He paused. Garland, Texas. Garland, Garland, Texas? Who did he know in Garland, Texas, on Mayflower Drive? He set down the magazine and looked up on his wall. The fan letters! By now he had accumulated several of them and, to his amazement, though they all were signed by different names, each and every one had the same return address: Mayflower Drive, Garland.
Romero was pissed. Here he was showing off to the other guys about all his supposed fans, when in fact it was just some loser fucking with his mind. Who the fu
ck does Scott Miller think he is? Romero whipped around to his keyboard and banged out a letter in fury: “Scott: You, sir, have serious psychological problems. . . . What’s the deal with the 15 million odd names you’ve been writing under to reach me? Huh, Byron Muilliere, Brian Allen, Byron Muller? How old are you, really? 15?” Romero fumed for a couple pages, then left the letter on his desk. The next day, he came back cooled off and wrote another note.
“Dear Mr. Miller,” he typed, “I have taken a considerable amount of time to reply to your last letter. The reason is because I was infuriated when I found out that you had written to me previously about 3–4 other times, all under different names and I didn’t know what was going on. My previous reply is a real scorcher; that’s why I didn’t send it earlier. I am sending it anyway just so you can see how pissed I was at the time. I am writing this cover letter to soften the previous reply and to tell you that I am somewhat intrigued by your numerous approaches.” He sealed up both letters together and sent them to Garland once and for all.
A few days later, Romero’s home phone rang. It was Scott Miller. Romero laid into him about sending those fake fan letters, but Scott had other things on his mind. “Fuck those letters!” Scott said breathlessly. “The only reason I did that was because I knew my only chance to get ahold of you was to go through the back door.”
Game companies at the time were extremely competitive and secretive, especially when it came to their programming talent. When Romero had been a young gamer, programmers like Richard Garriott or Ken and Roberta Williams always got top billing, their names advertised in big letters on the box. But by the early nineties, times had changed. Companies were not above poaching. As a precaution, many game publishers would loom over their staffs, monitoring calls to make sure that no one was trying to make a steal. Scott, well aware of the sensitivity of his call, had chosen instead to try to lure Romero into contacting him. It worked, though ironically not as originally intended. He hadn’t meant to piss Romero off. But now that he had his attention, he wasn’t about to let it go.
“We gotta talk,” Scott continued eagerly. “I saw your game Pyramids of Egypt. It was so awesome! Can you do a few more levels of it? We can make a ton of money.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I want to publish your game,” Scott said, “as shareware.”
Shareware. Romero was familiar with the concept. It dated back to a guy named Andrew Fluegelman, founding editor of PC World magazine. In 1980, Fluegelman wrote a program called PC-Talk and released it online with a note saying that anyone who liked the wares should feel free to send him some “appreciation” money. Soon enough he had to hire a staff to count all the checks. Fluegelman called the practice “shareware,” “an experiment in economics.” Over the eighties other hackers picked up the ball, making their programs for Apples, PCs, and other computers available in the same honor code: Try it, if you like it, pay me. The payment would entitle the customer to receive technical support and updates.
The Association of Shareware Professionals put the business, largely domestic, between $10 and $20 million annually—even with only an estimated 10 percent of customers paying to register a shareware title. Forbes magazine marveled at the trend, writing in 1988 that “if this doesn’t sound like a very sound way to build a business, think again.” Shareware, it argued, relied not on expensive advertising but on word of mouth or, as one practitioner put it, “word of disk.” Robert Wallace, a top programmer at Microsoft, turned a shareware program of his called PC-Write into a multimillion-dollar empire. Most authors, however, were happy to break six figures and often made little more than $25,000 per year. Selling a thousand copies of a title in one year was a great success. Shareware was still a radical conceit, one that, furthermore, had been used only for utility programs, like check-balancing programs and word-processing wares. It had never been exploited for games. What was Scott thinking?
As they talked, it became clear to Romero that Scott knew exactly what he was doing. Scott, like Romero, was a lifelong gamer. The son of a NASA executive, he was a conservative-looking guy with short, dark hair. He had spent his high school days in Garland hanging out in the computer lab during the day and at the arcade after school. He even wrote a strategy guide called Shootout: Zap the Video Games, detailing all the ways to beat the hot games of 1982, from Pac-Man to Missile Command. Scott soon took the inevitable path and started making games of his own.
When it came time to distribute the games, Scott took a long, hard look at the shareware market. He liked what he saw: the fact that he could run everything himself without having to deal with retailers or publishers. So he followed suit, putting out two text-based games in their entirety and waiting for the cash to roll in. But the cash didn’t roll; it didn’t even trickle. Gamers, he realized, might be a different breed from those consumers who actually paid for utility shareware. They were more apt simply to take what they could get for free. Scott did some research and realized he wasn’t alone; other programmers who had released games in their entirety as shareware were broke too. People may be honest, he thought, but they’re also generally lazy. They need an incentive.
Then he got an idea. Instead of giving away the entire game, why not give out only the first portion, then make the player buy the rest of the game directly from him? No one had tried it before, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. The games Scott was making were perfectly suited to such a plan because they were broken up into short episodes or “levels” of play. He could simply put out, say, fifteen levels of a game, then tell players that if they sent him a check he would send them the remaining thirty.
In 1986, while working for a computer consulting company, Scott self-published his first game, Kingdom of Kroz—an Indiana Jones–style adventure—as shareware, making the initial levels available through BBSs and shareware catalogs. There was no advertising, no marketing, and virtually no overhead—except for the low cost of floppy disks and Ziploc bags. Because there were no other people to pay off, Scott could price his games much lower than most retail titles: $15 to $20 as opposed to $30 to $40. For every dollar he brought in, Scott was pocketing ninety cents. By the time he contacted Romero, he had earned $150,000 by word of mouth alone.
Business was so good, Scott explained, that he’d quit his day job to start his own shareware game publishing company, called Apogee. And he was looking for other games to publish. Romero was making perfect shareware games and he didn’t even know it, Scott said. An ideal shareware game had to have a few ingredients: short action titles that were broken up in levels. Because the shareware games were being distributed over BBSs, they had to be small enough for people to download them over modems. Large, graphically intensive games, like those being published by Sierra On-Line, were simply too big for BBS-based distribution. Games had to be small but fun and fast, something adrenal and arcade-style enough to hook a player into buying more. If Romero would give him Pyramids of Egypt, Scott would handle all the marketing and order processing; the guys would receive some kind of advance plus a 35 percent royalty rate, higher than they’d get from any major publisher.
Romero was intrigued, but there was a problem. “We can’t do Pyramids of Egypt,” he explained, “because Softdisk owns it.” He could hear the disappointment in Scott’s sigh. “Hey,” he added. “Screw that game! It’s crap compared to what we’re doing right now.”
A few days later, Scott received a package with the Super Mario Brothers 3 demo from Ideas from the Deep. When he fired up the game, he was knocked out. It looked just like the console version—smooth scrolling and everything. He grabbed the phone and talked to Carmack for hours. This guy is a genius, Scott thought. He’s outthinking everybody. By the time they were through talking, Scott was more than ready to make a deal. The gamers said they would use this new technology to create a title specifically for Apogee to release as shareware. “Great,” Scott said. “Let’s do it.”
Now they just had to come up with a game.
After their initial conversation, Romero asked Scott to show them his seriousness by sending them an advance. Scott responded with a check for two thousand dollars, half his savings. There was only one thing he wanted in return: A game by Christmas, two months away.
Romero, Carmack, Adrian, Lane, Tom, and Jay convened in the Gamer’s Edge office to come up with the game. Tom was quick to point out that, because they were using this console-style technology, they should make a console-style game, something like Mario but different. Fueled by the energy, he was quick to volunteer himself with a fair amount of the bravado that was becoming a requisite part of their clan.
“Come on, what theme do you want?” Tom said. “Tell me. I can do anything. How about science fiction?”
They liked the idea. “Why don’t we do something,” Carmack said, “where a little kid genius saves the world or something like that? Mmm.”
“Okay, yeah!” Tom said. “I have a great idea for something like that.” And in a blur he sped from the room and locked himself in his office in the Apple II department. He could feel his head opening up, the ideas pouring out in what sounded like the voice of Walter Winchell. Tom had long been a huge fan of Warner Bros. cartoons; Chuck Jones, the Looney Tunes animator, was a god to him. He’d also watched Dan Aykroyd’s impression of The Untouchables’ Eliot Ness as a kid. He thought about all these things, plus Mario, plus, for flavor, a routine by the comedian George Carlin about people who use bay leaves as underarm deodorant and go around smelling like bean with bacon soup.
Tom typed until he had three paragraphs on his paper. Pulling it out of the printer, he dashed back into the Gamer’s Edge office and read these words in his best Winchell impression:
Billy Blaze, eight-year-old genius, working diligently in his backyard clubhouse, has created an interstellar spaceship from old soup cans, rubber cement, and plastic tubing. While his folks are out on the town and the baby sitter is asleep, Billy sneaks out to his backyard workshop, dons his brother’s football helmet, and transforms into. . . . Commander Keen—defender of justice! In his ship, the Bean with Bacon MegaRocket, Keen dispenses justice with an iron hand!
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