You

Chapter One

So what’s your ultimate game?”

He made it sound like a completely normal question, and I guess in this context it was. My long afternoon of interviews had come down to these two strangers. A tall guy, twentyish, with an angular face and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, who enunciated everything very precisely, as if speaking into a touchy voice-recognition program. The other one was slightly over five feet tall, with long, Jesus-like, wavy dark hair and a faded black T-shirt that read CTHULHU FOR PRESIDENT; WHY SETTLE FOR THE LESSER OF TWO EVILS? It was from 1988.

“Right.” I swallowed. “So, how exactly do you define that?”

None of the questions was what I expected. Most of them were esoteric thought experiments, “How would you turn Pride and Prejudice into a video game?” and “If you added a button to Pac-Man, what would you want it to do?” Conundrums like “How come when Mario jumps he can change direction in midair?” And now this one.

“You know, the game you’d make if you could make any game at all,” the long-haired designer explained.

“Forget about budget,” the short guy added. “You’re in charge. Just do anything! Greatest game ever!”

I opened my mouth to answer and then stopped. It was obviously a throwaway question, a way to close out the afternoon on a fun note. And so it was weird that my mind had gone blank when it was the one question I should have known the answer to, given that I was interviewing for a job as a video game designer.

I’d spent the past few hours in a state of mild culture shock. I’d arrived forty minutes early at the address the office manager gave me over the phone, an anonymous office complex at the far limit of the Red Line, past Harvard and Porter, where Cambridge gave out entirely, lapsed into empty lots and restaurants on the wrong side of Alewife Brook Parkway, and then into wetlands, brackish water, and protected species like sweet flag and pickerelweed.

Beyond the wetlands were the forested hills and the suburbs Arlington and Belmont and Newton where I grew up. Alewife was built to be the point of exchange between Cambridge and the true suburbs. It was also home to the acres of office space demanded by high-tech companies spun off from academic research and funded by the Department of Defense, IT training schools, human resources offices, real estate companies, and tax attorneys. Coming back here felt like I’d made it to the big city and now was on the verge of drifting back out into the nowhere beyond. This was where Black Arts Studios set up shop.

This particular building was apparently designed in the early eighties, while the Department of Defense was still funding blue-sky tech companies. The heavy glass doors led into a three-story lobby and courtyard with a fountain, pastel Mediterranean tiling, and incongruous broad-leafed faux-tropical foliage. It had a humid, greenhouse smell even in the oddly chilly spring of 1997; the frosted skylights let in a perpetually dim half-light. About half the office space looked empty.

Black Arts was on the third floor. There was no sign or number on the door, so I wandered back and forth along the balcony until I saw a piece of paper with BLACK ARTS written in black Magic Marker taped to the inside of a glass window reinforced with chicken wire. There was no doorbell. Through the square of glass I could see an empty reception area, and behind it an open doorway leading to a dimly lit office.

I wasn’t exactly comfortable in a job interview, and what made it worse was I already knew these people—pretty well, actually. We’d met when we were in high school together, fourteen years ago. Now I would be asking them for work, in the company they started. Darren and Simon were the cofounders. They’d been friends since as long as anyone could remember. Simon I remembered as small and dark-haired, round-faced, with olive skin that never seemed to see the sunlight. He wore checkered shirts and corduroys and never seemed to quite come into an adult body—at fifteen he could have passed for twelve. He was supposed to be smart but for some reason didn’t take any advanced classes. Pathetic, but so dorky as to almost round the corner into menacing. People claimed he built pipe bombs and had hacked a kid’s grades on the school computer once. They laughed at him, but not to his face.

Darren was taller and horse-faced and passably athletic. He ran track one year, but when he got to high school he grew his hair out, dropped the athletics and the honors classes, found an old army jacket and wore it all the time.

They were a fixture, short and tall, two different flavors of loser. You’d see them walking home every day, Simon’s hands shaping the air. What did they talk about? Comics, movies, inside jokes held over from the fourth grade? Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe.

I met them in an intro to programming class, and six years later they were legends, the two burnout kids who founded a computer game company and got rich. But even the money wasn’t as alluring as the idea that they’d made video games their jobs, even before anybody knew that games were going to turn into an industry, an entertainment medium as big as the movies—bigger, if you believed some people. Simon and Darren made money out of—well, being awesome, essentially.

Don and Lisa went with them, too—got rich, stayed, won. Meanwhile, I went on to an English degree, a year of law school, an internship at a doomed newspaper in Dallas, sublets in Cambridge, Queens, Somerville, San Francisco (a new start!), Austin, Madison, and imminently, nowhere.

Simon never graduated from college. He was killed four years ago, in a ridiculous accident that resulted in security cameras being placed inside all the elevator shafts of all the buildings on that particular campus. He wasn’t even a student there.

People were already starting to talk about him as a genius on a par with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and about what he might have done if he lived. The software he left behind was still state of the art in some ways, even though he wrote it way back in the eighties, before video games were in 3-D, before CD drives, before photo-real graphics. It was called the WAFFLE engine, a witches’ brew of robust world simulation and procedural content generation, the thing that powered Black Arts games first, to critical success, then to profitability, then to becoming a runaway phenomenon. It was still under the hood of every game they made; it had a weird genius x factor to it; it had never been surpassed or even duplicated. Before Simon died he was working on a project that he claimed would the next generation of the technology. He used the word ultimate more than once—in fact, right there in the title of his proposal (it was meant to finally get him his BA from MIT; they’d as much as offered it to him, but he never followed through): “The Ultimate Game: A Robust Scheme for Procedurally Generated Narrative.” There had even been a press conference, but no copy of the proposal had ever been found. The idea—the Fermat’s last theorem of video game technology—lingered on at Black Arts.

I should say, people have had the impression Simon killed himself, or else died as part of a game. That was the way it was reported in most of the papers. “A ‘Gamer Death’ on Campus,” as if there were such a phrase. More than one dipshit psychology professor said things like, “It’s not uncommon for these self-identified ‘gamers’ to lose the ability to distinguish between what is a game… and what is reality.”

First of all, this is a viewpoint that is frankly idiotic. People who play games don’t get killed or go crazy any more often than anyone else. It’s just that people point it out when they do. Second of all, Simon was a person with a vocation, one of the few people I’ve ever met for whom this was unmistakably the case. He wasn’t out of touch with reality, he was simply opposed to it. Third of all, fuck reality. If Simon didn’t like the world he grew up in, he has my wholehearted support and agreement. I went to his funeral, as did his many friends. They were not any kind of checked-out gamer fringe; it turns out a dude in a kilt who introduces himself as “Griffin” can be honestly, normatively upset that his friend got killed in a ridiculous accident.

When I heard that Simon had died, I tried to find something appropriate to feel. What I did feel wasn’t flattering. We hadn’t been friends since the early 1980s. I was still young enough to feel the death of someone I’d known as a novelty. Like it was one more aspect of Simon’s eccentricity, or his genius. One more place Simon got to before the rest of us. I felt sorry we’d been out of touch, sorry because we’d both vowed to do the impossible, and it was the only vow I’d ever made, and I hadn’t done it, and Simon—well, that was the thing. I was partly there because I wanted to know what exactly happened. How far Simon had gotten.

I let myself in. I smelled fresh paint; I could hear somebody laughing.

“Hello?” I called into the darkness.

A teenager in a black T-shirt looked out. He was built on a fun-house scale—my height but twice my width, a fat kid with the arms and chest of a linebacker. “Oh, hey. Are you Russell?”

“Yes, that’s me,” I answered, relieved.

“I’m Matt. Hang on.” He turned and yelled down the hall. “He’s here!”

He waved me inside, into a room that turned out to be almost half of the building’s third floor. It was a dim cavern, kept in semidarkness by venetian blinds. From what I could see it was mostly open space. Soda cans and industrial-size bags of popcorn had accumulated in the corners, along with a yoga ball, stacks of colorfully illustrated rule books, and what appeared to be a functioning crossbow. It looked like the aftermath of a weekend party held by a band of improbably wealthy ten-year-olds. In fact, there was a man curled up under one desk in a puffy blue sleeping bag. A young woman in a tie-dyed dress and sandals was sitting against one wall, typing on a laptop, ignoring me, her blond hair done in elaborate braids.

While I waited for Matt to come back, I looked at a wall of framed magazine covers and Game of the Year awards. I went over to one of the computers, which showed what I thought at first was an animated movie of a space battle, but when I touched the mouse the camera panned around the scene, and I saw it was a functioning game, a fully realized environment navigable in three dimensions. I hadn’t been paying much attention to video games for a few years, not since I’d graduated from college. Did they turn into something totally different when I wasn’t looking?

I was born in 1969, which was the perfect age for everything having to do with video gaming. It meant I was eight when the Atari 2600 game console came out; eleven when Pac-Man came out; seventeen for The Legend of Zelda. Personal computers were introduced just as our brains were entering that first developmental ferment of early cognitive growth, just in time to scar us forever. In 1978, kids were getting called out of class in the middle of the morning. A woman from the principal’s office (whose name I never learned) quietly beckoned us out two at a time, alphabetically, and ushered us back in fifteen minutes later. When our turn came, I went with a boy named Shane. I was tingling a little bit just with the specialness of the moment, the interruption of routine. We were led down the hall to sit in one corner of the school secretary’s office in front of a boxy appliance that turned out to be a computer. It was new, a Commodore PET computer.

The PET’s casing was all one piece, monitor and keyboard and an embedded cassette tape drive forming a blunt, gnomic pyramid. It was alien, palpably expensive, and blindingly futuristic in a room that smelled of the mimeograph machine used to print handouts in a single color, a pale purple—a machine operated in exactly the same manner as when it was introduced in the 1890s, with a crank.

The lady sat us down and quietly walked away. Shane and I looked at each other. I don’t know what he felt, but there was a realization stirring inside me. They didn’t know what the machine was. They’d been given it, but they didn’t know how to use it. It didn’t do much. It didn’t understand swear words or regular English. It played a couple of games, Snake and Lunar Lander. After fifteen minutes she led us back to class and brought out the next two kids, who would also type swear words into it.

But it was probably the most generous and the most humble gesture I received from an adult in the sixteen-year duration of my schooling. The woman was simply leaving us alone with our future, the future she wouldn’t be part of. She didn’t know how to do it or what it was, but she was trying to give it to us.

As we grew, the medium grew. Arcade games boomed in the late seventies and eighties and gave rise to video-game arcades themselves, built in retrofitted department stores and storefront offices, making money in twenty-five-cent increments, floods of quarters warmed with adolescent body heat. These were the cooler, dumber cousins of the quiet, hardworking PET. Video games had the street swagger and the lowest-common-denominator glitz of pinball machines refracted through the seemingly ineradicable nerdiness of digital high tech.

I was older when I started going to arcades—eleven, maybe. I relaxed in the warm, booming darkness of the arcade, the wall of sound, and the warm air, smelling of sweat and teenage boys and electronics. The darkness was broken only by neon strips, mirrored disco balls, and the lighted change booth. Looking around the arcade was like seeing thirty Warner Bros. cartoons playing at once, shown ultrabright and overspeed.

The state of the technology meant characters were drawn on 8-by-12-pixel grids, a strangely potent, primitive scale. Dogs and mailmen and robots became luminous pictoglyphs hovering in the dark. The cursory, dashed-off feel of the stories seemed to have opened a vein of vivid whimsy in the minds of the programmers and engineers of this first wave. The same limitations threw games into weird, nonperspectival spaces. Games like Berzerk and Wizard of Wor took place in bright Escher space, where overhead and side views combine.

And the dream-logic plots! Worlds where touching anything meant instant death; where mushrooms are friends and turtles are enemies. In each one I felt the presence of a deep logic living just offscreen, each one a bright painting telling a not-quite-explained story: Why am I a plumber fighting an ape for a princess? Why am I, a lone triangle, battling a fleet of squares? Who decided that?

And adults hated to be in there. It gave them headaches and made them look stupid when we all knew how to play and what to do because we were growing up with a technology whose buried rules made sense to us. In the swirling primordial mix of children and teenagers, hormones and technology were combining to form a new cultural idea. Some days I spent up to three hours in the arcade after school, dimly aware that we were the first people, ever, to be doing these things. We were feeling something they never had—a physical link into the world of the fictional—through the skeletal muscles of the arm to the joystick to the tiny person on the screen, a person in an imagined world. It was crude but real. We’d fashioned an outpost in the hostile, inaccessible world of the imagination, like dangling a bathysphere into the crushing dark of the deep ocean, a realm hitherto inaccessible to humankind. This is what games had become. Computers had their origin in military cryptography—in a sense, every computer game represents the commandeering of a military code-breaking apparatus for purposes of human expression. We’d done that, taken that idea and turned it into a thing its creators never imagined, our own incandescent mythology.

One summer in middle school I finally got an Apple IIe, a beige plastic wedge with computer and keyboard in one piece, along with its own nine-inch monochrome monitor. I discovered the delinquent thrill of using copy programs like Locksmith to duplicate copy-protected games on 5.25-inch floppy disks and the trick of double-siding a disk by clipping a half-moon out of it with a hole puncher.

The idea of simulating an alternate world had taken over thousands of otherwise promising minds. It was the Apollo program for our generation, or maybe the Manhattan Project was a better analogy. Because everyone wanted to do it, and every year it got faster and better. I could feel it, the chance, the generational luck of being born alongside a new artistic form, the way Orson Welles was born at the right time to make Citizen Kane and define the greatness of a medium. It was a chance to own the artistic revolution of our time the way Jane Austen owned hers and D. W. Griffith owned his.

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 the 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.

What had been a long, uncalculated slide into the fourth or fifth tier of academic standing finally flipped over into outright free fall. Who gets expelled from anything? Salvador Dalí. Buckminster Fuller. Woody Allen. Robert Frost. But they’d done it with considerably more style. And I wasn’t properly expelled, only put on a mandatory leave of absence. I’d simply sat there and watched it all float away. It was stupid that my parents had paid for it, for the lawyer they thought I was supposed to be—that I’d “told” them I would be.

This was me giving up on any sort of casual panache, any pretense that I’d be one of the up-and-coming best and brightest I’d been emulating less and less successfully since—when? Changing majors for the third time? Earlier?

Who knew? But this was the moment I publicly stopped pretending to be cool. Rhodes, no Marshall. There would be no Sex and the City barhopping, no making partner, no Central Park view. I scrubbed the uneven floor of my new apartment, the odd snaggletoothed nail shredding the wadded-up paper towel, letting the dream dissolve.

No one had cleaned the apartment in what seemed like a decade. I bought four rolls of paper towels and a spray bottle of dangerous-smelling cleaner. I sat on the floor and sprayed along the baseboard and onto the yellow-and-white linoleum. I kept spraying until it soaked into the caked-on dust and hair and brown whatever it was and turned it darker and soft. The wadded-up paper towels turned into a soft, soggy pile. I found a paintbrush caked with grime, shards of glass, peanut shells. Halfway through I realized I should have bought rubber gloves, that I was probably poisoning myself, but there was no point in stopping. Around midnight I’d wiped down the floor and all the fixtures; it didn’t look clean but it looked like if you started now it would be a normal enough cleaning job. I tried to count how many apartments I’d been through since college, but there had been too many three-week sublets to keep track of. One more, anyway.

The mystery wasn’t how my life had failed to come together—why I didn’t stick with things, why days and weeks seemed to vanish under the sofa, why I was always telling my six-month friends I’d found an internship or entry-level job at a newspaper or theater or paralegal firm and I was moving to San Francisco or Austin—the mystery was how it was any different for anyone else, how other people managed to stay in one place and stick it out.

I e-mailed my parents with my new address, the same as always—when I visited at home I’d see my name in my mother’s address book over a long column of crossed-out addresses and phone numbers. They sent presents—books and shirts—and birthday cards that said things like, “We’re so proud of your new internship,” and “Here’s to great things this year!” Here’s to training myself to pick locks. Here’s to learning to speak with a British accent from a set of four CDs I found in a used bookstore. Here’s to friendship. Here’s to failure. Here’s to the Quest for the Ultimate Game.

Chapter Three

Nobody gave me a schedule; it was more like a standing invitation to come over and hang out. The Monday after I moved in I tried going to work, and came in at nine in the morning. I sat on a beanbag chair just inside the door until a tall, fiftyish woman with short blond hair stopped by and introduced herself as Helen, the office manager. She took my picture with a digital camera and moved on. I read an old role-playing game manual, long lists of possible mutations you could choose. I decided that in the blighted future to come, it would be cool to have insect wings, and made a note to start saving up radiation points now.

After a while Matt noticed I was there and rescued me. He looked about fifteen, and must have been older than that but was still plausibly younger than the Realms of Gold franchise itself. On second viewing he was still disconcertingly large; his face seemed to widen from the top downward, like that of an Easter Island statue. He was an assistant producer, it turned out, a catchall workhorse position.

Black Arts was mostly the one big room, so we walked the perimeter, passing the wall of trophies and plaques: Game of the Year 1992, Game of the Year 1994. There was an early company photo, with Simon glowering at the extreme left, only three years from death. A poster showed the Milky Way galaxy with four enormous faces looking down on it, along with the words: Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation.

“Mostly people are on break from shipping Solar Empires, that’s why nobody’s here.” He stopped at a U-shaped formation of maybe a dozen desks. It was mostly empty. “This is the design pit, where you’ll be.”

The short guy from my job interview was at a desk, playing a version of Doom modified to have Flintstones characters instead of space marines. He was wearing a top hat.

“Hey,” he said without looking up. “I’m Jared.”

“We met,” I said.

“I guess Russell’s going to be working on the new thing,” Matt explained.

“Wait; what’s the new thing?” I asked.

“It’s still secret,” Matt said. “Darren will tell us when he’s ready.”

“It had better not be space. I’m so fucking sick of space.” The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand. I’d noticed him as we passed because his monitor showed a 3-D image of a brick wall, and he’d been sitting there pushing the camera a quarter inch to the left, then a quarter inch to the right, over and over, watching for some infinitesimal change.

“The market wants sci-fi, Toby,” Jared said.

“I’m so fucking sick of drawing planets.” He slumped in his chair and went back to tapping the arrow keys.

“Here’s where you’ll be sitting,” Matt said. “We’ve got your work machine set up.”

I’d had only one computer since freshman year, a Compaq Presario with a 486 CPU and a thirteen-inch monitor that at the time had looked like the last computer that ever needed to be made. The off-white slab felt expensive and contemporary and powerful. But over the next four years the white casing acquired smudges and Rage Against the Machine stickers; it sagged and slowed under the load of next year’s word-processing software and the cumulative weight of cat hair clogging the cooling vents and being shoved under too many cheap desks in too many low-rent apartments, only to be yanked out three months later. I hated that machine.

Matt explained that the computer in front of me had a 200 MHz Pentium MMX processor, 32 MB of RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, a 12x CD-ROM drive, a fifteen-inch monitor, external speakers, and subwoofers. It was built for the overspecced world of 3-D gaming, and viewed all lesser tasks with an appropriate contempt.

Matt showed me a file called RoGVIed.exe, and suggested I “play around with it.” I shrugged and said, “Sure.” When he was gone, I clicked on it.

For a few seconds there was nothing, then a torrent of text scrolled by, too fast to follow. Then the screen blanked, then showed only the Black Arts logo for about a minute. Just when I thought the computer had frozen on me, the screen changed to a startlingly complex collection of buttons, widgets, icons, and maps. It was like a mad, complicated puzzle box, but I knew I’d found something—one of their treasures.

I was feeling a little terrified, but also thrilled—however tentatively, I’d pulled back the curtain on this dorky reality. I knew this must be the game editor, the designer’s basic tool, the thing that lets you do everything a designer does—build the geometry of the levels, place monsters and people and objects in it, put in any traps and surprises and, generally speaking, create a world in which you can menace and persecute anyone fool enough to enter. Here were the nuts and bolts of the world.

Only… I’d expected it to be a high-tech piece of wizardry—a 3-D display, rotating cubes and graphs and blue-green numbers. This—this thing looked like crap. No one had ever spent time making the editor pleasant to work with, and in fact its ergonomics were almost abusively wrong. The screen was divided into four quadrants, with no indication of where to begin or what they represented. Each had functions accessed through dozens of unreadably tiny icons, many of them virtually identical but for a pixel here and there, most of which had only the vaguest relationship to their functions. It must have been intuitively obvious to somebody, but I was lost. What was the question mark for, and why would I click on it? What was the snake for? The semicircle? The tiny automobile? And why didn’t anybody write any of this down?

No one was paying attention to me, and I slowly realized that this was their equivalent of job training—leaving me alone with a computer and a game editor just to see what I’d do. Like dropping a delicate tropical fish into a new aquarium—they’d come back in a few hours and I’d either be swimming around or floating at the top of the tank.

I poked at a few icons experimentally, but nothing seemed to happen. People were throwing me glances every once in a while; I saw Don peering out of his office at me. It came to me, gradually, that I was undergoing a test, a deliberate one. Not for technical literacy, because there was no way I could have learned this ahead of time. It wasn’t supposed to make sense. It was a test of character—could I sit with this patchy, buggy, undocumented piece of software and learn it by trial and error and not freak out, not be reduced to tears or incoherent rage? They wanted to know how much frustration I could stand.

The truth was, though, that for the first time in a very long time I was being given a test that made sense to me. I clicked, a section of map highlighted. I clicked somewhere else, I noted the result. I didn’t worry about making a mistake. The editor was designed with a perversity that shaded over into cruelty, but I sensed that once I learned its rules, I could live with it.

I learned by trial and error. I figured out how to raise and lower pieces of floor, to place blocks and monsters, how to apply colors to the terrain and objects. I learned that trying to save over a file with the same name crashed it to the DOS prompt.

The screen froze, and somebody walking past said, “Did you right-click in the 3-D window? You can’t do that.” I learned that clicking Save As while you had a piece of terrain selected meant you had to reboot. I learned that nobody ever clicked on the button labeled SMART MODE. Nobody knew what it did.

There was another test. At first I thought there was no manual whatsoever for how to use the editor, until I realized that the manual was the people in the room with me. You learned when it was okay to ask—you waited for a coder to launch a long compile or export, as signaled by a trip to the candy machine. You learned to distinguish the “I’m taking a break” stare (usually accompanied by a sigh or chair spin) from the “I’m thinking really hard” stare (straight ahead, or angled roughly fifteen degrees upward) and the “I’m really screwed up and angry” posture—elbows on desk, hands gripping head.

And you learned whom to ask. Todd was the nearest UI/tools guy but he was perennially cranky, so talk to Allison if she was around, or catch him when he’s just coming back from lunch, and always phrase the question so it sounds like you screwed up and are just looking to be rescued, not like there’s something actually wrong with the editor.

It must have been around two in the afternoon when I started to relax. Bug fixes were for the customers, the soft, lazy civilians who only got the software after it was finished and boring and safe. Real game developers worked with real software, the kind that broke a third of the time unless you knew exactly what you were doing. The next time I went to the kitchen for a bag of Skittles, I did so with just a hint of world-weary swagger. Of course the editor crashed all the time. Why on earth wouldn’t it?

College was one long series of missed cues and indecipherable codes for me. Other people followed invisible markers to their appropriate clubs and majors and activities. Other people seemed to know which dorms meant what, which parties to go to, and what to do there. The knowledge was all there for me to pick up, but other people had some faculty of observation, patience, and fluency that let that knowledge adhere to them.

Whatever long-latent cognitive ability was involved, it had perversely decided to activate for me here in the land of the geeks. It was my brain stem’s way of letting me know I was basically home.

Don instant-messaged me on the third day, well into the afternoon, as if only just remembering I’d been hired. The company had its own internal chat network, shitty and home-cooked, just like the editor. Everything you read was in yellow letters on a bright blue background, and there was no way to change it.

I’d gotten to the point where I could change terrain a little, save and load files, and make primitive shapes and not crash the editor too often, but that was it.

He rang off. I looked at the personnel web page in the vain hope there would be another, different Lisa there. There were about a hundred people listed, most with a first-day photograph showing a stressed-out grin. Lisa was listed as a tools programmer on the Solar Empires team. She had somehow avoided having her picture taken.

Just as I’d gotten my bearings I was being pushed into another, subtler test—I’d gotten myself this far, but I now had to open an unsolicited online chat with this senior employee who had never liked me anyway, to tell her I’d be ruining her afternoon schedule so she could explain to the new guy what everyone else in the building already knew.

I took a few moments to breathe, then reopened the chat program. It’s not that I disliked the people who’d known me in high school, exactly. But I didn’t feel like explaining what I was doing there. Or why I hadn’t talked to them in years. And most of all I didn’t feel like seeing them. I’d gotten rid of the person I was in high school. I didn’t want to see the people who’d known me that way.

I got to watch the cursor blink for about ten seconds before the reply came.

Another twenty seconds ticked by, unreadable. Was she distracted? Or, more likely, was she opening another chat window to yell at Don? Or was she just marking time to indicate how annoying she found this?

I wondered why she was even still here at Black Arts. I remembered the no-girls-allowed clubhouse feel of the arcades; it must have been hard work to find a place here.

Then again, I thought, everybody has a reason.

Chapter Four

Lisa Muckenhaupt’s cubicle was socketed in at the far back corner of the Solar Empires sector of the office. Realms of Gold is only one of Black Arts’ three franchises. It has a science fiction and an espionage series as well, each set in its own separate universe. As I passed an invisible line in the cubicle ward, the decor shifted from foam broadswords and heraldry and other faux-medieval tchotchkes to a farrago of space-opera apparatus. A LEGO Star Destroyer was strung from the ceiling, along with an enormous rickety mobile of the solar system, its planets as big as softballs. I saw ballistic Nerf equipment and a six-foot-long, elaborately scoped and flanged laser rifle.

The decor was something other than simply childish. It was more like a deliberate, even defiant choice for a pulp aesthetic, holding out for the awesome, the middle-school sublime of planets and space stations, the electrical charge of nonironic pop, melodrama on a grand scale.

Lisa herself was the person I remembered, tiny and now in her late twenties. Lost in what seemed like an XXXL Iron Maiden T-shirt. She was vampire-pale, jet black hair pulled back in a ponytail from a broad, pimply white forehead. Her face narrowed downward, past a snub nose (her one conventionally pretty feature) to a narrow mouth and chin.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” she said. There was to be no handshake, and I didn’t know where to look. Her cubicle was unadorned, except for a pink My Little Pony figurine to the right of her monitor. Ironic whimsy? Childish? Dangerously unbalanced?

“How’ve you been?” I asked.

“Fine. My dad died. If that’s the kind of thing you’re asking about.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“It was a while ago,” she said. I’d forgotten the curious way she talked, a thick-tongued stumbling rhythm, in a hurry to get the meaning out. It suggested some cognitive deficit somewhere, but one that she’d been richly compensated for elsewhere in her makeup, a dark Faustian logic to her developmental balance sheet.

“Can I ask you a question?” she said suddenly.

“Sure.”

“Why exactly are you working here?”

“I needed a job.”

“There are a lot of jobs.”

“You know, I don’t actually have to explain this you.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I don’t have to explain how the editor works, either.”

“You remember the ‘Ultimate Game’ thing, right? That conversation?”

She sighed. “Yeah. I remember. I haven’t thought about that for years. That was a weird time for me.”

“Do you think it’s—well, I just kept thinking about it. How I was trying to memorize contract law and you guys were off having fun. How stupid is that, right?” I gave a gusty attempt at a laugh. Saying it out loud, especially to a real programmer, it sounded even more childish than I expected. I remembered how Simon had made it seem like a near-mystical quest; Darren made it seem like the chance of a lifetime.

“It was a fun idea. But until it comes along, this is the latest build of WAFFLE, set to Realms mode. Did you end up taking any more programming?” she asked. As she talked she shut down what she was doing—I glimpsed spaceships drifting between planets, in orbit around a double star.

“Two semesters of C,” I told her. But we both knew I was no Simon. I could see her features harden a little. She’d have the extra work of gearing all the explanations to a nontechie.

“All right. We won’t do scripting language for now. I’ll just load a level,” she said. She ran the editor—her setup had an extra monitor with a monochrome display—and as the editor ran it showed a long series of status messages.

The editor screen appeared, split in four parts. She piloted the camera around, zooming over chasms and through walls. We passed a group of goblins standing motionless, each with a swarm of tiny green numbers hovering over its head. Time had stopped, or, rather, had not yet been turned on. There were extra objects visible in the world—boxes, spheres, cartoon bells, and lightbulbs—hidden lines of influence, pathfinding routes, traps, and dangers. I was seeing the world as game developers saw it.

“You got through changing terrain, right? Placing objects?”

I nodded. I hadn’t, quite, but I’d decided already to stop admitting things like that, to just add them to the list of things I’d figure out later. I had to just keep assuming I was smart enough for this job.

“That’s the 2-D texture library, object library, terrain presets, lighting…” She toggled through a series of windows full of tiny icons that looked like candies on a tray.

“There’s really no manual for any of this?” I asked.

“I never have time, and the spec is always changing anyway.” Did she write all this?

“This is the creature library. Just select one, then click on the 2-D map to place it. Shift-click to bring up its behaviors. Scripting, conversation, patrol routes, starting attitude.” She clicked, and clicked again faster than I could follow. A tiny dragon appeared, frozen in the 3-D window; a corresponding dot appeared in the map window.

“So is that…” I started.

“It’s a bad guy. Okay so far?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“So viewing options now. You can cycle through the four versions of the world.” She backed the viewpoint up into the sky, then whip-panned to focus on a small fort in the middle of a forest, a single round tower, and tapped the space bar.

“Wireframe.” The screen instantly darkened to a black void where the tower stood, now revealed as an octagonal tube drawn in precise, glowing straight lines, triangular and trapezoidal facets in a night-black void. “Like in Battlezone. Back when you were gaming, probably the first 3-D game you saw.”

She tapped again. “Unshaded polygons.” The glowing lattice kept its shape but became an opaque crystal formation, sides now solid, a world of pastel-colored jewels that shone in a hard vacuum. Atmospheric haze is a high-tech extra.

Another tap of the space bar and the blank jewel facets filled with drawn-in detail. The tower walls were now painted to look like stonework, expertly shaded to indicate bumps and ridges.

“Textured polygon. Like a trompe l’oeil painting, if you took that in college. Whatever you did in college.”

“English.”

“Wow,” she said, toneless. “I’m going to zoom in a little—when we get closer it swaps in a high-res texture to give it more detail,” she said. As the camera moved in the stones of the tower blossomed with moss, cracks, crumbling mortar.

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Smoke and mirrors. It looks real but there’s a million little tricks holding it together,” she said. I couldn’t tell from her tone whether she was proud of the illusion of reality or contemptuous of the cheap theatrics. “Okay, now last year’s big hack—textured polygons, but with lighting.”

A final tap of the space bar and the tower was brushed with shades of darkness that gave it definition and, somehow, the impression of weight. The light came from just above the horizon, a sunset, and the hills beyond the tower faded away into dimness.

“Didn’t it just get darker?”

“Lighting isn’t about making it brighter, it’s figuring out where the shadows do and don’t fall. It’s easy to just light everything—you’re just not checking for darkness. What’s tricky is looking where the light source is and when it’s blocked.”

In the upper right corner of the screen, I noticed the letters FPS, followed by a flickering number. It bounced around between thirty and forty, with occasional jumps into the sixties. When Lisa added the lighting effects, the number tumbled into a single digit and turned red, and the view seemed to stutter instead of panning smoothly.

“What’s FPS?” I asked.

“Frames per second,” she said after a moment. “How many times the view updates every second. When it gets below thirty, everything starts to look jerky.”

“Like it’s doing now?” I asked.

“Yeah. It’s having to draw too many lit polygons. It has to do other stuff, like update positions of objects and play sounds and do AI calculations and all that stuff, too, but graphics are always the big drain. It’s all about getting those polys up on-screen to make everything detailed and pretty. The more polys you draw the better it looks, but then the frame rate slows down. Fewer polys, higher frame rate.”

“So who’s putting all those polygons up there?” I said, intuiting the answer.

“You are. You’re a designer, you build the world they have to draw every second. So you know when you’re in a meeting and there’s a guy who’s just looking at you with this twitchy, barely controlled hatred every time you open your mouth? That’s a graphics programmer. Every bright idea you have is putting more polygons on-screen and making his job harder. Every time that number on the screen goes below thirty, everyone can see that his code is slow and therefore he is not smart.”

“Good to know.”

“That guy’s entire job is to keep that frames-per-second number above thirty and green. Every time you put in too many trees, or make a room too large, or put five dragons in the same room, it’s going to turn red.”

“Then if I’m a game designer, what’s my whole job?”

“I don’t really play games, so I don’t know,” she said. “From what I gather, it’s to keep adding stuff to the world until that number gets to exactly thirty-one.”

“I thought it was to make the game fun.”

“I don’t know what that means, though,” she said. She was watching me carefully as she spoke. As if maybe she was hoping I knew a secret everyone else had forgotten.

Chapter Five

I sat down at my desk and tried to remember everything Lisa did. Now that I knew about frames per second, I could see the number drop every time I made a room bigger or more complicated, the point of view lurching like a stick-shift car with a novice driver. That’s why everything felt claustrophobic, because every cubic foot of space meant more polygons. That’s why the player was stuck in underground corridors all the time—it was just the easiest thing to draw.

I browsed around the network directories, looking for something to do, snooping at folders. There was an Art/Assets server with gigabytes of images and 3-D models, thousands of them, and a little viewer that would show the model on the screen by itself, hanging in a starry void. I chose a file at random and opened it: a bird-headed knight on horseback. The next, a black London taxi. The third, a silver-metal rifle with its circuitry burned out. I wondered who the bird’s-head knight was. The files went on and on, thousands of them, as if a whole library full of weird stories had been shaken and these were the random objects that fell out. A wooden cross; a china teapot; a sarcophagus. I’d stumbled into the great storehouse of their toy multiverse.

I clicked and a 10′ by 10′ by 10′ cube appeared, lit as if by a candle flame. It was textured as the default plain stone wall. Click and click and you’re digging out a corridor, rooms, cube by cube. Paint on textures, stone or wood or dirt or lava. You can build what you like, nothing weighs anything and it’s all infinitely strong. You can build pillars of dirt, metal, lava, water. I built a few rooms and corridors, dropped in a few monster spawners, treasure, and the rest, then flipped into game mode to see what it felt like.

Back in the game, I could see how this could get frightening. It was one thing to see a map of the place. It was another to be fifty feet belowground, down there in the dark, in a world silent except for distant running water, and… footsteps. A figure emerged from the darkness at the end of the corridor. A walking skeleton, animated by who knew what necromantic fires, ambled toward me. I stepped to the left to let it pass, keeping my eyes on it. To conserve polygons, it was built like a paper doll, a picture of a skeleton mounted on a single plane that slid around the dungeon shuffling its feet, pretending to walk. I felt bad for it. It wanted so badly to look like it was in 3-D. Up close I could see how low-resolution it was, too, just a bunch of pixels in jagged lines, like the side of an Aztec pyramid, just a graphic pretending to be a skeleton.

As if angered by my pity, it stopped, turned to face me, and clicked into a new set of animations—it was hostile! Its mouth opened and closed soundlessly. It drew its sword and made a chopping motion. The screen flashed red. It hit me! Being a game designer didn’t make me special or invulnerable.

I dove to the game manual to see how to defend myself, but it was too late: my health bar was falling away in chunks. The sword had a gold hilt and a fleck of red at its base—a thumb-size ruby mounted in the pommel. Was the skeleton rich once? Were these the bones of a king? No time to wonder; another flash and my in-game point of view fell over and dropped to the ground. I watched the skeleton’s feet, seen from behind now, walk off into the darkness in bony triumph. Someday it would be a real boy. I noted in passing that the skeleton had stolen my sword and two gold pieces. Up close, I could see that the floor was a pattern of black and brown pixels.

“Uh, yeah, you wanted to turn on invulnerability there,” Matt said, walking past.

I started again, this time working from empty space. I built a pillar, just a stack of blocks. And another pillar, then an arch connecting them, then a line of pillars. I built a second line next to it. I added more pillars, then a roof and a tower, until it became a cathedral, a cathedral to the undead god-emperor Russ’l the Dreadlord. I built a hundred traps to maul or ensnare or disintegrate passersby. Then I built the hell where Russ’l put those who defied him. Feeling a bit ashamed, I created an elaborate garden where Russ’l met petitioners seeking his blessing. I noticed it was four twenty-five in the morning, and I was crouched with my face inches from the monitor, my back oddly twisted and locked in place. I was in pain and needed the bathroom and I was happier than I could remember being for at least a year or two.

I walked home, newly unable to make sense of the world, or perhaps able for the first time to see through the trick of three-dimensional space. Three-dimensional space was not at all what I thought it was. It was just a sort of gimmick, nothing more than a set of algorithms for deciding what shapes you can and can’t see and how big they look at a given distance, whether they’re lit or in shadow, and how much detail shows. When you could write a computer program that did the same thing, it didn’t seem so special. I walked in a new reality, the airless dark 3-D world of Massachusetts, and the ultimate game seemed just a twist of thought away. Maybe I was there already.

Chapter Six

I had only been at Black Arts a week when I saw the bug for the first time. I was trying to clone a level out of a forgotten RPG (Into the Kobold Sanctum) just to see if I could do it. It was an underground fortress improbably embedded in the base of a gigantic tree. You never saw the tree itself, just its roots as they wound in and out of the corridors and chambers. At the center was a hostage, your sister, and you were racing to free her. In reality she couldn’t be killed, the suspense was fake, but players wouldn’t know that.

I was in the rhythm of tweaking a few triggers, flipping into the game, playing through the level until something broke, and flipping back to tweak again. I passed a guardsman half-embedded in a cave wall, flipped to the editor and pumped him a few grid points, then restarted.

Immediately I heard the sound of combat down the hall. Was something off? I’d run this section a dozen times. I ran down the hall, this time passing only dead and dismembered guardsmen. The halls were silent. I reached the main hall, where a goblin king should have been sitting, a bound maiden at his feet. Instead, the hall was a sea of dead bodies. The king who couldn’t be killed lay dead in front of his throne. Far at the back of the hall, I saw two figures fighting, and in a moment one was dead. The other was my sister, a black sword in her hand, and there was a moment when she turned, ready to go for me, and I felt an irrational panic, like very little I had felt before in a game. The eerie, substanceless mannequin approached, her black pixel eyes swelling to an inch wide on the screen, and all at once her death animation began. She arched her back and then threw herself violently to the stone floor. Like any dead creature in a game, she spawned her inventory, a few coins and the sword, which promptly disappeared. Before I could stop myself, I shut the computer off, all the way off, powered down.

I booted the computer back up and ran the editor. Both the king and the woman were flagged immortal. I ran the level again, three more times, with no trouble.

It was remarkable, terrifyingly remarkable, and deeply uncanny, the way a broken simulation always is; something about it suggested a brain having a stroke, an invisible crisis in the machinery. It had lunged up momentarily from the depths of the code base, a flash of white fin and gaping mouth seen for an instant, then gone again.

I was going to the kitchen to shake the whole thing off with a bag of Sour Patch Kids when Don’s voice came over the paging system.

“Could I have everyone join me and Darren in the conference room for a second?”

“Holy shit,” Matt said across the cubicle divider. “Darren’s back. It’s the new game.”

We shuffled in. Don stood at the far end of a row of tired, puffy faces, bad haircuts, a long conference table populated with Diet Coke cans.

At least half of us were wearing iterations of the company T-shirt; I could see four or five versions of the Black Arts logo. Lisa leaned against a wall at the back, eyes closed. She wore the company T-shirt, too, in a tentlike XXL edition.

Don and Darren stood at the front. I hadn’t seen Darren for at least six years; he’d started wearing a sport jacket over his T-shirt and ripped jeans, Steve Jobs–style, but otherwise he looked exactly the same—sandy blond hair, wiry build, and slightly messianic stare. I remembered being a little dazzled by him in an older-brother kind of way. It wasn’t just me; he had that quality for nearly everybody—he had this taut magnetism. I avoided his gaze. I didn’t think he ever liked me, even before I bailed on the game world.

“Thanks, everyone. Thanks. I only have a couple of things to cover,” Don said. “Darren and I want to just get everybody oriented.” For a manager, he didn’t seem that comfortable as a speaker. He was used to Darren handling it.

“Number one, we shipped Solar Empires III. It’s selling… pretty well so far, and CGW’s cover story is going to come out next week, which should give it a boost, and a little bird told me we’re a contender for the Best Strategy Game award from Electronic Gaming.” There was some cheering—people were still buzzed with whatever they’d gone through. Lisa didn’t bother clapping. Neither did Toby. He really did hate outer space now—planets, comets, gleaming battleships aloft on the solar wind like golden cities, the whole empty lot of it—but there was a much wider market for it than for fantasy.

“Second thing. Darren and I talked this week since he got back from Nepal, and we roughed out a couple of big decisions for the company.

“First off, we’re entering into a partnership with Focus Capital, which should stabilize things a bit after last year’s rough spot.”

“What’s the next game?” Jared called out.

“Right. The market for science fiction gaming is pretty good right now…” The room went a bit quieter. I saw Matt’s knuckles actually whiten on the edge of the table. The romance of simulated space exploration had palled over three months of eighty-hour workweeks. “But we’re going back to fantasy. We’re going back to the Realms. Darren’s working out the details, but it looks like we’re back to the Third Age. Darren?”

Real cheering this time, and questions, everyone talking over each other, Dark Lorac, Endoria, conversation interfaces and hit location, something about the White City.

Darren stood up. It was the first time I’d heard him speak in years. I wondered if he knew I was there; I felt the urge to duck down. All of a sudden I felt ashamed at coming back, like I still wanted him to like me.

“Hi, guys,” he started. He spoke quietly, and everyone shut up instantly. “So what’s the Third Age about?”

He stopped and let the silence go on a little, the room completely still now; he had a knack for making eleven in the morning feel like a primal midnight. The lights dimmed a little—Matt was standing at the switch. Darren looked around the room at each of us. The screen behind him lit up, showing a series of screenshots from what I supposed were past Black Arts games: at first just a few characters and dots on a black screen, then a hypercomplex board game, fading forward to real images.

“The First Age is long gone, a fallen legend. The Second Age, a magical war that shattered the world. Now the Third Age. Four heroes battling for a thousand years, and for what? Simon’s notes don’t say. It’s up to us,” he said, and paused. Darren was good at this.

“I want you all to think about the Third Age, everything that happened there, the fall of Brennan’s house, Dark Lorac. How does the Third Age end? I mean, how did it end for you? What did you find at the end of a thousand years of struggle in the dirt and the rain, and what did you do with it? Were you brave? Did you win or lose? What did it take out of you?”

On-screen, the capsule history had gone to 3-D, a view of a warrior fighting wolves alone in a snowstorm. I thought about it. What was Darren’s story? What was Simon’s? Was he brave? Did he get what he wanted?

“It’s the end of the Third Age, people. You are going to slay gods.” A burst of applause, which Darren let run for a few seconds, then continued on. He had more coming.

“The ads talk about the technology. We’ll say it’s the fastest, most realistic graphics yet. We’re probably going to beat Carmack at id, we’ll beat Epic for sure. But it’s 1997, and games are about as realistic as they’re going to get, right?

“Think again. Big news, we’re throwing out all our old graphics tech, which means… a couple things. We’re ditching the Ukrainians, for good”—a modest cheer at that—“and we’re bringing in a fresh take on it. I’ve got a little surprise.”

Toby perked up a little, and then I saw Lisa. Her expression had changed very little, but her normally pale face was red almost to the hairline. She was watching Darren with what some might call nervousness, but it was more like hunger.

“I’ve been talking to a new person for this,” Darren said, and I saw Lisa’s posture straighten, flexing like a cat waiting to be petted. “We’re about to announce a partnership with NVIDIA, to be the flagship product for their next-gen graphics card. We’re going to get direct access to the software guys as well as their hardware team.”

I saw Lisa react. Her lips made the tiniest possible “no.” Otherwise her features didn’t change, they just went entirely slack, as if in shock. You would have to have known her a long time to catch the change. I thought I was the only one seeing it, until I saw Don’s eyes on her. Darren worked the room, but Don watched it.

Darren showed us a series of new screenshots. A waterfall with sunlight shining through it, forming a rainbow. A garishly lit nightclub where a generously proportioned, lingerie-clad woman danced on a pedestal, lit by multicolored spotlights. A domed temple with arches and gleaming black marble floors. The images looked like they’d taken a supercomputer a hundred hours to draw; they looked incredible.

Darren ticked off the list of features. “Translucency, curved surfaces, colored lights. Everything from a gamer’s wet dreams, all in real time. Bloom, specular highlights, insane poly counts, level of detail, all running at sixty frames a second, solid as a fucking rock. This is it, people.”

We were, yet again, looking across the threshold to the next thing, another phase change. Everything new this year was already becoming old, sad, and pathetic. Darren understood this so well. We were going into the future and he was taking us with him. We were the smart kids again, rich in the currency of our peculiar nation, foresight.

“And… number three,” Don said. “Scheduling.” Darren gave a quick nod, then ducked out the door while Don took us back into the mundane. Lisa followed behind Darren.

“We’re going to have about eighteen months for this one. We’ll be reusing a lot of tech, but it’s still going to be tight. Matt, could you—” Matt hopped up, and Don handed him a page of printout. He started sketching out a grid on the whiteboard on the wall.

Horizontally across the top, he wrote six items: PREPRODUCTION, ALPHA 1, ALPHA 2, ALPHA 3, BETA, and RTM.

At the right-hand edge, he wrote three words, arranged vertically: PROGRAMMING, DESIGN, and ART. These, I knew, were the three core disciplines of video game production. There was also production, which meant tracking the schedule, the budget, and doing a thousand other things, such as organizing translations for foreign publication, keeping in touch with publishers, and generally figuring out what on earth was going on at any given time. And then there was quality assurance, or playtesting, devoted to finding mistakes in other people’s work. No one was ever very fond of QA.

Don explained the schedule carefully—we’d have eighteen months for this, which put sharp limits on how much new technology we could create. I got the feeling this made the programmers feel a little pissed off. Working from the sheet, Matt began adding deadlines for each of these in neat, spiky handwriting. As Don talked us through the dates, I gradually picked up on rough meanings of the other terms.

Preproduction: planning the product and scheduling the milestones. As it would in a prolonged dorm-room discussion, the phrase “wouldn’t it be cool if” played a major part. Endless circular debates, pie-in-the-sky speculation. Lots of features that would be cut later for scheduling reasons.

Alpha phases 1, 2, and 3: building the game. This part was longer than the others put together, for obvious reasons. For most of this period, the game was going to be nonexistent or broken and decidedly unfun, and everyone would regret everything they said during preproduction.

Beta meant that the game, theoretically, was done except for all the many, many problems and mistakes and omissions.

RTM stood for “Release To Manufacturer,” when the finished master disk would be sent off to the publisher (note: we did not have a publisher). The publisher would do its own testing, and either accept it or send it back to have the problems fixed.

Of course none of these phases or deadlines would happen cleanly; there would be slippage and temporary solutions that would be fixed later, or, more often, become permanent. There would be interdependencies, times when art or programming couldn’t move forward because design hadn’t said what it wanted yet; or design couldn’t build its levels properly because art hadn’t produced the models or programmers hadn’t implemented the necessary features. It would be a dizzying creative collaboration that often took the form of a drawn-out, byzantine war of intrigue.

Preproduction started Monday. It was starting to sink in that this would be our lives for the next eighteen months. It was April then; it would be June when we started alpha 1 while my law school friends would be at graduation parties, the start of a lazy summer before moving on to New York or Palo Alto or New Haven, while I stayed behind in this made-up career. It would be June again when we got out of alpha 3, a year of my life gone, and it would be early October of next year when we reached RTM, and getting cold, and my life would be different in ways I couldn’t imagine yet.

Chapter Seven

I took the bug to Matt.

“In Realms VI?” he said. “It’s possible, I guess. But it’s probably already DNF’ed.”

“DNF?”

“Do Not Fix.”

“Why wouldn’t you fix a bug if you knew about it?”

Matt sighed. “Okay. So Realms VI has on the order of a million lines of code. It’s not going to be perfect, but it has to be shipped. At some point the producer and the leads sit down and go through all the existing bugs and prioritize according to various totally subjective criteria. How often it happens. How bad it is—where the top end is, like, ‘Game crashes, hard drive is erased, user catches fire,’ and the low end is, ‘Yeah, the text in that Options menu could be a more eye-catching shade of blue.’ Fixability, i.e., how loudly and effectively are the people tasked with repairing it going to complain.

“So these bugs are assigned priority numbers, but there’s a cutoff, and anything below that point is marked DNF, Do Not Fix, and officially closed. Ship it. So it’s, like, bugs that almost never happen, or are tiny aesthetic problems, or only come up when you have this or that shitty off-brand video card—it’s not our problem. Oh, and bugs that are part of a tricky section of code, so when you fix them you’d probably end up making new and worse bugs.”

“Okay, but what if this bug was pretty weird and noticeable?”

“Well there’s another category of bugs that don’t get fixed, which is the ones that only ever happen once, and those are marked NR, No Repro.”

“Wouldn’t you fix it anyway, just in case?” I asked. Before answering, Matt gestured me to roll my chair a little closer.

“So I came up through playtest, so… here’s how it looks from that perspective. The fate of many, many bugs runs as follows: a playtester spots it once or twice, logs it in the database with a tentative classification—art, programming, design, or unknown. The report includes instructions on how to find the bug and make it happen again, but some bugs don’t happen reliably. Sometimes they come and go for whatever reason—there’s a little mystery there. But it goes to the bug meeting, where the lead for that area assigns it to a team member, who may or may not have caused it. Doesn’t matter.

“So now the team member has to fix the bug, and they’re cranky because it’s a brand-new bug and they haven’t budgeted time for it and they’re going to be late for something else. So first thing they do is run the game and see if it reproduces. If it doesn’t happen on the first or second try, some guys will slap a No Repro on it, kick it back to playtest, and go on to their next bug.”

“Do they think you’re making it up?”

“You have no idea the contempt people hold toward playtest. You see the logic—everyone else’s job is to get the list of active bugs to zero, except us, whose job is add bugs to the list. So people just kick bugs back all the time. And some of them are pretty hard to verify, and you’ve got to figure out that the bug happens only if the game tries to autosave while you’re actively wielding a plus-three glass dagger and there are exactly four lizard men within three hexes. And then walk into a meeting and do it with—I’m not going to name names, but they’re literally standing over you, staking their reputations on the idea that this bug absolutely cannot happen, that it is literally technologically impossible.”

“So I guess you’re not in play test anymore.”

“Not for this one, no. I guess that’s the grand prize.”

There was nothing going on the rest of the day except other designers speculating about what more Darren had planned. I found a database showing records of bugs from previous projects, all closed and confirmed before shipping, but the records were there. I sorted for the ones that weren’t active, strictly speaking, but neither had they been fixed. The DNFs.

I searched around a little in the No Repro pile. It turned out there was no one bug exactly like the one I’d seen, but a few that might have been similar: “King Aerion dead when should be unkillable, WTF”; “Level three, dragon already dead when I arrived”; “Goblin children massacred? Why???” None of them repeated, and they could have been part of the same underlying bug or three entirely separate bugs.

They could have been minor coincidences. I knew by now that a simulation-heavy game was unpredictable. A monster could wander too close to a torch and catch on fire; then it would go into its panic-run mode and anything else it bumped into might catch. Or a harmless goblin might nudge a rock, which then rolls and hits another creature just hard enough to inflict one hit point of damage, which then triggers a combat reaction, and next thing you know there’s an unscheduled goblin riot. The blessing and curse of simulation-driven engines was that although you could design the system, the world ran by itself, and accidents happened.

They usually didn’t, because the game didn’t bother to simulate anything too far from the player in any detail—it would slow everything down too far. But maybe the game was having trouble deciding what not to simulate. Each one was marked No Repro, so maybe it just never happened again.

I noticed that most of these bugs belonged to the same person, LMcknhpt. I sent Lisa a quick e-mail with the subject line “RoGVI bugs 2917, 40389, 51112.”

The reply came a few minutes later.

That “probably in data” was an ever-so-slightly dickish sign-off. What she meant to say was that the code was working fine, so it must be the designer who screwed up—he just forgot to flag the king as unkillable, or he put a rock in the wrong place, or routed a goblin’s patrol path through a lit torch.

I wrote back, “I triple-checked the data. Want to see?” but she didn’t respond at all, except that five minutes later, the bug database had sent me three separate automated messages.

Where was the bug? How did I even start thinking about fixing something like this? A bug could be in either of two elements of the game, data or code, or it could be in both.

Something horrible was lurking in memory or code or whatever forsaken in-between region of space it lived in, and it was messing with our game. But bugs don’t happen without somebody making them, by stupidity or negligence. All I had to do was trace it back to where it lived. The first step, as everyone knew, was to find the version where it first occurred—the crucial change, an added feature or an attempt to fix some other problem, which had been copied from version to version ever since. So far I hadn’t even found a version where it didn’t occur, but there must be one. I’d just have to go back far enough.

Chapter Eight

I slept late the next morning, sat for a half hour over cereal and coffee before wandering over to work, shirt untucked, past midday traffic, people with regular jobs already heading to lunch. No one minded. I lost myself in reading through old computer game manuals, role-playing game modules, design documents, even the italicized flavor text on game cards (CORRELLEAN REMNANT (5/4) / Submarine movement / The regiment fought on as the waters rose; they never stopped).

Black Arts made role-playing games, strategy games, first-person shooters, even a golf game. But if there was one constant in the Black Arts games, it was the Four Heroes. They were—I think—based on the ones in Gauntlet, but you couldn’t say for sure because they were the same four heroes you found in almost any video game that featured four heroes, anywhere:

(1) A muscular guy with a sword

(2) A bearded guy in a robe

(3) A skinny guy with a knife

(4) A sexy lady

Whether you thought of them as Jungian archetypes or a set of complementary game mechanics, they’d been around almost since the beginning. Black Arts mixed and matched them depending on the plot of a given game, but they kept the names the same. It was part of the brand, and people cared a surprising amount about them.

The history of Endoria was divided into three ages, which had in common the fact that the world of Endoria was completely fucked.

Of the First Age comparatively little is known, other than it was an age of near-divine beings, heroes, Dreadwargs, and tragedy. Games were never set directly in the First Age; it was just used to explain strange objects like the Hyperborean Crown and the Brass Head, which emanated from the gods and wizard kings of this era. A creeping darkness overwhelmed the Great Powers, and the world descended into warring kingdoms.

The Second Age: That was when the four central heroes made their first appearance: Brennan the warrior, Lorac the wizard, Prendar the thief, and Leira the princess. I had no idea what happened other than that it ended with a gigantic war involving practically everybody.

The Third Age, where Realms games are mostly set, was the era of rebuilding, the long struggle for the restoration of the world.

Third Age Endoria was a dangerous place; it wasn’t noble, it wasn’t mystical, and it wasn’t especially dignified. Dwarves lied; elves slit throats. The land was a chaotic mess of factions and cultures and species. Different languages split the world, Coronishes and Zeldunics at each other’s throats. Rival deities and pantheons played games with the world, spawning curious groups like the Antic Brotherhood, which served the chaos daemon, Quareen, and the Nephros Concordance, with its vast and mysterious wealth. Different schools of wizardry competed for supremacy: Horn Adepts were masters of illusion; Summoners and Divinomancers were like cosmic hustlers, making deals with unseen entities, playing powerful forces against each other, always trying to come out ahead. Pyrists and Infomantics clung to their disciplines like addicts; Necromancers, like engineers of a rotting eldritch calculus. The world was dirty, as if in that tournament all the shiny, high-fantasy idealism had been hacked to pieces and ground into the mud of the Second Age.

The Four Heroes’ lives continued, through sequel after sequel. There was no fictional justification for their extended life spans—did they have identical descendants, or did they just live a long time, as people in the Old Testament did? No one explained. Prendar was half elf and half human, and Lorac was a wizard, so they might plausibly have extended life spans, but even this was pushing it. (This was to say nothing of their twentieth-century and far-future analogues, for which no rational explanation suggested itself. Realms had a ludic dream logic of its own.) The Four Heroes were more like actors in a repertory company than stable characters. Nearly every story needed to fill one or more of their roles, “fighter” or “wizard” or “thief” or, well, “generic female person,” and they always showed up and did their bit. Sometimes they were a little older or younger than they were in previous games.

Were the characters supposed to remember everything that happened to them? If I asked one of them, would it know? It didn’t seem like it—most of the time they seemed paper-thin, just empty things you steered around the world to get what you wanted. No way to ask them, and no point to doing so. They weren’t even people; they were half people, you and not you, or the half of you that was in the world.

The Heroes met, adventured together, betrayed one another, reconciled, and even married (choice of Leira and Brennan or Leira and Prendar; I went with the latter). Lorac recovered the Staff of Wizardry and became the evil Dark Lorac for a while. Leira and Prendar ended up leading an army against the other two, and even had a son.

The Lich King rose, the last Elven Firstcomer died, and her knowledge was lost forever.

And of course they explored about a thousand dungeons and had a thousand adventures. There was the urban conspiracy one. The icy northern one that explained the elven tribes, the one about the swamplands, the one about the dwarven empires, the weird plane-traveling one, the forestlands, the drowned ruins one, the vampire one.

The Heroes saved the world and acquired vast riches, as one does, but when next we would meet them they were always back to square one, broke and first-level. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

After that… things got weird. If you paged through enough rule supplements and unofficial spin-offs you could find rules for almost anything—rules in case characters dimension-traveled into the Old West or postapocalyptic Earth, for example.

The Soul Gem turned the time line back on itself, stretching and looping it forever. The Heroes even turned up in the First Age from time to time. Rumor had them fighting in the final siege of Chorn, or seeking out Adric from his wandering years and putting him on the path homeward. People said Leira’s child was Adric’s and was the true heir to the crown before he fell. Or that one day the far-future heroes Pren-Dahr, Ley-R4, Loraq, and Brendan Blackstar would travel back in time to save the Third Age, or perhaps doom it, whatever that means—people are always dooming things in fantasy. The Third Age kind of doomed everything anyway.

As I thought of it, the First Age was like childhood, years of long-ago upheaval, trauma, and unbearable longing, during which our characters were formed.

The Second Age was high school. Battle lines were drawn, alliances hardened into place, strategies tested, scars acquired. The crimes committed in this Age would fester for millennia.

And the Third Age was everything after, when we went our separate ways and order was restored but nothing quite forgiven or forgotten. There was also a Fourth Age no one much bothered with, which marked the retreat of magic into mere legend and superstition and the ascendancy of humankind—i.e., the time when we grew up and got boring and our hearts, generally speaking, died.

I gathered there was a certain amount of armchair quarterbacking in the lower ranks of Black Arts, about how we were a little too loyal to the Realms of Gold thing. Don still believed the franchise had legs, that with the right game behind it, RoG could be as big as Final Fantasy or Warcraft, with bestselling tie-in novels, conventions, maybe a movie. But for now it was just another medieval pastiche, a sub-Narnian, off-brand Middle-earth, waiting to be a forgotten part of somebody’s adolescence, all the knights and ladies and dragon-elves left behind along with high school detention and Piers Anthony novels.

On the other hand, there were, out there, players who genuinely cared about the third Correllean dynasty, who read the cheaply ghostwritten tie-in novels, who were emotionally invested in the war against the House of Aerion, and who considered the death of Prince Vellan Brightsword in the Battle of Arn to be an event that genuinely diminished the amount of goodness and light in the world.

But it wasn’t as if Black Arts suffered from an exaggerated reverence for its own intellectual property. Maybe at first, but all the high-fantasy gravitas in the world wouldn’t survive the sight of Lorac hiking up his robes to nail a tricky hardflip-to-manual transition in Pro Skate ’Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich.

The four crowded awkwardly into the skate shop.

“What are we doing here?” Brennan said, gazing around at racks of boards and skatewear.

“I think it’s important,” whispered Leira. “I think we’re here for a reason.”

Lorac scowled. “This is humiliating.”

“Shred regular or goofy-foot?” asked the teenager behind the counter.

“Regular?” Brennan said uncertainly. Leira and Prendar shrugged—regular would be fine. After an agonizing pause, Lorac replied, “Goofy.”

The skate shop attendant showed them an array of possible T-shirts. Lorac chose a black one. He was a necromancer, after all.

They found themselves in the parking lot of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Elementary.

“Skate!” cried the arch-lich. “Skate!”

Brennan scanned the others’ faces grimly. “Aye. We will skate.”

They learned to ollie and nollie and heelflip and air it out and, yes, grind. Prendar kept an eye out for cop cars while Leira tentatively worked out half-pipe moves in a concrete spillway to a grunge-and-speed-metal sound track. Lorac had promise as a tech skateboarder; Brennan went in for vert. When perfected, his double-handed Decapitation-Vacation 360-degree grab raked in a huge bonus.

They improved. They got licensing deals and won competitions. And there really were moments when GtA-L came mind-bendingly close to working. Prendar gliding through the suburban gloom, elf ears glimpsed for a moment under a streetlight, then just a shadow as he rounded the corner of a Safeway and disappeared. Lorac closed his eyes a moment as he rolled down the long hill toward downtown, felt the sun on his face, set aside, for the time being, his long years of study, the price of his arcane knowledge, the doom waiting for him. He ollied to grind the curb, nollied into a 360 to land clean. He grinned.

When Leira managed a handplant on the edge of an abandoned public pool to the cranked-up sound of surfpunk guitar, it almost made sense of the insanity, her body extended almost vertically in the last light of day, her arm straight on the lip, supporting her body, her back arched against the sunset, orange light glinting liquid off the centuries-old katana strapped to her back and pouring over the grass that was poking through the concrete, over the trash piled against a sagging chain-link fence.

“Skate! Skate, or taste the wrath of the arch-lich!”

That night as I was falling asleep I noticed a light through the crack under the cheap door dividing my apartment’s two rooms. At first I thought the refrigerator door hadn’t closed, but when I looked, I found that the Four Heroes of Endoria had showed up to visit.

It was unexpected, and I wasn’t set up for company; in fact, I had exactly one card table and one folding chair, which Lorac the wizard had claimed. They were a striking quartet, larger than life, angular in the way of computer models.

Their glowing, pixelated forms took up a surprising amount of room. Brennan was nearly seven feet tall, and his broad shoulders seemed to swallow up the entire kitchen.

“What are you doing in my kitchen?” I asked them.

“My friend, the time has come to embark on our quest,” he said in the smooth baritone of the semiprofessional voice actor who recorded his dialogue.

I guessed, sure, we were friends, in a way.

“You are the chosen one,” said Princess Leira, who leaned against the sink. She had the requisite Amazonian figure, full red lips, and jet black hair. She had bright eyes and a mouth that drooped at the corners, which gave her smile an appealing, sheepish quality. She wore a traveling cloak, which was a relief; some of her costumes were pretty revealing.

“Chosen for what? What quest?” I asked. “I don’t understand. Am I supposed to find something?” We were always finding things in games. Rings, books, crowns.

“You’re the one we need,” said Prendar the thief, a tall, pale half elf with sandy red hair and black eyes. “A man of courage and strength, but also guile.”

I’d never seen an elf up close before. From a distance they were graceful, elegant beings, but from a few feet away Prendar was vibrantly inhuman. You’d think an elf would have a cute snub nose, but his was long and beaky. Maybe it was his human father’s. I’d never heard the word guile used in a conversation, either.

“Russell, we entreat your help,” intoned the magus. “Our worlds are in great danger, and only you can save them.” His cloak stiff with whorls of gold thread, Lorac spoke with a theatrical old-guy quaver. He was an Arabian Nights character, an exotic older man with a Levantine cast, a thin, crooked nose, and a neatly trimmed beard. His staff was too long, and he brushed the dusty lighting fixture with it. “Sorry.”

“But you’re the Heroes,” I said. “It doesn’t make any sense for you to talk to humans.”

“We’re all in the game, Russell,” Leira said. “We’re characters, but you’re the player. We need you.”

“A great danger is coming,” said Brennan. “Greater than any we have ever faced.”

“Beware Adric! Beware the grieving blade!” Leira whispered breathlessly.

“Just play the game, asshole,” Prendar snapped, and drew on a cigarette.

“Wait… what game?” I said. “Realms VI? VII?”

“The Ultimate Game,” sing-songed Lorac. He began to laugh. They must have gotten a really good voice actor. Looking closer, I saw that his staff had a small animal skull on the end of it. It might have been a ferret’s. The ferret’s eyes glowed.

I fell asleep again, and this time dreamed I was still at work but there was an extra office marked Secret Projects, and I went in and found Simon there where he’d been all along and he told me how he’d built the Ultimate Game and it was just a golden ring, and he said he’d already spoken the wish and tomorrow the five of us would wake up and be fantasy adventurers together like I’d always wanted. I’d get to be the elf. I started crying right then and there, I just thought, what a relief, because I remembered now how much I wanted it. How had I forgotten that?

Chapter Nine

Hey, Matt, are there any magic swords in the Realms universe?” I asked.

There was no reason for preamble; Matt got thrown these questions. Black Arts didn’t have an archivist. The closest we had was Matt. He did the research to find out what make of Soviet tanks rolled into Berlin in 1945, and what breed of horse a Knight Templar might have ridden. He was consistently cheerful, and he was Black Arts’ biggest fan. He’d read every comic book and novel adaptation and was an authority on the past and future histories of the Black Arts multiverse. Although for all I knew, he made up the answers on the spot.

“Oh! Well.” Matt thought a moment, then drew a breath. “I mean, there’s the usual ones, plus one, plus two, that kind of thing. There’s flaming swords, ice swords, vorpal. Silver, not really magic, but it interacts with those systems. There’s Sunshard, pluses against undead. Daemonsbane—obviously—a bunch of other… banes, giants, and stuff. You can make one out of star metal if you have the right equipment, that’s pretty good. There was a place you could find a vibro-sword from Solar Empires, that was just in as a joke. And, well, there’s the Rainbow Blade, has a bunch of different effects.”

I was impressed, by his humility, if nothing else. He always talked as if he were ticking off the obvious points everyone knew.

“Are there any evil swords?”

“Evil… swords…. Nothing comes to mind, not swords, anyway. Staff of the Ancients turned out evil, obviously. The DireSpear. At high level, antipaladins manifest burning swords as a class attribute. I don’t think the blades themselves are aligned, but I can check.”

“Huh. Where would I start looking? Like, Realms I?”

“Oh, man… oh, man. I don’t even know if you could. I don’t know if even Simon and Darren had a copy, or one that would run, anyway. The thing was written in COBOL.”

Black Arts had a game library of sorts, three gray metal bookshelves bolted to the wall between the Realms art pit and the kitchen. They were stacked unevenly with all the collected debris of four or five insular, feverish midadolescences. Rows and then boxes of fantasy and science fiction novels with doubles and triples of anything in the golden-age SFF canon—the Dune books took up their own shelf. Stacked, hand-labeled videocassettes of films someone considered essential reference (Aliens, The Dark Crystal, and Ladyhawke were visible on top), Dungeons & Dragons modules containing scribbled marginalia, Avalon Hill board games, stacks of comic books, an unused dictionary and thesaurus, a separate section for art books, histories of medieval architecture, and color plates of Vallejo and Frazetta and Whelan and Mead and Piranesi.

And of course stacks and stacks of computer games in no particular order. Most of them were in their original boxes, with worn corners and sprung seams after the long, rough trips from home to dorm room to apartment to apartment before arriving here.

Old consoles; the beetlelike curve of a SEGA Genesis; the triple-pronged Nintendo 64 controller.

I picked one up, already dusty and faded only a few years after being state of the art. Quest of the White Eagle. On the cover a blandly handsome teenage boy in a white T-shirt and jeans and an eighties feathered haircut hung in midair, frozen in the act of leaping eagerly from the sidewalk into a glowing doorway hanging a few inches off the ground. He was grinning madly, obviously overjoyed to be getting the fuck out. Behind him, a dark-haired girl watched, lost in admiration.

The boy was already halfway through; his shoulder and arm emerged on the portal’s far side wearing a medieval tunic and gripping a sword. There, the same teenage girl awaited, with an identical expression but wearing longer hair and dressed only in a few shreds of chain mail and a tiara. The back of the box showed an actual screenshot—blocky, pixelated stick figures.

All the Black Arts games were there, a few still shrink-wrapped, going back to 1988’s Clandestine, the official first release under the label. Realms I was the kind of game that never had a commercial release. It was an underground classic that had been swapped over BBSes in the mid-1980s and been passed from hand to hand in the form of eight floppy disks bundled with rubber bands. I was sure a few dozen copies were out there lying in basements in cardboard boxes, filed away with cracked copies of The Bilestoad and Lode Runner.

I opened a few of the older boxes, shifted piles of loose graph paper, manila envelopes holding mostly 3.25-inch disks (“crispies”), even opened up and shook out a couple of the larger books in case a few floppies had been tucked inside and forgotten. There wasn’t much from 1983 apart from an incomplete set of blue-and-white Ultima III: Exodus floppies.

It turned out there was a whole room in Black Arts that was just all of Simon’s stuff. He had an apartment of sorts but he wasn’t that invested in it. The rest of it was here at the office, where he’d slept most of the time anyway. Don and Darren had gone through Simon’s notebooks page by page in search of the breakthrough they’d announced, and there was nothing, but I looked through their inventory list anyway.

Items included:

I’d just given up and was looking through the manual of some old White Wolf game when a slip of notepad paper fell out. It was graph paper. Across the top it read REALMS OF GOLD: ADRIC’S TOMB. It held a few short paragraphs in what was definitely Simon’s handwriting.

The writing cut off. Sophomore year was ending. One day high school itself would end and the future would begin—long after the TRS-80 would be obsolete, after sixteen colors became 256 colors became millions of colors; long after sophomore year would be over, they’d have 3-D graphics like in TRON and computer games so real it would be like living in the world of D&D. I remembered believing that.

At the bottom of the page, at an angle, as if noted down casually at some later date, there was a phone number with a local area code.