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Chapter Twenty-Four

The cafeteria was thick with tension and nerd sweat. The walls were hung with long streamers of printout—code samples, ASCII art, player rankings, daily schedules, tournament rules—in the gray, uniform characters of the camp’s two dot matrix printers. It was just after midnight, the last Saturday in August, the last night of computer camp, and the Realms II tournament was down to its last two players. It had been a long summer.

A small contingent of light infantry, literally just eight units, charged Darren’s shield wall, maintained by ogre irregulars with dark-elven support, all with the Discipline upgrade. Nothing short of heavy cavalry should even have distracted the line, and Darren wrote it off as a tactical oversight. Three turns later he looked again and saw the break in the shield wall. The whole flank was collapsing. And the small band of fighters was still on the move, eating up elite guard units right and left. It was the arrival of Mournblade, the Sword that Ruined Computer Camp; it was the end of summertime.

Summer arrived early, the rainy, overheated summer of 1983, the summer that changed things. The movie WarGames came out in June and we went to see it four times in the first week. Simon was entranced; I think it was the first time in his life he saw a smart person who kicked real-world ass.

For another, Darren found the brochure from KidBits in a pile of magazines and mimeographed handouts in a classroom drawer when he was looking maybe for a scrap of paper with an admin password, as Matthew Broderick would have done, or evidence of Mr. Kovacs’s drug habit.

Darren pitched it to us during one of those aimless car rides, the key point being that each of our parents would contribute a little to help pay Simon’s way. Even if no one talked about it, it was clear Simon had fewer options than the rest of us. There was no hope of getting a computer of his own; even if he could afford one, his mother wouldn’t allow it. She’d seen his grades drop, and she worried about him. No computers in the house, no computers anywhere.

The brochure from KidBits cannily anticipated this line of thinking and promised a “balance of computer activity and outdoor recreation.” We’d meet people our own age, get out of the house. The brochure promised five hours of classes a day, sports, hiking, and “a fun and instructional atmosphere.”

What clinched it was a letter from UMass Amherst that came almost the next day. Whatever had happened to Simon’s grades, he could still destroy a standardized test when he wanted to, and UMass decided to overlook his record and treat him as a diamond in the rough. Simon had applied early and been offered a full scholarship. From what I understood it was the only way he was going to college at all.

Even then, I thought there was a little more to the summer-camp plan. For one thing, on the last day of school I saw Simon by himself in the computer lab. The air-conditioning had shut off for some reason and school was stifling hot. He was typing, banging the keys on one of those huge old single-piece terminals. The printer started up, an old chattering dot matrix that took in a single long stream of paper, perforated on either side for the blunt teeth of the plastic gears that would catch it and pull it through. The printer head jolted back and forth and the machine rocked with the effort of churning out 148 pages of source code for Realms of Gold I: Tomb of Destiny.

Simon fit the entire slab into a three-ring binder—the largest kind, with rings that could have fit around his upper arm. He snapped them shut with the nervous gravity of a man carrying nuclear authorization codes. It was the Codex of the Realms, and it felt weighty and dangerous, less like code and more like the warhead itself.

Darren’s father drove the four of us up to computer camp on the last Monday of June. The station wagon pulled up in front of the Bertuccis’ and Simon came out, waving good-bye to his mother inside and running to the curb. We pulled out and onto I-90 for the long quiet drive west, the road bordered with pine forest and fast-growing high-tech office parks, buildings with shiny black glass and no signage, computer start-ups and defense contractors. Darren’s dad worked at one of those contractors, doing he couldn’t say what sort of work on Cold War initiatives. He was tall, red-faced, an aging athlete who didn’t pretend to understand what the four of us were up to. He made awkward small talk with Simon, asking after his parents, his grades, before falling silent.

It was almost noon by the time we turned off onto a single-lane road that wound for miles with no houses on either side, just pine trees. Mr. Ackerman missed the turn and doubled back to turn in at a dirt road with a pink construction-paper sign stapled to a tree, just KIDBITS in black Sharpie and an arrow. The road gave out at a circular drive before a two-story brick building with slightly dirty white trim. The main building (called Main) was a boarding school most of the year, rented out for the summer.

About forty boys and eighteen girls were collecting in and around the building, each orbited by one or two parents, unglamorous fortysomethings who had an air of competitiveness and also a shared, head-shaking embarrassment. They were the parents of computer geeks without knowing what that meant.

Neither did any one of us, quite. It was a deeply peculiar moment, the teenage geeks of the personal computer era emerging from CRT-lit curtained bedrooms to behold each other for the first time. To see ourselves as a strange, incipiently powerful cohort. And it wasn’t so much the way we looked—there were plenty of soft bodies, T-shirts, and bowl-cut hair, but there were also more than a few would-be tough kids. The girls were alert and conservatively dressed, most of them used to passing unnoticed at the back of the class. A few of them towered over the tinier late-blooming boys. There were angry nerds, frightened nerds, nerds that didn’t know yet they were nerds.

It might have been the eyes; quick eyes, with a way of focusing then looking away. We’d all discovered the same things privately and were meeting for the first time, like a meeting of UFO abductees. Moments of eye contact seemed to have a stealthy tentative question there, something like, “Do you think this is as important as I think it is?” Which at some point changed to “Can you believe they’re really letting us do this?” and “When do you think our parents are going to leave?” It wasn’t the first time in history that nerd was meeting nerd, but it was the first time for us, our cohort—the first nerds of the modem age, floppy-disk drives, game consoles, Apple IIs, and C64s—and we were different.

A cheerful, overweight man sweating in the heat handed out thick orientation packets, a manila folder with a name handwritten on the front. “Welcome to KidBits,” he said. The folder held a medical release form; a personal information sheet to check. A room key, taped to a map of the dorm with a room circled. A map of the area. There were a few stapled pages of orientation information; curfew and lights-out times. We’d be doing swimming lessons and outdoor sports, the camp regimen from time immemorial—hiking, tennis, soccer. And computers.

After dinner, most of the campers sat on the front steps below the entrance to the dorm long after quiet hour, a few boldly smoking cigarettes. I looked out through the screen door, breathing the warm air. I couldn’t see out past the circle of orange-yellow lights that shone down on the granite steps and a few yards out along the asphalt, just to the edge of the grass. Beyond that there was only blackness out to where the quad ended and the trees began. I heard a car pass on the main road, too far off to see.

I wasn’t ready to sleep. It would be the first time I had ever slept away from home. I slipped out a side door and circled the building, trailing one hand along the rough brick. I heard Darren’s voice mingled with the others, but I wasn’t ready to join them. I walked straight out onto the quad, into the darkness. The stars got visible really fast out there. I couldn’t see my own body and it made me dizzy. I ran a little ways. I was the only one out there—was that strange? Why was I different? I spun around, the stars whirling above me, then lay on my back in the grass. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be comfortable. Nobody knew me here except the Realms gang, and they didn’t care who I was. I was starting to feel, maybe for the first time in my life, that I had arrived where I was supposed to be.

I listened to the others back in the circle of light behind me. “What group are you in?” they called out to each newcomer. “B Group,” a male voice answered, followed by two or three cheers. Introductions. There were already rumors of a hookup but nobody knew exactly who; and they said a few people had broken into Main and hacked the phone switchboard to call—depending on the version told—Anchorage, the camp office, Hong Kong, and/or NORAD. Tomorrow, classes would start, and the whole summer’s saga, but this is what I would remember. The crickets were incredibly loud. It was summer; there would be weeks of this before I had to go back. Oceans of time. I’d be a different person. I couldn’t wait.

All the next day, we were trying to figure out who exactly everybody was, who we were, who showed up to this. Who exactly likes computers? We picked our way barefoot along the dirt and pine-needled track to the lake, where, two at a time, we lowered ourselves off the dock and swam the length of the roped-off section of chill dark water and then back. A full dozen of us mustered signed medical exemptions and stood off to the side, arms folded against the cold, watching the spectacle. The others floundered, heaving, to the finish line or turned in smoothly athletic performances.

Who likes computers? The skinny mantislike kid with the bowl-cut hair; the one girl out of twenty who wore a bikini instead of a one-piece bathing suit; the seventeen-year-old boy with noticeable abdominal muscles and an almost-mustache; the kid who just froze at the end of the dock for a full minute before being let off the hook by the bewildered swimming counselor.

The programming classes were no less brutal. Most of the campers were self-educated in different languages, BASIC and FORTRAN and LISP and C, and now they were all expected to pick up and use Pascal whether or not they’d seen it before. Kids talked over each other, and insufficiently brilliant questions could be punished with an eye roll and an audible “Tch!” from the back row. Nerds could be bullies, too, and the usual targets were poorer kids who hadn’t had much computer access and, unfortunately, girls. Maybe this was part of why Realms II took hold. It was both an arena for people to prove themselves and a collective goal bigger than any one person’s test scores.

It was the first time Simon had been thrown into the larger population of kids who programmed, up against kids whose parents had money and bought them Sinclair ZX81s the moment they started to be available. This was how he must have learned he was good at programming. As the summer went on he fidgeted more often in class, or asked questions that jumped ahead of the curriculum or out of it altogether.

There were two or three kids marked out that way, and a dozen others who pretended they were, but for some reason genius is terribly conspicuous in computer programming. As is mediocrity—I knew that no matter how hard I worked I wasn’t one of them. I wrote code that merely did what it was supposed to do. Simon’s solutions were rapid and weird—convoluted, sometimes in a pointless way, often in a way that looked pointless until you saw how elegant it was.

On the third night of camp, Simon and Darren and Lisa and I, with two recruits from among the campers, stayed up until one in the morning entering the entire Realms code base onto the local network, all four of us sweating, typing in silence as crickets buzzed and chirped outside. There was no air-conditioning and only dim fluorescent lighting from overhead panels dappled with the bodies of trapped insects. It took two more frustrating hours of compiling and recompiling to weed out the typos and the little glitches from the slightly different flavor of the local COBOL variant, but at three twelve we had a local executable version of Realms 0.8. Before he went to bed Darren handwrote a note giving its location on the Net and tacked it to an inconspicuous corner of the computer lab’s bulletin board.

At lunchtime the following day Simon discovered three sheets of notebook paper tacked up in the same spot, written in blue ballpoint in an unfamiliar hand. He took it down. It was code. The style was alien to him, but reading and rereading it he gradually understood that it was a program that, added to the game, would set up an AI pet that followed the player around, fetching useful items and nipping at enemies. The pet could be a dog, cat, hawk, or iguana, each with different behaviors and special abilities.

That evening there were two more code samples in two new sets of handwriting. There was a primitive lighting model that found lines of sight and the strength of different light sources, and could reveal or conceal the world accordingly. There was also a rewrite of the wind direction code that incorporated the basic idea of moving hot and cold air masses and the position of mountains and oceans in the landscape. A day later Darren came back to the lab to find that someone had printed the source code and annotated the entire length of it with scribbled taunts in the margins alongside code optimizations and fairly witty critiques of Simon’s amateurish code architecture. On the fourth night Darren called a full-scale camp meeting in a note tacked up in the same spot. We’d meet at eleven thirty in the dining commons. Bring a pen and a flashlight.

It’s a moment I think back on, a moment Darren instinctively grasped and owned. The product pitch was its own minor performance-art form, and Darren was born a master of it. Standing on a bench in the dining commons, lit by a few flashlights, Darren already had the bobbing walk and mischievous almost-grin that would be so devastatingly charismatic on the stage at CES and Macworld, and he never really needed the stagecraft of a fifty-foot-high projection to make you want what he was selling. He had his own hyperdorky magnetism, a controlled contagious excitement crossed with adolescent cool. He gave you the sense that he really, really hated to show you what he was working on, but he couldn’t resist because it was so cool he couldn’t hold it back any longer. A bit like the mean but terribly charismatic older brother who was busy all the time, whom you couldn’t help longing to hang out with, who just once was going to let you into the clubhouse.

He talked about the game we’d make, its ambition, its potential. He sketched the outlines, and then he opened a copy of that month’s issue of Creative Computing magazine. WarGames wasn’t the most important gamer-related media event of June 1983. That was also the month when the most important advertisement in the history of computer games came out. It ran in Creative Computing magazine and took up two full pages. On the left-hand page, two columns of text were spanned at the top with the sentence CAN A COMPUTER MAKE YOU CRY? The right kind of person understood the question intuitively as a challenge. The text underneath began:

Darren read it aloud: “In short, we are finding that the computer can be more than just a processor of data.

“It is a communications medium: an interactive tool that can bring people’s thoughts and feelings closer together, perhaps closer than ever before. And while fifty years from now, its creation may seem no more important than the advent of motion pictures or television, there is a chance it will mean something more.

“Something along the lines of a universal language of ideas and emotions.”

He broke off and looked up at the crowd, letting them all get it, feel the hubris of it, the vision and the sheer swagger. Everyone felt like summer camp just began for real.

For me it was the photograph that ran on the right-hand page that almost rendered the text superfluous. It said anything anyone needed to know. Seven men and one woman, all wearing black, shadowed dramatically, few of them smiling, all looking into the camera. Bill Budge of Pinball Construction Set fame wore what looked like a leather glove with metal studs; John Field, creator of Axis Assassin, held the center with folded arms and an arrogant sprawl. They were setting these unglamorous software developers up as icons, self-consciously, a bit of theater that sent a message. It said, “We’re making ourselves look like rock stars or movie stars just to show you what it would be like if our work meant as much as theirs does, and to make you imagine for a second that it can.” And once you’ve imagined it, you know it’s possible. For certain people in a certain generation it was that first moment when someone looked us in the eye and challenged US to take ourselves seriously.

“So who wants to do this?” he said. “Who wants to make spreadsheets and plot data points and whatever bullshit the counselors want to hand us? And who wants to make something the world has never seen before? Who wants to make the language of dreams?”

Chapter Twenty-Five

We’d already talked it over and set the outlines of the new project. The new game wouldn’t be about dungeon levels; it would be set aboveground, in the world of Endoria. And the scale would be epic. You wouldn’t be a tiny + sign at the mercy of &s; you would be a king, directing peasants and ships and whole armies of +s. You wouldn’t fight to stay alive; you would make war for a place in history, for the survival of the Elven lands or Dwarfholm. Realms II was about the grand strategy.

We had sign-up sheets ready, broken down by general areas of interest. The ad hoc Realms Committee would oversee code architecture and control what features would and wouldn’t go in. It would also, collaterally, codify the camp’s nerd hierarchy.

It still might never have happened if it weren’t for 1983’s rainy summer, which unleashed a downpour for five days of the second week. KidBits had laid in jigsaw puzzles, two Ping-Pong tables, board games, and a small library of worn paperback fantasy, science fiction, Mark Twain, and Faulkner, leavings from one of the counselors’ freshman American lit classes.

Because we were trapped indoors, there was a kind of imaginative fermentation that took place in the common rooms and computer lab. Campers broke off in twos and threes, tasked with bits and pieces of the world, rules for siege warfare or cavalry charges or the interface for diplomacy or troop psychology and morale or the rules governing succession in the rare case of a royal’s death on the battlefield. They sat in circles and perched on tables or huddled at computers, each of the fastest typists and thinkers surrounded by onlookers, all rapidly conversing. Kim, a high school freshman who had revealed himself as the phantom coder, recruited a steely-eyed brother and sister to port the entire original code base into C. Hours would pass uninterrupted with only the sounds of low voices, the hollow clattering of keyboards, the occasional roll of thunder, and the steady ticktack of the Ping-Pong tables.

On the fourteenth day of camp, the first full beta of Realms II: The Second Age debuted at KidBits. Open computer lab started at seven that evening. I drew the short straw, so it was Darren, Kim, Lisa, and Simon who solemnly took their places at the keyboards. Someone at the back of the room dimmed the lights, and the first Realms II tournament began. It would conclude, interrupted by three restarts and two full recompiles, six hours and 872 Endorian years later.

Realms II was still unmistakably the direct descendant of Realms I, just enormously enhanced and reworked in certain directions—world simulation, multiplayer control, different viewing scales, simultaneous combats resolved en masse.

The alphanumeric characters were replaced by minuscule tiles, twenty-four pixels by twenty-four, each one a tiny miracle of miniaturization. Like the mosaic tiles in a Byzantine church, they made a virtue of simplicity. A tiny tree stood for a forest; a tuft of grass stood for a plain. A tiny cave mouth. A knight with sword upraised. A castle with a flag bravely flying. A horse, a three-masted sailing ship, a peasant clutching a spear. (Stacks of photocopied paper, a combined bestiary, almanac, and gazetteer, identified each feature with numbing precision, detailing its capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.)

The tiles stood together in insane profusion—districts, duchies, city-states, nations, and continents, the Lewis Carroll chessboard landscape come to life. Years later they would remember it in color, as it was in subsequent editions, but in the summer of ’83 it was all black-and-white.

The geography was recognizably the layout of KidBits spread to continent size, the hills become mountains, the pond an inland sea, the whole thing a quilt of small nation-states, forests, mountains, badlands, and mysterious blank areas. Players zoomed and tracked across multiple screens to encompass it.

It was a crazy, kitchen-sink work of simulation and strategy, with a profusion of subsystems running diplomacy and AI management and a dozen other tiny disciplines.

The effect, which might have been sterility or confusion, was one of richness, of possibility. This was a world, or an outline of a world, in which you could do anything. The tiles themselves were static but evocative; the numerical blood of the simulation engine flowed through them, giving each one life, choice, consequence, a tiny destiny. A story was going to unfold, tonight.

The foursome had played before, of course, even sped through a game, but never in earnest, never for blood. Everyone knew the rules of the game, but they were learning at the same time what strategies would and wouldn’t work, and what exactly was going to happen when players were at each other’s throats.

They took turns moving. By house rules, the game played silently. People in the crowd shifted once in a while; the ceiling fans rotated. Someone got a soda from the machine. Every few turns a new feature would come to light, rules for mining or applying wind direction as a modifier to naval movement, and its author would lean over his or her neighbor or camp best friend and say, “That’s mine,” or, more often, “There’s ours. I can’t believe it’s working!” The four monitors were the brightest things in the room, but from time to time the players would glance up and see the crowd perched on chairs and bookcases and desks, occasionally shifting to another side of the room to follow the action from another perspective.

I watched from the sidelines. It was interesting to see Simon as a player and not a programmer. Whereas Lisa held a decidedly ironic distance from the action—playing the game was a systems test to her, merely an artifact of the coding process, and I was surprised she turned up for it at all—Simon played as if it mattered, and seemed always slightly surprised, as if he’d written the code but never in a million years expected it to work.

Simon and Lisa had the fortune or misfortune of starting out relatively close together, which might have made for a preemptive death struggle, but they lost no time in establishing embassies and trade relations through the diplomatic interface. The Second Age was founded on a human-elven alliance.

After a few turns a rider appeared from the southeast, announcing peaceful intentions from a wizard king, and Kim’s capital appeared on the map, sequestered in a forested bowl between two mountain ranges. A good portion of the world was still in darkness. In the corner by the soda machine, Darren was working alone, four or five campers clustered behind him.

Years flashed by. Nations grew and changed. It became apparent that the players were working in vastly different styles. Simon’s territory was expanding in steady, regular blocks of farmland, harmonious and efficient, sprouting feudal castles as it went.

Lisa, in decidedly unelven fashion, was rapidly stripping her forests of timber, the purpose of which was revealed twelve years into the game, when a large cluster of catapults, siege towers, and elven foot soldiers appeared outside the walled city of Carn. The elf queen had brought overwhelming force, and the elves breached and overran the walls simultaneously after only a few turns of action. They pillaged, garrisoned, and trundled on.

Kim wasn’t visibly expanding at all. Only a set of mine shafts ringing his capital—and a rapidly growing surplus in precious metals—showed what he was doing. Everyone knew there were other resources underground, though, if Kim managed to hit one.

Darren’s people finally came into view in a series of raids on Simon’s coastal settlements. He had opted not to have a capital city at all, only a moving fleet of pirates and a rogue band of horsemen who poached caravans here and there. When Simon mustered a well-armed citizen militia, the first player-on-player battle occurred.

The action stopped while a battle screen replaced the world map on Simon’s and Darren’s screens. The view shifted from displaying a continent to an expanded view showing a ring of seven hexagonal tiles. From viewing the world from ten miles up, we went to seeing it from five hundred feet, as though we were in a Goodyear blimp hovering over a football game.

The terrain in each hex was randomly generated depending on its type. When viewed from up close, a plains hex was mostly level grass with a few trees and boulders. A forest hex was trees with a few paths and clearings, and so on. The troops fought it out until the battle was resolved, then zoomed back out.

The icons representing platoons and cavalry detachments were laid out on a field of speckled tiles evoking grass. Darren’s nomadic cavalry was a collection of fearsome riders armed with spears and wicked scimitars, but Simon had prepared well for the encounter and his pikemen were formed up in neat squares. Darren’s horsemen charged the line, but the pikemen were revealed to have sky-high discipline scores. They refused to break formation, and in the end only a few bloodied horses managed to escape the encounter.

The pattern of border conflicts continued until roughly halfway through the game, when Lisa was revealed to be holding almost three-fifths of the map and the other three players agreed to a five-year alliance. Her rapid expansion had left weak points in the frontier, and her faerie empire was broken into two sections before the former allies turned on one another.

From then on peace never resumed. Simon poured resources into a regular navy and swept the seas clear, but even as he did so his fields were burning. Kim had poured his treasury into a motley mercenary army—northern axmen and southern archers, even a small dragon.

Then, at eleven forty-eight, in a single turn, an enormous swath of Lisa’s and Simon’s territories converted to a scrambled, blinking wasteland of desert and lava hexes, a brushstroke of annihilation smeared through the center of the map. Hundreds of miles of fertile farmland, teeming cities, and unbreachable fortifications—not to mention tens of thousands of elves and men—were gone in a single update of the board.

The room froze as Simon and Lisa broke the silence rule with, simultaneously, “Holy shit” and a whisper-sung “What the fuuuck…” Noise began bubbling up from the room.

Kim cleared his throat. “It’s not a bug,” he announced distinctly. He’d found what he was looking for under the mountains, a daemon or artifact or spell. After a few moments, the room quieted and Simon and Lisa began entering their moves. The strategic landscape had been turned on its head: Darren’s horde was soon reduced to irrelevance. He formally resigned and his remaining units flipped to Simon’s control. But Simon’s economic base had turned to ash and sand in the cataclysm together with much of his royal family. A half dozen turns later, he bowed out. Lisa survived at the edges of the blighted lands, coldly rebuilding.

It was one of the few times I saw Lisa suspended at the center of a frozen, attentive room. I knew she was nervous, because she kept looking down to check where her hands were on the keyboard. But after a few minutes I decided it wasn’t stage fright, it was something more surprising. It took a little while to grasp it—Lisa was playing. I was more and more sure that if she hadn’t before, she now wanted to win.

Lisa pursued a Fabian strategy, ducking and dissolving her army whenever Kim’s massed dwarves appeared until she had managed to back them up to the desert’s edge, and then she revealed her hidden card. At the head of Lisa’s army stood a tiny stick figure of a man with a conical hat and a staff. A #info command revealed it to be the Archmagus Lorac. This final touch had been added by Darren and Simon. Four Heroes, powerful and nearly immortal, roamed the map: the wizard Lorac, Prendar the thief, the warrior Brennan, and the princess Leira. If a player’s conduct had appealed to them, they would lend their talents to that nation. Lorac had been called to the elf queen’s banners. This was their first appearance, the Four Heroes of the Realms. They started as essentially a couple of power-ups for lucky players, a little bonus to combat or magic or scouting that might tip a battle or two.

(A note on naming: Lorac was Carol spelled backwards; she did the initial pass on the special-unit code; when last heard from she was doing her residency at Johns Hopkins medical school. Brennan was Simon’s old D&D character. Leira because Darren had a crush on a girl named Ariel at computer camp. They made out twice and nothing else happened, but by then the name was already canon. No one knows where Prendar comes from.)

When Lorac, a stick figure with a grinning skull, a crown, and a wizard’s staff, took the field, his magical protection became the vital counterweight to Kim’s undead sorcerous monarch. Kim’s wizard king had died a century into the game, but his magic sustained him beyond the grave—all hail the Lich King!—and until then he had had no match on the battlefield.

The two battle lines met, and the elves won out over a mixed force of living and dead in a grinding battle of attrition. The power of Ahr was broken. At one forty in the morning, all four screens cleared at once, then displayed the same message in block capitals:

The room was silent except for the two ceiling fans. No one seemed to know when to break the six-hour hush until Darren pushed his chair back to stand and it toppled over. The brazen clanging seemed to unlock something in the crowd, because they realized they could cheer what we were doing, and that we had figured out how to be awesome, together. The sound that followed sounded just like what it was, history being made. Simon and Darren looked at each other, and Simon was grinning his face off.

Chapter Twenty-Six

There were sixty-three participating campers, and it would take a punishingly intense schedule to run sixteen official first-round matches, and four official second-round matches in eleven days (with one three-player match). The second round would produce a final four, with a twenty-first and final match on the final night to produce an ultimate winner. A grueling but unmistakable necessity. A moral imperative, in fact.

There was no prize for winning, at least nothing tangible. But there was a slightly sleazy unspoken question that hovered everywhere at camp, which was, who was the smartest. Who wrote the tightest search function; who could find the optimal shortest path between cabin, lake, and dining hall. There were people who wrote brilliant code and people who wrote workmanlike functional code, but there was no scoring system. Realms II was a contest you could win, though. Seen in this light, Darren’s easy assurance that he’d make the finals was a stark provocation, and Simon’s mouth-breathing gamer stare became a challenge. Mind to mind, who was smarter?

You couldn’t set the question aside, because for a lot of these people it was the arena of last resort. They thought they were ugly; they thought they were losers; but they knew they were smart and it kept them afloat, and, in some cases, it kept them alive.

I hadn’t fought for rank on Realms I; I’d ceded that fight without thinking of it. But one of us was going to win this. Realms II made me ask myself: Was it possible that I could be the best? And I was a little surprised to find myself answering, “Let’s see.” I suspected Lisa felt the same way, that a lot of us did.

Watching the first round of sixteen four-player matches was like watching sixty-four fantasy novels in a fast-forward tabletop brawl. Nobody played the same, maybe because everyone felt that the feature they authored held the mystical key to victory—they could game the way weather patterns influenced land and sea battles or price-control laws or weapons-forging expertise or the breeding of magical creatures. A few were proven right, such as the kid who attained a first-round victory by cloaking a capital’s location until the final three turns. Darren’s highly focused assassin’s guild planted moles inside its three opponents’ ruling bodies and won the game on a single invisible signal at the two-century mark, resulting in the shortest game on record and the first flash of his pro gamer talent at work. (The longest-lasting game featured a diplomatic alliance that spanned 312 years and ended in a brutal twelve-year siege with a Masada-style finish. The traumatized victor had to be talked out of conceding.) But just as often, these strategies failed spectacularly. The game world was just way too complicated for a single strategy to rule. Lisa’s game saw a fluke roll on the wandering monster table produce a huge ancient white dragon, a great three-tile monstrosity that sent sovereigns scurrying for the corners; the remainder of the match depended on relocating forces out of its way.

The wandering AI heroes were decidedly a factor. Brennan reinforced troop discipline and morale; Leira, movement rate and aggressiveness. Prendar could scout and reveal troop movements, or conceal one’s own, and one time performed an assassination. Lorac’s abilities ranged from defensive magic to illusion to terrain alteration to explosions. The AIs weren’t under direct player control. They chose what battles to show up to and which abilities to use, and it was up to players to woo them however they could.

At the conclusion of the first round, five girls and eleven boys emerged from sixteen matches (one of them three-handed). Five of six RealmsCom members had pulled out first-round victories, except for Don, whose good nature had been a little bit preyed upon by a Yale-bound Hotchkiss junior. We met formally to discuss bug fixes, rules changes, features, and tweaks to game balance. The white dragon was duly adjusted. Play was suspended for a day as everyone collectively relaxed. Broken friendships were patched up, homework was done, and the camp, generally speaking, realigned itself around a new class hierarchy—the audience and the sixteen players.

I could reconstruct every single game of that tournament, and years later, when I had trouble falling asleep, I would try. But I could remember other things. We were all wobbling, sleep-deprived, and night-blind through a summer of early adolescence, some of us more functional than others. At night, we would sit up late on the porch of Senior Cabin, Simon and Darren and Gabby—the tall, world-weary Long Islander with a terrible case of acne whose parents were divorced (“Stepmom’s a bitch. It’s no biggie”)—and Lisa and me, and one night the five of us made a dash out past the floodlights to the fence and then walked a long two and a half miles in the dark down the main highway with no streetlights. I remember the brilliant stars and black, creaking pines, and screaming with laughter and dashing into the trees at any flash of far-off headlights until we hit Lanesborough’s bare quarter-mile downtown. We all watched while Gabby, four inches taller than anyone else in the group, crossed the parking lot to the pale buzzing circle of light surrounding the Quick-Stop: Food and Liquor, strutting like a gunfighter at ten minutes to noon, waiting until the very last moment to flick her cigarette into the shadows before yanking the jingling door open. We waited, hushed with the audacity of it, four and a half minutes while she stood in line, until she came out, unsmiling but radiating triumph, carrying a six-pack of Rolling Rock and a small paper sack with the mouth of a brown bottle projecting out of it, and I felt a peculiar joy, the indelible cognitive rush of living a moment for the first time, and knowing it and feeling every part of it.

And we half ran back into the darkness and huddled in a natural clearing a short ways back from the road, where moonlight showed our faces just a little, and Gabby parceled out the glass bottles, which Simon opened neatly with a Swiss army knife. We toasted and Simon had only a few sips of his. I gulped as much as I could.

We passed around the other bottle, Maker’s Mark, and he made himself take a long swig. The walk back passed in a blur of hilarity and at least one genuinely drunken face-plant over the curb and into the grass, and it was only when we were maybe a hundred yards short of the cabin that Simon and I took in, with a kind of cresting heartbreak and what must have been pride, that we were now three, that Darren and Gabby had disappeared during the walk back without our even noticing. Simon waved a kind of stunned good night to me and Lisa and waited a moment on the porch before turning in. We were still the coolest kids in camp that night, and he could hold on to that as long as he needed to. I think he knew there were things Darren was always going to learn faster than he could. That he’d always be running to catch up, if not falling farther and farther back. That in the end he’d be left behind.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Four second-round games for the winners; killers and survivors only. In the opener I got pulled into the game’s first player-on-player aerial battle, my giant eagles to the Hotchkiss kid’s dragonets. With the aid of graph paper and a few trig functions, I was the first to spot a small inequity in the turn radius. A hungover Darren surprised everyone with a rather elegant and economic victory over Lisa, steamrolling two other hapless campers in the process. The third match got replayed because an Italian camper, Val, had exploited a bug in the river-travel rules that enabled her to effectively teleport masses of troops. She won the replay as well, on a truly grisly display of high-level necromancy.

Simon’s match deadlocked in the medieval fantasy equivalent of trench warfare. The war turned on productivity, all four sides straining to squeeze more gold pieces out of hyperoptimized economies as play ground on for a full millennium. But Simon always played dwarves—eldritch miners with iron in their blood—and as dawn came the lines finally cracked, and the last slot in the final four was his.

The summer was peaking in the third week of July, the smell of wet trees after rain, the slow fade to darkness during evening rec period—it all seemed to have come to its fullest, long days we hadn’t been counting until now. We had the second-to-last Thursday night booze run, the last hot-fudge-sundae night in the dining hall. Most of all, it was the tournament that was measuring out the days to the end of summer friendships, the rare (three, by my count) summer flings, the whole prolonged sweet moment of it. I felt how much Simon wanted to stay in it, to drink in everything he could.

Darren was busier and busier, and more and more popular, and Simon and I fell into the habit, I guess, of being close friends. We’d go for walks sometimes, or have long confessional talks in the darkness of our shared room. Most of what I know about Simon firsthand I know from this period and a few long phone calls he made to my college dorm room.

The calls came once every two or three months. I’d go that long without even thinking of Simon, and then when the phone rang I’d know it was him. He’d want to reminisce and go through old inside jokes together, or talk about games he’d played. Mostly I was humoring him. Occasionally he’d talk about an idea for the Ultimate Game based on this or that new intellectual passion of his, Chomskian linguistics or psychological profiling or Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. Or there would be a new way of arranging menued conversations or new ways of measuring player behavior that opened and closed new branches in the story in ways guaranteed to be meaningful. And it was always the same result—a frantic brittle enthusiasm, and then he would never mention it again. In the last call he said he’d found it, yet again, but he was uncharacteristically evasive. His own idea, this time. And not to tell Darren he’d found it. I honestly didn’t feel like following up, and I didn’t. I was in college, and I’d be a different person now. It was all exactly what I was trying to get away from.

Simon’s dad left a long time ago; his mom seemed to be a step behind, working at a tragic little crafts store. He was smart, but in a way he didn’t ever quite value in himself. He was short and unpopular and had no visible means of support in the world other than that he genuinely loved computers and computer games, probably more than I loved anything.

In a certain way Simon… shamed me, I’m forced to say; something about him gave the lie to what I was then. I wanted to be popular, I wanted to be very conventionally well thought of. I wanted a girlfriend and a car and a good college. I would have traded places with a lot of people. I was his friend, but I transparently didn’t want to be like him. I could never have stood it, being him. I was, I think, a contemptible little climber, waiting for something better to come along. If I could have, I would have been a lot more like Darren, charismatic and loud, always at the center. It’s fair to say that I was more a failed Darren than I was anything else.

Simon told me later about the walks he’d go on, through the baseball field to the trees bordering the ratty “Nature Woods.” He found himself on the shore of what they stupidly called the Lake, really just a large pond.

He stood on the beach, just a thin strip of sand and pine needles, letting the water lap at his sandals.

He needed Realms to save him, I think, more than the rest of us did. This was his summer, the summer of his life. For most of us—me, certainly—computer camp was a logical stopover, a little bit of college prep; a résumé builder; for Simon it was a last resort.

The day Simon lost it, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Fights weren’t a part of KidBits; there wasn’t even much roughhousing. People were laughing. Simon self-evidently wasn’t a boxer—he clawed—and Darren’s advantage in reach only increased the farcical look of the contest.

Darren’s expression was somewhere between angry and amused, part of him still hoping to pass it off as a play fight, to bring Simon in and wrestle him out of it. But Simon was serious; there was blood on Darren’s forearms, and at some point he got a fingernail into Darren’s cheekbone that left a scar I could see fifteen years later. In the end Darren was left holding his oldest friend at arm’s length until four counselors could pull him away. Simon was panting, his pudgy face red and smeared, his shirt hanging half off. He’d torn it trying to get at Darren. Simon was escorted from the camp and put on a bus.

But the fight itself was forgotten an hour later, when word got out of something a lot more serious. Simon had managed to release a computer virus onto the KidBits servers; it erased a fair amount of data, mostly personal e-mail, as well as the grades database. A lot of people ended up getting free As because of it. But it wasn’t terribly sophisticated—in fact, it was an uncharacteristically clumsy piece of execution. There was no doubt as to where it came from.

It wasn’t anything more than juvenile mischief, but this was the heyday of teen hacker paranoia, of experts testifying soberly that one unsupervised kid could set off a nuclear war, and of federal agents breaking down the doors of unsocialized fourteen-year-olds. Once Simon was tagged as a computer criminal there was nothing even Darren could do to keep him from being prosecuted. He ended up with a hundred hours of community service and was lucky to get it; but his scholarship was revoked. Simon wouldn’t be going to college, then or ever.

It was a deep unsolved mystery, one Darren would never shed any light on. Was it about a girl? Was there a love triangle? That was the most popular theory, one with endless variants. Or was it creative differences, or just old business from the antediluvian past? All I could think of was how Simon could have explained it to his mother, whose vague ideas about the dangers of hacking, of computers as the gateway to cloudily imagined supercrime, would only be confirmed.

And the more I thought about it, the more serious it seemed, and I couldn’t help thinking Simon knew it. Simon and his mother had had early experience of downward mobility when his father left. Some part of him knew that his sullen refusal to engage in school was turning into more than just an adolescent funk, that it was self-dooming. But this was it for him, a clean break with the future. What was Simon thinking, on the long bus ride home? How would he save her now?

Five days afterward, at ten thirty on the last night of computer camp, Darren, Val, and I entered the computer lab for the first and last ever official Realms II world championship. After some debate, we’d left the final slot open in honor of our fallen comrade rather than replace him with the second-place finisher from his bracket.

We sat down with the charged solemnity of a world-renowned string trio and a nameless feeling, something between pride and anticipatory bloodlust, that verged over into a round of pregame applause—for the finalists but mostly for ourselves, for the game, for the whole summer, for what it had all been for us. But when the applause was over there was still something left to be decided.

I’d always credited Darren with a showman’s instinct, but when the door slammed open every camper in the room turned and then froze. I didn’t want to meet Simon’s eyes. Ten long seconds passed, and then Darren stood and pulled the empty metal folding chair out from the table and gestured for Simon to take a seat. We went through the now-familiar routine of setting keyboard macros and setting starting parameters, the Realms II equivalent of rosining and tuning our instruments. The evening now promised carnage unparalleled. Each of the four of us was the sole survivor of two previous four-person matches averaging six hours apiece, and had watched half a dozen others.

I specced out a bandit kingdom made up of a mixture of humans, elves, and the odd faerie. I planned to lurk in the forest and prey on stragglers while the others slugged it out in the field. Whatever he was doing, Simon took the longest. In the long interval Darren held up two quarters to signal for a Mountain Dew. Val sipped her black coffee. When Simon slapped the return key, all choices had been entered, the lights were dimmed, and war in the realms commenced.

My scouts quickly sussed out the terms of the conflict. Darren’s forces looked like tenth-century Normandy, a tightly controlled balance of aggression and monetary craftiness along with a good deal of careful castle-building.

Val was lucky enough to spawn in a mountainous corner of the map. My scouts reported her walling off a passage in and out, then they stopped reporting at all. My people vanished into the Perrenwood and started swallowing caravans whole. Nice, but I’d be noticed before long.

And Simon’s choices were… eccentric. His entire nation was made up of tiny bands of humans wandering the map. I saw a few of them hack down trees and build a galleon that sailed away before I could catch it. What was he doing? He seemed to have opted out entirely. Maybe Simon really wasn’t a fighter.

I harassed Darren’s militia while he huddled safely behind walls, playing Sheriff of Nottingham to my Robin Hood. I could bleed him, but once his castles were up they were proving impossible to dislodge. He took land and held it. He had just begun to get cocky again when the gates of Val’s enclave opened and (there is no other word for it) disgorged a horrifying army of daemons that ravaged and blackened the countryside as only the sons of a nation built on profane sorcery and purest evil can. We could practically hear the crackling flames and panicked horses. Castles that a few turns ago looked like permanent chunks of landscape were being reduced to sad little rubble icons, which after a few years blinked into peaceful little grassy icons. One hour in, Darren signaled for another Mountain Dew. I spotted him the fifty cents.

I waited for him to crack, for the weakness to show under his cocky exterior, but two things saved him. He put his king into the field. It was a grave risk, but it was the only thing that would put heart into feudal lordlings who were almost visibly shitting themselves. And on the next turn, the familiar icon of a man with an oversize sword presented itself at Darren’s capital. Legendary Brennan the warrior had joined Darren’s cause.

Gradually, desperately, Darren slowed, stopped, and reversed Val’s advance. But Val had another card to play: Lorac the wizard. Further, it was the rare Inverse Lorac, the tiny wizard drawn in white on a black tile to indicate that this was the sorcerer’s evil incarnation. This was the first game to put three Heroes on the board. I watched from the safety of the forests as a last great war of light against dark was contested.

But when the turn counter reached 446 of the Third Age, my screen blanked itself and the map was simply replaced by a tally of personnel, wealth, and territory. I’d never seen the Game Over screen before; I didn’t realize what it was until I saw the entire room looking at me. Darren stood and led a brief, respectful round of applause. The bandit king was dead, and I didn’t even see it happen. I was too shell-shocked to feel the sting of it yet.

It wasn’t either Darren or Val; they were obviously dumbfounded, and Simon didn’t even look up. Spooked, they nonetheless rushed to claim the eastern forestland I’d been stalking since year one. Ultimately, Darren was simply better placed for it. Inside two turns he was cutting timber, building siege engines, and ridding the world of evil at an admirable rate. Val fell back to the mountains, still contesting the field but already looking done. Simon was still technically in the game, which meant that attrition hadn’t claimed all his wanderers yet. But short of a miracle, Darren was going to be the Realms II champion of KidBits, Western Massachusetts, and Planet Earth. I felt unexpectedly disappointed. He already acted like this belonged to him and had for weeks; he shouldn’t have it. I wanted it to be Simon, but his game looked like a preemptive concession.

The bitter fighting in the mountains was all but over, and on the very same turn that the spider queen fell, the tattered sons of Simon’s horde came into view of Darren’s rear guard. I think we all assumed that Simon was now sportingly presenting himself for termination so as to let the game end.

Darren’s forces met him on the field, the king personally commanding. Simon’s people had stats as individual fighters, but the king’s escorts were all elite heavies of their type, and they outnumbered Simon’s entire country.

The sides touched and bodies began piling up, and then Darren’s left flank began falling in on itself, its numbers swallowed as if a black hole had formed in its ranks, centered on a single fighter. Darren ID’d it. A star indicated that it was Simon’s sovereign unit, his king, inexplicably placed at the front lines.

Simon’s king was an apparent nobody, a midlevel fighter in a half helm, wooden shield, and chain mail. But listed in the weapon slot was a piece of inventory called Mournblade.

The room was on its feet in a babble of voices. Out of sixty-three campers, no one failed to grasp the grave provenance of that eloquent portmanteau.

Mournblade. The author Michael Moorcock wrote a series of novels starring the antiheroic Elric of Melniboné, the last king of a doomed race, a tall albino with long hair and amazing cheekbones and a hereditary frailty owing to his weak, rarefied, inexpressibly noble blood. Isolated by his gloomy destiny, he wanders through a world torn by an endless war between Law and Chaos. He also carries a huge, extremely handy black sword carved with eldritch runes called Stormbringer, a sword that absorbs the soul of anyone it kills and gives Elric the strength to get through the day. It’s horrendously cursed, of course; in fact, it’s really a daemon that will one day devour him. (In the plus column, in the far, far future, as the solar system goes into decline, Stormbringer will have absorbed so many souls that its energy will be used to reignite the dying sun and save humanity.)

I was extremely murky on the rest of it, but I did remember that Stormbringer had a duplicate named Mournblade, an equally powerful but apparently less ambitious cousin that wandered in and out of the various books on its own business, which was rarely explained.

Why shouldn’t Simon use it? He probably had Excalibur, Glamdring, Durendal, and the Sword of Shannara wandering around in there, too. But the one he wielded had to be Mournblade—it was black and uncanny and runic—but more than that, it fit Simon. I could just see him lying in bed staring up at the ceiling and thinking “God, I am so Elric,” having the inner certainty that on some level he was the lonely king of a lost people and a land that was no more.

Loose in the world, it was just a tiny icon of a standard broadsword, with a black border and a tiny squiggle or two on the blade denoting the fact that it was deeply incised with obscene carvings and cryptic runes. It was Endoria’s first artifact-class item: unique, overwhelmingly powerful, storied, and cursed. Darren simply stopped play and brought up the Help file, in which Mournblade had been duly entered, if anyone had thought to look for it. It wasn’t a complex bit of code, just a simple piece of algorithmic hatred:

There were a few more details to fill in. Mournblade could destroy objects such as siege works, but that wouldn’t restore life to the wielder. And there was a 10 percent chance that it would attack an adjacent friendly unit, even if you didn’t want it to.

Anyone foolish enough to pick up the cursed thing could be an unbeatable champion in war, but thereafter the logic of the item turned grim. You’d end up wandering Endoria in search of victims, ultimately turning on the few friends you had left. It was a tiny encoded curse, a few simple rules that, combined in a single item, gave rise to a lonely, haunted destiny.

It certainly hadn’t been in Simon’s manifest when the game began. It was there, it was in-fiction, it was surprising but hard to call illegal. Endoria was still Endoria, but nobody had bothered to delete Adric’s Tomb. All Simon did was find it again, navigating the twenty levels down, past the fearsome &s and putting Mournblade in one of his wanderer’s hands. Then he walked the chosen bearer back up and outside and Mournblade had returned to the world. Then the carrier made the long trek, a hundred hexes cross-country, to Darren’s encampment, murdering lesser units as he went to keep the wielder from expiring as a result of the curse.

Nothing was going to stop the accursed broadsword from reaching its target. The room fell silent, and Simon rested like a virtuoso violinist, letting the final notes of a plaintive, triumphant melody ring into silence. Darren looked as devastated as I’d ever seen him, but managed to shake Simon’s hand nonetheless. The victory stood; the game, and the long summer, were over.

The friendship never officially ended, but Simon and Darren didn’t talk much for a while. They nodded in the hallways, sure, but their collaboration had gone slack and awkward. Darren gravitated back to the tall, buzz-cut kids from the track team, to roughhousing and weekend parties, and Simon gravitated back to himself. But Darren’s father took pity on him, maybe, and set up an office for Simon in the garage, and bought him his own used C64. He sat up late that first Indian-summer night with the crickets buzzing. By November he was there every night, with the door closed and a space heater on, learning to code C properly and beginning what would become his imaginative lifework—the hundreds, maybe thousands of pages outlining the past and future histories of the Realms worlds. Time lines, city maps, histories, sagas, encyclopedic descriptions of imagined countries and planets, floor plans, character sketches. He developed a mild addiction to clove cigarettes. He once alluded to those months as the happiest in his life.