Park pumps out three thousand floppies. He hires two ex-Stanford friends to get the game into stores up and down both coasts. Within a month, The Sylvan Prophecies sells out. Neelay dupes more discs. They sell out again. He’s stunned that so many rigs out there meet the game’s minimum specs. Word of mouth keeps spreading. Revenues flow in, and soon there’s too much work for him to handle alone.
He signs a five-year lease on a former dentist’s suite. He hires a secretary and calls her the office manager. He hires a hacker and calls him the lead programmer. He signs a guy with an accounting degree who metamorphoses into a business manager. Assembling the team feels like building up the home planet in The Sylvan Prophecies. From scores of applicants, he hires the ones who flinch the least when they see his stick-figure body sprouting from the motorized chair.
Astonishingly, the new employees prefer cash up front to shares in the future. It’s a total failure of imagination. They haven’t a clue where their species is headed. He tries to talk them around, but they all elect for safety and cash.
Soon the business manager breaks it to Neelay: it’s not enough to pretend he’s a company. He has to incorporate for real. Sempervirens becomes a legal person. Neelay goes to bed at night dreaming of branching and spreading. It’s a brand-new industry with an unlimited growth curve. He needs only a few market hits, each one compounding the success of the previous. Then he’ll make the world over, the way it was shown to him, in a flash, by alien life-forms in the wild terrarium of Stanford’s inner court.
By day, when he isn’t learning how to run a company, Neelay keeps on coding. Programming still amazes him. Declare a variable. Specify a procedure. Call each well-formed routine to do its part, inside larger, cleverer, more capable structures, like organelles building up a cell. And up from simple instructions emerges an entity with autonomous behavior. Words into action: it’s the planet’s Next New Thing. Coding, he’s still a boy of seven, with the whole world of living possibilities coming up the stairs in his father’s arms.
The first game is still selling at a healthy clip when Sempervirens releases the sequel. The New Sylvan Prophecies employs unbelievable verisimilitude in an astonishing 256 colors. There’s real packaging now, with professional artwork, though the gameplay is the same old exploration and trading set in a glorious new higher-res galaxy. The public doesn’t care that it’s a rehash. The public can’t get enough. They love the world’s open-ended nature. There’s no real way to win the game. As with running a business, the point is to keep playing for as long as possible.
The New Sylvan Prophecies tops the charts, even before its ancestor falls out of the top ten. Players post messages in online bulletin boards about wild creatures they find on backwater planets, odd, unpredictable combinations of animal, vegetable, and mineral. Lots of people find baiting the game’s flora and fauna more entertaining than finding the treasure at the galaxy’s core.
Together, the two games make more money than many Hollywood movies, on a much lower outlay. Neelay plows all profits back into the third installment, already more ambitious than the previous two games combined. When The Sylvan Revelation appears nine months later, it lists for an outrageous fifty bucks. But for growing numbers of people, that’s a small price to pay for a transformative experience that didn’t even exist two years ago.
A big publisher called Digit-Arts offers to purchase the brand. The arrangement makes all kinds of sense. Professionals would take over sales and distribution of all future products, freeing Sempervirens to devote itself to development. Neelay doesn’t want to run a company; he wants to make worlds. The Digit-Arts offer would guarantee his freedom and keep him in state-of-the-art wheelchairs forever.
The night he agrees in principle to the deal, Neelay can’t sleep. He lies in his adjustable bed, trimmed by his mother’s runner of quilted storage pockets and arched over by a steel grab-bar wrapped in foam padding. Around midnight, his legs start spasming like an ambulatory person’s. He needs to get up. That would be easier with the caregiver, but Gena doesn’t come for another several hours. A button press brings the bed’s head all the way upright. He wraps his arm around the right-hand vertical post and flings his left up in front of the horizontal bar. Muscle wastage has left