The sword was coming more and more often. After E3 we saw it at least once a week. Todd watched it destroy all the life in a crowded city, an hour and fifteen minutes to bare streets and empty houses. Even the rats were gone. Afterward, he reformatted the hard disk twice before reinstalling everything.
“I just… didn’t like it,” he explained.
I came into the playtest room to find them crowded around a single machine; we watched a berserk halfling on the far side of a metal grating; it bobbled back and forth for a few minutes, then chopped through the grating. Everyone flinched as the screen flashed red; another player character down.
“Not supposed to do that,” a long-haired tester muttered.
We had nine weeks to get through beta, which was an arbitrary length of time that had been set with no actual regard for how much work it represented. We fixed hundreds of bugs a day, which seemed impressive until I realized that the number of bugs was still increasing. We couldn’t even think of bringing the bug count down until we tamed the rate at which new bugs were discovered. Black Sword bugs were all assigned to me, as the original owner, but I noticed no one was asking me about it.
Chapter Forty-Four
My bug list was flooded, and it wasn’t until the third weekend in September that I found time to play through the rest of the Nick Prendergast games. I had to; there was no other way to find Mournblade. But it also meant facing the fact that first-person shooters ruined Nick Prendergast. The debonair, slightly hapless spy became a hardened one-man killing machine, fully capable of storming through a division of Russian infantry and leaving behind nothing but well-searched corpses.
In 1992, id Software shipped Wolfenstein 3D, the first game that let you sprint through three-dimensional corridors, killing anything that moved. I can only picture Darren and Simon sitting at their monitors partly inspired but mostly aghast that they had been so massively, atrociously scooped. Every advance in video game graphics looks definitive; everything before it looks pathetic. They stared into the hacked 3-D perspective sliding past them. No more cartoons; this was an enchanted mirror, and Simon felt the otherworldly breeze blowing through it. Holy fucking shit.
Simon stayed up until dawn three nights in a row taking apart what John Carmack had wrought and reverse engineering it. It wasn’t that difficult when he looked at it. It cut every possible corner. You were looking into a flat maze; there was no variation in floor heights; it was all walls and ninety-degree angles; there was no looking up or down, and the floor and ceiling were featureless planes. It minimized the number of problems the computer had to solve, but in a clever way. Simon worked rapidly, knowing that everybody else interested in the problem was thinking the same way.
There was going to be a land rush into the third dimension of virtuality. As soon as he had the engine in hand, Darren lost no time in putting it to use. They would need to occupy and monetize, get their brand and their reputation out there. Nick Prendergast was the logical choice; he’d sold well, and he fit the context. The poor man was called back into service, his license to kill renewed and then some.
Clandestine II: Love Never Thinks Twice (1992)
Gone was the quaint two-dimensional animated figure ambling across colorful backdrops. Prendergast had disappeared—or, rather, you saw the world from his point of view. The new Nick was simply a gun hovering in midair, scanning the world.
Gone was the slender, slightly schoolmasterish, and, let’s face it, virginal Nick. He was done with fooling around picking locks and making chitchat with this or that baroness. There was no apparent plot. Nick was deployed like an infantry brigade to sterilize any square mile of rooms and corridors his spymaster deemed a threat. It would in general have been more humane to carpet-bomb a given area rather than to dispatch Nick Prendergast in first-person shooter mode. Enemies made just as little sense. They’d pop out of dead-end alleys or closets or basements as if they’d been living their whole lives there, waiting for Nick to walk past. In between, there were colorful graphics of Nick indulging his new interest in sports cars and East German strippers.
Clandestine II outsold every Black Arts game in history, and for a few years Black Arts turned into a factory for Clandestine sequels. One thing didn’t