post office boxes in Madison or State College or midwestern college towns. I remember padded manila envelopes arriving, hand-addressed, containing the data on actual cassette tapes, which we slotted into Darren’s cut-rate boom box, with its whining, wheezing gears, which we then plugged into Darren’s computer, which then served as a disk drive. Simon played them avidly, solved every puzzle, ground through every dungeon from first room to last. But he felt they lacked ambition.
Simon’s room had stacks of 5.25-inch disks in their white paper sleeves, all games, each one labeled in Magic Marker. Some of them had been copied over three or four times, the old game carefully crossed out and the new one added. Most of them had been double-sided manually.
He’d come to Darren’s after school—fuck even stopping by home—with the latest one. Darren’s mom might leave him a glass of milk, but mostly they left him alone; they considered him Darren’s project. He’d put on music, something loud on his headphones, seventies classic or prog rock, and for an hour, two hours, three, he could disappear as long as Darren’s dad would leave him alone, disappear the way he could in a fantasy novel, but differently.
Silly 2-D games, little guys jumping around on platforms—Sammy Lightfoot, Hard Hat Mack, cheap Mario Bros rip-offs. Adventures—Escape from Rungistan, Mystery Mansion. He didn’t even know who made the things—were they teenagers? Professional software engineers?—but somewhere out there people were inventing his medium without him.
The world narrowed to the tiny realm where he was always pushing on to the next screen, the next castle, always in a private dream of concentration and hard reflex, like a stoner kid doing bar chords over and over until his fingers were cramped and the muscle memory was there even in his sleep, always on the verge of some conclusion on the next screen, the crucial revelation that never quite appeared, that he could spend his life chasing, unless he learned to make them, unless he got to set the rules himself, unless he could put what he wanted in that castle, lock it away and bury it in a dungeon for a thousand years. He’d come home at nine or ten, biking home even in winter, snow in his eyes and silting up in his collar.
The dungeon couldn’t be just corridors. Simon had read his Tolkien a hundred times; this had to be Moria. There had to be great halls, chasms, locked rooms. That meant doors had to have multiple states—they could be open or closed, locked or unlocked. But if there were locks, that meant there had to be keys. And that meant there had to be objects you could pick up. So now there were things called objects, which could be displayed in the world, but could also be carried by your character—there was now inventory. And stairs. When you walked on stairs, you went to another map, notionally “up” or “down” from the map you were on. Just like that, the thirty-two-by-thirty-two world became an infinite series of levels extending upward and downward.
Darren added a level that was mostly empty space with two lines of pillars running through it. Then he added a level where the walls spelled DARREN RULES, followed by a pentagram level, then a stick-figure level, then a rough map of our high school, then an attempt to mimic a Nagel print, then a giant ampersand that the little ampersands (we started calling them ampers) ran around in, and finally a stylized picture of a penis. Simon added a class of command that printed more text beneath the map, to say things like “I don’t recognize that key” or “You feel cold air moving” or “The walls here are covered with rotting tapestries,” and invented without thinking about it the voice of the game, which skipped around between first and second and third person depending on what you were doing—the hidden narrator, the companion, the adjudicator behind the curtain. “You smell burning.” “Suddenly you yearn for your distant homeland.”
The maze didn’t have a name, but eventually Simon added text that would appear when you ran the program, just so the start-up would feel less abrupt:
Welcome to the Tomb of Destiny.
Beware Adric!
HJKL to move.
Who was Adric? Why was he dead? Why was he interred in such an elaborate underground complex, and by whom? And what was a “tomb of destiny”—did destiny die and get buried? Never mind; it was the kind of thing one wrote. Realms didn’t have a story.