a big, blunt, teardrop-shaped landmass that Darren freehanded in the last fifteen minutes of a Friday study hall. It showed the continent of Endoria and its capital city, Kronus. Endoria sat in the middle of a nameless sea, and had two principal mountain ranges and then a couple of rivers sketched in after the first bell rang. Darren handed it around. Simon and his parents had gone on a summer trip to Israel, and Darren had been to Scotland, plus he’d lived in Iowa until he was eight. Between them they’d seen castles, farmlands, cliffs, ruined temples, and Roman fortresses, along with their own native terrain types—patchy, deciduous groves gradually being claimed by strips of pine tree, subsiding into streams and swamps, fronting onto asphalt. In art class Simon tore off one of a big three-by-four-foot sheet of paper, gray and pulpy, like newsprint, from a giant pad the teacher kept in the room and copied the blobby outline Darren had made.
Over the next week we passed the map around between us and it accrued tiny details. Each time it came back to me it had more tattered edges and creases from being folded and refolded. After a week it was almost illegible, having been written and rewritten. Kronus sat inland at the place where two rivers met, on the border between the southern grassland and the northern forest. Simon put Dwarven tunnels in the mountains, drew elf-haunted forests in the central valleys, and marked the pastoral west with tiny crenellated towers in blue ballpoint—the lands of men. Darren spent way too much time on the extremely detailed walled kingdom of Arrek, in the southeast, ringed by mountains he’d set up for that purpose. Simon aggressively marked out a swath of the northeast as the Plains of the Wind Riders, with no explanation other than a passable sketch of a horse and long-haired rider. The Shadow Marches, the Blackened Lands, Boralia (there was an Old Boralia as well, much larger), Skarg, the Perrenwood, the Bottomless Lake.
A line of dashes, never explained, wandered through the middle of the continent—A road? A tunnel? An ancient wall? Dungeon entrances were marked in black and were found in ruins, mountains, and the very center of the Duskwood. It took Simon and Darren months to translate the map into digital form, improvising ASCII notation as they went. When the continent of Endoria went live, there were fifty-six new dungeons to build and dozens of new monsters and terrain types to consider.
You had to really love computer games to get excited about a game this crappy, to really invest in this little shifting grid of letters as an alternate world, but Simon obviously did, believed in it to the point where the real world seemed like a gray shadow by comparison. I’d driven past his one-story house, at the shabbier end of our mostly affluent suburb. Simon slept on a pull-out couch in the living room.
When Darren’s parents bought him a Commodore 64 Simon began sleeping over at Darren’s at least three nights out of the week. When he wasn’t there he was visibly fogged over. I’d see him eating lunch in the quad, blocking out code in a notebook. More than once I saw him in Radio Shack, standing up at a floor-model computer, typing furiously, trying out this or that idea, glancing over his shoulder at the salesperson hovering and waiting for the right moment to kick him off.
March and April passed, and Simon and Lisa mumbled through their bar and bat mitzvahs. The differences between Simon and the rest of us were getting more obvious. Simon probably wasn’t going to college.
Over the next four months he and Darren wrote an enormous amount of code, mostly between the hours of midnight and four in the morning, sometimes individually, sometimes on the phone to each other.
When I was with them, I never before or since had the experience of concentrating so fluidly or intensely. There were nights when, midsession, one or another of us jerked up from a momentary sleep trance, still typing out dense functions with names like SPIRAL-BOUND, PROPHET, and CORINTHIAN, the purpose of which we would know fleetingly once and then never again. What came out of it was a shockingly flexible simulation and procedural content-generation engine, elements of which survive today. It generates random encounters, manages some of the large-scale flow of the game world, and controls interactions between objects, character attributes, and what players can and can’t do. Countless Black