late at night, I walked onto a random-level teleporter and found myself in a strange place. The population was nearly all dwarves and gnomes, creatures who didn’t normally live aboveground and usually hated each other. There were long rows of stalls, with dwarves and gnomes running indiscriminately between them. The stalls radiated out from a central circular plaza, where there was a pedestal on which I read the word HOUSTON. On top of the pedestal, immobile, was a figure I did recognize—Algul the Nefarious. I clicked on him but nobody had written conversation for him, so he ignored me.
A dwarf came up to me and offered to sell me some oil futures. I clicked on Appraise. YOU THINK YOU ARE GETTING A TERRIBLE DEAL.
The next day I asked Don, who just laughed.
“You saw that,” he said. “Okay, that was how we got money for the art on Realms III. Darren hooked it up for a bunch of rich frat kids.
“This was freshman year of college, and there was a rumor that Simon was, like, a magic computer genius, and these guys came and told us what they wanted—a stock market robot, they called it—and they were going to build a little company around it called AstroTrade. Darren played into it, I swear, had this whole act going, this high voice, like a movie idea of a nerd. Whatever they said, he’d give this jerky nod and then push his glasses up his nose, and they’d smirk and nudge each other. I thought I was going to start laughing and blow the whole thing. We did the deal for a lump sum, then Simon went off and did it in a weekend.”
“But what exactly was it?” I asked.
“I mean, it wasn’t a con or anything. They were just so stupid! He took the Endorian economy and made it stand in for America’s. Of course we did a lot of tweaking on the world. I mean, more dwarves. Way more dwarves, quite a lot of dwarves, they stood in for the oil industry, everything heavy industry. Then the high tech and software were modeled as elves—you know the way they live off in forests and spin stuff out of nothing? Agricultural sector, humans. We suppressed all combat in the marketplace. Feed it the right parameters, it’s a little toy industry.
“And there were no graphics, just spreadsheets on what the market was doing, price fluctuations, and… you know. And then we just let the sim run.
“We gave it a title screen like GLOBAL FUTURES MARKET ALGORITHM GENERATOR. But if you open up the code, it’s all elves and dwarves, a couple of good and evil wizards playing the federal agencies, who stepped in if things skewed too far. The actual thing that made the calls for them? A modded version of the semidivine necromancer Boris, wearing a plus-four Ring of Cunning and a Mild Prescience Aura. Brutal, brutal hack.
“And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It basically did rational things. It was like everything Simon did on that engine. God, he was smart.”
“Did they make money?” I asked.
“I have no idea. They talked about using it in the Hong Kong market, but this was right in October of eighty-seven—Black Monday, remember?”
I did, the same way I remembered Walter Mondale running for president.
“A stock market crash.”
“A pretty big one. They lost their money, or so we assumed. We didn’t care—they were laughing at us the whole time anyway. It was like doing business with Biff from Back to the Future. We never heard from them again.”
“So you never found out if it worked?”
“It was a nice little system, and it had a logic to it, just the way the game does, but who knows if it worked in reality? Darren walked away with ten thousand dollars and put it all into revamping Realms III for the commercial version. That’s how we seeded Black Arts.”
In the final reckoning, Tomb of Destiny got a C plus because it was buggy and, as a piece of code, it didn’t solve even its reasonably simple problems elegantly, but it was not a terrible game when you got used to the lack of graphics. More than once, I played until two in the morning, and after a while the &s and +s and all the letters and numbers fell away and it was all the same to me, like looking through the black screen and glowing letters to a darker, hidden place—daemons and sepulchral