stone chambers and stairways and landings corkscrewing down into the earth. Maybe the story wasn’t complicated, but maybe “downward” was all the story I needed just then, simple and elementally real. I tapped forward grid point by grid point, braced for the next horror to spring out at me in the form of some friend or foe. All you know is to go downward from stair to stair, down into the unknown, in spite of the dangers, keystroke by keystroke, further into the data. I delved into the substanceless phosphorescent earth for that priceless treasure, always elusive, the transcendent loot of memory.
Chapter Fifteen
On April 14, Darren Ackerman, lead designer and legitimate game-industry legend, quit. He came in at eleven and spent maybe twenty minutes in Don’s office, and then walked through the empty office, ponytail bouncing briskly, past the Excellence in Game Design awards, past the cubicle maze, past the testers playing split-screen Mario Kart in the conference room, past the life-size cutout of a man wielding an ergonomically impractical sword, and out of the building forever, past the two shaggy guys still porting Solar Empires III to Mac.
I watched him Frisbee his security card far out into the weeds, get in his signature Rolls-Royce, and drive away. About twenty minutes later, Don sent a company-wide e-mail explaining that over the weekend Darren had “chosen not to continue his journey with us.”
Twenty minutes after that, another e-mail came with a list of fourteen other employees who were also not making said journey. Most of them I didn’t know, but the employee directory put them as nearly all the senior design and programming staff. It seemed that Darren had taken his pick of the developers before he left. He must have been arranging it for weeks. He didn’t take Lisa.
A few minutes later I got a private e-mail from Don asking me to come talk to him in his office.
His door was ajar, but I knocked anyway. No one at Black Arts would wear a tie, but Don wore the nearest equivalent, the scaled-back management uniform of blue button-down shirt with khakis, the shirt bulging in the middle a little and giving him the overall look and feel of a Best Buy employee. He looked uncomfortable, as if I were trying to return a copy of Quake II after the ninety-day deadline without a receipt.
He owned part of the company, but I couldn’t tell if that made him rich or not. I was starting to realize how little I knew about how Black Arts worked.
“Hi, Don.”
“Hey, Russell.”
Everything at Black Arts was so purposely informal that when actual business conversations had to happen they became ten times as uncomfortable. Or else maybe people came to Black Arts because they were innately terrible at this kind of thing.
“How are you liking it here so far?” he asked. Uh-oh.
“It’s—it’s really great,” I said. “I’m pretty much trained up on existing tools, just waiting for the new engine to happen.”
“Okay, good, great.” Don sighed—not like I’d passed a test; more like I’d left him no way out.
“So, this weekend…” he began. Was I really being fired? I had never been fired, not even from a job taking tickets at the box office of a summer-stock theater over an exquisitely lonely summer on Cape Cod—not even after drunkenly losing half a night’s receipts.
“This weekend the company was sold to Focus Capital. It was a decision between Darren and myself. Darren holds—held—a majority stake, which he no longer does. This is confidential, for now.”
“Okay,” I said. Did Don think I knew about things like this? Did he want advice? It looked like he hadn’t slept much. Also like one of his oldest friends had betrayed him.
“But this turned out to be part of a—maneuver—Darren had been planning, I think for some time,” Don went on. There might have been a slight quaver in his voice. “He left and took a lot of senior developers with him to a new start-up. It was perfectly legal. No one ever signed a noncompete agreement.
“I know you’re wondering where this is going. The partners at Focus are… well, they’re not too happy. They thought they were buying up the talent that was Black Arts’ principal asset, but that’s not what they got. What they have in Black Arts is a slightly rickety code base, a whole bunch of intellectual property, and game franchises. And a bunch of desks and computers and a pretty high burn rate. I’m being candid here.