supposed to do. Simon’s solutions were rapid and weird—convoluted, sometimes in a pointless way, often in a way that looked pointless until you saw how elegant it was.
On the third night of camp, Simon and Darren and Lisa and I, with two recruits from among the campers, stayed up until one in the morning entering the entire Realms code base onto the local network, all four of us sweating, typing in silence as crickets buzzed and chirped outside. There was no air-conditioning and only dim fluorescent lighting from overhead panels dappled with the bodies of trapped insects. It took two more frustrating hours of compiling and recompiling to weed out the typos and the little glitches from the slightly different flavor of the local COBOL variant, but at three twelve we had a local executable version of Realms 0.8. Before he went to bed Darren handwrote a note giving its location on the Net and tacked it to an inconspicuous corner of the computer lab’s bulletin board.
At lunchtime the following day Simon discovered three sheets of notebook paper tacked up in the same spot, written in blue ballpoint in an unfamiliar hand. He took it down. It was code. The style was alien to him, but reading and rereading it he gradually understood that it was a program that, added to the game, would set up an AI pet that followed the player around, fetching useful items and nipping at enemies. The pet could be a dog, cat, hawk, or iguana, each with different behaviors and special abilities.
That evening there were two more code samples in two new sets of handwriting. There was a primitive lighting model that found lines of sight and the strength of different light sources, and could reveal or conceal the world accordingly. There was also a rewrite of the wind direction code that incorporated the basic idea of moving hot and cold air masses and the position of mountains and oceans in the landscape. A day later Darren came back to the lab to find that someone had printed the source code and annotated the entire length of it with scribbled taunts in the margins alongside code optimizations and fairly witty critiques of Simon’s amateurish code architecture. On the fourth night Darren called a full-scale camp meeting in a note tacked up in the same spot. We’d meet at eleven thirty in the dining commons. Bring a pen and a flashlight.
It’s a moment I think back on, a moment Darren instinctively grasped and owned. The product pitch was its own minor performance-art form, and Darren was born a master of it. Standing on a bench in the dining commons, lit by a few flashlights, Darren already had the bobbing walk and mischievous almost-grin that would be so devastatingly charismatic on the stage at CES and Macworld, and he never really needed the stagecraft of a fifty-foot-high projection to make you want what he was selling. He had his own hyperdorky magnetism, a controlled contagious excitement crossed with adolescent cool. He gave you the sense that he really, really hated to show you what he was working on, but he couldn’t resist because it was so cool he couldn’t hold it back any longer. A bit like the mean but terribly charismatic older brother who was busy all the time, whom you couldn’t help longing to hang out with, who just once was going to let you into the clubhouse.
He talked about the game we’d make, its ambition, its potential. He sketched the outlines, and then he opened a copy of that month’s issue of Creative Computing magazine. WarGames wasn’t the most important gamer-related media event of June 1983. That was also the month when the most important advertisement in the history of computer games came out. It ran in Creative Computing magazine and took up two full pages. On the left-hand page, two columns of text were spanned at the top with the sentence CAN A COMPUTER MAKE YOU CRY? The right kind of person understood the question intuitively as a challenge. The text underneath began:
Right now, no one knows. This is partly because many would consider the very idea frivolous. But it’s also because whoever successfully answers this question must first have answered several others.
Why do we cry? Why do we laugh, or love, or smile? What are the touchstones of our emotions?
Until now, the people who asked such questions tended not to be the same people who ran software companies. Instead, they were