brushed-steel pavilion. Electronic Arts had erected a full-size professional wrestling ring on the show floor. Sony had claimed a mansion-size stretch of territory, upon which twenty-five-foot plastic busts of its signature characters looked down like gods. Several booths incorporated full-size automobiles or custom-built suits of powered armor; many were stage sets of scenes from games—blighted city streets or spaceship corridors. Glittering archways coated in LEDs pulled visitors in. In that company the Black Arts booth looked tawdry and sullen. Guests wandered through like bored toddlers, whipping the mouse back and forth across the pad and gazing up at the screen, disappointed. The games were too complex, depended too much on a long investment in time and attention. No one would stay to watch a colony launch a light-sail barge and wait the few minutes to see it dock at another star. A bearded man in a canary-yellow T-shirt stayed a moment to pan the view across the forest, then dropped the mouse and filed out, ducking eye contact.
“Let me know if you have any questions!” I shouted after him, but no one could hear anything. The booth on our left, an Atlanta company offering children’s games, had a speaker stack and a projection TV that played a video short on continuous loop, a shrill cartoon voice saying, “I’ve got the most star tokens! You can’t beat me! This will be the greatest Spin-a-Thon ever!” We heard this once every twenty seconds, which made roughly one thousand and forty times in the course of a day. On our right, four grimly serious Frenchmen had a display of looping CG film noir scenes and a patented way of branching movie narratives they couldn’t quite explain to me. Somebody else had licensed “Tubthumping.” I kept hearing the phrase “Ocarina of Time.” But most of the first day was watching conventiongoers file past, dull-eyed with overstimulation. Lacking as it did a strobe light or flamethrower, our booth didn’t even register.
People were aware of us, that much I could tell. It was no secret that Black Arts had lost its marquee talent—not just Darren but the whole upper echelon—and had replaced them with a bunch of no-names hired off the street. The fan community was already clogging the message boards with catcalls, predictions that we were going to turn the hallowed Black Arts name into a joke, kill the Realms franchise, and ruin everyone’s memories of the early games. There was a vocal minority arguing that this had happened long ago, that anything good about Black Arts ended with Simon’s death. It didn’t seem as if anyone even knew Lisa’s or Don’s name. For the fans, Black Arts was the Simon-and-Darren show.
I could sense the world turning. Carmack and id Software debuted Quake in 1996 and did the same trick they’d done with Wolfenstein 3D and then with Doom—they’d again become oxygen, become the standard of high-speed illusion, and their system was either being licensed or cloned twenty different ways, with different tweaks to the DNA. I knew the names of the derivatives because Matt tracked them on a whiteboard: Half-Life, Prey, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana. And there was already a Quake II engine coming.
There was a rivalry I didn’t understand but that everyone talked about, in which a designer named John Romero left id Software to form another company. Jared pointed him out to me, a small, long-haired, solid guy, butting through the crowd at the head of an entourage in red-and-white T-shirts. He showed me Carmack, too, who had a Kevin Bacon squint and walked with a stiff bounce, before he disappeared into a closed-door meeting. Ours wasn’t the only world whose creators were at war.
Four o’clock came, and even the show floor’s manic energy seemed to flag. Matt went out to collect sandwiches. A man and a woman accosted me. It took me a moment to realize they weren’t just in medieval dress—they were the first Lorac-and-Leira cosplayers I had ever seen. He was also the youngest man I had ever seen with a full beard.
“What are you shipping on?” he asked without preamble. I soon discovered that encounters with Realms fans came with an abrupt and total sense of intimacy, as if we all knew the important things about one another and there was every reason to cut to the chase.
“Windows only.” He gave a quick nod, as though I had confirmed a long-held suspicion.