hang on the response.
“You meet Dark Lorac,” I said eagerly. “You meet everybody! It’s going to be awesome!”
“Cool, man,” he said, and offered me his hand. “I’m Mark.”
They nodded and moved on.
On the second day, a couple of journalists quizzed me on the game’s release date and system requirements, and copied down my e-mail address. One asked for my feelings about Darren’s departure.
“Darren is a legend in the game industry and we at Black Arts wish him well.”
“I heard the departure was pretty sudden.”
“I’m going to respect Darren’s wishes, obviously.”
“You’re not feeling a little nervous, then, stepping into his shoes?” He leaned in, I guess to express the idea that the two of us were having an intimate chat. I had the feeling he was doing something he’d seen a reporter do on television, and that he was somewhere under twenty years old.
“We—well, I think our product speaks for itself.”
Jared had been listening, and he added, “We’re pretty nervous that Darren’s going to see our game and cry like a little bitch.”
The reporter copied it down and thanked us for our time.
“Come back! You haven’t seen our weapons upgrades!”
Two or three times, I’d seen a man or woman spend ten or fifteen minutes at one of our kiosks, face carefully neutral. Not playing, exactly, but doing odd maneuvers like looking at the same object at different distances. I noticed their tags were turned around so I couldn’t see their name, title, or company, which at first I didn’t understand, but Jared explained—these were the enemy, the competition. Whatever Lisa had done, they were taking it seriously. They wanted to find out if we were a threat, if we could actually win.
“I’m just really looking forward to this Spin-a-Thon,” Jared said.
Ryan got all of us invitations to the different corporate-sponsored parties. Sony’s was in a parking garage and featured a band that I thought seemed addicted to doing Soul Asylum covers, until I realized they were Soul Asylum. Wasn’t one of them dating Winona Ryder? I looked around for her. Anything seemed possible. Nintendo had the B-52s.
I was picking up on things everybody else already knew. The booths were built out of marketing budgets to impress the journalists and most of all to attract retail buyers, the representatives for Walmart and Best Buy and Software Etc. Microsoft and Sony and SEGA and Nintendo were at war, rival hardware platforms gearing up to capture the upcoming sixth-generation console market. Activision, Acclaim, Eidos, Capcom, Electronic Arts, and the other big software publishers were fighting over different pieces of the software market. The hardware giants used high-profile game releases as lures to grab market share. Mario sold Nintendo game consoles just as Sonic the Hedgehog and Soulcalibur sold SEGA consoles. I began to see how much money was involved, and that we’d lost control of the whole thing. Not that we’d ever had any. This wasn’t about kids trading floppy disks anymore. As actual game developers, we were the only amateurs in the room. We were wandering around, thinking we were the point of it all, when the real contest had almost nothing to do with us. The grown-ups were finally in charge again. No, they’d been there all along, and I was just the last to notice.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The speaker room was just another conference room with slightly nicer snacks. Coffee, bottled water, bagels, and pastries. The other tables were occupied by small groups, mostly huddled around laptops, mostly engaged in serious conversations. All of them looked like they were making deals, or were demoing, secretly, the next big tech advance, or like they at least knew what was going on in the world. It was six thirty in the evening—dinner hour, not exactly prime time for a product demo. But then, I wasn’t exactly ready for prime time.
That morning I’d stood in the doorway and watched for a few seconds as Darren ran through his act at the Vorpal press event. Darren was onstage with a headset mike, being interviewed by the editor of a prominent gaming magazine.
“Simon and I were like brothers, you know? And the games we did, they have their niche, right? We love them, we really do.” There was a pause, staged or not. There was an industry rumor that Darren could in fact cry upon command.
“But games have changed, it’s bigger now. I want to make games for everybody. It’s about more than just action, it’s about telling a story. It’s about character. We’re up against the big