and horse-faced and passably athletic. He ran track one year, but when he got to high school he grew his hair out, dropped the athletics and the honors classes, found an old army jacket and wore it all the time.
They were a fixture, short and tall, two different flavors of loser. You’d see them walking home every day, Simon’s hands shaping the air. What did they talk about? Comics, movies, inside jokes held over from the fourth grade? Another teen friendship, another tiny mysterious universe.
I met them in an intro to programming class, and six years later they were legends, the two burnout kids who founded a computer game company and got rich. But even the money wasn’t as alluring as the idea that they’d made video games their jobs, even before anybody knew that games were going to turn into an industry, an entertainment medium as big as the movies—bigger, if you believed some people. Simon and Darren made money out of—well, being awesome, essentially.
Don and Lisa went with them, too—got rich, stayed, won. Meanwhile, I went on to an English degree, a year of law school, an internship at a doomed newspaper in Dallas, sublets in Cambridge, Queens, Somerville, San Francisco (a new start!), Austin, Madison, and imminently, nowhere.
Simon never graduated from college. He was killed four years ago, in a ridiculous accident that resulted in security cameras being placed inside all the elevator shafts of all the buildings on that particular campus. He wasn’t even a student there.
People were already starting to talk about him as a genius on a par with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, and about what he might have done if he lived. The software he left behind was still state of the art in some ways, even though he wrote it way back in the eighties, before video games were in 3-D, before CD drives, before photo-real graphics. It was called the WAFFLE engine, a witches’ brew of robust world simulation and procedural content generation, the thing that powered Black Arts games first, to critical success, then to profitability, then to becoming a runaway phenomenon. It was still under the hood of every game they made; it had a weird genius x factor to it; it had never been surpassed or even duplicated. Before Simon died he was working on a project that he claimed would the next generation of the technology. He used the word ultimate more than once—in fact, right there in the title of his proposal (it was meant to finally get him his BA from MIT; they’d as much as offered it to him, but he never followed through): “The Ultimate Game: A Robust Scheme for Procedurally Generated Narrative.” There had even been a press conference, but no copy of the proposal had ever been found. The idea—the Fermat’s last theorem of video game technology—lingered on at Black Arts.
I should say, people have had the impression Simon killed himself, or else died as part of a game. That was the way it was reported in most of the papers. “A ‘Gamer Death’ on Campus,” as if there were such a phrase. More than one dipshit psychology professor said things like, “It’s not uncommon for these self-identified ‘gamers’ to lose the ability to distinguish between what is a game… and what is reality.”
First of all, this is a viewpoint that is frankly idiotic. People who play games don’t get killed or go crazy any more often than anyone else. It’s just that people point it out when they do. Second of all, Simon was a person with a vocation, one of the few people I’ve ever met for whom this was unmistakably the case. He wasn’t out of touch with reality, he was simply opposed to it. Third of all, fuck reality. If Simon didn’t like the world he grew up in, he has my wholehearted support and agreement. I went to his funeral, as did his many friends. They were not any kind of checked-out gamer fringe; it turns out a dude in a kilt who introduces himself as “Griffin” can be honestly, normatively upset that his friend got killed in a ridiculous accident.
When I heard that Simon had died, I tried to find something appropriate to feel. What I did feel wasn’t flattering. We hadn’t been friends since the early 1980s. I was still young enough to feel the death of someone I’d known as a novelty. Like it was one more aspect of Simon’s eccentricity, or