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Chapter Twelve



We worked on it all through fall semester, in between my abortive acting career, Lisa’s freeze-up on the debate team, and Darren’s first ignominious fistfight. Three days a week, I’d park my bike by the garage, climb two or three concrete steps, and ring the doorbell. One of Darren’s sisters would answer the door and almost in the same motion step aside while I wiped my sneakers and thudded down the carpeted stairs to the basement, where Simon would be. He’d wave me over to the C64 to look at a new game he’d found or a new feature he’d hacked into Tomb.

“I was thinking we could do flying creatures,” I said once. “Birds or bats. Just the boringest version, just turn off terrain effects for that subtype.”

Simon and Darren did their mind-meld glance to decide, then they both nodded.

“Sure, sure,” Darren said. “Let’s do it.”

“Great,” I said. In two hours I had created a subclass of monsters, FLYER, built out of hacked-together exceptions that let it ignore water, lava, acid pools, caltrops, and any floor-based traps and trip wires. Just birds and bats first, but later the category would encompass all dragonkind.

High school—no one wanted to say it—was terrifying. Every hour was like standing in a roaring blast furnace of excitement and terror and shame all at once. I’d come to Darren’s house bruised and raw from the day, grateful it was over and grateful I had a place to go that wasn’t home.

Simon or Darren would sit on folding chairs at Darren’s dad’s computer; I’d be in the leather recliner. Lisa claimed the plaid couch. If we had a milestone coming, we’d break at seven, when Darren’s mom brought us all dinner on paper plates, with a two-liter bottle of Sprite or Diet Coke; then at nine thirty, when it was time for the big check-in and test, we talked over how the week’s goals were going. One night I realized that Simon had started sleeping in Darren’s basement.

A lot of things about Simon are obvious only in hindsight. I was far too sheltered and self-involved to notice that we never went to his house. His whole life, he mixed with the children of doctors and professors, professional couples who fought about spousal hires and what city the wife would do her residency in. He gave off a little feeling that maybe there was something wrong at home, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked about.

Darren worked most weekends at the Baskin-Robbins, so Simon and I would ride our bikes four miles to Gordon’s Hobby Shoppe, riffling through racks of role-playing game manuals, modules, magazines, and rules supplements. Gordon’s was a hobby and crafts store that eked out an existence among the candle shops and lamp emporiums that populated the cul-de-sacs of suburban shopping malls, run by stoners with curious facial hair who did most of their business with model railroad builders and high-end doll collectors. They saw the market for gamers, and kept a magazine rack full of what we wanted.

We’d read all the manuals and pore over the maps, wander mentally from room to room. We’d wonder at the tantalizing histories behind the buildings, creatures, and odd artifacts, tracing the fragmentary links between Vecna and Saint Cuthbert and Mordenkainen, scraping the tiny bits of information out of each artifact’s list of powers, its built-in curses.

We learned about other computer games from eighth-page ads in the margins of Dragon magazine, the ones adorned with Gothic fonts and fantasy clip art and inviting readers to send their orders to post office boxes in Madison or State College or midwestern college towns. I remember padded manila envelopes arriving, hand-addressed, containing the data on actual cassette tapes, which we slotted into Darren’s cut-rate boom box, with its whining, wheezing gears, which we then plugged into Darren’s computer, which then served as a disk drive. Simon played them avidly, solved every puzzle, ground through every dungeon from first room to last. But he felt they lacked ambition.

Simon’s room had stacks of 5.25-inch disks in their white paper sleeves, all games, each one labeled in Magic Marker. Some of them had been copied over three or four times, the old game carefully crossed out and the new one added. Most of them had been double-sided manually.

He’d come to Darren’s after school—f*ck even stopping by home—with the latest one. Darren’s mom might leave him a glass of milk, but mostly they left him alone; they considered him Darren’s project. He’d put on music, something loud on his headphones, seventies classic or prog rock, and for an hour, two hours, three, he could disappear as long as Darren’s dad would leave him alone, disappear the way he could in a fantasy novel, but differently.

Silly 2-D games, little guys jumping around on platforms—Sammy Lightfoot, Hard Hat Mack, cheap Mario Bros rip-offs. Adventures—Escape from Rungistan, Mystery Mansion. He didn’t even know who made the things—were they teenagers? Professional software engineers?—but somewhere out there people were inventing his medium without him.

The world narrowed to the tiny realm where he was always pushing on to the next screen, the next castle, always in a private dream of concentration and hard reflex, like a stoner kid doing bar chords over and over until his fingers were cramped and the muscle memory was there even in his sleep, always on the verge of some conclusion on the next screen, the crucial revelation that never quite appeared, that he could spend his life chasing, unless he learned to make them, unless he got to set the rules himself, unless he could put what he wanted in that castle, lock it away and bury it in a dungeon for a thousand years. He’d come home at nine or ten, biking home even in winter, snow in his eyes and silting up in his collar.


The dungeon couldn’t be just corridors. Simon had read his Tolkien a hundred times; this had to be Moria. There had to be great halls, chasms, locked rooms. That meant doors had to have multiple states—they could be open or closed, locked or unlocked. But if there were locks, that meant there had to be keys. And that meant there had to be objects you could pick up. So now there were things called objects, which could be displayed in the world, but could also be carried by your character—there was now inventory. And stairs. When you walked on stairs, you went to another map, notionally “up” or “down” from the map you were on. Just like that, the thirty-two-by-thirty-two world became an infinite series of levels extending upward and downward.

Darren added a level that was mostly empty space with two lines of pillars running through it. Then he added a level where the walls spelled DARREN RULES, followed by a pentagram level, then a stick-figure level, then a rough map of our high school, then an attempt to mimic a Nagel print, then a giant ampersand that the little ampersands (we started calling them ampers) ran around in, and finally a stylized picture of a penis. Simon added a class of command that printed more text beneath the map, to say things like “I don’t recognize that key” or “You feel cold air moving” or “The walls here are covered with rotting tapestries,” and invented without thinking about it the voice of the game, which skipped around between first and second and third person depending on what you were doing—the hidden narrator, the companion, the adjudicator behind the curtain. “You smell burning.” “Suddenly you yearn for your distant homeland.”

The maze didn’t have a name, but eventually Simon added text that would appear when you ran the program, just so the start-up would feel less abrupt:

Welcome to the Tomb of Destiny.

Beware Adric!

HJKL to move.

Who was Adric? Why was he dead? Why was he interred in such an elaborate underground complex, and by whom? And what was a “tomb of destiny”—did destiny die and get buried? Never mind; it was the kind of thing one wrote. Realms didn’t have a story. Not that it needed one to work. What’s happening in Space Invaders is pretty clear by the time you’re done reading the title. You live out your brief lonely heroic destiny in full understanding of the stakes, sliding an artillery piece back and forth while death creeps down from the sky in lateral sweeps. For the moment, no one needed to say anything more.

But eventually we couldn’t help ourselves. We emptied out the school library’s stock of fantasy and science fiction, from Poul Anderson to Roger Zelazny, taking notes, harvesting characters and story lines for later, irrespective of genre or period. It was all one contemporaneous fever dream. For underinformed fourteen-year-olds (or thirteen—Simon skipped fourth grade) it was a mass of curious ideas. Piers Anthony’s Blue Adept first suggested the idea of dating a robot. Our consensus was that that was probably the best option for any of us, once it became possible.

“Robot, probably,” was Simon’s opinion. “If not, then alien. If not, then human.” We all nodded.

“Or dragon,” added Lisa.

I saw the way Lisa looked at Simon sometimes, usually when he was working on a problem, and I wondered why. I didn’t know exactly why any girl thought anything. A girl’s attention was like the mind of an alien in an Arthur C. Clarke novel—shattering, sublime, unintelligible. I wasn’t sure if “cool” was an idea that registered for Lisa. Did she have posters on her wall at home, a picture inside her locker—how did it work, exactly?

For the rest of us, cool was a deep fantasy, the stuff of Heavy Metal dreams, marble cities, adventure, fate, ancient curses, reaching its extreme limit in the lonesome, otherworldly hauteur of Elric of Melniboné. It wasn’t possible to be cooler than Elric. I think there was a tacit agreement between them that Simon and Darren were in some way both Elric, which was as close as they could safely get, maybe, to saying they loved each other.

Darren was cool because he was tall and bitter and had learned how to smoke and was confident, and Simon was cool I guess because when he was thinking really really hard the air around him seemed to warp inward, as though there were a black hole behind his eyes. Or because he didn’t give a shit about anything but what we were working on, and he had a way of making it seem like the problem that everything was staked on. He’d already found out what he really wanted—to carve something out behind the command line that answered his feeling that he was born in the wrong place in the wrong body. But this also made you wonder whether he gave a shit about any of us, and then you started trying to figure it out and couldn’t stop. It made him a little bit like a dragon. But Lisa started dating a college freshman she met at Brandeis, where she had to take math, because I guess no one at our school was qualified to teach her. I learned that it was possible to hate reality as much as Simon did.

Which made me ask, late one evening, dizzy with caffeine and fatigue, what if you went up and up and up, climbing torch in hand, up the cramped spiral staircases, makeshift ladders, broad processional ramps, kicking aside bones and splashing through curtains of water dripping downward, up and up, until the orange torchlight or the blue-green glow of phosphorescent algae gave way to the pale gold of sunlight on the top few steps of the topmost staircase? Or until you smelled fresh air and looked up to see sky instead of stone blocks, and you were out in the world you started in? Where were you? What did you do then? The simplest answer, apart from just ending the game, was to make a metamap, a surface country, where you could walk overland between dungeons. There wasn’t any new programming necessary to make this one; it was just a new map built on a larger scale. There were multiple stairways leading down to different dungeons, but none leading up. This map had a different character set—∼, ∧, and % for water, mountains, and forest spaces. And then the movement rules were altered so you couldn’t move into mountain and river spaces. Just a hack, but it changed what Darren and Simon were doing. Now there was more than just the darkness of Adric’s Tomb, there was a whole world to explore.

Realms map 1.0 was a big, blunt, teardrop-shaped landmass that Darren freehanded in the last fifteen minutes of a Friday study hall. It showed the continent of Endoria and its capital city, Kronus. Endoria sat in the middle of a nameless sea, and had two principal mountain ranges and then a couple of rivers sketched in after the first bell rang. Darren handed it around. Simon and his parents had gone on a summer trip to Israel, and Darren had been to Scotland, plus he’d lived in Iowa until he was eight. Between them they’d seen castles, farmlands, cliffs, ruined temples, and Roman fortresses, along with their own native terrain types—patchy, deciduous groves gradually being claimed by strips of pine tree, subsiding into streams and swamps, fronting onto asphalt. In art class Simon tore off one of a big three-by-four-foot sheet of paper, gray and pulpy, like newsprint, from a giant pad the teacher kept in the room and copied the blobby outline Darren had made.

Over the next week we passed the map around between us and it accrued tiny details. Each time it came back to me it had more tattered edges and creases from being folded and refolded. After a week it was almost illegible, having been written and rewritten. Kronus sat inland at the place where two rivers met, on the border between the southern grassland and the northern forest. Simon put Dwarven tunnels in the mountains, drew elf-haunted forests in the central valleys, and marked the pastoral west with tiny crenellated towers in blue ballpoint—the lands of men. Darren spent way too much time on the extremely detailed walled kingdom of Arrek, in the southeast, ringed by mountains he’d set up for that purpose. Simon aggressively marked out a swath of the northeast as the Plains of the Wind Riders, with no explanation other than a passable sketch of a horse and long-haired rider. The Shadow Marches, the Blackened Lands, Boralia (there was an Old Boralia as well, much larger), Skarg, the Perrenwood, the Bottomless Lake.

A line of dashes, never explained, wandered through the middle of the continent—A road? A tunnel? An ancient wall? Dungeon entrances were marked in black and were found in ruins, mountains, and the very center of the Duskwood. It took Simon and Darren months to translate the map into digital form, improvising ASCII notation as they went. When the continent of Endoria went live, there were fifty-six new dungeons to build and dozens of new monsters and terrain types to consider.

You had to really love computer games to get excited about a game this crappy, to really invest in this little shifting grid of letters as an alternate world, but Simon obviously did, believed in it to the point where the real world seemed like a gray shadow by comparison. I’d driven past his one-story house, at the shabbier end of our mostly affluent suburb. Simon slept on a pull-out couch in the living room.

When Darren’s parents bought him a Commodore 64 Simon began sleeping over at Darren’s at least three nights out of the week. When he wasn’t there he was visibly fogged over. I’d see him eating lunch in the quad, blocking out code in a notebook. More than once I saw him in Radio Shack, standing up at a floor-model computer, typing furiously, trying out this or that idea, glancing over his shoulder at the salesperson hovering and waiting for the right moment to kick him off.

March and April passed, and Simon and Lisa mumbled through their bar and bat mitzvahs. The differences between Simon and the rest of us were getting more obvious. Simon probably wasn’t going to college.

Over the next four months he and Darren wrote an enormous amount of code, mostly between the hours of midnight and four in the morning, sometimes individually, sometimes on the phone to each other.

When I was with them, I never before or since had the experience of concentrating so fluidly or intensely. There were nights when, midsession, one or another of us jerked up from a momentary sleep trance, still typing out dense functions with names like SPIRAL-BOUND, PROPHET, and CORINTHIAN, the purpose of which we would know fleetingly once and then never again. What came out of it was a shockingly flexible simulation and procedural content-generation engine, elements of which survive today. It generates random encounters, manages some of the large-scale flow of the game world, and controls interactions between objects, character attributes, and what players can and can’t do. Countless Black Arts programmers have thrown APIs and GUIs on top of it, added functions that search and query and parse output; they’ve added graphics, physics, and sound engines to display the world WAFFLE imagines. But nobody knows what makes WAFFLE quite so fast, and eerily acute in its heuristic take on large-scale simulation problems.

There is a core there—so compressed as to be molten and illegible, forged by a now-alien cognitive self, a mix of hubris and anger and innocence and catalyzing hormonal change—that simply can no longer be understood.