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Chapter Thirty-One



It was becoming clear that high-end game development had a bizarrely sadistic chicken-and-egg quality. During preproduction we’d all sat around and designed a game as we’d imagined it, inventing features and game mechanics and systems and telling ourselves how much fun they were going to be. And so we’d begin building levels months before the game was actually playable. When we actually began playing the game we’d discover that everything worked entirely differently from the way we thought it would, and the things we thought would be fun weren’t; the things that were fun, on the other hand, would be things we’d never even thought about. But by then the game would mostly be built and we’d have to scramble to change everything and resign ourselves to all the missed opportunities and promise to do everything correctly in the sequel, which would take another two years to build and would have an identical set of problems. The exact same thing was true for the look of the game; half the art would be built before we had a solid idea what the renderer really looked like. Not just technical specs, such as frame rate and resolution, but the intangibles—how the light fell, how solid the shadows felt, what exact register of realism or stylization it seemed to occupy. Don said it was like we had all the problems of shooting a movie while simultaneously inventing a completely new kind of movie camera and writing the story for a bunch of actors who weren’t even going to follow the script.


There was an arcade-style cabinet that sat in the corridor that ran between the library and the kitchen. It wasn’t a real arcade machine, but a PC running an emulator that let you choose from an encyclopedic menu of vintage arcade games, from Space Invaders to Japanese-only knockoffs of NBA Jam titles. It was the type of device I would have sold either of my parents for when I was nine. I was pretty sure it was illegal.

Lisa was playing an old-style vector graphics game, a world sketched in plumb-straight green and red lines. It looked like Asteroids but was more complicated; there was gravity and terrain. In fact, it was a distant descendant of Lunar Lander. She scowled as she piloted a triangular ship above a hostile landscape, dodging flak, managing the fuel supply. As I watched, she picked her way through a cave system on precisely gauged spurts of acceleration. As I watched, she bombed an enemy fuel tank and her fuel meter jumped up.

“Why would shooting their fuel give you more fuel?” I asked.

“Do you want fuel or do you not want fuel?”

She killed all the enemy bases and grabbed all the fuel, then jetted off into the void, while behind her the planet exploded into jagged, candy-colored shards.

“Why does the planet explode?” I couldn’t help asking. “Was… was that necessary?”

“Because it knows there’s a triangle out there that can take all its stuff.”