You

Chapter Fifty-One



I came in the Saturday after we shipped to look at the game we had finished, right at the last possible instant. No matter what happened, I wanted to see what we had before they took it away.

WAFFLE was so legally radioactive at that point that we’d be releasing it as shareware—all the tools, all the source code, a game construction anthology for the ages. Focus had, sadly, become the prey of Bain Capital, which managed to make a modest profit from its assets, either because of the unexpected value of cask-aged intellectual property or its superfluity of high-end office chairs.

Matt, Don, and I were forming Magus Games, a start-up stealth-funded by Vorpal, now flush with cash. The film rights for Clandestine had sold for more than what I would have believed possible. Hollywood had decided to start taking notice of video games; I could almost believe we were beginning to scare them a little. Darren immediately packed up and moved to a house in Pasadena, and was reportedly “in meetings.” Lisa walked into an MIT doctoral program after a lengthy interview and presentation of her work, and the discovery that very few people could keep up with her in conversation.

For now, I just wanted to look around with the virtual camera and see what this place was. I let it spawn in at a random location. Take me anywhere, I thought. I don’t care.

We wound up on a hillside far out on the eastern continent. A half-elven prospector looked out in the blue early dawn over a misty virtual pine forest. Water condensed in tiny drops on his leather armor. I could see him breathing as his standing-still animation cycled; I could almost feel the moist air in his hybrid half-faerie lungs, his narrow eyes watching the pixelated trees in the far distance.

This was Simon’s vision brought to life as truly as I could make it. Display technology didn’t matter; who cared how many polygons the trees had? I could feel this world breathing.

I drew the camera back, kicked the time scale up, and watched days and then years pass. Smoke ascended from a solitary woodcutters’ camp in the ocean of pine. Every few turns there was a low-percentage chance the forest would spread out and become fields, or die and become desert, or a tribal people would settle there and form a village.

Clouds gathered, herded around by a rough climate model, towering over plains in jagged cubical stacks, shadowing castles and armies on the march, piling up against the mountain ranges that ribbed the continents. Rivers and streams trickled from the mountains’ heads and shoulders, through bumps and ridges, down into the plains. There was no geologic time per se, but we registered a few types of terrain-altering events, the rare earthquake or volcano, the once-in-an-era feat of earthshaking high magic or divine retribution.

Simple probability pyramids governed the world’s production. Fields generated crops in appropriate proportions, more staples and fewer luxury goods; regional imbalances generated trade. Forests generated x amount of game, and x/10 predators, and then rarer exotic or magical fauna, populations swelling and shrinking by Malthusian logic. The seas generated fish and whales and, in the depths, the leviathan and kraken and the odd stranger things, ancient things that belonged on other planes but found their way into the deep ocean. When a dragon, our apex predator, appeared, it automatically aggregated treasure and laid waste to the surrounding countryside. (It is a privilege of my profession to know where dragons come from.)

In our toy economy, all the world’s wealth started at the top of the supply chain, as gold and wood and leather and food. Dwarves and humans dug for minerals in the deep folds of the irregular crust, and so jewels and metals and rarer things propagated along caravan routes and clogged in the cities then radiated outward as crafted goods. X number of ingots became a dagger or a sword, so many hides became a cloak or a suit of leather armor, and so forth for all the myriad daggers and bridles and lanterns and helmets and vestments and statuettes and bowstrings and scroll cases that equip and ornament the world.

The supply chain had a top, and it also had a bottom—a benthic sludge of used boots, misfired arrows, torn surcoats, sunken ships, blunted weapons, and burned siege engines that simply vanished from the simulation after a set time. The economy worked, but we were long past understanding why, because every employee who had ever touched the system—which was almost every designer or programmer in the building—had added their own little algorithmic tweak to it, and by now the price-setting algorithm had fifty different half-remembered undergraduate versions of Keynes or Weber or Adams feeding into it. Add to this the nonlinear fluctuations born from player behavior—tweaks to the magic system revalued every magical herb and powder, and every infusion of treasure every adventuring party hauled up from the depths, to upset the markets like a diver cannonballing into a neighborhood pool. It still worked suspiciously well. In fact, I suspected that large sections of the economics programming were a front, and that Lisa ran it all from a little console, four or five sliders controlling pricing and production as though it were a tiny Soviet-style command economy.

Cities and settlements held together in fanciful political congregations—the lands sparkled with barons and dukes, viziers and khans, elven kings, orcish warlords, dwarven magnates, tribal elders, Lich Kings, robber-chieftains, matriarchs, regents, god-emperors, and petty lordlings who ruled a stockade and five or six men-at-arms, an underground convocation of thieves.

After much overpromising and backtracking from Toby, we agreed that yes, there would be a day-night cycle running at eight to one, roughly three hours per twenty-four-hour day. Things were a little hacked at night, colors were wrong and nothing shadowed correctly, but there were three moons and they were beautiful.

Elves (high / wood / dark) lived in dark forests or fanciful spun-sugar Bavarian castles. Dwarves lived in caves and forged things. Orcs lived their economically ineffectual tribal lives in the wastelands. Humans did their bit, filled up the map with farmers and thieves and priests and castles. Lizard men lived in deserts and swamps and carried on their biologically doubtful lives in isolation. Exotic horrors lurked in the darkness. Daemons, devils, spirits, giants, benevolent jinn. Extraplanar magi and ethereal predators that intruded into the world from extraplanar civilizations, through gates or summonings or natural rifts. We’d get to these other worlds in fourth- or fifth- or sixth-edition rules. The toughest adventurers would still be killed—by undetectable traps, by unpredictable monster types, or, if necessary, by mobs or armies of midlevel monsters. There would be epic deaths, throw-the-controller-across-the-room deaths. Where necessary, there were gods.

History progressed, blissfully free of historical or political or technological progress. Kingdoms rose and fell over the millennia, but there was no trend toward democracy, no Enlightenment, no industrial modernity, no Luther, no Hume, and absolutely, definitely, no gunpowder. No Principia Mathematica or Declaration of Independence. We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armor.

What we had instead was world history frozen in an eternal thirteenth century—or, rather, something more complicated than that. It’s more as if history had paused forever during eighth-grade study hall, a Thursday afternoon free period stretched out into countless millennia, where knights and castles mix in with fantasy novels, fairy tales, vague orientalist fantasies, Arthurian kitsch, Norse mythology, Star Wars, Paradise Lost, medieval travelogues, heavy metal album covers, and dimly remembered historical trivia.

I felt it then, Simon’s victory. We could indeed make a world. Chess is a game with simple rules and pieces, a small sixty-four-space board, but there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

But in the middle of all this, there’s you, a person playing a video game. For fun, for a challenge, for reasons hard to understand. Some of it is just cognitive burnoff, something to take up the mental cycles you aren’t using and, frankly, desperately don’t want, because a lot of it is just compressed, impacted sadness.

But there is only so much you can do about it. Your character is always going to be you; you can never ever quite erase that sliver of you-awareness. In the whole mechanized game world, you are a unique object, like a moving hole that’s full of emotion and agency and experience and memory unlike anything else in this made-up universe.

You can’t not be around it; it’s you, even though “you” might be the last person you want to be around. But when the game, the second-person engine, starts again, it tells you about yourself, and maybe this time you will get it to tell you the thing you’ve been waiting to hear, the mighty storytelling hack that puts it all together. You’re lost in a forest, surrounded by mist-shrouded mountains. You’re in command of a thousand gleaming starships in a conflict spanning the galaxy. You and the machine, like Scheherazade and her king mixed up together in one, trying over and over to tell yourself your own story, and get it right.





CODA: RULES SUPPLEMENTAL

Introduction

Simon’s original paper-and-pencil role-playing game notes were left in his old bedroom until his mother sold the house, at which point they went into storage for a few years and wound up in the Black Arts office. I’d seen them long ago, sat reading them sometimes during sophomore year, waiting for the school bus, waiting for the long afternoons to end and my dad to get home. I read and read them, but we never ended up playing them even though I’d gone through all the dungeons in my head.

There are two main rule books. There’s the one with the red dragon on the cover, a picture of a dragon rearing up and breathing fire down on an armored figure whose upraised shield divides the stream of flame. REALMS OF GOLD is written across it in gold letters. And then there’s the Creatures and Items catalog, the cover of which depicts men and women in medieval dress posed stiffly around an overflowing treasure chest, their eyes wide in greed and wonder. There were also many, many supplements and photocopied articles, and the maps to all the dungeons and lands, with accompanying descriptions.

You got the books for Christmas when the game was first popular, and maybe your parents didn’t know what to get for you, but heard this was a good gift. The sample character sheets are marked up and erased in a bunch of different places, with joke character names written in and doodles in the margins.

(It’s hard to explain to Lisa how some of this matters; it helps that she used to play bridge a lot. Also that she is a good listener.)

Basic Rules

It’s a game, but there’s no score and no winner, and too many rules to remember properly. There are six terrain types: Town, Forest, Ocean, Mountain, Ruin, and Sky. There are five public character attributes: Fortitude, Acumen, Nimbleness, Resolve, and Folly; these cards go faceup. There is also a sixth secret attribute that is different for everyone. It goes on a card you hold facedown on the table.

Town Zone

The way it starts is that you meet an ancient traveler in a village inn who tells you a tale about a lost ruin deep in a mountain fastness; beneath it lies the gateway to a fantastic underground empire containing fabulous riches. At its very center is a treasure of untold value.

There are four of you. You listen, spellbound. Things aren’t going well at home, not for any of you. Barbarians sacked your village; your master was killed before your eyes; you were jilted by a lover. A usurper stole your rightful kingdom, and you stood around and let it happen. Somewhere out in the world there’s got to be a fix for this. You’ve got to find it.

As you exit the Town Zone, there is a rush of feeling, a mixture of relief and regret as you leave your backstory behind.

Forest Zone

On the map, the Forest hexes are cool and green, with darker green trees, like lumpy pillows, sketched in. The elf ignores movement penalties here, but it’s not like he cares—according to the manual, elves live for a thousand years.

As you wander the trails, there’s too much time to think. About whether the old man was lying, about why you didn’t just do something about that f*cking usurper. It was all you had to do, deal with one guy in a velvet chemise. Why couldn’t you have been just a little bit brave? You imagine pushing him off a balcony; the crowd below cheers, the king and queen smile approvingly. You walk a little faster—can’t we get this over with?—and the track of an ancient road leads through miles of underbrush to a break in an ancient stone wall. There you make camp, crouching in the dimness like coders from Lisa’s graphics team.

You wonder who built the wall—dwarves or orcs or humans. Certainly not adventurers like you, who pause at places like this to search them for treasure but who never figure out how to stop and build a city. People like you only hoard the spoils, dividing it among sons who fight among themselves then ride off into the wild. Nobody learns to weave or make bricks or anything; there are just men in furs on horseback, bows and arrows and swords, and at night it’s cooking fires to the horizon.

Ruin Zone

A nameless, deserted fortress stands alone, deep in the wilderness. Once upon a time, this was the center of a great kingdom surrounded by a forest without end, a vast swath of Town terrain that stretched the length of the map until, long ago, it was annihilated in a strategic-scale campaign. When the kingdom fell, its terrain type modified to Ruin; one day, centuries from now, it will change to Forest.

(Ruins can contain multiple specialized terrain types: Cavern, Corridor, Debris-Strewn Corridor, Door [Standard and Secret], Room [Large and Small], Stairway, Pit, Special.)

A) Dungeon

Under a wooden trapdoor in the courtyard, stone stairs lead downward into a narrow space smelling of earth. At first, tree roots poke through the ceiling and stray sunbeams come in through the cracks, but after a few hexes, sunlight and the sounds of the forest disappear.

Skeletons hang from manacles in rooms and corridors of damp stones coated with algae. Goblins, giant rats, vicious animals roam the otherwise empty halls. A false wall at the back of a cell opens to reveal stairs leading still farther down.

(There’s a picture showing the ruined hall; Lisa says the artist could stand to learn a little about stonework, not to mention where to place load-bearing elements.)

B) Tombs of Terror

Were these built at a later date? The workmanship is much finer, although poison spikes and mocking inscriptions ward explorers off from the graves of the honored, eternally pissed-off dead. In the Tomb of Lorac, there is a cache of gold and precious magic objects surrounded by the bones of luckless adventurers who came before you.

This is as far as the old kingdom builders ever dug, but a crack in the tomb wall gives access to the Glowing Caverns.

C) Glowing Caverns

A rough landscape of towering stalagmites and luminous, overgrown fungi. Colored crystals protrude from the cavern walls. A pool of shimmering rainbow liquid yields random magical effects—invisibility, telepathic powers, hallucinations.

Your pouches are now full of rubies and emeralds dug from the walls; you are all wealthy enough to live comfortably for the rest of your lives. You think fleetingly of going back, but no one mentions it aloud. Why would you? This is the best part of your lives—the four of you together against the darkness and the unknown, a quest that could last forever without your ever wanting to leave this basement.

D) Underground Stream

The distant sound of running water beckons you forward to the place where a swiftly running stream of black water has carved a channel in the stone that leads downward into the earth, through a series of narrow tunnels and larger chambers. An Ancient Giant Cave Pike swims just beneath the surface. Farther down, the stream becomes a river that drops then drops again, then cascades down into a cavern so vast you cannot see the far wall. A fresh breeze blows through it, smelling of salt water and carrying the sound of… crowds?

E) Goblin City

The Goblin City has always lain beneath the kingdom and was perhaps the secret agent of its downfall. You follow the river as it winds through crowded streets and markets to a dock where a skiff is moored, and the party stops to camp by the dark waves of a mysterious underground sea.

Probably everyone’s pretty tired by now, and outside the sun has long since gone down and you’re going to need a lift home, or else you’re going to have to ride your bike a long way on a cold March night, your back wheel sliding on wet leaves as you pass the lit windows of houses and wonder what it’s like, how you’d be different if you lived there. You’re way too much inside your head, and other people notice, but you won’t realize that for another ten years, maybe more, and by then maybe it’s too late.

F) Subterranean Ocean

As you cross the subterranean ocean, shadowy, enormous forms move beneath your boat, lit from below by phosphorescent algae. Nautical movement rules apply.

G) Maze of Wonder

Those who journey to the far shores discover the gemlike Maze of Wonder, where corridors bend at impossible angles and the rules of space and time become less certain. The monster population becomes more exotic—outré, whimsically lethal inventions out of rare rules supplements. Lorac himself lurks here, now an undead being of near-infinite power. He warns you to go back. He, too, was once a prince and a twenty-sixth-level magus, until he opened a portal to the Burning Worlds and was lost.

Here and there portals lead off into other dimensions, where you can fight angels or mutants or space aliens or Nazis for as long as you want to, but the quest remains here.

H) The Base of the World

Few indeed have seen the silent chamber at the base of the world, which is littered with the most flagrantly unfair traps available—soul traps, contact poison, portals leading into doorless chambers filled with water.

Each of you will find a hidden treasure inside, and it’s the one thing you always wanted. The royal signet ring; your master’s sword; a lock of hair; a seed to regrow the forests of your homeland. But now that you think about it, you’re not sure if your origin makes sense anymore. Has it been weeks since you left home, or months? Years? It’s getting late and everybody’s tired and you can barely remember what was said at the start that meant so much, about a girl in a muddy village or a third-level barbarian chief who threatened your tribe. Seems like inventory could just about buy that town by now.

Town Zone (2)

But when you get home, you find that everything has changed. While you were away the town grew into a sprawling city. They built walls around it, then the city expanded past them. It sent roads into the outlying fields, past new farms and over the borders to other lands. The old king died, and in your absence the false prince took the throne. He sent the kingdom deeper and deeper into debt until he in turn was replaced by a council of merchants, and that’s it for the royal family.

More time passes, and the palace you grew up in is now a museum. The forest is cut down; the city spreads along the river to the sea and establishes a port where ships come from all over the world and bear people away to countries you’ve never heard of. The ships bring back textiles and jewelry and gunpowder. New character classes appear, some playable and some not, artisans and musketeers and gangsters and astronomers, which are explained in still more supplemental rule books, Realms of Gold: Age of Sail and Realms of Gold: Sages and Scientists. You pack away the lock of hair, the signet ring, and the sword. All that stuff was long ago.

Decades go by, faster and faster, and now, of the original party, only the elf survives. He has aged only fractionally through the years, and his accumulated experience points have taken him far off any of the level charts. He spends the day lounging in cafés on the cobblestone street where the old tavern used to stand; he pays his rent with jewels and odd coins that ring strangely against the table. He owns a horse and carriage and half a dozen houses in town. He’s an eccentric guest at dinner parties, the subject of society talk and gossip. You—and somehow it’s still you—can invest in merchant caravans for profit. You can finance other adventurers if you want, for a share in the returns. You never marry or have children. You collect old books, a few of which make reference to your early adventures, but only as legends.

One day a hot air balloon passes over the city. It only costs five gold pieces to ride in it. An amusement for gentlemen and ladies of quality!

Sky Zone

You ascend. The Sky Zone was never meant to be playable, so now what? You scrounge up a Xeroxed page and a half of sketchy guidelines. Rules for movement, suggested cloud maps, lightning-strike table.

It’s raining hard outside the office this evening, too, there’s lightning here, too, and past nine o’clock it doesn’t feel like work. You’re hanging out late in the break room with Matt and Lisa and you’re trying to steal soda from the machine using adhesive tape, which doesn’t work but is hilarious.

The Sky Zone contains air elementals, floating eyes, yellow lights, storm giants. Giant Erl from the Legendary Adventures supplement in a cloud castle. All areas of the Town, Forest, and Ruin maps are accessible. You find portals to all the elemental planes. You may reach the Starlight and Ethereal Zones from here.

You order new rules through the mail from an address in the back of Dragon magazine, rules not published officially, to describe galleons that sail between planets and starfish with arms that span continents. You resolve to reach the center of the galaxy, the center of everything, if you can, and that’s where the game ends, now not a game at all but a campaign that’s going to go on as long as your life does, no matter what you think of me now, because we are graduating from high school, from college, getting married, and now it’s time for all cards to be turned over, all items identified, all secret areas revealed. And now at last maybe we can score this thing properly.





A Selective Time Line of Video Game History



1971: The Chainmail tabletop strategy game is modified to include rules for person-to-person combat, rules that would ultimately be used in Dungeons & Dragons.

1975: Adventure (a.k.a. Colossal Cave Adventure)—the first text-based computer adventure game—is created by Willie Crowther and Don Woods.

1979: The first Choose Your Own Adventure book—The Cave of Time, by Edward Packard—is published. Adventure for Atari 2600, containing the prototypical video game Easter egg, a secret room showing the name of its creator, is released.

1982: The hit single “Pac-Man Fever” by novelty act Buckner and Garcia reaches number 9 on the Billboard chart.

The movie TRON is released.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, widely accepted as the most loathed home video game of all time, is released for Atari 2600.

1983: Ultima III: Exodus, often cited as the foundation for the computer fantasy role-playing genre, is released.

Realms of Gold I: Tomb of Destiny is written in Mr. Kovacs’s intro to programming class.

The movie WarGames is released.

Electronic Arts runs the famous “Can a Computer Make You Cry” advertisement in Creative Computing.

Realms of Gold II: War in the Realms is written at KidBits computer camp.

1985: The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is released in the United States.

1987: Realms of Gold III: Restoration is released.

1988: Clandestine for the Commodore 64, Black Arts’ first commercially published title, is released.

1989: Solar Empires I is released.

1990: Realms of Gold IV: City of Hope is released.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is released for NES.

1991: Black Karts Racing is released.

1992: Realms of Golf is released.

id Software releases Wolfenstein 3D, introducing the first-person shooter genre.

Clandestine II: Love Never Thinks Twice is released.

1993: Cyan releases Myst, an artistic milestone and the first mainstream hit on the CD-ROM platform.

Realms of Gold V: Aquator’s Realm is released.

Realms of Gold’s Worlds of Intrigue: High Society is released.

Clandestine III: Mirror Games is released.

1994: Clandestine IV: On American Assignment is released.

Realms of Gold VI: Far Latitudes is released.

1995: Clandestine V: Axis Power is released.

Solar Empires II: The Ten-Thousand-Year Sleepover is released.

Pro Skate ’Em Endoria: Grind the Arch-Lich is released.

1996: Tomb Raider, featuring the first successful female action hero in a video game, is released.

Clandestine VI: Deathclock is released.

Clandestine: Worlds Beyond (Limited Edition) is released.

Tournament of Ages is released.

1997: Clandestine VII: Countdown to Rapture is released.

Ultima Online, the first massively successful multiplayer-only role-playing game, is released.

Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation is released.

Founding member Darren Ackerman leaves Black Arts and founds his own studio, Vorpal, which will continue the Clandestine franchise.

1998: Mike Abrash publicly reveals the technology behind the Quake game engine in a talk at the annual Game Developers Conference.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of several games often referred to as the greatest video game of all time, is published.

Clandestine: World’s End is released.

Realms of Gold VII: Winter’s Crown is demonstrated at the Electronic Entertainment Expo.

2000: The Sony PlayStation 2 is released.

2006: The Nintendo Wii, the first mainstream motion-sensing console, is released.

2008: Gary Gygax, principal inventor and popularizer of Dungeons & Dragons, dies.





AUSTIN GROSSMAN is a video game design consultant who has worked on such games as Ultima Underworld II: Labyrinth of Worlds, System Shock, Flight Unlimited, Trespasser: Jurassic Park, Clive Barker’s Undying, Deus Ex, Tomb Raider Legend, Epic Mickey, and Dishonored. He is also the author of Soon I Will Be Invincible, which was nominated for the 2007 John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. His writing has appeared in Granta, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. He lives in Berkeley, California.

austingrossman.dreamhosters.com