“She’s not three hundred pounds.”
“Are you kidding?” Alf asked. “She’s so fat, she shows up on radar.”
“For real,” Clark said. “She’s so fat, her blood type is Ragu!”
They were on a roll now, volleying zingers back and forth.
“She’s so fat, the zoo goes to visit her!”
“She’s so fat, her scale says ‘to be continued’!”
“She’s so fat, her clothes have stretch marks!”
“She’s so fat . . .”
They might have continued like this forever if the 5:35 Amtrak to Philadelphia hadn’t materialized out of nowhere, blasting its air horn and streaking past at 125 miles an hour. Its sudden arrival knocked all three of us to the ground. I huddled in the gravel with my hands over my head, afraid to open my eyes, afraid I’d see the great grinding wheels inches from my nose. The train was so loud, I felt certain it was running over part of me, and I braced myself for a pain that never came.
My ears kept ringing long after the train was gone. Eventually the earth stopped shaking and I dared to open my eyes. All around us, the woods were calm. Clark was sitting up and picking gravel from his hair. Alf spat out some dirt and debris, then finished his earlier statement: “She’s so fat, the horse on her polo shirt is real.”
We rose to examine the wreckage. The items we glued to the tracks were gone, scattered, pulverized into nonexistence. All that remained were a handful of Styrofoam peanuts.
And the rules of the Game of the Year Contest for High School Computer Programmers, which I’d safely stored in the back pocket of my pants.
500 REM *** INTRODUCE VARIABLES ***
510 SCORE=0:LEVEL=1
520 LIVES=3:TIMER=300
530 HX=24:HY=50:AA=1:BB=256
540 W1=54276:W2=54283
550 W3=54290:H1=54273
560 H2=54280:H3=54287
570 L2=54279:L3=54286
580 V=53248
590 RETURN
I WENT HOME THAT afternoon, hurried into my bedroom, and started flipping through my collection of floppy disks, looking for a game that would be worthy of Fletcher Mulligan’s attention. Strip Poker with Christie Brinkley was out of the question. Fletcher wouldn’t be impressed by a simple poker simulation. I needed something bigger, more ambitious—something that would really dazzle him.
His company, Digital Artists, was famous for building massive, fully realized worlds within 64 kilobytes of RAM. Every game took players to new and surprising destinations: Egyptian pyramids, alien planets, pirate ships, and gothic mansions, all rendered in beautiful, blocky 8-bit graphics. Fletcher never made the same game twice, and he never copied popular hits. Anytime you saw the Digital Artists logo on a package, you knew you were buying something completely original.
Unfortunately, most of my homemade games were rip-offs of arcade classics. I gave them names like Gobbleface (a Pac Man rip-off), Toadally Awesome! (a Frogger rip-off), and Monkey Kong (you get the idea). I learned a lot by making these games, but I wouldn’t dare submit them to the contest.
I also had a dozen half-finished programs that never went anywhere. I once started a game called Mission Zero because I liked the name “Mission Zero,” but I never got past creating the title screen. I started an adaptation of the Stephen King novel Cujo, in which you played a Saint Bernard and tried to bite as many people as possible—but stopped when Clark warned that Stephen King would probably sue me.
The best of these half-finished efforts was a game called The Impossible Fortress. I got the idea after seeing a drawing by a guy named M. C. Escher. He’d created this crazy castle full of hallways and staircases that doubled back on themselves. My idea was to set a jumping-and-climbing game in an Escher-like setting. Players had three hundred seconds to climb a mountain and enter a giant fortress with a princess hidden in its center. There were guards and guard dogs swarming all over the place; if they collided with the player, or if the time ran out, then the hero was imprisoned in the fortress for all of eternity. To win the game, you had to free the princess and then follow her out of the castle to safety.
I’d used a sprite with six different frames to animate my hero. The graphics weren’t terribly detailed, but he bent his knees and elbows when he ran, and the animation looked fairly realistic:
There was just one problem: All the fancy graphics and animation were overtaxing the 64, so the game was painfully slow. The hero lumbered across the screen and the guards trudged after him, like they were slogging through mud. Playing the game was like listening to a 45 record at 33 RPM—you could make out the basic idea, but after a minute or so it would drive you crazy.
I knew that if I could speed up the action, I’d have a pretty decent game. But when I flipped the power switch on my 64, nothing happened. I got down on my knees and studied the tangle of wires underneath my desk. The computer wasn’t plugged into the wall. In fact, the entire power supply box was missing. This could only mean one thing.
I found my mother in the kitchen, making me a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. She was already dressed in her white Food World uniform; her shift started in twenty minutes, but for some strange reason she wasn’t rushing to get out the door.
“Have you seen my power box?”
She didn’t answer. She just pressed the sandwich into the pan with a metal spatula.
“It looks like a black brick,” I explained. “With wires coming out of it.”
I studied her more closely and realized she was upset. It looked like she was channeling her anger into the sandwich; she was leaning so hard on the spatula, I thought the handle might snap.
“I saw it in your bedroom,” she finally said. “Under your computer desk.”
“It’s not there anymore.”
“You’re damned right it’s not.”
She flipped the grilled cheese onto a plate and then dropped it on the table. I realized my report card was waiting there with the rest of the day’s mail. This is what it looked like:
“I can explain,” I said.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me how you get a D in gym. Tell me how you fail a class called Rocks and Streams.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t apologize to me. You’re not hurting me. Three months ago we sat at this table and you promised me you would do better. But look at these marks. You’ve gone from Ds to Fs. You’re failing Rocks and Streams!”