by Steven Levy
On the other hand, there were plenty of things that the Apple offered that Ken’s Hulking Giants did not provide. Up till the time he worked at Informatics, his computers had been batch processed, loading dread punch cards. The Apple at least was interactive. And when you got down to it, it was fairly powerful, especially compared to the big machines of less than a decade ago. (MIT’s Marvin Minsky once estimated that an Apple II had the virtual power of the PDP-1.) And it ran pretty fast, almost comparable to a big machine, because on a time-sharing mainframe you’re fighting for CPU time with eight hundred people all trying to grind their code through at once, with the Dumb Beast sweating silicon trying to parcel out nanoseconds to each user. You shared your Apple with no one. In the middle of the night, it was just sitting there in the house, waiting for you and you alone. Ken Williams decided he had to have one.
So in January 1980 he scraped together “every cent I had,” as he later told it, and bought an Apple II. But it took a while to understand how significant a machine it was. Ken figured that everybody with an Apple was like him, a technician or engineer. It seemed logical that what these people really wanted was a powerful language to run on their computer. No one had yet done FORTRAN for the Apple. Hardly anyone had done anything on the Apple at that point, but Ken was thinking like a hacker, unable to envision anything neater than something to use the computer with. The Tools-to-Make-Tools syndrome. (Richard Greenblatt’s first big project on the PDP-1 was a FORTRAN implementation, for much the same reason.) At that point Ken was unable to conceive that the Apple and small machines like it had opened the field of recreational computing to others besides hackers.
The irony of it was that, even as Ken planned to write a FORTRAN for the Apple, this more significant revolution in computing was happening right there in his own house.
• • • • • • • •
For most of her life Roberta Williams had been timid. There was a dreamy quality about her, and her doll-like brown eyes, long brown hair, and frilly, feminine wardrobe—bell sleeves, suede boots, Peter Pan collars—indicated that this was a woman who’d had a childhood rich in fantasy. In fact, Roberta Williams’ early daydreaming had taken on almost supernatural proportions. She had always pictured herself in strange situations. At night she would lie in bed and construct what she referred to as “my movies.” One night pirates would kidnap her and she would devise elaborate escape plans, often involving some dashing savior. Another night she would be in ancient Greece. Always dreaming of things happening to her.
Daughter of a frugal agricultural inspector in Southern California, she was painfully shy, and the relative isolation of her rural home reinforced that. “I never really liked myself,” she would later reflect. “I always wanted to be someone else.” She felt her parents doted on her younger brother, who suffered from epilepsy. Her form of entertainment was telling stories that would enthrall her elders, and enrapture her brother, who took the stories literally. But as she got older, and coped with dating and the grown-up world, “all that got thrown out the window,” as she says now. When she and Ken married, she passively expected him to make a living; as for herself, she was so shy she, “could hardly make a phone call.” The storytelling remained buried.
Then one night Ken, who had brought a computer terminal home, called Roberta over to show her this program that someone had put on the IBM mainframe computer he was connected to. “Come on over here, Roberta,” he urged, sitting on the green-carpeted floor of the spare bedroom where he’d put the terminal. “See this—it’s a really fun game.”
Roberta didn’t want anything to do with it. First of all, she didn’t like games too much. Second, it was on a computer. Though much of Ken’s life was spent communicating with computers, they were still unfriendly ciphers to Roberta. But Ken was persistent, and finally cajoled her to sit at the terminal to see what this thing was about. This is what she saw:
YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY.
It was Adventure, the game written at the Stanford AI lab by hacker Don Woods, the Tolkienesque game which lured hackers and users into immersing themselves in a magical dungeon world. And from the moment Roberta Williams tentatively poked GO EAST she was totally and irrevocably hooked. “I just couldn’t stop. It was compulsive. I started playing it and kept playing it. I had a baby at the time, Chris was eight months old; I totally ignored him. I didn’t want to be bothered. I didn’t want to stop and make dinner.” She didn’t want to do anything except figure out how to get to Witt’s End or get around the snake. She would be up until four in the morning, trying to figure out how to get around the damn snake to get to the giant clams. And then she would sit up in bed thinking, What didn’t I do? What else could I have done? Why couldn’t I open that stupid clam? What’s in it?
At first Ken participated, but he soon lost interest. Roberta thought this was because Ken never liked it when Adventure got sarcastic. You would say KILL DRAGON and it would come back and say WHAT, WITH YOUR BARE HANDS? You couldn’t get mad, you had to ignore it. And you certainly couldn’t be sarcastic back, just say, “Yes,” And it said WITH YOUR BARE HANDS YOU KILL THE DRAGON AND HE’S LYING DEAD AT YOUR FEET. You killed the dragon! You could go on. Roberta approached the game with methodical intensity, drawing elaborate maps and anticipating what was around every turn. Ken thought it was amazing that one day Roberta couldn’t stand computers and the next day he couldn’t get her away from the terminal. Finally, after a month of ratiocination about trolls, axes, misty caverns, and vast halls, Roberta solved Adventure. She was desperate to find more games like it.
By then, Ken had bought the Apple. Despite her newfound interest in computers, Roberta was less than thrilled at the two-thousand-dollar purchase. If Ken wanted it so badly, she told him, he should try to make money from it. This coincided perfectly with Ken’s desires at the time, which were to write a FORTRAN compiler for the Apple and sell it for bundles of money to the engineers and technicians who wanted Tools to Make Tools. He hired five part-time programmers to help him implement the compiler. Ken’s house, a typical Simi Valley four-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot tract home, became headquarters for the FORTRAN project.
Meanwhile Roberta had heard that there were some Adventure-style games available for the Apple. Roberta bought some at a computer store in nearby Northridge in the San Fernando Valley, but she found them too easy. She wanted her newly awakened imagination to be as taxed and teased as it was before. She began sketching out an adventure game of her own.
She started by writing out a story about a “mystery house,” and things that happened in it. The story had much to do with Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians; another inspiration was the board game Clue. Instead of just finding treasures as in Adventure, this game would have you do some detective work. Roberta mapped out the story just as she mapped out an adventure game when she played it. Along the way, she devised puzzles, character traits, events, and landmarks. After a couple of weeks she had a stack of papers with maps and dilemmas and plot turns and twists, and she flopped it down in front of Ken and said, “Look what I did!”
Ken told Roberta that her little stack of papers was very nice and she should run along and finish it. No one really wanted to use a personal computer as a game machine—they were for engineers who wanted to figure out how to design circuits or solve triple-x exponential equations.
Not long after, Ken and Roberta were at the Plank House in the Valley, a redwood-walled steak house where they often dined, and there he finally listened to his delicate wife describing how her game put you in an old Victorian house in which your friends were being killed off one by one. She described a few of the dilemmas, and told of a secret passageway. It began to sound good to Ken. Ken Williams could usually smell some money to be made, and he thought that there might be enough bread in this for a trip to Tahiti or some new furniture.
“This sound
s great,” he told her, “but to really sell you need more. An angle. Something different.”
As it happened, Roberta had been thinking lately how great it would be if an adventure game were accompanied by pictures on the computer screen. You could see where you were instead of just reading it. She had no idea if this was possible on an Apple or any kind of computer. How would you even get a picture into a computer?
Ken guessed they could try.
As it happened, a device called a VersaWriter had just been released. It was a tablet that you drew on and it registered the shapes into an Apple computer. But it didn’t draw very accurately, and it was hard to control the writing mechanism, which was like the clunky base of a desk lamp. Worst of all, it cost two hundred dollars. Ken and Roberta decided to shoot the dice and spring for it. Ken then reprogrammed the whole thing so Roberta could do something with it. Eventually she made a few dozen black-and-white pictures of rooms inside the Mystery House, with people drawn only slightly better than stick figures. Then Ken coded the game logic, after figuring out how to pack seventy pictures onto one floppy disk—a task which any programmer in the least familiar with the Apple would have guessed was impossible. The secret was not storing data for entire pictures, but using assembly-language commands which stored coordinates of the individual lines in each picture; as each new picture was due to appear, the computer would follow the commands to draw the picture. It was a dazzling program bum that characterized Ken’s facility for top-level hacking.
The whole thing took a month.
• • • • • • • •
Ken scrapped the FORTRAN project and took the game to a software distributing company called Programma. It was the biggest distributor of Apple software in the world. In early 1980, that was not saying too much. It sold a range of programs with names like Biorhythm, Nude Lady, Vegas Style Keno, State Capitals, and Apple Flyswatter. Most of the games were written in BASIC (as opposed to the much faster-running assembly language) and could entertain only a toddler or a person in love with the idea of playing with a computer. There were enough of the latter to jack Programma’s gross up to $150,000 a month.
The Programma people loved Mystery House. Here was an assembly-language adventure game that was well planned, challenging—and had pictures. The fact that the pictures were in black and white and looked like something young D.J. Williams (age six) might have drawn was irrelevant. No one else had done anything like it. They offered Ken a twenty-five percent royalty on the $12 wholesale price, and assured him they could sell five hundred copies a month for six months, which at $3 a copy would be $9,000. This was almost twice the amount that Ken had been promised for the FORTRAN compiler—before splitting it with his five programmers. All for Roberta’s silly game.
Ken Williams also considered selling the game directly to Apple Computer. He sent a sample, but waited over a month and got no reply. (A year later, Apple—now a large company with a slow-moving bureaucracy, wrote back and said, yes, maybe we might like to consider buying this. This said a lot more about what Apple Computer had become than it did about Mystery House.) Ken and Roberta did not take Programma’s offer. Ken and Roberta wanted all the money. Why not try to sell it independently? If it doesn’t work, then take it to Programma.
So the Williamses started taking Mystery House around to the few computer stores in the area. The people at the stores would be skeptical at first—after all, excited new computer fanatics, intoxicated with the power lent them by their new Apples and Radio Shack TRS-80s and PET computers, were always trying to sell strange programs. But then Roberta’s game would boot with a picture of an old house drawn on the computer’s high-resolution (hi-res) screen rather than the computer’s clunky, block-oriented lo-res one. The people at the stores would ask how Ken did that. After a few experiences like that, Ken and Roberta figured they might be able to make as much as one or two thousand dollars a month from this software-selling thing.
The next step was advertising the product in a magazine. But as long as they were doing that, they figured, why not offer a couple more games, and look like a real company? They already had a name: On-Line Systems—a holdover from Ken’s vision of selling the respectable kind of business software for the Apple that he did in his consulting for online computer firms. Ken went to a friend and asked him to be On-Line’s first outside programmer. In return for eventual royalties, the friend did a simple black-and-white shoot-one-dot-with-another-dot game called Skeet Shoot. They printed up some advertising fliers and documentation sheets—unwilling to pay the one-hundred-dollar typesetting fee, Roberta cut the individual letters out of magazines and got that “master” printed by a local copy shop. It came back with little lines that betrayed its cut-and-paste origin, but they had already spent five hundred dollars. Anyway, that form of packaging was state of the art at that time. This was the computer world, where the packaging didn’t matter. What mattered was the magic that happened when all those binary connections were made. Marketing was second to substance.
Mystery House, or “Hi-Res Adventure #1,” was priced at $24.95. Ken and Roberta, in a fit of optimism, had bought a box of one hundred blank disks at the nearby Rainbow Computing store, and once the fliers were sent to computer stores and the ad placed for a reluctantly paid two-hundred-dollar fee in the May 1980 issue of a small magazine called MICRO, they waited. The phone rang on that first day in May, and then there was a break and then it rang again. And from then on, it would be a long time before Ken and Roberta could count on their phone not ringing.
Ken and Roberta made eleven thousand dollars that May. In June, they made twenty thousand dollars. July was thirty thousand. Their Simi Valley house was becoming a money machine. Ken would go off to work at Financial Decisions, where he was now programming for around forty-two thousand a year, and Roberta would copy disks and put the disks, along with the fliers and inserts, into a Ziploc bag. She would also take care of the kids and put the programs in boxes and keep the house clean and send programs out by UPS. At night Roberta was designing a longer and better adventure game based on the world of fairy tales.
Every few minutes the phone would ring and it would most likely be someone ready to absolutely die unless they got a hint to unstick them from a seemingly hopeless situation in Mystery House. People who called the number shown on the flier included in the Ziploc bag with the floppy disk were under the impression that On-Line was some big conglomerate, and they couldn’t believe their luck in somehow connecting with the actual author of the program. “I’m talking to the person who wrote the game?” Yeah, in her kitchen. Roberta would give them a hint—never a straight answer: part of the fun was working it out for yourself—and chat with them a while. The energy level was contagious. People were going loony over playing with computers.
Ken Williams was carrying a full work load at Financial Decisions, developing a complicated finance system and heading the data processing department. At night, he would work on the Apple, hacking a new machine-language system for Roberta’s new adventure game. On weekends, Ken would make the rounds of the computer stores. It was clear that the software business required his full time.
Roberta thought that as long as Ken was thinking of quitting, they might as well live out their longtime dream of moving to the woods. Her parents lived near Yosemite, above the town of Oakhurst, and it was even more rural and quiet than the place Roberta grew up in and still remembered fondly. It would be perfect for the kids. So they did it. “I’m going to move to the mountains,” he told an astounded Dick Sunderland at a party in mid 1980. Dick and Ken were in a room a bit away from the party noise, and Ken said, “Here I am, twenty-five years old, and the Apple Computer has enabled me to fulfill my dream: living in the woods and living in a log cabin and writing software.”
Ken and Roberta bought the first country house they looked at, a three-bedroom, rustic, wooden A-frame cabin on Mudge Ranch Road just outside Coarsegold, California.
By then, they had finished Roberta’s fa
iry-tale game, Wizard and the Princess. It was twice as long as Mystery House, and ran faster thanks to Ken’s improvements on the program logic. Ken had developed a whole new assembly-language interpreter for writing adventure games; he called it ADL, or Adventure Development Language. Also, this “Hi-Res Adventure #2” had over one hundred and fifty pictures. Ken had devised subroutines that allowed Roberta to enter the pictures into the computer as easily as if she were drawing on a regular tablet. This time the pictures were in color; Ken used a technique called "dithering" to blend the six colors of the Apple, mixing dot by dot, to get twenty-one colors. He was performing stunts on the Apple that Steve Wozniak never dreamed of. Magic stuff.
The game’s only problem was the first puzzle, where the adventurer, on his way to rescue Princess Priscilla of Serenia from Wizard Harlin, had to get past a snake. The answer was rather obscure: you had to pick up a rock and use it to kill the snake, but unless you chose a rock in one specific location (they all looked alike) you got bit by a scorpion and died. Most people started banging their heads against the wall at the third or fourth scorpion bite. Eventually, after countless frustrated adventurers made calls to Roberta’s kitchen in Coarsegold (East Coast people sometimes would call at 6 A.M. California time), On-Line began supplying a hint to that dilemma in every package.
Snake or not, Wizard and the Princess eventually sold over sixty thousand copies at $32.95. Ken and Roberta would sit in the hot tub they’d installed and shake their heads, saying, “Do you believe this?”
On December 1 of that first year, after the business had already changed their lives, got them a new house, and made them the rising stars of the Apple world, they finally moved the business out of the house to a space on the second floor of a two-story building in Oakhurst, seven miles up Route 41. Their neighbor was a religious promoter who was unsuccessfully trying to book Little Richard on a national preaching tour. You could hear him shouting through the thin walls.