by Steven Levy
Atari did not see merit in that argument. This was the real world. So after Jawbreaker’s release, Atari began pressuring On-Line Systems. On one hand, it wanted Ken Williams to stop marketing the game. On the other hand, it wanted to buy John Harris’ program.
• • • • • • • •
Ken had no desire to fight Atari, He was not an unconditional supporter of the Hacker Ethic, so he had no political problem, as John Harris did, with selling the program to Atari, When Atari’s Fred Thorlin invited Ken and John Harris to come up to Sunnyvale, Ken agreed.
John Harris, who seemed only rarely to handle the simple mechanics of living as masterfully as he evoked magic from the guts of the Atari 800, missed his flight, and got to Atari’s complex of low-lying glass-and-concrete buildings in Sunnyvale after the meeting ended. He had been lucky.
Ken later recounted the experience under oath. Fred Thorlin had ushered him into an office where some of Atari’s in-house lawyers were waiting. Atari’s associate general counselor, Ken Nussbacher (who was not at the meeting), later described his company’s approach to publishers like On-Line as “carrot-and-stick,” and this might have been a classic example. According to Ken Williams, one attorney told them that he would like to see On-Line agree to produce a Pac-Man game for Atari so that they could quietly resolve the problem of infringement which Jawbreaker had created (the carrot). Ken said he would be happy to deal with Atari and he hoped to hear a proposal.
A second attorney delivered the stick. According to Ken, this attorney began shouting and cursing. Ken recalled him saying “he had been hired by Atari to find companies infringing on Atari’s copyrights and put them out of business . . . he said [Atari] would be able to afford much, much more legal support than I would and that if I did not play ball with them, they were going to put me out of business.”
Ken was so scared he was shaking. But he told the attorneys that a judge might be better qualified to see if Jawbreaker was a copyright infringement.
About that time, Fred Thorlin asked the attorney to calm down and consider the prospect of the two companies working together (the carrot). They discussed how long it would take John Harris, the nineteen-year-old hacker who loved Atari computers but despised Atari and was lost somewhere between Coarsegold and Sunnyvale, to finish a new Pac-Man game for Atari. But Thorlin’s offer of a five percent royalty was insultingly low. After Thorlin told him “You have no choice,” Ken’s fear began to turn to anger. He decided he would rather let Atari sue him than give in to blackmail. To signify his distaste, he threw the specifications for converting Pac-Man on Thorlin’s desk, and returned to Coarsegold without a deal.
For a while it looked like Atari would close down On-Line. Ken’s brother John later recalled that one day someone let him know that Atari had gotten an injunction to confiscate any machinery that might copy disks of Jawbreaker—every computer and disk drive in the company. The marshal from Fresno was on the way. John Williams, twenty years old and running the company that day, could not get hold of Ken and Roberta, so he ordered everyone to carry out the computers before the marshal arrived. Otherwise, the company couldn’t have run for another day.
Al Tommervik, who drove a wheezing Toyota all night to get to court to be by Ken during the injunction hearing, suggested that Roberta mail down all the masters to him for safekeeping. He said he’d find a place for On-Line if Atari closed down its offices. It never came to that, but there were some very tense times in the fall of 1981.
John Harris was particularly shaken. He had been getting enough in royalties to buy himself a house outside of Oakhurst, a big, orange-colored wood structure. He also bought himself a four-wheel-drive pickup. He was working on a new game for On-Line, another maze game called Mouskattack. Despite this upswing in his fortunes, it was a very nervous John Harris who appeared for deposition in early December.
It made an odd picture. John Harris, a nineteen-year-old hacker in jeans and T-shirt, facing the best pin-striped legal talent of one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates in America. On-Line’s legal team was headed by one Vic Sepulveda, a flip-talking Fresno lawyer with short gray hair, large, aviator-style black glasses, and a laid-back confidence. His previous experience in copyright law was in a case in which some printers had insisted that the text to the homily “Desiderata” was in the public domain.
During the deposition, John Harris was so nervous he could not keep still. Atari’s lawyer began by asking him about his early programming efforts, his job in San Diego, how he met Ken, how he wrote Jawbreaker . . . all questions John could easily answer, but because of his tenseness he kept getting entangled and correcting himself—at one point cutting himself off and saying, “Oh God, that sounded awkward.” John was usually a person who liked to talk about his work, but this was different. He was aware that this lawyer’s goal was to make him say something he didn’t mean, to trip him up. Supposedly a deposition is a search for truth, where the most effective questions are asked to get the most accurate responses. It should work like a smooth program in assembly language, where you have given the fewest instructions to access the 6502 chip, direct information in and out of memory, keep the proper flags on the registers, and, out of thousands of operations taking place each second, get your result on the screen. In the real world it did not work that way. The truth that you found in a computer was worthless here. It was as if the lawyer were feeding John Harris bogus data in hopes of a system crash.
While the hacker in John Harris was appalled at the adversarial nature of the legal system, the legal system had its difficulties adjusting to him. The rules of evidence were somewhat more rigorous than John’s own archival standards. Ken Williams, in his own deposition, had warned Atari’s lawyers of this when they had asked him about the status of Harris’ source code for the program and he had replied: “I know John Harris and I’m positive there’s nothing written down. He doesn’t work like that.”
Doesn’t work like that? Impossible! A programmer at Atari, like any “professional” programmer, probably had to submit code regularly, allow for proper supervision. What Atari’s lawyers did not realize was that Ed Roberts, Steve Wozniak, and even the designers of their own Atari 800 had wrought a Third Generation of hackers, idiot savants of the microprocessor, kids who didn’t know a flowchart from Shinola, yet could use a keyboard like a palette and hack their way to Picasso-esque peaks.
ATARI LAWYER (to Ken): Isn’t it a fact that typically the programmer who’s designing these games at least produces a flow chart and then writes out the source code manually prior to punching it in?
KEN WILLIAMS: No.
ATARI LAWYER: Do they simply sit down at the keyboard and punch in the program?
KEN WILLIAMS: My programmers are typically too lazy to make up any sort of a flow chart. In most cases they don’t even know where they’re going when they start a program. They try to get a routine working to put in a background, and from that move toward some game.
It couldn’t have been too much of a surprise to Atari’s lawyers, on the second day of John Harris’ deposition, that he was unable to find the copy of the pre-Jawbreaker Pac-Man game he’d written. On-Line’s Atari machines were in use copying Wizard and the Princess, and John’s equipment was broken, so he couldn’t even find the disk it was on. “It’s not labeled on the front,” John explained, saying, “As far as I know it should be somewhere in my library.”
So Atari’s lawyers continued with John Harris, probing the difference between the versions of his game. And as the examination continued, the line between creative freedom and plagiarism got fuzzier and fuzzier. Yes, John Harris consciously copied from Pac-Man in programming his game. But some of the routines he used were written before he’d ever seen Pac-Man. Since the Atari 800 was radically different from the Pac-Man arcade machine, using different chips and requiring different programming techniques, John Harris’ code bore no resemblance at all to the Atari code. It was completely original.
Still, his fi
rst game had looked like Pac-Man, using the characters protected by copyright. But Ken had refused to market that version, and John had changed the characters. Atari insisted that this change was insufficient. Atari had its marketing chief come in to explain “the magic of Pac-Man" to the judge, calling it “a game with a little guy, a little Pac-Man” who gobbles dots and power pills, which enable him to “turn the tables” and go after the goblins who have been devouring him. The marketing man went on to say that the “magic of Atari” rested in its commitment to buying the rights to popular arcade games.
Vic Sepulveda insisted that John Harris had simply taken the idea of Pac-Man from Atari, and cited law which stated that ideas are not copyrightable. Vic’s brief listed side by side the differences between Pac-Man and Jawbreaker. Atari’s reply was that despite the differences the game was Pac-Man. Of all the mazes John Harris could have chosen, Atari’s lawyers noted, he chose the Pac-Man maze. By On-Line’s own admission, they had simply performed cosmetic surgery on a virtual copy of Pac-Man!
But the judge refused to grant Atari a preliminary injunction to force On-Line to stop marketing Jawbreaker. He looked at the two games, figured he could tell the difference, and ruled that, pending a full trial, On-Line should be allowed to keep marketing Jawbreaker. Atari’s lawyers seemed stunned.
David had temporarily smitten Goliath. Still, Ken Williams was not as thrilled with the decision as one might have expected. Because On-Line had its own games, and its own copyrights. It was becoming clear to Ken Williams that in the bottom of his heart he identified with Atari’s point of view much more than he cared about the Hacker Ethic. “If this opens the door to other programmers ripping off my software,” he told Al Tommervik immediately after the decision, “what happened here was a bad thing.” He would settle the lawsuit before it came to trial.
Chapter 17. Summer Camp
Ken Williams came to rely on people like John Harris, Third-Generation hackers influenced not so much by Robert Heinlein or Doc Smith as by Galaxian, Dungeons and Dragons, and Star Wars. A whole subculture of creative, game-designing hacker-programmers was blooming, beyond the reach of executive headhunters. They were mostly still in high school.
To lure young programmers to Coarsegold, Williams took out ads in the Los Angeles Times tempting programmers to “Boot into Yosemite.” Typical of the replies was a man who told Ken, “My son’s a great Apple programmer and would like working with you.” “Why don’t you let me talk to your son?” Ken asked. The man told him that his son didn’t come across well on the phone. At the job interview at Oakhurst, the man insisted on answering all the questions for his son, a small, round-eyed, sixteen-year-old blond who had peach-fuzz on his cheeks and seemed intimidated by the entire situation. None of this mattered when Ken discovered the kid was capable of grasping the intricacies of Apple assembly language. Ken hired him for three dollars an hour.
Slowly, Ken Williams began to fill up the house he bought in the Sierra Sky Ranch area, just beyond Oakhurst where Route 41 starts climbing to elevations of over five thousand feet. Besides free rent, there were Ken’s impromptu graphics tutorials. Ken was now known as a certified Apple wizard. He could turn on his hacker inquisitiveness almost on whim. He refused to accept what others considered generic limitations on the Apple. He would use page-flipping, exclusive-or-ing, masking technique . . . anything to get something up on the screen. When looking at someone else’s program, he could smell a problem, circle around it, get to the heart of the matter, and come up with a solution.
On-Line’s corporate headquarters in 1981 was the second floor of a dark brown wood-frame structure on Route 41 whose ground floor housed a stationery store and a little print shop. You entered the office after climbing a flight of stairs on the outside of the building; you had to go outside past the staircase to go to the bathroom. Inside the office were a group of desks, fewer desks than there were employees. People played a continuous game of musical chairs to claim desk space and use of one of the several Apples. Boxes of disks, discarded computer monitors, and stacks of correspondence were piled on the floor. The disarray was mind-boggling. The noise level, routinely intolerable. The dress code, nonexistent. It was productive anarchy, reminiscent of the unstructured atmosphere of the AI lab or the Homebrew Club. But since it was also a prosperous business, and the participants so young, the On-Line office resembled a weird combination of Animal House and The Millionaire.
It was indicative of Ken Williams’ priorities. He was involved in a new type of business in a brand-new industry and was not about to establish the same hateful, claustrophobic, secretive, bureaucratic environment that he despised so much at almost every company he had worked for. He was the boss, but he would not be the kind of boss Dick Sunderland at Informatics was, obsessed with detail. He was in control of the bigger picture. Besides getting rich, something that seemed to be falling neatly into place as his programs regularly placed in the top ten or fifteen of the “Top 30 Bestsellers” list published by Softalk each month, Ken felt that he had a dual mission to fulfill at On-Line.
The first was to have fun, an element he felt had been lamentably lacking in the decorum-bound establishments of the Old Age. Ken Williams became, in effect, the head counselor in a high-tech Summer Camp. There was Summer Camp fun and rowdiness and drinking and dope-smoking. Stoned or not, everyone was on a high, working in a field that felt good, politically and morally. The extended party was fueled regularly by an influx of envelopes of money.
Packages would also arrive containing new games—whether games from friendly competitors like Sirius or Brøderbund, games from would-be software superstars looking to get published, or games from one of On-Line’s outside authors working under Ken’s supervision. No matter. Everything stopped for new games. Someone would run off copies and everyone would take to the Apples, playing the game, making fun of its bugs, admiring its features, and seeing who could get the highest score. As long as the money kept coming in, and it certainly did, who cared about a little disorganization, or an excessive tendency to shift into party mode?
Outsiders would visit the office and not believe what they saw. Jeff Stephenson, for instance. At thirty, he was an experienced programmer who had recently worked for Software Arts, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company that had written the bestselling Apple program of all time, the financial “spreadsheet” VisiCalc. That company was also headed by programmers—Jeff could recall the two presidents, one of them a former MIT hacker and the other a meticulous young Orthodox Jew, arguing for half an hour about where a comma should go on some report. Jeff, a quiet, unassuming vegetarian who held a black belt in Korean sword-fighting, had moved to the mountains with his wife recently, and called On-Line to see if the closest company to his new home needed a programmer. He put on cord jeans and a sport shirt for the interview; his wife suggested he dress up more. “This is the mountains,” Jeff reminded her, and drove down Deadwood Mountain to On-Line Systems. When he arrived, Ken told him, “I don’t know if you’re going to fit in here—you look kind of conservative.” He hired Jeff anyway, for eighteen thousand dollars a year—eleven thousand less than he’d been making at Software Arts.
At the time, the most ambitious project On-Line had ever attempted was bogged down in an organizational disaster. Time Zone, the adventure game Roberta had been working on for almost a year, was a program out of control, gripped by a literary equivalent to the Creeping Feature Creature. Almost drunk with the giddy ambition of creating on the computer, Roberta was hatching a scenario which not only would re-create scenes from all over the world but would take in the breadth of recorded history, from the dawn of man to the year 4081. When Roberta played a good adventure game she always wished it would never end—this game, she decided, would have so many plots and rooms that it would take even an experienced adventurer a year to solve. You would see the fall of Caesar, suffer the Napoleonic wars, fight Samurai warriors, rap with prehistoric Australian aborigines, sail with Columbus, visit hundreds of pla
ces, and witness the entire panorama of the human experience, eventually winding up on the planet Neburon, where the evil leader Ramadu is planning to destroy Earth. A microcomputer epic, conceived by a housewife in central California.
Programming this monster was grinding the business of On-Line to a halt. One staff programmer was working on a routine to triple the speed with which the program would fill in colors for the hi-res pictures. The young programmer whose father had arranged his employment tried to cope with the game logic, while a former alcoholic who had bootstrapped his way to the title of programmer keyed in the Adventure Development Language messages. A local teenager was painstakingly drawing the fourteen hundred pictures, first on graph paper, then retracing on an Apple graphics tablet.
Jeff Stephenson was asked to somehow tie the program together. He was dismayed at the disorganization, and appalled at the deadline: autumn, so the game would be on sale for Christmas. (He was later to conclude that any deadline Ken gave was usually overoptimistic by a factor of three.)
Despite the project being so far behind schedule, the company was still run like Summer Camp. Tuesday night was “Men’s Night,” with Ken out on a drinking excursion. Every Wednesday, most of the staff would take the day off to go skiing at Badger Pass in Yosemite. On Fridays at noon, On-Line would enact a ritual entitled “Breaking Out the Steel.” “Steel” was the clear but potent Steel’s peppermint schnapps which was On-Line Systems’ beverage of choice. In the company vernacular, a lot of steel would get you “sledged.” Once they broke out the steel on Fridays, it could be reasonably assumed that work on Time Zone would be halted while the staff, Ken leading the way, would explore the hazy, timeless zone of sledgedom.