by Steven Levy
Christmas came and went, and Time Zone did not ship until February. Twelve times the size of Wizard and the Princess, filling both sides of six floppy disks, it retailed for one hundred dollars. The first person to solve it, a jovial, adventure-game fanatic named Roe Adams (who was also the chief reviewer for Softalk), went virtually without sleep for a week until he vanquished Ramadu and declared Roberta’s creation one of the greatest gaming feats in history.
Time Zone, though, did not earn nearly the notoriety of another On-Line adventure which was well in keeping with the spirit of the company. The game was called Softporn. In the spring of 1981, Ken had met a programmer who had been talking to publishers about an adventure game he had written and was trying, with little success, to market himself. This game was not your usual adventure where you quest for jewels, or try to solve a murder, or try to overthrow some evil Emperor Nyquill from the Planet Yvonne. In this game, you were a bachelor whose quest was to find and seduce three women. The programmer had written the program as a training exercise to help teach himself about databases, using the sexual theme to make it interesting. It was the kind of thing that hackers, at least the ones who were aware that a thing called sex existed, had been doing for years, and it was rare to find a computer center without its own particular sexual specially, be it an obscene-joke generator or a program to print out a display of a naked woman. The difference was that in 1981, all sorts of things that hackers had been doing as cosmic technical goofs had a sudden market value in home computer translations.
The program in question was a cleaned-up variation of the original. It would get vile only if you used obscenity in your command. Still, in order to win the game you needed to have sex with a prostitute, buy a condom to avoid venereal disease, and engage in sadomasochism with a blonde who insisted on marrying you before you could bed her. If you wanted to do well in this adventure, the replies you typed into the computer had to be imaginatively seductive. But there were perils: if you came across the “voluptuous blonde” and typed in EAT BLONDE, the computer would type out a passage intimating that the blonde was leaning over and performing oral sex on you. But then she’d flash her gleaming choppers and bite it off!
To those with a sense of humor about that sort of thing, Softporn was a uniquely desirable Apple game. Most software publishers wanted nothing to do with the game; they considered themselves “family” businesses. But Ken Williams thought the game was a riot: he had a great time solving the adventure in three or four hours. He thought the controversy would be fun. He agreed to market Softporn.
One day not long afterward, Ken walked into the office and said, “Who wants to come over my house and take pictures in the hot tub naked?”
The idea was to get three women to pose topless in Ken’s hot tub for the Softporn advertisement. Somewhere in the picture would be an Apple computer, and in the tub with the three naked women would be a male waiter serving them drinks. They borrowed a waiter from The Broken Bit, a Coarsegold steak house which was about the only decent place to eat in town. The three women, all On-Liners, who took their blouses off were the company bookkeeper, the wife of Ken’s assistant, and Roberta Williams.
The full-color ad, with the women holding wineglasses (the water in the hot tub tactfully covering their nipples), the fully clothed male waiter holding a tray of more wineglasses, and an Apple computer standing rather forlornly in the background, caused a sensation. On-Line got its share of hate mail, some of it full of Bible scripture and prophecy of the damnation ahead. The story of the game and the ad caught the imagination of the news services, and the picture ran in Time and over the UPI wire.
Ken Williams loved the free publicity. Softporn became one of On-Line’s biggest sellers. Computer stores that wanted it would be reluctant to order just that one program. So, like the teenager who goes to the drugstore and says, “I’d like a comb, toothpaste, aspirin, suntan oil, stationery, and, oh, while I’m here I might as well pick up this Playboy,” the store owners would order a whole sampling of On-Line products . . . and some Softporn too. Ken guessed that Softporn and its ripple effect just about doubled his revenue.
Having fun, getting rich, becoming famous, and hosting a never-ending party were only part of Ken’s mission; there was a more serious component as well. He was developing a philosophy about the personal computer and its ability to transform people’s lives. The Apple, and the group of computers like it, were amazing not only for what they did, but also for their accessibility. Ken had seen people totally ignorant about computers work with them and gain in confidence so that their whole outlook in life had changed. By manipulating a world inside a computer, people realized that they were capable of making things happen by their own creativity. Once you had that power, you could do anything.
Ken Williams realized that he was able to expose people to that sort of transformation, and he set about using the company he and Roberta had founded as a sort of rehabilitation project on some of the underutilized people around Oakhurst and Coarsegold.
The area had been suffering from the recession, especially in the industrial-mining realm which once supported it. There hadn’t been any boom since the Gold Rush. On-Line Systems quickly became the largest employer around. Despite Ken’s unorthodox management style, the appearance of a high-tech firm in town was a godsend—they were, like it or not, part of a community. Ken enjoyed his role as nouveau riche town father, dispatching his civic responsibilities with his usual bent for excess—huge donations to the local fire department, for example. But the close friends Ken and Roberta would make did not seem to come from the upper reaches of Oakhurst society. They were, instead, the people Ken lifted from obscurity by the power of the computer.
Rick Davidson’s job was sanding boats, and his wife Sharon was working as a motel maid. Ken hired them both; Rick eventually became vice-president in charge of product development, and Sharon headed the accounting department. Larry Bain was an unemployed plumber who became Ken’s head of product acquisition.
A particularly dramatic transformation occurred in the person of Bob Davis. He was the prime specimen in Ken’s On-Line Systems human laboratory, a missionary venture using computers to transmogrify life’s has-beens and never-weres into masters of technology. At twenty-seven, Davis was a former musician and short-order cook with long red hair and an unkempt beard. In 1981, he was working in a liquor store. He was delighted at the chance to reform his life by computers, and Ken was even more delighted at the transformation. Also, the wild streak in Bob Davis seemed to match a similar kink in Ken’s personality.
Whenever Ken Williams went into the liquor store to buy his booze, Bob Davis would beg him for a job. Davis had heard of this new kind of company and was curious about computers. Ken finally gave him work—copying disks at night. Davis began coming in during the day to learn programming. Though he was a high school dropout, he seemed to have an affinity for BASIC and he sought extra help from Ken’s crew of young hackers. Street-smart Davis saw that a hell of a lot of money was coming in to On-Line from those games, and vowed to write one himself.
Bob and his wife began hanging out with the Williamses. On-Line Systems was a loose enough company to accommodate an arrangement that flouted traditional taboos between owners and employees. They went on trips together, to places like Lake Tahoe. Bob’s status at the company rose. He got appointed to programmer and was project director of the Time Zone venture. Mostly, he typed in ADL code, not knowing much about assembly language. It bothered a few people—even amiable Jeff Stephenson, who liked Bob a lot—that Bob Davis was going around calling himself a programmer, when a real programmer, anyone with hacker credentials, should have been able to perform a lot more concentrated wizardry than Davis had.
Once Davis learned Ken’s ADL tools, though, he had the key to writing a professional-level adventure game. He’d always been interested in mythology, and he read up on some Greek classics, particularly those dealing with Jason, and worked the ancient tales into an adventure
game. He programmed the game, he claimed, in his spare time (though some at On-Line thought that he neglected his Time Zone duties for his own project) and with some help from Ken, he finished it. Less than a year after being rescued from clerkdom in a liquor store he was a software star. On-Line’s lawyer guessed there might be a problem in calling the game Jason and the Golden Fleece because that was a movie title which might be copyrighted, so On-Line released the game as Ulysses and the Golden Fleece.
It was an instant hit, placing comfortably in Softalk’s Top Thirty. Videogame Illustrated magazine called it “one of the most important and challenging videogames ever created,” though it really did not represent any significant advance over previous hi-res adventures except that it was longer and its graphics looked considerably more artful than the Mystery House pictures with their stick-figure look. The magazine also interviewed Davis, who sounded quite the pundit, talking about what gaming consumers might expect in the next five years (“computers hooked up to every phone and every television . . . voice synthesis . . . voice recognition . . . special effects generated by videodisks . . .”). A Utopian scenario, and why not? Look what computers had done for Bob Davis.
• • • • • • • •
The changes that personal computers were making in people’s lives were by no means limited to California. All over the country, the computer was opening up new areas of creativity. Part of the hacker dream was that people who had unfulfilled creative tendencies would be liberated by the computer. They might even ascend to a level of wizardry where they might earn the appellation of hacker. Ken Williams now could see this happening. Almost as if predestined, some of his programmers, once immersed in communion with the machine, had confidently blossomed. No transformation was more dramatic than that of Warren Schwader.
Perhaps the most significant event in Warren Schwader’s life occurred in 1977, when Warren was eighteen: his brother purchased one of the first Apple II computers. His brother had been paralyzed in a car accident, and wanted the Apple to relieve his boredom. It was up to tall, blond, thick-featured and slow-talking Warren to help his brother key commands into the Apple. And it was Warren who became the hacker.
At that time Warren was working at the Parker Pen Company in his hometown in rural Wisconsin. Though Warren had a talent for math, he stopped his schooling after high school. His job at Parker was running an injection molding machine, which consisted of a big mold and a tube where plastic was heated. The hot plastic would be injected into the mold, and after twenty seconds of cooling Warren would open the door and take out the newly formed pen parts. Then he would shut the door again. Warren Schwader considered the job a challenge. He wanted the pen parts to be perfect. He would constantly be adjusting the loader, or twisting the key, or tightening the nuts and bolts on the molder. He loved that machine. Years after leaving Parker, he said with pride that the pen parts from his molder were indeed perfect.
He approached programming with the same meticulous compulsiveness. Every day he would try a different graphics demo. In the morning he would decide what he wanted to try. During the twenty-second intervals that his molding machine allowed him, he would use pencil and paper to flowchart a program for the demo. At night, he would sit down at the Apple and debug the program until his intended effect filled the screen. He was particularly fond of kaleidoscopic, multicolored displays.
One of the graphics demos Warren tried appealed to him so much that he decided to try to expand it into a game. Ever since he first played Pong in arcades, Warren had been a videogame fan. He tried to copy a game he’d seen in an arcade: it had a paddle on the bottom of the screen and little bricks at the top of the screen. You would hit a blip with the paddle and it would bounce like a pinball machine. That took Warren a month of twenty-second intervals and nighttime debugging, and though it was written in lo-res graphics, which weren’t as sharp as the things you could do in assembly language and hi-res, the game he turned out was good, too.
Up until this time Warren had been working on the Apple solely to discover what he could do on it. He had been absorbed in pure process. But seeing these games on the screen, games he had created from thin air, games which might have been the most creative things that he had ever accomplished, Warren Schwader began to realize that his computing could actually yield a tangible result. Like a game that others might enjoy.
This epiphany drove Warren deeper into the machine. He resolved to do an assembly-language game, even if it took him months. There were no books on the subject, and certainly no one Warren knew in Wisconsin could tell him anything about it.
Also, the only assembler Warren had was the simple and slow mini-assembler that was built into the Apple. None of this stopped Warren Schwader, who in personality and outlook is much like the fabled turtle who eventually outraces the rabbit.
Warren did an assembly-language game called Smash-Up, in which the player, controlling a little car, tries to avoid head-on collisions with other cars. He considered it good enough to sell. Warren didn’t have enough money for a magazine ad, so he just made as many copies as he could on cassette tapes and sent them to computer stores. This was 1980, when the newly minted Apple game market was switching from cassette to the faster and more versatile floppy disks. Warren sold only about two thousand dollars’ worth of Smash-Up games, spending out almost twice that in expenses.
Parker Pen company closed down the factory, so Warren had a lot more time to work on his next game. “I had just learned [the card game] Cribbage and I really loved it,” Schwader would later recall. “There was nobody that knew how to play it [with me] so I said, ‘Why don’t I write a program that plays Cribbage?’” He worked perhaps a total of eight hundred hours on it, often wrapping around until the Wisconsin dawn. He was attempting graphics tricks he didn’t quite understand, things he would later know as indirect addressing and zero-page graphics. He worked so hard at the game that “the whole time I felt that I was inside the computer. People would talk to me, but I couldn’t interact,” he later said. His native tongue was no longer English, but the hexadecimal hieroglyphics of LDX #$0, LDA STRING, X, JSR $FDF0, BYT $0, BNE LOOP.
The finished program was superb. Warren had developed some inspired algorithms that allowed the computer to evaluate its hand by twelve major rules. He considered the program flawless in its choosing of cards to throw in the crib. It was only because Warren was familiar with the program’s traits—he knew it like an old-time card partner—that he could beat it around sixty percent of the time.
Warren Schwader sent the game to Ken Williams, who was impressed with the logic and with the graphics, which gave a clear, sharp picture of each card dealt. What was even more amazing was that Schwader had done this on the limited Apple mini-assembler.
It was as if someone had sent Ken a beautifully crafted rocking chair, and then had told him that the craftsman had used no saw, lathe, or other conventional tools, but had built the chair with a penknife. Ken asked Warren if he wanted to work for On-Line. Live in the woods. Boot into Yosemite. Join the wild, crazy Summer Camp of a new-age company.
Warren had been subsisting on the couple-hundred dollars a month he received from the state for taking care of his brother. Warren was worried about leaving him to day nurses, but his brother told Warren that this On-Line thing was a big opportunity and he should take it. And it appealed to Warren, this idea of going off and making money programming games and living in the woods. So he decided to do it. But there was one part of the package that did not appeal to him. The Summer Camp fun and rowdiness and drinking and dope-smoking that were common practices at On-Line Systems.
Warren was a Jehovah’s Witness.
Around the time Warren was working on Cribbage, his mother had died. Warren got to thinking about where he was headed, and what his purpose was in life. He found that computers were the main thing he was living for. He felt there had to be more, and turned to his late mother’s religion. He began intense study of the Bible. And he vowed that hi
s new life in California would be characterized by adherence to the precepts of Jehovah.
At first this did not interfere much with his life at On-Line. Warren Schwader did not criticize la dolce vita at On-Line Systems. But because of the godless habits of his colleagues, he generally limited his transactions with them to business or technical discussions. He preferred to stick with people of his faith so he would be protected from temptation.
He was living alone, free of charge, in one of Ken’s houses, a small two-bedroom. His social life was confined to a hall of the Kingdom of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Ahwahnee, five miles west of Oakhurst, The very first time he went to a service there, he felt he had made more friends than he ever had before. They approved of computers, telling him that they could do much good for man, though one must beware that much can be done through computers to do harm. Warren became aware that the love he had for hacking was a threat to his devotion to God, and though he still loved programming he tried to moderate his hacking sessions so that he was not diverted from his true purpose. So while he kept programming at night, he would also maintain his Bible studies, and during afternoons and weekends he would travel through the area, knocking on doors and going into people’s houses, bearing copies of Awake! and The Watchtower, and preaching the faith of Jehovah.
Meanwhile, he was working on a game based on some of Ken’s fastest, most spectacular assembly-language subroutines yet. It was a game like Space Invaders, where you had a rocketship and had to fight off waves of invaders. But the waves were full of weird shapes and moved in all kinds of directions, and if the player tried to send a constant stream of bullets off to fight them, his “laser gun” would overheat and he would face almost certain death. It was the kind of game designed to spur cardiac arrest in the feeble-hearted, so fierce were the attackers and so violent were the explosions. It was not exactly a landmark in Apple gaming, since it was so derivative of the Space Invaders school of shoot-’em-ups, but it did represent an escalation in graphic pyrotechnics and game-playing intensity. The name of this computer program was Threshold, and it made Warren Schwader almost one hundred thousand dollars in royalties, a significant percentage of which was tithed to the Kingdom Hall in Ahwahnee.