by Steven Levy
But as Warren drew closer to the community of the Kingdom, he began to question deeply the kinds of things he had been doing for On-Line. He wondered if his very joy in programming wasn’t some kind of sin. The act of programming the game had been carnal—Warren had worked through the night with his stereo blaring Led Zeppelin (Satan’s rock band). Worse, the shooting nature of the game left no doubt that it glorified war. Warren’s study of scripture convinced him one should not learn war any more. He felt ashamed that a war game he had programmed would be played by kids.
So he was not surprised to see an Awake! article about videogames which compared them to drugs and said that the warlike games “promote aggression without mercy:” Warren decided to stop programming violent games, and he vowed that if Watchtower were to come out strongly against all games, he would have to stop programming and find something else to do with his life.
He began work on a nonviolent game with a circus theme. The work went slowly because he tried not to lose himself in programming to the point that he would be a zombie who had lost contact with God. He got rid of all his hard rock albums and played music like Cat Stevens, Toto, and the Beatles. He even began to like music he once would have considered sappy, like Olivia Newton-John (though when he played her record he always had to remember to lift the needle when the sinful song Physical played).
Still, when Warren talked about his new game, how he was using dual-page animation with twelve different patterns to control the rolling barrels that the character must leap over, or how it would have zero-flicker and be “one hundred percent playable,” it was clear that despite his ascetic efforts, he took a sensual pride in the hack. Programming meant a lot to him. It had changed his life, giving him power, made him someone.
• • • • • • • •
As much as John Harris loved living away from San Diego in the Sierra foothills, as much as he appreciated the footloose Summer Camp atmosphere, and as happy as he was that his programs were recognized as colorful, creative efforts, one crucial part of his life was totally unsatisfactory. It was a common disease of Third-Generation hackers, to whom hacking was important, but not everything, as it was to the MIT hackers. John Harris hungered for a girlfriend.
Ken Williams took the concerns of his young programmers seriously. A happy John Harris would be a John Harris writing hit games. Roberta Williams also felt affection for the ingenuous twenty-year-old, and was touched by what she believed was a secret crush he harbored for her. “He would look at me with those puppy-dog eyes,” she later recalled. The Williamses resolved to clear up John’s problem, and for a considerable length of time an unofficial corporate goal of On-Line Systems was getting John Harris laid. It was not so easy. Though John Harris could conceivably be called “cute” by women his age, though he could be verbally clever and was certainly making enough money to please all but the most exacting of gold diggers, women did not seem to react to him sexually.
Around Oakhurst, of course, even finding women was a problem. John Harris had taken a part-time job in the local arcade, figuring that any girl who liked games would have something in common with him; he made it a point to stay around almost all the hours the arcade was open. But the girls who spent time at the arcade were still in high school. Any local girl with much in the way of brains would go away to college; the ones that stayed were into motorcycle types, and didn’t relate to gentle guys who were nervous around women, as John Harris was. John asked a lot of girls out, and they usually said no, probably making him feel as he did when people would choose sides for basketball games and he’d be standing there unchosen.
Ken vowed to change all that. “I’m going to get you laid, John Harris,” he would always say, and though John was embarrassed and urged Ken to stop saying those things, he secretly hoped that Ken would keep his promise. But the mishaps continued.
Every time John went out, there were calamities. First the teenage girl he met in a fast-food restaurant who accompanied him for pizza and would not go out with him again. Then a woman who packaged disks for On-Line, a date arranged by Ken. John embarrassed himself by locking his keys in his new four-wheel-drive, had trouble getting into the saloon where they all went, and was mortified when Ken, in front of the woman, began making crude remarks about how horny John was—“That really embarrassed me,” John Harris later said. When everybody went back to the Williamses’ house to get in the hot tub, John’s four-wheel-drive got stuck in the snow; and finally, the girl met up with her old boyfriend and left with him. That was the end of a typical John Harris date.
Ken Williams did not give up that easily. The Williamses took John Harris to the Club Med in Haiti. How can a guy not get laid at Club Med? When a woman wearing no bikini top—you could see her breasts right there in front of you—asked John if he’d like to go snorkeling, Ken just laughed. Pay dirt! The woman was around ten years older, but perhaps an experienced woman was what John Harris needed. The snorkeling trip was lots of fun, and on the way back all the girls were fooling around, putting their tops on the guys. Roberta grabbed John’s arm and whispered, “If you don’t do something with this girl, I’ll never talk to you again!”
John Harris suppressed his shyness at that point. “I finally put my arm around the girl,” he later recalled. “She said—‘Can I talk to you?’ We sat down and she brought up our age difference.” It was clear that there was no romance in the offing. “I’d planned to take her sailing, but I was too embarrassed after that,” John later said.
Ken got even bolder after Haiti. “He did quite a few things [to find me a woman],” John Harris later said. At one point, Williams asked a waitress at Lake Tahoe, “How would you like to sleep with a rich twenty-year-old?”
Probably the worst of all happened at a bachelor party they threw for an On-Line employee. Ken had hired two strippers. The party was held at the office, and it was indicative of the freewheeling, anything-goes spirit in Ken’s company. People imbibed heavily; somebody started a game where you would try to look the other way and throw beer bottles into a far cubicle. The office became covered with broken glass, and the next day almost everyone at the party woke up with cuts and bruises.
John liked the looks of one of the strippers. “She was unbelievably gorgeous,” he recalled. She seemed shy to John, and confessed to him that until a couple of weeks back she’d been a secretary, and was doing this because the money was so good. She danced right around John Harris, at one point taking her bra off and draping it around his head.
“I want to talk to you,” Ken said, taking John aside. “I’m being perfectly honest. This is what she said—‘He’s really cute.’”
John just listened.
“I told her you make three hundred thousand dollars a year. She asked if you were married.”
Ken was not being totally forthright. He had made a deal with the woman to have sex with John Harris. Ken arranged it all, telling John she would be at the Chez Paree in Fresno, and John got all dressed up to see her. Ken went along. John and the woman retreated to a rear table. Ken told John he’d buy them drinks, but all she wanted was Seven-Up. Ken bought the couple a bottle of Seven-Up. “The bottles were expensive,” John later recalled. “Twenty dollars a bottle.” It was the first of many bottles of twenty-dollar Seven-Ups. “I was totally entranced by this girl. She was really easy to talk to. We talked about things she did before, why she decided to be a stripper. She didn’t seem like the stripper type.” By then Ken was gone and John was buying the twenty-dollar bottles of Seven-Up. The place was closing down. It was the moment of truth. The girl was acting like it was natural for her to go her way, and John to go his. So John went home. When Ken called later and asked if he’d “scored,” John later recalled, “I didn’t have much to say in my defense.”
It looked like a permanent plight. Success on the Atari, but no luck with women.
• • • • • • • •
Despite John Harris’ female troubles, he was a new role model for a new age: the
hacker superstar. He would sit for magazine interviews and gab about the virtues of the Atari 800. The articles would often mention his six-figure income from his thirty percent royalty deal. It was an enviable, suddenly hip position. All over America, young, self-described hackers were working on their masterpieces: it was the new-age equivalent to all those young men in the forties trying to write the Great American Novel. The chances that a bestselling game might come in over On-Line’s transom, while not great, were somewhat better than those of an unsolicited bestselling novel.
Ken realized that he was in competition with other companies of the Brotherhood for these programmers. As more people learned the Apple and Atari assembly-language wizardry that was unique when Ken Williams started out, the home computer consumer was becoming more discerning about what he or she bought. Companies besides On-Line were now publishing graphic adventures, having figured out their own tricks to put dozens of pictures with text on Apple disks. Also, a new company in Cambridge called Infocom, using text only, had developed an advanced interpreter that would accept large vocabularies of words—in complete sentences. The company was begun by MIT hackers. Their first microcomputer game, lifted straight from the game they’d written for fun on one of the Tech Square computers, was Zork, a supercharged elaboration on the original Adventure dungeon tale written by Crowther and Woods at Stanford. It was selling like crazy.
It was indicative of how fast the computer game market was moving. What was brilliant one year looked dated the next. The Apple and Atari hackers had taken the machines far beyond their limits. It had only been a few months, for example, since its introduction that On-Line’s Skeet Shoot program looked so crude it was embarrassing, and Ken dropped it from the product line. Threshold, for instance, blew that previous standard away. And a hacker named Bill Budge wrote a program that simulated a pinball machine, Raster Blaster, that blew away almost anything On-Line had to offer on the Apple.
Ken Williams knew On-Line had to present itself as a desirable place to work. He and his staff put together a printed package full of promises and dreams to prospective software superstars. Oddly, the enticements that On-Line offered had little to do with the Hacker Ethic. The package did not emphasize the happy Summer Camp community around On-Line. Instead, it seemed almost a paean to Mammon.
One part of the package was titled “Questions and Answers.”
QUESTION: Why Should I Publish With On-Line (and not someone else)?
ANSWER: One very good reason is money. ON-LINE pays the highest and most regular royalties in the business . . . Our job is to make your life easier!
QUESTION: Why Not Publish Myself?
ANSWER: With ON-LINE your product will receive support from a highly trained technical staff. This frees you for more important things like Caribbean Cruises, skiing at Aspen, and all of life’s other “rough” activities. To put it simply, we do all the work . . . The only thing we do ask of you is to remain available to us in case any bugs occur. Other than that, just sit back and watch the money roll in!
Also in the package was a letter from Ken Williams (“Chairman of the Board”) explaining why On-Line Systems was the most professional and effective marketing operation around. He cited the ace programming staff of Schwader, Davis, and Stephenson, and trumpeted his own technical expertise. There was also a letter from On-Line’s sales manager: “We are the best and want only the best to be on our team. If you fit this simple description, come breathe the rarified air with us at the top. Success is heady. Can you stand it?” A note from the Software Acquisitions Department summed up the message to prospective programmers: “We’re interested in you because you are the life blood of our business. Programming has become a premium commodity.”
It was quite a transformation from the days when a hacker would be more than satisfied to see someone appreciate the artistry in his software. Now that there was a marketplace, the real world had changed hackerism. It was perhaps a necessary trade-off for the benefits of widespread computer availability. Look at all the wonderful transformations computers had made in the lives of the people in the On-Line community.
Ken was hugely proud of these transformations. They seemed to bear out the brilliant promise of the hacker dream. Not only was he prospering, but he and the other companies in the Brotherhood were doing it in an unselfish, new-age mind-frame . . . they were the pioneers of the New America! And what was more, as the months rolled by it became clearer and clearer that computers were a boom industry the likes of which no one had seen since the auto industry. Everybody wanted a piece of it. Apple Computer, which seemed like some questionable venture when Ken first saw the Apple II, was on its way to becoming a Fortune 500 company, more quickly than any company in history had ever done. Venture capitalists were focusing on the computer field and seemed to identify software—things to make these computers work—as the hottest speculative investment in the land. Since games were, by sheer volume of floppy disks sold, the bestselling computer applications, and the Brotherhood companies between them had a sizable percentage of the computer game market, offers for investment and buyouts came in as often as packages of new games. Though Ken loved to talk to these wealthy suitors, whose names often appeared in The Wall Street Journal, he held on to his company. The phones of the Brotherhood would often ring with the last report of a buyout offer—“He said he would pay ten million!” “Well, I just got offered ten for half the company!” “Oh, and I turned down so-and-so for that much!” Ken would meet these suitors at airport breakfast meetings, but the respective executives would jet off to their final destinations without buyout agreements. Ken Williams was having too much fun changing people’s lives and driving to work in his new, fire-engine-red Porsche 928 to consider giving it up.
Chapter 18. Frogger
As 1982 progressed and the second anniversary of his company rolled around, Ken Williams was beginning to lose patience with John Harris and with young hackers in general. He no longer had the time or the inclination to give hours of technical assistance to his hackers. He began to regard the questions his programmers would ask him (How can I put this on the screen without flicker? How can I scroll objects horizontally? How do I get rid of this bug?) as distractions from what was becoming his main activity: hacking On-Line Systems as it grew in logarithmic leaps and bounds. Until now, when a programmer would call Ken and frantically howl that he was stuck in some subroutine, Ken would go over, cry with him, and fiddle with the program, doing whatever it took to make his hacker happy. Those days were ending.
Ken did not see the shift in attitude as making his company any less idealistic. He still believed that On-Line was changing lives through the computer, both the lives of its workers and the lives of its customers. It was the beginning of a computer millennium. But Ken Williams was not sure that the hacker would be the central figure in this golden age. Especially a hacker like John Harris.
The split between Ken Williams and John Harris symbolized something occurring all over the home computer software industry. At first, the artistic goals of the hacker coincided neatly with the marketplace, because the marketplace had no expectations, and the hackers could blithely create the games they wanted to play, and adorn business programs with the nifty features that displayed their artistry.
But as more nontechnical people bought computers, the things that impressed hackers were not as essential. While the programs themselves had to maintain a certain standard of quality, it was quite possible that the most exacting standards—those applied by a hacker who wanted to add one more feature, or wouldn’t let go of a project until it was demonstrably faster than anything else around—were probably counterproductive. What seemed more important was marketing. There were plenty of brilliant programs which no one knew about. Sometimes hackers would write programs and put them in the public domain, give them away as easily as John Harris had lent his early copy of Jawbreaker to the guys at the Fresno computer store. But rarely would people ask for public domain programs by name: they wan
ted the ones they saw advertised and discussed in magazines, demonstrated in computer stores. It was not so important to have amazingly clever algorithms. Users would put up with more commonplace ones.
The Hacker Ethic, of course, held that every program should be as good as you could make it (or better), infinitely flexible, admired for its brilliance of concept and execution, and designed to extend the user’s powers. Selling computer programs like toothpaste was heresy. But it was happening. Consider the prescription for success offered by one of a panel of high-tech venture capitalists, gathered at a 1982 software show: “I can summarize what it takes in three words: marketing, marketing, marketing.” When computers are sold like toasters, programs will be sold like toothpaste. The Hacker Ethic notwithstanding.
Ken Williams yearned for the bestsellers, games whose very names had the impact of brand names. So when his star programmer, John Harris, mentioned that he would like to try converting a popular coin-op arcade game called Frogger to the Atari Home Computer, Ken liked the idea. Frogger was a simple yet bewitching game in which the player tried to manipulate a cute little frog over a heavily trafficked highway and across a stream by making it hop on the backs of logs and turtles; the game was popular, and, if well hacked, might well be a bestselling computer game. “John Harris saw it and said it was really neat. He told me he could program it in a week. I agreed—it looked trivial,” Ken later recalled.
Instead of having Harris copy the program and give it another name, Ken Williams played by corporation rules. He called the owner of the game’s rights, the Sega division of the Gulf & Western conglomerate. Sega did not seem to understand the value of their property, and Ken managed to acquire computer-disk and cassette rights for a paltry ten percent royalty fee. (Sega licensed cartridge rights to the Parker Brothers game company; the marketers of Monopoly were breaking into the videogame market.) He set John Harris to work immediately on the conversion of the game to the Atari computer. He also assigned a programmer to do an Apple version, but since the Apple graphics were not well suited to the game, it would be the Atari which would showcase the excellence of Ken’s company.