by Steven Levy
Without computer access, Mark Duchaineau later said, “there would have been this big void . . . it would be like you didn’t have your sight, or hearing. The computer is like another sense or part of your being.”
Coming to this discovery in the late seventies, Mark was able to get access to computers for his personal use and become a hacker of the Third Generation. While still in high school, he landed a job at the Byte Shop in Hayward. He loved working at the computer shop. He’d do some of everything—repairs, sales, and programming for the store owner as well as the customers who needed custom programs. The fact that he was getting no more than three dollars an hour didn’t bother him: working with computers was pay enough. He kept working at the shop while he attended Cal State at Hayward, where he zipped effortlessly through math and computer courses. He transferred to Berkeley and was shocked at the rigorousness of the computer science curriculum there. He had developed a hacker attitude: he could work intensely for long periods of time on things that interested him but had little patience for the things that didn’t. In fact, he found it virtually impossible to retain what he called “the little nitpicking things that I knew I’d never need” that were unfortunately essential for success in Berkeley’s computer science department. So like many Third-Generation hackers, he did not get the benefit of the high-level hacking that took place in universities. He dropped out for the freedom that personal computers would provide, and went back to the Byte Shop.
An intense circle of pirates hung out at the shop. Some of them had even been interviewed in an article about software piracy in Esquire that made them seem like heroes. Actually, Mark considered them kind of random hackers. Mark, however, was interested in the kinds of discoveries that it took to break down copy protection and was fairly proficient at breaking copy-protected disks, though he really had no need for the programs on the disks. A student of the Hacker Ethic, he didn’t think too much of the idea of being a person who writes copy-protection schemes.
But one day Mark was playing around with the Apple operating system. He often did this—the common hacker pursuit of wandering around within a system. “My big thing is discovery,” he explained later. Working with computers, he could always unearth something new and got incredible satisfaction from these finds. Mark was trying to figure out what turned the disk drive on and off in the operating system and soon knew what triggered it, spun it, worked the head, moved the motor. As he experimented with variations on the usual ways to work the disk drive, he realized that he was on to a very big discovery: a new way to put information on a disk.
Mark’s scheme involved arranging data in spiraling paths on the disk so information could not be accessed concentrically, like a needle following a record, but in several spiraling paths. That was why Mark called the scheme "Spiradisk.” The different arrangement would thwart programs which broke copy protection and allowed pirates to copy disks. While not being totally pirate-proof (nothing is), Mark’s scheme would defy Locksmith, and any other commercial scheme. And would take a hell of a long time for even a devoted hacker to crack.
Through a friend who was working on a game for On-Line, Mark met Ken Williams. Ken expressed only vague interest in Mark’s scheme, and over the next few months they talked about it over the phone. Ken always seemed to pick out faults in Mark’s system. For one thing, Mark’s scheme consumed too much space on a floppy disk. Spiradisk only allowed you to put in half the information you could normally fit on a disk.
While fixing that, Duchaineau came up with another revelation, which allowed him not only to store the full amount of information on a disk but also to speed up the process by which the computer and the disk drive swapped information. At first, Duchaineau doubted it could be done. But like any good hacker, he tried, and after some intense hours of hacking he looked up, flabbergasted, and said, “Gee, this works.”
According to Duchaineau’s calculations, the Spiradisk process worked twenty times faster than the normal Apple operating system. That meant that you could load the information from a disk into the computer memory in a fraction of the time. It was revolutionary, truly amazing. Mark Duchaineau did not understand why Ken Williams was so reluctant to use it.
Ken saw some value in Duchaineau’s system but did not want to risk his whole company on an untried scheme concocted by some random kid genius. In his two years as head of On-Line, Ken had seen plenty of them by now—true wizards who were brilliant conceptualists but hackers in the worst sense; people who couldn’t finish. What insurance did he have that Duchaineau could—or would—fix any dire bugs that would inevitably appear in such a revolutionary scheme? He was impressed enough with Duchaineau, though, to ask him to come to Oakhurst to do more conventional copy protection. Mark, miffed at Ken’s rejection of Spiradisk, said he didn’t think so.
“What do you want to get paid?” Ken asked him.
Mark Duchaineau had been living at home and working in the computer store for three dollars an hour. He took a shot and said, “Ten bucks an hour,” mainly because, he later said, “that sounded like a neat number to me.”
“Well,” said Ken, “what if I let you live in one of my houses and give you $8.65 an hour?”
Deal.
Ken basically wanted a fairly reliable copy-protect system to work with the Form Master, a big disk-copying machine On-Line had bought to churn out products. Could Mark come up with a program that could do that? Yes. In half an hour, Duchaineau conceived of a plan and set about writing code for the next twenty-four hours, finishing with a complete protection scheme that he says “wasn’t incredibly reliable, wasn’t very high-quality, but it did work, if you [had] clean disk drives and normal disk speeds.” Over the next few months, Mark used it to protect about twenty-five products.
He also became the official Dungeonmaster for a running Dungeons and Dragons game at Hexagon House. Built as a traditional suburban family home, the house was beginning to show some wear from neglect by a shifting roster of hacker-boarders. The walls, the wooden banisters, and the kitchen cabinets all had a battered, war-pocked look. No one had bothered to get furniture, and the main room had only a Formica dining table and cheap kitchen chairs, a six-foot-tall sword-dueling arcade game, and a large color TV without a stand, connected to a Betamax that seemed to constantly play Conan the Barbarian. On D&D nights, a few of the programmers would gather around the table, while Mark sat cross-legged on the soiled wall-to-wall carpet surrounded by hardbound D&D guides for running games. He would roll dice, ominously predicting that this person . . . or troll, as the case might be . . . had a forty percent chance of getting hit by a lightning bolt cast by a wizard named Zwernif. He’d roll an eighteen-sided die, peer down at it, and look up with those disconcertingly intense eyes and say, already eager for the next crisis, “You’re still alive.” Then he’d thumb through the book for another life-and-death confrontation for the role players. Running a D&D game was a great exercise in control, just as computers were.
Mark kept lobbying for Spiradisk. His eagerness to implement the hard-to-crack scheme was not due to a desire to thwart would-be pirates; Duchaineau considered it a sacrifice to bring about his more altruistic master plan. He hoped Spiradisk would generate enough royalties for him to begin his own company, one that would be guided not by the unproductive standards of commercialism, but by the forward-thinking goals of research and development. Duchaineau’s company would be a hacker paradise, with programmers having every conceivable tool at their disposal to create awesome software. If a programmer felt the company needed a piece of equipment, say some supercalibrated oscilloscope, he would not have to get permission from unconnected management channels . . . he and his fellow hackers would have a large say in the process. Initially, Mark’s company would write state-of-the-art software—Mark himself dreamed of writing the ultimate computer version of Dungeons and Dragons.
But software was only the beginning. Once revenues could support it, Mark’s company would get into hardware. The ultimate goal wou
ld be to create a computer good enough to handle an arcade game as good as the most sophisticated coin-operated games. It would have a built-in music synthesizer better than the most advanced current models; it would have more than enough power to run Mark’s dream software “environment” called SORDMASTER (Screen Oriented Data Manipulation System), which would be like taking the best program running today and extending its value to the tenth power . . . a computer, in Mark’s words, that would “do anything you want.”
Finally, Ken Williams agreed to allow the Dungeonmaster to copy-protect On-Line’s programs with Spiradisk. Mark would get forty dollars an hour for setting things up, five thousand dollars a month to maintain the system, and a one percent royalty on all disks which used his system. Mark also fixed it so that the first thing a user would see when he booted up a Spiradisk was the name of Mark’s “company,” Bit Works.
As Ken suspected, there were problems with the scheme. The disks often had to be rebooted once or twice before the program would properly load. Williams began to get disenchanted with Duchaineau. In Ken’s view, Mark was one of those brilliant but unfocused hacker prima donnas. Ken believed that Mark was capable of pulling off a coup that could prove critical for the whole industry: creating a disk format that would support Apple, Atari, and IBM on the same disk, instead of the current system, which required a separate disk to run on each machine. “Mark knows how to do it,” Ken complained. “He could do it in six weeks. He doesn’t want to make the effort. It’s work. He sat down, worked for a week, lost interest in the project. He can do it, but it doesn’t excite him. It’s not fun.” According to Ken Williams, “You’d have to be suicidal to let your company depend on a guy like Duchaineau.” When it was pointed out to Ken that his company did depend on that Third-Generation hacker, Ken Williams admitted that that was the case.
This came into sharp focus at the annual Applefest in San Francisco. One of the highlights of that big weekend event, a bazaar in which all the companies selling products for the Apple would display and sell their wares, was to be the introduction of a long-awaited and ornately augmented sequel to one of the best-loved Apple games of all time, Ultima. In a tremendous coup, On-Line Systems had landed the game and its mercurial author, who wrote under the pseudonym of Lord British.
The original Ultima was a fantasy role-playing game where the player created a character, assigned certain “attribute points” in areas of durability, wisdom, intelligence, dexterity, and strength, and, traveling about a mysterious planet, searched dungeons and towers, went to villages for supplies and helpful gossip, and fought elves, warriors, and wizards. Even though the game was written in BASIC and ran rather slowly, it was a masterful feat of imagination, and was an Apple bestseller. But when Lord British prepared his sequel, he let it be known that he wished to leave his current publisher—who, he said, was not paying him all his royalties.
He was deluged with offers from software houses. Though he was only twenty at the time, Lord British was no stranger to pressure situations: his real name was Richard Garriott, and he was the son of Skylab astronaut Owen K. Garriott. He’d known and enjoyed the reflected limelight of his father’s fame, especially when his Skylab 2 was aloft and the family seemed the focus of the world’s attention. Richard had grown up in the engineering-intensive Nassau Bay area of Houston and had gotten into computers in high school, where he convinced his teachers to allow him to take private classes in programming. His curriculum was writing games.
In many respects, he was a well-adjusted, all-American boy. On the other hand, he would stay up all night on the Apple Computer in his bedroom. “Once the sun came up I’d realize how late it was and crash right there on the spot,” he later explained. He had long held an interest in fantasy role-playing games and was particularly fascinated by medieval culture, belonging to a club called the Society of Creative Anachronisms. While a freshman at the University of Texas, he joined the fencing team but was really much more into swashbuckling—free-swinging, climbing-on-table, Errol Flynn-style sword-fighting. He wanted to merge his two interests and attempted to make a computer game that would do it. After writing for months, he completed his twenty-eighth game and named it Alkabeth, and was astounded when a publisher who happened to see one of the copies that Richard sent to friends for free offered to publish it and send him money. Why not? He requested the pseudonym Lord British because some kids at a computer camp once teased him that he sounded as if he’d come from England (he didn’t).
Alkabeth made enough money for several college educations. His next game, Ultima, was more ambitious, and with his six-figure royalties he bought a car, established fat Keogh and IRA accounts, and invested in a Houston restaurant. Now he was considering real estate.
Garriott saw his follow-up as something special. He had learned machine language especially to write it and was dizzy with the new power it gave him: he felt that it enabled him to see the memory, the microprocessor, the video circuitry . . . you understood what each bit did and where the data lines went. And the speed it gave you was incredible. Only with this power could he bring Ultima 2 to fruition. Because, in Ultima 2, Richard Garriott was writing a true epic, one that enabled the player to do more than any player of a computer game had ever done before. He insisted that some of these abilities be listed in the box in which the program was sold:
Seize Ships
Hijack Airplanes
Travel Throughout the Solar System
Clash with Innocent Bystanders
Be Pursued by KGB Agents
Get Accosted in Dark Alleys
Battle Pirates on the Open Sea
Be Seduced in a Bar
Dine at Your Favorite Restaurant
Meet Prominent People Within the Computer Industry
Cast Magical Spells at Evil Creatures
Visit the Castle of Lord British
Explore Deep Dark Deadly Dungeons
Burglarize Merchants
Slay Vicious Creatures
Charge Through Impenetrable Forces
Grow to Wield the Most Powerful Magic Known to Man
Garriott had embodied the metaphor of the computer—creating and populating a private universe—into a game which allowed the player to live in the world of Lord British’s imagination. Moving the character that you created by designating personality traits, you gained powers, tools, transportation craft, weapons . . . and among the murderous Orcs and evil wizards, you might also chance upon characters based on real people, many of them friends of Richard Garriott’s—characters who, in keeping with their real personalities, would give you cryptic information that helped to solve the riddle.
Richard Garriott might have displayed Joycean ambition and intricacy, but he admittedly lacked literary skills: “I can’t spell, have no grammar techniques, and have read less than twenty-five books in my life.” This embarrassed him at first, but now he told himself that the computer was a viable artistic form. And in peddling Ultima 2 to a new publisher, his prime concern, besides a nonnegotiable thirty percent royalty rate, was that the package and marketing be artistically consistent with the virtuoso computer program contained therein. This would require a large, professionally illustrated box, a cloth map of the universe with lines designating time warps, special cardboard cards holding the dozens of commands available to players, and an elaborate, oversized manual in which each of the sixteen pages resembled a faded sheepskin document.
None of these demands discouraged software publishers from attempting to sign this most bankable of hackers. Ken Williams pursued him relentlessly, smelling bestseller. After flying the young author to Oakhurst, he agreed to all of Lord British’s demands, even the thirty percent royalty. Ken Williams wanted him to sign then and there, and, Garriott later said, “got all huffy at the fact that I wasn’t going to sign anything [that day].” But after he returned to Texas, Garriott did sign. “I couldn’t see a reason not to.”
Now, after months of delay, some due to an unexpectedly long debugging peri
od (there has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in the history of computers), some due to the fact that the cloth maps were ordered from a firm in Iran, which was suddenly closed off to American commerce after the hostage crisis, the program was complete.
Garriott had the game in hand at Applefest; festooned in gold chains and a suede-and-leather tunic, the tall, brown-haired, angular-featured Texan drew crowds to the On-Line booth as he unveiled his masterpiece. The people could not believe their good fortune as they gathered around the twenty-one-year-old Garriott, who was casually demonstrating how they might find occasion in Ultima 2 to travel to Pluto. This is the guy who wrote Ultima! Back orders for the $59.95 program numbered in the tens of thousands; Richard Garriott expected the first royalty check for Ultima 2 to be bigger than the sum of checks he had previously collected for game authorship. He would have been a very happy young man, except for this one problem that was preventing Ultima 2 from being released that very weekend. The problem was Mark Duchaineau. He had not copy-protected the program, and it was not clear that he would.