by Steven Levy
The Dungeonmaster had insisted to Dick Sunderland that his Spiradisk system would work perfectly on Ultima 2, speeding up the loading time, and substantially slowing down the pirate network eagerly awaiting the challenge of breaking it. He dismissed On-Line’s previous Spiradisk problems as insignificant. He hinted that there might be some problems copy-protecting the program without Spiradisk. Dick suspected that Mark’s arguments were motivated by his eagerness to promote Spiradisk and to collect the royalty—which would be worth over ten thousand dollars on a bestseller like Ultima 2.
Richard Garriott, his friend and fellow programmer Chuck Bueche, and On-Line’s product manager jointly concluded that Spiradisk would be too risky, Dick Sunderland called Duchaineau to tell him to copy-protect the old way. But Mark was still evasive.
Dick was furious. This odd-looking creature, this twenty-one-year-old megalomaniac Dungeonmaster, living in one of Ken’s houses, taking advantage of On-Line’s reputation to promote his system . . . now had the gall to hint to Dick that the most lucrative program of the season would not ship—because he wanted to copy-protect his way! As frightening as his threat sounded, Mark, as the sole copy-protect person, had the power to back it up—it would take weeks to bring in a replacement. What was even more frightening was that Mark Duchaineau, if he chose, could withhold his services for On-Line’s entire product line! The company could not release any products without him.
Sunderland was at a loss. Ken had not arrived at the Fest. He was still on his way back from Chicago, where he had attended the convention of pinball and coin-op videogame manufacturers. Dick did not even have the technical wherewithal to judge the validity of Duchaineau’s claims. So he recruited one of On-Line’s young programmers, Chuck Bueche, to go to the long bank of pay phones by the entrance to Applefest and call Duchaineau—not letting on that it was at Dick’s behest, of course—and get a grasp of the technicalities involved. It wouldn’t hurt, either, if the programmer softened the Dungeonmaster’s hard line.
Indeed, though Bueche was an uneasy double agent, the call seemed to break the logjam. Perhaps what made Duchaineau relent was that the call reminded him he was slowing down a process that would eventually allow users to benefit from a fellow programmer’s triumph—Mark Duchaineau was in the awkward role of a hacker trying to stop another hacker’s worthy program from getting out. In any case, he agreed to copy-protect the product, though when Ken Williams found out about the incident, his regard for the hacker Mark Duchaineau sank even lower. He later vowed to run Duchaineau out of Oakhurst in tar and feathers—as soon as On-Line could figure out how to replace him.
• • • • • • • •
For two years, the Applefest show had been the prime gathering of the Apple World companies like On-Line, Sirius, Brøderbund, and dozens of suppliers of software, add-on boards, and peripherals that ran on the Apple. It was a time to celebrate the machine that had given the Brotherhood its livelihood and inspiration, and the companies were more than happy to entertain the thousands of Apple owners eagerly immersing themselves in a sea of arcade games, printer buffers, disk drives, programming guides, joysticks, RAM cards, RGB monitors, war simulations, and hard-shell computer carrying cases. It was a time to renew the bonds within the Brotherhood, to seek new programmers, to write up orders, to let people see who you were and how you were running your own show.
But the 1982 San Francisco Applefest would turn out to be the last of the important Applefests. For one thing, On-Line and its competitors were now releasing programs for several machines; the Apple was no longer dominant. Also, the companies were beginning to see the open-to-users shows as drains on time, energy, and money—resources which could be spent on what were becoming the essential shows: the big, trade-only Consumer Electronics Shows in Las Vegas and Chicago. Where the hero was not the hacker, but the man who wrote up sales.
Still, the show was packed, one more indication of the economic explosion that had come to computers. Amid Applefest’s din of shuffling feet, voices, and electronic game noises, what emerged was a melody of unprecedented prosperity. Almost everywhere you turned there were millionaires manning booths, millionaires who only two years ago were mired in obscure and unprofitable activities. Then there were the start-ups, with smaller booths or with no booths at all, dreamers drawn by the thrilling, aphrodisiac scent emanating from the Apple World and the related world of home computers.
That smell of success was driving people batty.
People idly swapped unbelievable stories, with even the most startling high-tech Horatio Alger saga effortlessly topped by a more startling example of the boom. It was a gold rush, but it was also true that the minimum buy-in for serious prospectors was a more formidable sum than it had been when Ken Williams began. Venture capital was a necessity, obtained from the men in pinstripe suits who dined at the mediocre French restaurants in the Valley, uttered In-Pursuit-Of-Excellence koans at industry seminars (“Marketing, Marketing, Marketing”), and solemnly referred to themselves as “risk-takers.” These were intolerable people, carpetbaggers of the hacker dream, but if you could get them to wink at you, the rewards could be endless. No one knew this better than the people at the Applefest who were working to start a company called Electronic Arts. Their idea was to bypass what they regarded as the already old-fashioned practices of the companies in the Brotherhood, and establish a firm that was even newer than New Age. A company that took software into another realm entirely.
Electronic Arts had defined its mission in a little booklet directed to “software artists” they were trying to lure away from their current publishers. This prospectus sounded like something penned by an ad copywriter who had successfully merged the sensibilities of three-piece suits and top-grade Hawaiian dope. It was loaded with one-sentence paragraphs which contained words like “excitement,” “vision,” and “nontraditional.” Its true brilliance lay in the focus of its appeal—aimed directly at the hacker heart of its readers. Electronic Arts knew better than to whip up the greed factor by promising hackers enough royalties to buy cherry-red Trans-Ams and Caribbean trysts with hot-blooded software groupies. It confided instead: “We believe that innovative authors are more likely to come from people who are independent and won’t work in a software ‘factory’ or ‘bureaucracy.’” It promised to develop fantastic and powerful tools and utilities that would be available to EA authors. It vowed to maintain the kind of personal values that hackers appreciate more than money. What this would result in was “a great software company.” The implication was that as far as creative, honest, forward-thinking programmers with hacker values were concerned, there was at present no such company.
Electronic Arts was the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, who had quit his job as Apple’s director of marketing for the USA project to do this. He started the company out of an extra room in the office of a venture capital firm. Hawkins brought together a team from Apple, Atari, Xerox PARC, and VisiCorp, and, in a coup sure to charm the heart of any hacker, got Steve Wozniak to agree to sit on the board of directors.
Electronic Arts had no booth at the Applefest, but its presence was felt. It hosted a big party on opening night, and its people worked the show floor like politicians. One of them, a former Apple executive named Pat Mariott, a tall, thin, blond woman with huge round glasses and a deep tan, was enthusiastically explaining the company to a reporter. Trip started Electronic Arts, she said, because he saw how fast the business was starting to happen and he “didn’t want to miss the window.” Pat went with him because she saw it as an opportunity to have fun and, not incidentally, make money.
“I want to get rich, by the way,” she said, explaining how, in Silicon Valley, wealth was omnipresent. Everywhere you looked you saw its artifacts: BMWs, stock options, and, though she didn’t mention it, cocaine in snowdrift quantities. This was not your garden-variety, hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year wealth, either—this was Croesus Mode, where floating-point arithmetic was barely sufficient to count the millions. When
you saw your friends come into it, you thought, Why not me? So when a window into wealth opened, you naturally leapt through it. There has never been a window as inviting as that of the software industry. Pat Mariott summed it up in a whisper, quoting gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Pat Mariott hoped to kick into Croesus Mode without compromising her sixties-shaped personal values. She would never, for instance, work for a cutthroat company. Pat had been a programmer herself, experiencing hacker culture at Berkeley and the professional milieu at evil IBM. “Berkeley was truth and beauty. IBM was power and money. I wanted both,” she said. Electronic Arts seemed the way. The products and philosophy of the company would be truth and beauty, and the company founders would all be powerful and rich. And the programmers, who would be treated with the respect they deserved as the artists of the computer age, would be elevated to the status of rock or movie stars.
This message managed to find its way around the Applefest, enough so knots of programmers began gathering outside the Convention Hall for the buses that supposedly would take them to the Stanford Court Hotel, where Electronic Arts was throwing its big party. One odd group included, among others, several On-Line programmers and John “Captain Crunch” Draper.
John Draper, whose dark stringy hair was flying out in all directions, had done well by himself. During his stint in prison after he was caught using the Apple phone interface as a blue box, he had written a word-processing program called “Easy Writer,” which made him a considerable sum. Amazingly, when IBM sought a program to issue as its official word processor, it chose Easy Writer; the company that published Draper’s program had the good sense to act as intermediary with IBM, not letting on that the program’s author was the notorious Captain Crunch. Reputedly, Draper had made a million dollars from the transaction. You wouldn’t have known it from his faded jeans, his old polo shirt, and his apparent need for dental work. Mark Duchaineau regarded him with a mixture of awe and repulsion as the former phone hacker harangued him about some technical aspect of the IBM PC.
Soon, they gave up on the bus and hailed a cab. The cab driver made the mistake of smoking. John Draper almost ripped the cigarette out the driver’s mouth, demanding at the top of his lungs that all the cab windows be opened in the chilly, damp November night of San Francisco.
The hotel was quite fancy, and the hackers, in jeans and sneakers, seemed intimidated. Electronic Arts had prepared for them, though: along with a rock band playing dance music, the company had rented over a dozen stand-up, coin-operated videogames, adjusted to give unlimited free games. This was where the hackers immediately headed. As the party heated up, it was apparent that many of the industry’s biggest authors had appeared, some to check things out, others genuinely interested in this newer-than-new-age venture.
The center of attention, though, was EA board member Steve Wozniak, cited in a series of speeches as “the man who started it all.” It was an epithet that would have haunted some young genius eager to shake the past and get on to newer things, but Wozniak seemed to revel in it; for over a year now he had been traveling around the country to industry gatherings, accepting the same accolades. He had spent a considerable portion of his Croesus Mode bankroll on presenting massive rock festivals. He still fervently believed in the Hacker Ethic, and wherever he went he not only preached that gospel but set himself as an example of it. Tonight, for instance, he preached to a small group on the evils of secrecy, using Apple’s current policy as a prime example. The secrecy and the stifling bureaucracy there were such that he was not sure if he would ever return to the company built on his brainchild, the Apple II.
All in all, the party was a success, crackling with the sweet feeling that everybody was riding on the crest of a tidal wave. Were things like this in the early days of Hollywood? In the record industry in the sixties? The future stood at their feet, a blend of hackerism and untold wealth, and the aggregate impression was that history was being made right there.
The On-Line hackers left impressed. Some would sign with Electronic Arts in the following months. And one of the hackers left with a particularly satisfied grin—he had scored the high totals on Pac-Man, Robotron, and Donkey Kong. For a bestselling author, a night to remember.
• • • • • • • •
Ken Williams arrived at Applefest in a bad mood. The pinball manufacturers’ convention in Chicago had been frustrating; giant companies, particularly Atari, had thrown truckloads of money at the coin-op manufacturers to nail down first rights of refusal for the home computer version of any game that was even vaguely playable. A repeat of Frogger, which Ken had procured for a mere ten percent royalty fee, was out of the question.
Ken, traveling with Roberta, went straight to his company’s Applefest display. On-Line had taken a huge booth, situated right at the entrance, by the escalators, which would carry the masses down into the underground Brooks Hall complex. The booth featured a giant photo mural of a Sierra waterfall, emphasizing the name change from On-Line Systems. The booth also had plenty of computer-joystick-monitor combinations embedded within panels so that the hordes of computer-freak youngsters could play the latest Sierra On-Line games. The monitors were set into the panels well above eye level, so spectators could easily appreciate how deftly crafted the games were. And to draw customers to the booth, a huge projection-screen color television was hooked up to a computer which continuously played the best-selling On-Line game, Frogger. Since the Apple version did not have the continuous music and arcade-level graphics of John Harris’ Atari version, On-Line employees discreetly hid an Atari 800 computer underneath a drape, and was running that version at the Applefest: the equivalent of displaying a Japanese car at a General Motors exhibition. With all those crowds, all that hoopla, who would notice?
Two people who noticed were Al and Margot Tommervik, publishers of Softalk: they noticed right away because Frogger was not just another On-Line program to them. It represented a depressing turn of events. Like everyone who had seen John Harris’ brilliant conversion, they had been awed and delighted when they saw it earlier that year. But when they viewed the Apple counterpart soon after, they were shocked. It was awful. To Al and Margot, the miserable graphics in this version of Frogger represented at best an error, and at worst an absolute betrayal of the Apple market, which had nurtured On-Line in the first place.
The Apple World was a spiritual preserve to the Tommerviks, and it seemed that by making an inferior Apple Frogger, On-Line had contemptuously spit on the floor of this exalted preserve. Obviously, Al and Margot owed it to the rest of the Apple World to do something they rarely did in their magazine: give a game a negative review. The reviewer they assigned agreed with the Tommerviks and wrote a scathing description of the game: “It has about as much soul as month-old lettuce in the Sahara,” he wrote. “Your frog resembles a chess pawn with vestigial wings . . . the logs on the river look like they just escaped from an Oscar Meyer factory . . .”
The reviewer did not stop there. He asked what had become of the company which once stood as a “bastion of quality in a sea of mediocrity.” While giving Atari owners a great program, On-Line was giving Apple owners “a slap in the face.” Serious stuff, cutting to the heart of the Hacker Ethic, which instructs you to keep working until your hack tops previous efforts. “Have they forsaken us?” the review asked of On-Line.
Since Margot and Al had been so close to Ken and Roberta, they tried to explain the review to their friends before it appeared in the December Softalk. But they had difficulty reaching Ken or Roberta. The lines of bureaucracy were hardening at On-Line; no longer would one of the Williamses be picking up the phone. You’d get a receptionist, who would connect you to a secretary, who would take your name and your company’s number and tell you someone would return your call. If you were lucky. Finally, Al reached Ken’s brother John, who said there were reasons the game looked the way it did . . . but these reasons were never presented to t
he Tommerviks. People at On-Line were too swept up in management battles to explain.
Al and Margot had carried early copies of the magazine to Applefest with them. Seeing On-Line’s devious trick with the Atari Frogger only confirmed their belief that the review was a righteous one. They figured that after talking to Ken and Roberta, things would be amicably settled. Weren’t they all in this for the same thing? To maintain the fantastic humanistic momentum of Apple World? You couldn’t let a disagreement like Frogger affect an important mission like that.
When someone at On-Line’s booth gave Ken a copy of the new Softalk, he turned immediately to the Frogger review. Roberta read over his shoulder. They had known the review would be negative, and more or less expected some criticism of the game’s graphics, though not in such scathing language. But they had no idea that the review would go on to question whether the company, by releasing such a great Atari version of Frogger and such a pitiful Apple version, had sold out the Apple World. “Either Frogger is a mistake or a betrayal,” the review concluded. “You’ll have to make up your own mind.”
“This goes way beyond what’s fair,” Ken said. For one thing, he said, Softalk did not realize how difficult it was to do the game on the Apple as compared to the Atari. The Tommerviks had apparently chosen to attack the company—all after the Williamses had helped get the magazine off the ground when the Brotherhood was just forming. Roberta thought that this confrontation had been brewing for a while: for some reason Softalk seemed always to give On-Line short shrift. But every time Roberta asked the Tommerviks if anything was wrong, they said things were fine.
“They don’t want us in that magazine,” Roberta told Ken. “We should pull our ads.”