by Steven Levy
It was another sign that the Brotherhood was not inviolate. Things were bigger now than personal friendships. Now that the companies of the Brotherhood were more like real-world businesses, they were competing among themselves. The Williamses rarely spoke to people at Brøderbund or Sirius and never swapped secrets anymore. Jerry Jewell later summed it up: “We used to socialize a lot with Brøderbund and On-Line . . . now the attitude is that if you invite competitors to parties, all they’re going to do is dig up as much dirt about you as they can and try to hire your programmers away. [Socializing] gets less and less possible as the business gets more and more cutthroat. You want your competitors to know less and less what you’re doing.” It was something you had to accept.
Ken touched on this briefly when he ran into Doug Carlston on the show floor. Doug seemed to have changed the least—he was as sincere and open as he always was, the sanest in the Brotherhood. Both agreed that they should get together more, as they had in the old days, one year ago. They discussed new competition, including one new company which was entering the market with $8 million in capital. “That makes us look like toys,” said Carlston. “We got a million [in venture capital]. You got . . .”
“A million two,” said Ken.
“You gave up more. We gave up twenty-five percent.”
“No, we gave up twenty-four.”
They talked about Sirius Software’s no-show at the Applefest—another indication that the action was switching to trade-only shows. Ken thought that Jerry Jewell’s push to mass-market cartridges was a good one, “He’ll be richer than all of us,” he predicted.
Doug smiled. “I don’t care if everybody else gets rich . . . as long as I do.”
“I don’t care if anybody gets rich,” said Ken, “as long as I get richer.”
Ken tried to throw himself into the spirit of the show, and took Roberta, looking chic in designer jeans, high boots, and a black beret, on a quick tour of the displays. Ken was a natural schmoozer, and at almost every booth he was recognized and greeted warmly. He asked about half a dozen young programmers to come up to Oakhurst and get rich hacking for On-Line.
Though they took pains to avoid the Softalk booth, the Williamses did run into Margot Tommervik. After an awkward greeting, she asked Ken if he’d seen the Dark Crystal cover.
“All I saw was the Frogger review,” he said. Pause, “I thought it was kinda nasty.”
Margot hugged him to show no hard feelings. “Oh Ken, the game was crummy,” she said. “We did it because we love you. Because your stuff is so much better than that. We expect more of you.”
“Well,” said Ken, smiling through his teeth, “didn’t you think it went beyond the game? It said all kinds of things about our company.”
Margot would not hear about it. The Williamses, though, did not consider that matter closed. To them, it was one more case of how people changed when things got big.
That night On-Line hosted a dinner at an Italian restaurant at North Beach. Ken had been talking for weeks about the potential for a good, old-fashioned night of On-Line rowdiness, but though everybody was in a celebratory mood, the affair never took off. Maybe because only two programmers were invited—Richard Garriott and Chuck Bueche—and the rest of the people were older, many of them mired in the mind-frame of sales, accounting, and marketing. There were the usual repeated toasts, and of course there was the Steel—peppermint schnapps—large swigs of it from a bottle with a metal drink-pourer attached. Many of the toasts were directed to the guest of honor, Steve Wozniak. Ken had run into him that afternoon, and to Ken’s delight the legendary hacker had accepted the belated invitation to dinner. Ken Williams made a point of telling Woz about his prize possession, the most cherished tie he had to the spirit of the liberating age of the home computer: an original Apple I motherboard. Ken loved that hunk of epoxy and silicon; it meant something to him that Woz himself had hand-wired it in a garage, back in the Pleistocene era of 1976. Woz never tired of hearing about Homebrew days, and he appreciated Ken’s compliment. Wozniak smiled widely as he was toasted, this time by Dick Sunderland. The Steel went around once more.
For Woz, though, the highlight of the evening was meeting Lord British. Months afterward, he was still talking about how excited he’d been to talk to such a genius.
Dinner was followed by a hectic trip to a disco in the Transamerica building. After all that reveling, Ken and Roberta were exhausted by the time they returned to their hotel. An emergency call awaited them. There had been a fire in the A-frame wooden home on Mudge Ranch Road. Only the heroism of a baby-sitter had saved their two sons. The house, though, was severely damaged. Ken and Roberta demanded to speak to their children to make sure they were safe, and immediately drove home.
It was daylight by the time they arrived at the site where their house once stood. The children were safe, everything seemed covered by insurance, and the Williamses had planned to move anyway the following year, to the palatial home currently under construction. The fire was not the catastrophe it might have been. Ken Williams had only one lingering sorrow: the loss of a certain irreplaceable material item in the home, an artifact that meant something to him far beyond its raw utility. The fire had consumed Ken’s Apple I motherboard, his link to the idealistic beginning of the humanistic era of computers. It was somewhere in the rubble, damaged beyond repair, never to be found.
Chapter 20. Wizard vs. Wizards
In December of 1982, Tom Tatum, lanky, dark-haired, mustached, and as cool as his lazy Southern drawl implied, stood at the ballroom podium of the Las Vegas Sands. Behind him, sitting uncomfortably on a row of chairs, were ten hackers. Tom Tatum, former lawyer, lobbyist, and Carter campaign aide, now a leading purveyor of video “docusports” programming, thought he had serendipitously latched on to a jackpot bigger than that of any slot machine in the casino only yards away from where he stood.
“This is the event where Hollywood meets the Computer Age,” said Tom Tatum to the crowd of reporters and computer tradespeople in town for the Comdex show. “The ultra-contest of the eighties.”
Tom Tatum’s creation was called Wizard vs. Wizards. It was to be a television contest where game designers play each other’s games for a set of prizes. Tatum had gathered programmers from companies like On-Line and Sirius because he sensed the arrival of a new kind of hero, one who fought with brains instead of muscle, one who represented America’s bold willingness to stay ahead of the rest of the world in the technological battle of supremacy: the hacker.
Unlike Tom Tatum’s previous sports productions, which included the 1981 Maui Windsurfing Grand Prix and the Telluride Aerobatics Invitational, this Wizard vs. Wizards had the potential to draw a new audience to the docusports genre. “Only a small percentage of the population will own a Super Cross bike,” he later explained. “But when you look at people computing at home, it’s awesome.”
Obviously, the contests people cared about were now occurring in arcades and in front of Apple computers. Imagine how many would tune in to see pros compete. What’s more, as Tatum put it, “the sizzle in this show is the double whammy” of the authors themselves—those weird, sci-fi computer guys—competing against each other.
“These are the new stars!” said Tom Tatum in Las Vegas, but the new stars seemed ill at ease being paraded on a Las Vegas stage like so many misshapen Miss Universe contenders. The beauty in hackerism was Taoistic and internal, blindingly impressive when one could perceive the daring blend of idealism and cerebration, but less than compelling when presented as a chorus line in a Las Vegas ballroom. The hacker smiles were wooden, their suits ill-fitting (though a few were wearing specially made—though still ill-fitting—athletic warm-up suits). Even the most obtuse observer could divine that most of them would rather be home hacking. But with mixed motivations of curiosity, pressure from their publishers, a desire to spend a few days in Vegas, and, yes, vanity, they had come to the Sands to compete in the hottest thing Tom Tatum had ever done, with the possible e
xception, he later conceded, of the Miller High Life Super Cross Finals.
The contest would include hackers from seven companies. Jerry Jewell was on the scene with Sirius’ two most awesome arcaders. On-Line would arrive tomorrow. After the presentation, Jewell bragged to one of the competitors that one of his men might well be the world’s best videogamer. “I’ve seen him play Robotron for four hours,” he said.
The hacker was not intimidated. “You see this?” he replied in a shrieky voice, holding his hand out. “This is my Robotron blister. I usually stop after an hour because my hands are so sensitive.”
Later, in his hotel room, Jewell watched as his hackers practiced the games scheduled for the competition. Jewell was exultant about his company’s deal with Twentieth-Century Fox Games. The VCS cartridges his programmers now designed were widely distributed and heavily marketed by Fox; his was the first company of the Brotherhood to have its games advertised on television, and distributed in mass-market outlets. “It’s one thing to see your Apple product on the wall of a computer store,” Jerry Jewell was saying, “but when you see a rack of your stuff in K-Mart, you know you’ve arrived.”
Ken Williams arrived in Las Vegas in time for a pre-contest meeting that Tatum held for the twelve contestants and their sponsors. Having bounced back quickly from the fire, Williams was ready to be the only competitor in the show who was actually a publisher. He and the others drew chairs in a semicircle to hear Tatum describe the rules.
“This is a new kind of contest,” Tom Tatum addressed the group. “It wouldn’t happen except for television. It is created for television. The rules have been developed for television.” He explained that two sets of conflicting values were involved in this new kind of contest: Value One was the urge for an honest, fair competition, and Value Two was the need to do everything possible to make things look good on television. Tatum said that both values were important, but whenever the two values conflicted he would choose Value Two.
Then Tatum described the image with which the show would begin: a shot of the nighttime Las Vegas neon strip with a wizard—symbol of the hacker—looming over it, bolts of lightning streaming from his fingertips. An omnipotent New Age icon. This image seemed to impress the computer people, as did the picture Tom Tatum drew of the benefits of competing in a television event. It might boost them, Tatum said, to the status of household names. “Once this show hits and other shows start to happen, things will start to happen,” Tatum said. “You can earn income from other sources, like advertising products.”
On the morning of the television show, before the cameras were turned on, the meager audience in the Sands Ballroom was able to witness something that ten or twenty years before would have been considered beyond the imagination of Heinlein, Bradbury, or even MIT’s resident visionary Ed Fredkin. Makeup specialists casually were applying pancake makeup to the faces of antsy young computer programmers. The age of the media hacker had begun.
Tom Tatum had hired a soap opera actress, coiffed to kill and armed with a tooth-polish smile, to host the show. She had trouble with her opening line about how this was the first time in intergalactic history that the world’s computer wizards and techno-geniuses had gathered to compete; it took fifteen iterations before a take. Only then did the competition begin, and only then was it woefully clear how boring it was to watch a bunch of hackers sitting at long tables, joysticks between their legs, each with one sneakered foot curled under the chair and the other foot extended under the table, jaw slightly slack, and eyes dully planted on the screen.
Unlike more compelling forms of video competition, the programmers were undemonstrative when clearing a screen of aliens or getting wiped out by an avenging pulsar ray. Discerning spectators had to watch very carefully for grimaces or for squinty frustration to tell when a wrong move ended in a video explosion. When players were confronted with the despised GAME OVER signal before the five-minute time limit was reached, they would sadly raise a hand so one of the judges would take note of the score. A lackluster agony of defeat.
Tatum figured that this videogenic deficiency would be remedied by quick cutting, shots of the computer screens, and pithy interviews with the silicon gladiators. The interviews generally went like the one that the soap opera star conducted with Sirius’ nineteen-year-old Dan Thompson, who quickly established himself as a front-runner.
SOAP OPERA STAR: How does it feel to have such a commanding lead going into the semi-finals?
THOMPSON (shrugs): Great, I guess.
Cut! Can we do this one again? The second time, Dan did not shrug. Once more, please? By now, Dan Thompson’s digital logic and problem-solving technique had been applied to the puzzle. As soon as the question left the soap opera star’s mouth, he leaned to the mike, eyes to the camera.
“Well, it feels wonderful. I just hope I can continue this . . .” He had synthesized the superficialities of jock-speak.
Thompson, beneficiary of hours of joysticking at a Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre in Sacramento, won the contest. Ken Williams had performed admirably, considering he barely had a chance to look at some of the games before he played them; the fact that he placed sixth overall was testament to his ability to instantly get to the heart of a computer game, and the fact that at twenty-eight he still had some reflexes left.
In Tatum’s suite that night, the video impresario was beside himself. “I think we’ve seen the most revolutionary television event in years,” he said. He predicted that these hackers would capture the imagination of America—athletes who don’t take a physical beating, but emanate a transfixing intensity. He raised his liquor glass to the future of the hacker as the new American hero.
• • • • • • • •
One On-Line programmer who had shown signs of becoming a media hero was Bob Davis, the former alcoholic whom Ken Williams had elevated to the status of game author and considered a best friend. Williams had cowritten with Davis the adventure game Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and the closing lines of Margot Tommervik’s Softalk review read like a triumphal justification of Ken Williams’ decision to go into partnership with the computer to change the world:
On-Line Systems has two new winners in “Ulysses”: The adventure, which is the best from On-Line since “Wizard and the Princess”; and Bob Davis, a new author from whom we hope we’ll be seeing many new adventures.
The package Sierra On-Line sent to entice prospective authors included an open letter from Bob Davis, who told of his experience of being “bitten by the computer bug,” seeing his game go through a painless production process, and receiving royalties, “more than ample and always on time.” Davis concluded by writing: “So now I just spend my time skiing the slopes of Lake Tahoe, watching my video recorder, driving my new car and living quite comfortably in my new three-bedroom house. I strongly suggest you do the same.”
Yet not long after Ken’s return from Las Vegas, Bob Davis could not be reached at the ski slopes, behind the wheel of his car, or in his new home. He was receiving visitors only at the Fresno County jail. Davis wore a scuffed red prison jumpsuit and a haunted look. He had long, bright red hair, an unkempt red beard, and worry lines in his face that made him seem older than his twenty-eight years. Since the glass between prisoner and visitor was thick, his discussions were conducted through telephone receivers at either side of the glass.
Bob Davis had not received many visitors in his few weeks in jail. He had been trying to get Ken Williams to bail him out, so far unsuccessfully. He had gone from alcoholic to software superstar to drug-addicted convict, all in months. He had thought the computer would deliver him. But the computer had not been enough.
For a high school dropout turned boozer who secretly liked logic puzzles, programming had been a revelation. Davis found that he could get so deeply into it that he didn’t need to drink any more. His fortunes in the company rose as he headed the Time Zone project, cowrote his adventure game, and began to learn assembly language for the confounding VCS m
achine. But just as suddenly as his life had changed for the better, it began to fall apart.
“I have a little bit of trouble handling success,” he said. The heady feeling he got from a being a bestselling software author made him think he could handle the kinds of drugs that had previously made his life miserable.
There had been drugs around On-Line, but Bob Davis could not indulge with the moderation that others managed. It affected his work. Trying to learn VCS code was hard enough. But Davis’ quick success with Ulysses, written in Ken Williams’ relatively simple Adventure Development Language, had geared him to instant programming gratification, and he became frustrated. “I tried to make up excuses,” Davis later said. “[I said] On-Line was becoming too corporate for me.” He quit, figuring he’d write games on his own and live on royalties.
He had been working on a VCS game, but despite hours of trying to get some movement on the screen, he couldn’t. Though Ken Williams realized that Bob was the kind of person who got his breakthroughs only when someone guided him—“If someone’s there, he’ll be there [working] till 4 A.M.,” Ken once commented—Ken could not take the time to help his friend. Davis would try to reach Ken and tell him how unhappy he was, but Ken was often out of town. Bob would take more coke, shooting it directly into his veins. At odds with his wife, he would leave the house when shot up, all the time yearning to be home, back in the new, computer-centered life he had begun: the kind of software superstar life he had talked about in that first-person testimonial that On-Line was still including in the package sent to prospective authors.
Bob Davis would return home late at night, find his wife gone, and begin calling everyone he knew at On-Line, all the programmers’ houses, places where he knew she couldn’t possibly be, in hopes someone might know where she was. Even strangers who answered the phone would hear his plaintive voice, scraped to bare bones of panic. “Have you seen my wife?” No, Bob. “Do you know where she might be?” I haven’t seen her, Bob. “It’s very late, and she isn’t home, and I’m very worried.” I’m sure she’ll come home. “I hope she’s all right,” Bob would say, choking back sobs. “No one will tell me where she is.”