by Steven Levy
Everyone felt horrible about Bob Davis. It was one of the first things that tipped off Dick Sunderland that On-Line was not just another company in just another industry: the very night Dick was hired, Davis was out on one of his Oakhurst crawls. Here was this ghost, this haunting blight of the computer dream, this golden opportunity missed. Like an unrelenting conscience, Bob Davis would plague his former friends with calls, often begging for money. Programmer and Jehovah’s Witness Warren Schwader, who had liked Bob despite his frequent swearing and smoking, once offered to pay his mortgage bill directly, and Bob, wanting cash instead, slammed down the phone . . . but later convinced Warren to lend him a thousand dollars.
Like everybody else, Schwader wanted to believe that Bob Davis could come back to the computer and program his way out of his drug-ridden whirlpool. Eventually they all gave up. People like steady programmer Jeff Stephenson, who tried to enroll Bob in an AA program, got disgusted when Bob began passing bad checks. “My habit ran from three hundred to nine hundred dollars a day,” Davis later explained. “I wound up driving my wife out. I tried to kick the habit twice.” But couldn’t. He asked Dick Sunderland for advances on his royalties, and when Dick refused, he offered to sell his future royalties “for a pittance,” Sunderland later said. But soon Davis’ royalties were going straight to the bank to pay off past debts. He was selling the furniture to get more money for drugs. Finally, he sold his Apple computer, the instrument of magic that had made him into somebody.
It was a relief to the people at On-Line when Bob Davis wound up in jail. Arrested at a motel. People assumed the charge was passing bad checks, but Davis himself said it was for cocaine, and that he’d pled guilty. He wanted to get into a drug rehabilitation program to start over again. He’d been trying to get a message to Ken, but Ken figured that Bob Davis was better off in jail, where he might shake the habit.
The author of the twelfth-bestselling computer game in the country, according to Softsel’s Hot List, spoke into the prison telephone and explained how he’d blown it, how he’d seen the dazzling light the computer gave, basked in it, but could not live up to it. He was in mid-sentence when the phone went dead and visitors to Fresno Jail had to go back into the night. The visitor could make out his words as he screamed them into the glass before he was led off: “Have Ken call me.”
• • • • • • • •
Bob Davis’ plight exemplified the disarray at Sierra On-Line that winter. On the surface it seemed a company approaching respectability—conglomerates still tendered buyout offers, the most recent for $12.5 million plus a $200,000-a-year contract for Williams. But underneath the veneer of a growing, thriving enterprise was nagging doubt. This was heightened by a December 1982 announcement that Atari’s sales figures of videogames had plummeted. People at On-Line and other computer game companies refused to see this as indication that the field was a fading fad.
Disorganization had only increased with Sierra On-Line’s new, unwieldy size. For instance, one game which Dick had thought compelling, a multilevel game with a mining scenario, had been languishing in the acquisitions department for weeks. The programmer called to make a deal, and by the time Dick managed to trace its path through the company, the college student who had programmed the game had given up on On-Line and sold the program to Brøderbund. Under the name Lode Runner, the game became a bestseller, named “1983 Game of the Year” by many critics. The story was an eerie parallel to what had occurred when Ken Williams had tried to sell Mystery House to Apple less than three years before—the young computer company, too muddled in management to move with the lightning-quick responses that the computer industry demanded, did not get around to expressing interest until too late. Was Sierra On-Line, still an infant company, already a dinosaur?
The conflict for control between Ken Williams and Dick Sunderland had grown worse. The newer, sales-oriented people supported Dick; most of the early employees and the programmers, though, disliked the president and his secretive management techniques. Feelings toward Ken were mixed. He would speak of On-Line spirit; but then, he would speak of the company “growing up,” as if computer software was something that required a traditionally run company, replete with business plans and rigid bureaucracy. If this were true, what did this say about the hacker dream of relying on the computer as a model of behavior that would improve and enrich our lives? It was a moral crisis that haunted all of the industry pioneers who had begun their businesses thinking that the magic technology they had to offer would make their businesses special. Mass marketing loomed in front of them like some omnipotent Tolkienesque ring: could they grab the ring and not be corrupted? Could whatever idealism existed in their mission be preserved? Could the spirit of hackerism survive the success of the software industry?
Ken worried about this: “When I used to work for Dick, I used to bitch about working eight to five [and not in the freewheeling, hacker mode]. Now I want a programming staff that works from eight to five. It’s like going from being a hippie to being a capitalist or something. I think there’s a lot of programmers [here] who feel betrayed. Like John Harris. When he came up, it was open house, my door was open anytime. He could come in, we could talk programming techniques. I’d take him places. We never did business with a contract. Didn’t need it. If we didn’t trust each other, we shouldn’t do business together. [Now] that’s changed. I don’t know what my goals are anymore. I’m not sure which is the way to run the company. Somehow, by hiring Dick, I copped out. It’s the uncertainty that bothers me—I don’t know if I’m right or wrong.”
Inexplicable events kept occurring. Like the incident in the programming office. A young man working overtime drawing computer pictures for the overdue Dark Crystal adventure game, an On-Line employee from nearly the beginning, put down his graphics tablet one day and began screaming, pounding the walls, pulling down posters, and waving a long knife at the terrified young woman who had been tracing pictures beside him. Then he grabbed a stuffed toy dog and furiously stabbed it, tearing it to shreds, its stuffing flying around the tiny workroom. The programmers in the next room had to stop him, and the young man waited quietly until he was calmly led away. Explanation: he just lost it, was all.
Hacker Jeff Stephenson, working on the secret IBM project (also behind schedule), expressed the overall frustration: “I don’t know who the company is being run for, but it’s not the authors, who strike me as the bread and butter of the company. The attitude is ‘So you’re John Harris, who needs you?’ We do. He’d made a lot of bucks for this company. But they seem to think that as long as you can get fancy packing and nice labels, it’s going to sell.”
Indeed, John Harris had noticed this trend. The talkative game designer who had written two of the most popular programs in microcomputer history was torn between loyalty and disgust at the way the Hacker Ethic was being ignored. Harris hadn’t liked the fact that authors’ names weren’t on the new boxes, and he certainly hadn’t liked it when, after he mentioned this to Dick, Dick replied, “Hold on—before we do anything, when is your next game for us done?” Quite a change from the Summer Camp days. Harris believed that the times everybody would stop working and pull pranks—like going to Hexagon House and turning everything in the house, even the furniture, upside down—were the best times for On-Line; everybody worked better and harder for a company that was fun to work for.
John Harris was also upset by what he considered the company’s retreat from high artistic standards. John took it as a personal offense if the company released a game he felt was brain damaged in some way. He was absolutely horrified at the Atari and Apple versions of Jawbreaker 2. The fact that the games were official sequels to his original game design was nettling, but John wouldn’t have minded if he’d felt the games were superbly executed. But they weren’t—the smiley faces were too big and the ends of the chutes in which the faces moved back and forth were closed. John resented the drop in quality. He felt, in fact, that On-line’s newer games in general we
ren’t very good.
Perhaps the worst thing of all about On-Line as far as John was concerned was the fact that Ken Williams and his company had never sufficiently genuflected to what, in John Harris’ mind was the undeniable greatness of the Atari 800. He had a savage identification with that machine. John sadly concluded that at On-Line, Atari would always have second billing to the Apple. Even after the Frogger debacle, when John’s Atari version was state-of-the-art and the Apple version was relatively a mess, Ken did not seem to take the Atari seriously. This depressed John Harris so much that he decided he would have to leave On-Line for a company which shared his views on the Atari.
It was not easy. On-Line had been good to John Harris. He now had a house, respect, reporters from People magazine coming to interview him, a four-wheel-drive truck, a projection television, a hefty bank account, and, after all those travails from Fresno to Club Med, John Harris now had a girlfriend.
At a science-fiction convention, he’d run into a girl he’d known casually in San Diego. She had changed since then—“She looked great,” John would later recall. “She lost weight and had got a nose job.” She was now an actress and a belly dancer in Los Angeles. She had even been asked to dance, John explained, at the most prestigious belly dancing location in Hollywood. “In San Diego, she’d always seemed to be with someone else; this time she wasn’t. She paid more attention to me than [to] anyone else. We spent nineteen out of the next twenty-four hours together.” He saw her often after the sci-fi convention; she would stay at his house for weeks, and he would go to L.A. to see her. They began to talk of marriage. It was a happiness that John Harris had never known.
He knew that his mentor Ken Williams had been instrumental in bringing about the change in his life. It would seem logical, then, that John Harris, harboring these deep doubts about the company with which he was so closely identified, would have taken his objections directly to Ken Williams. But John Harris could not bring himself to talk to Ken about how close he was to leaving On-Line. He no longer trusted Ken. When John would try to explain why he felt cheated by On-Line, Ken would talk about all the money John was making. At one point, Ken told a reporter from People that John was making $300,000 a year, and when Harris had tried to correct that figure, Ken had embarrassed him by giving John his most recent royalty check. The four-month check (Harris was paid monthly, but sometimes would not get around to picking it up for a while) was for $160,000. But that wasn’t the point; Ken never talked about the money On-Line was making from John Harris’ work. Instead of telling Ken this, though, John would just agree with whatever Ken proposed. He didn’t know if it was shyness or insecurity or what.
So he did not talk to Ken Williams. He visited his new girlfriend and he worked on a new assembler for the Atari and visited the local arcade {setting a high score on the Stargate machine) and thought up ideas for his next game. And talked to the people at Synapse Software, a company that took the Atari 800 seriously.
In fact, Synapse was almost exclusively an Atari Home Computer software company, though it was planning to do conversions to other systems. The games Synapse produced were full of action, explosions, shooting, and brilliantly conceived graphics. John Harris considered them awesome. When he went to visit them in Berkeley, he was impressed that the programmers were catered to, that they swapped utilities and communicated by a company-run computer bulletin board. When John Harris found out from a Synapse programmer that part of a sound routine on one Synapse game had been literally lifted out of the object code from a copy of the Frogger disk stolen from John at the Software Expo—that theft which had plunged John into his deep and painful depression—he was less angry at the violation than he was delighted that a Synapse hacker had gone through his code and found something worth appropriating. Synapse promised John that he would get all the technical support he needed; he could join their community of programmers. And they offered a straight twenty-five percent royalty. In short, Synapse offered everything to an Atari hacker that On-Line did not.
John agreed to do his next project for Synapse. On-Line’s software superstar was gone.
John was sitting in his house wondering how to tell Ken Williams when the phone rang. “Earth,” John answered, as usual. It was Ken. John was flustered. “I’m programming for Synapse now,” he blurted out, in a tone that Ken took to be insufferably cocky. Ken asked why, and John told him because they were offering twenty-five percent royalty instead of Ken’s twenty percent. “That was kind of stupid,” Ken said. But John had many things to say. In a rush, he began to finally say all the things to Ken about On-Line that he’d been too intimidated to say before. Even more things than he’d previously thought of: John later would shudder at the memory of it—telling the president of the company that had done so much for him that the company’s products were garbage.
John Harris, with all his lost programs, quirky source codes, perfectionist delays, and Atari 800 chauvinism, had been the hacker soul of Sierra On-Line. He had been both the bane of Ken Williams’ existence and the symbol of Ken’s accomplishments. His closeness with Ken had been representative of the new benevolence that companies like On-Line would substitute for the usual chasms between boss and worker. Now John Harris was gone, having delivered a jeremiad on the way On-Line had abandoned its original mission. What he left behind was Frogger—for weeks now the bestselling program on the Softsel Hot List.
• • • • • • • •
Far from being shaken by the loss of John Harris, Ken seemed ebullient in the aftermath. It was as if he had not been crowing several months back that John Harris’ name on an Atari program would sell games. Ken was certain that the age of the independent game-hacking auteur was over: “I think I have a view of authors which is different from authors’ views of authors, and I pray I’m right. Which is, the [hackers] I’m dealing with now just happen to be in the right spot at the right time. John Harris was. He’s a mediocre programmer who’s not creative at all who happened to be programming Atari at the right time.”
Instead of a hacker wasting time trying to make a product perfect, Ken preferred less polished programs that shipped on schedule, so he could start building an ad campaign around them. Not like Frogger, which was held up because one day John Harris decided he just didn’t want to work. “You can’t run a business on people who get depressed when their stuff gets stolen. You need people who will deliver when they say they will, at the price they say they will, and are able to work their problems out by themselves. John Harris wants you to go drinking with him, get on the phone, go to Club Med, get him laid. I’m a real expert on John Harris and his emotional problems. I wouldn’t want to be basing my 1983 game plan and placing orders for $300,000 in ROM cartridges based on a game John Harris is supposed to deliver. If his girlfriend didn’t like him, or said he was bad in bed, he’d be gone.”
“If you can do [Frogger] with the silly talent we have in place, imagine what’ll happen when we have a real company in place. We’ll be unstoppable. If I go on depending on guys who could leave me at any minute because somebody’s offering more, or could suddenly quit working one day because their girlfriends are seeing somebody else, then the company’s doomed ultimately. It’s just a matter of time. I have to get rid of the crybabies.”
To Ken, software, the magic, messianic, transmogrifying, new-age tool, had come to that. Business. Cut off from his own hacker roots, he no longer seemed to understand that the hackers did not make decisions based on traditional business terms, that some hackers would not consider working for companies where they did not get a warm feeling, that some hackers were reluctant to work for companies at all.
But then, Ken did not care very much at all what hackers thought. Because he was through with them. Ken was seeking professional programmers, the kind of goal-oriented people who approached a task as responsible engineers, not prima donna artistes hung up on getting things perfect and impressing their friends. “Good, solid guys who will deliver,” was the way Ken put it.
“We’ll lose our dependence on programmers. It’s silly to think programmers are creative. Instead of waiting for the mail to come, for guys like John Harris to design something, we’re going to get some damn good implementers who aren’t creative, but good.”
Ken felt he had already found some latent game wizards who’d been buried in corporate programming jobs. One of these goal-oriented pros Ken recruited was a local programmer for the phone company. Another was a Southern California family man in his forties who had worked for years doing government contracts using digital imagery, he said, “with obvious military implications.” Another was a rural Idaho vegetarian who lived with his family in a wooden geodesic dome.
On Ken went, trying to replace the hackers with professionals. He already deemed the great experiment taking place in the old office on Route 41, where he attempted to turn novices into assembly-language programmers, an overall loser. It took too long to train people, and there was really no one around who had both the time and the technical virtuosity to be a guru. Finding enough assembly-language programmers was tough, and even a dragnet of headhunters and classified ads could not guarantee the winners Ken needed in the next year. He would need many, since his 1983 game plan was to release over one hundred products. Few would involve original creative efforts. On-Line’s programming energy instead would go into converting its current games to other machines, especially the low-cost, mass-market, ROM-cartridge-based computers, like the VIC-20, or Texas Instruments. On-Line’s expectations were stated in its “strategy outline”: “We believe the home computer market to be so explosive that ‘title saturation’ is impossible. The number of new machines competing for the Apple/Atari segment in 1983 will create a perpetually new market hungry for the winning 1982 titles. We will exploit this opportunity . . .”