You

by Austin Grossman

  Only one corner remains free. The moment you, Leira, take a seat there, time accelerates. In the space of a few seconds the sky outside dims to blue-black, a yellow crescent moon surges into view, and twinkling stars appear. It’s approaching midnight, and most of the regulars have left. The fire burns low, but the four travelers haven’t moved from their corners yet.

  The image fades out with the words,

  AND SO THE FOUR TRAVELERS MADE A SACRED VOW, TO FIND AND DESTROY MOURNBLADE, AND TO RECOVER THE HYPERBOREAN CROWN OF THE KINGS OF OLD.

  THIS WAS THE DAWN OF THE THIRD AGE, THE QUEST FOR THE RESTORATION OF THE WORLD.

  It’s only when you finish the entire damned Realms of Gold III and start on the next one that you see one of the deep truths of the WAFFLE engine. Because when you type rogiv.exe, you get the prompt Import rogiii.dat?

  Lorac reached in and depressed the Y key with one long, stained fingernail, then gave me a long look, as if to say, “On this everything depends.”

  When played in order, each game imports the previous game’s end state. Which is to say, if a character found a unique item or a highly developed skill in add-on packs like the House of the Unborn Duke, that item or skill will be present in his or her character sheet at the beginning of Forbidden Tales. It was an odd idea but not unheard of, and it lent the game the quality of an Icelandic saga or a long-running soap opera. It even seemed as if the Heroes’ AI files noted certain experiences. As a player you never controlled more than one Hero at a time, and the Heroes you weren’t using were programmed to act reasonably autonomously while following you around—to fight when attacked, collect useful valuable items, and (usually) avoid walking off cliffs. After Prendar and Brennan were tricked into fighting each other in Elven Intrigue, Prendar never again healed Brennan in battle or even walked near him in the lineup.

  I thought about how that was supposed to play out. They were video game characters. They’d been sentenced to run and jump for their entire lives, to quest and fight in causes not their own. Longer than their whole lives, because they’re going to die and be resurrected forever. They’re pieces in a cosmic game, and they know it. They can only do what you tell them.

  In the tavern, they fall into conversation, haltingly at first. War stories, mostly. They’ve all heard the same story, told around the campfires of an army that marched west to the Elder Wars and the lost crown. The story of the king who fled south from Shipsmount when the dragons first came, who journeyed to the White Mountains and never returned, leaving his crown there. That crown was worn by the kings who built the walls that once surrounded this city, the kings who ruled before the great crash at the end of the Second Age.

  And what brought that on? Brennan describes the aftermath of the battle, to which he arrived too late. Bodies piled high around a king, who died afraid. Mournblade, the cursed blade that is a cancer, the black sword, the black temptation that makes any wielder an immortal killer while slowly eating him or her alive.

  Already the necromancer in the east and the merchants’ convocation, as well as any number of petty nations and warlords, were at work tracing it. Mournblade had proven itself a weapon to devastate armies and murder sovereigns on the battlefield. And who would stop it from ravaging the world forever, for all the ages to come?

  The fire dies and you, Leira, stumble to bed, still thinking of the feast days, which matter less than they used to, and the mean look in merchants’ eyes, and cheap, ill-made goods, and the feeling that one man cannot trust another, and what force, if any, can repair the broken world.

  But it’s awkward in the morning. The four of you are in the tavern common room, the two southerners sitting together silently, Prendar and the wizard off in separate corners eating the gray oat mush the tavern offers. Without the firelight’s warm tones and flickering shadows, the room seems smaller. The stone floor is filthy, and the smell of urine cuts through the smoke.

  The spell of last night is gone, and the remembered intimacy is embarrassing now. It would be easy to nod and step outside and keep walking, all the way up to Shipsmount in a day and a half, but somehow nobody does. You don’t want to forget about how it felt to talk about the crown. Everyone is waiting for everyone else.

  The bearded man stands to go. You clear your throat. You’re lousy at breaking the ice.

  “Where are you bound, mageborn?”

  “West, perhaps, across the mountains, maybe. If it matters to you.”

  “I might be going that way,” you reply. You sound younger than you mean to, and you hope he doesn’t notice. The last thing you need is another father figure.

  The scarred man stands up and says, a little too eagerly, “We’re walking that way ourselves. To Orenar, perhaps, before the winter closes the pass.” He wears chain mail, and the hilt of his longsword is wrapped closely with fine wire, a journeyman’s sword.

  “A strange chance, but mayhap a fortunate one,” you add.

  “I’m Brennan,” says the swordsman to the room, pausing briefly, as if we might have heard the name.

  “Leira,” you say.

  “Lorac.”

  “Prendar.”

  I can feel them even though they’re not real, they’re not even fictional characters. They’re simultaneously less and more than real characters. Less because they don’t have real selves. They don’t have dialogue, or full backstories. They’re just a bunch of numbers. They’re vehicles or tools players use. They’re masks.

  But more because part of them isn’t fiction at all, it’s human—it’s their player half. It’s you. Or Simon, or Darren, or Lisa, or Matt. And I wonder what that moment is like for them, when they become playable. It must be like possession, like a person succumbing to the presence of a god or daemon. A trance, then a shuddering, as of flesh rebelling against the new presence. Then the eyes open and they’re a stranger’s. The new body is clumsy; it stumbles around, pushes drunkenly against walls and objects, tumbles off cliffs.

  But what’s it like for the god that possesses them? There’s a little bit that goes the other way. The fleeting impression of living in their world, playing by their rules.

  The Heroes swore to find Mournblade themselves and destroy it—swore by the great secrets, by the fifty-six opcodes, by the sixteen colors and three channels and four waveforms, by KERNAL, whose stronghold is $E000-$FFFF, by the secret commander of the world, whose number is 6,502.

  They didn’t know the vow would follow them through a hundred lifetimes, through the end of the Third Age and beyond. Through seven generations of console, through the CD-ROM and real-time 3-D and graphics accelerator revolutions. For that matter, they didn’t know they were characters in a series of video games.

  It was one thing to destroy Mournblade, but it didn’t have to happen right away, did it? It was hard not to think of what you could do with Mournblade’s long, black, soul-devouring weight in your hand.

  It could have all kinds of uses, Lorac thought, calculating the to-hit and damage penalties he’d suffer using a class-inappropriate melee weapon. It could be a tool for redemption, or maybe for finishing the job he’d started. He could always decide when he got there.

  Why not bring it back home to the folks, why not teach people a lesson, teach a lot of people lessons? Leira thought.

  Brennan was in fact reasonably clear with himself that he’d think about destroying Mournblade only after he pulled it from the heart of the last son of Aerion. He thought about his sad father’s humiliation. That wouldn’t happen to him. Prendar had already thought out how many people he’d have to kill per annum to keep the thing going indefinitely—if there was one thing a game character understood, it was mechanics.

  Brennan, Leira, Prendar, and Lorac were the characters, but you were the one who would decide what to do. You would come into their world, and your decisions would be the only ones that mattered. Why not take the sword, if that was allowed? Why not smash all the rules there ever were, and live forever if you could?

  Chapter Thirty


  A few weeks in, I sat down with the level designers to debug mission logic in the first third of the game. The question was, how do we keep the player involved in the story, and how do we make the story seem to unfold naturally around the player? As the players travel through the world, new plot developments must spring up seamlessly; nonplayer characters (NPCs) must react naturally to whatever players choose to do. A fiendishly complicated set of triggers, metrics, and tripwires would set the bits necessary to move all the scenery and cue all the NPCs in exactly the right way. Collectively, this apparatus was referred to as the plot clock.

  Most of all, we focused on keeping the player from breaking the illusion of reality we were projecting. There were players out there who thought of nothing else, who took every game as a challenge to outsmart the designers and do exactly that—break our game. It didn’t take long before we developed a siege mentality. Everything became about containing players in their all-out assault on the bones of our alternate reality. They wanted, deeply and viscerally, to break our world, and we needed to make it bulletproof.

  What if the player walks by and doesn’t talk to the old man? No one opens the gate until the talking takes place.

  What if the player collects all the boulders in the world and makes a giant pile and climbs over the wall? Ask Lisa.

  What if the player decides they don’t like the princess? Make the princess really nice so this doesn’t happen.

  What if the player finds all the gloves in the world and takes them back to the store and sells them and the income is enough to buy a Sword of Nullification? A large supply of gloves depresses the local glove market, so the glove sale yields diminishing returns. Also, let’s reconsider the Sword of Nullification.

  What if the player sets the store on fire, then takes everything when the owner is going into the “I’m near fire” AI behavior? The player can take the stuff, but city guards are set to hostile.

  What if the player casts Genocide on all shopkeepers? Genociding any human type results in player death.

  What if the player uses a wand of cold to freeze the sacred pool? Note: Sacred pool immune to cold.

  What if the player casts Fireproof and walks through the flame barrier? Note: Change flame shield to force barrier.

  What if the player teleports back past the doorway once it’s sealed? Teleportation requires line-of-sight.

  What if the player drops the chalice into the lava? Chalice disappears, but we spawn another chalice at the altar.

  What if the player does it again? There are infinite chalices.

  What if the player jumps off the cliff and has so many hit points that they survive, and then they bypass the entire scene with the princess and they go on to the castle and don’t know what they’re supposed to do there, and the AI doesn’t have any kind of scripting for that? Put an automatic-death trap at the bottom of the cliff.

  What if the player puts on a ring of fire resistance, casts Fireball, and the explosion hurls them over the wall, so they don’t need the key? Good for them.

  What if the player summons a genie, stands on its head, wishes for another genie from a bottle, steps onto that genie’s head, and thus builds a staircase out of the level? Add genie bottle to the list of things you can’t wish for.

  So he tells you to meet him in the cellar. Can’t he just walk to the cellar? Pathfinding.

  So then when you leave the room we just teleport him to the cellar, and it’s like he walked there? When you pass a certain radius, yeah.

  What if you double back? He’s already gone to the cellar.

  But there’s no other exit. He should have passed you, but he hasn’t. Shut up.

  What if the player kills the princess? We make her immortal.

  What if the player kills the lady-in-waiting? We make her immortal.

  Why doesn’t the player stay home and let the immortal princess and lady-in-waiting kill every single monster in the dungeon? Because the artists didn’t make any combat animations for them.

  What if the player puts a bag of holding inside a bag of holding? What if he turns it inside out? Cuts it open? Sets it on fire? Quit fucking around.

  What if the EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE ARE WE DEALING WITH HERE?

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It was becoming clear that high-end game development had a bizarrely sadistic chicken-and-egg quality. During preproduction we’d all sat around and designed a game as we’d imagined it, inventing features and game mechanics and systems and telling ourselves how much fun they were going to be. And so we’d begin building levels months before the game was actually playable. When we actually began playing the game we’d discover that everything worked entirely differently from the way we thought it would, and the things we thought would be fun weren’t; the things that were fun, on the other hand, would be things we’d never even thought about. But by then the game would mostly be built and we’d have to scramble to change everything and resign ourselves to all the missed opportunities and promise to do everything correctly in the sequel, which would take another two years to build and would have an identical set of problems. The exact same thing was true for the look of the game; half the art would be built before we had a solid idea what the renderer really looked like. Not just technical specs, such as frame rate and resolution, but the intangibles—how the light fell, how solid the shadows felt, what exact register of realism or stylization it seemed to occupy. Don said it was like we had all the problems of shooting a movie while simultaneously inventing a completely new kind of movie camera and writing the story for a bunch of actors who weren’t even going to follow the script.

  There was an arcade-style cabinet that sat in the corridor that ran between the library and the kitchen. It wasn’t a real arcade machine, but a PC running an emulator that let you choose from an encyclopedic menu of vintage arcade games, from Space Invaders to Japanese-only knockoffs of NBA Jam titles. It was the type of device I would have sold either of my parents for when I was nine. I was pretty sure it was illegal.

  Lisa was playing an old-style vector graphics game, a world sketched in plumb-straight green and red lines. It looked like Asteroids but was more complicated; there was gravity and terrain. In fact, it was a distant descendant of Lunar Lander. She scowled as she piloted a triangular ship above a hostile landscape, dodging flak, managing the fuel supply. As I watched, she picked her way through a cave system on precisely gauged spurts of acceleration. As I watched, she bombed an enemy fuel tank and her fuel meter jumped up.

  “Why would shooting their fuel give you more fuel?” I asked.

  “Do you want fuel or do you not want fuel?”

  She killed all the enemy bases and grabbed all the fuel, then jetted off into the void, while behind her the planet exploded into jagged, candy-colored shards.

  “Why does the planet explode?” I couldn’t help asking. “Was… was that necessary?”

  “Because it knows there’s a triangle out there that can take all its stuff.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  I’d long ago noticed that there was a sort of bubble in the middle of the spring schedule not connected to anything else. This turned out to be the five weeks given over to prepping the E3 demo.

  Matt and Lisa were hanging out in the Sargasso Sea of office chairs.

  “What’s E3?” I asked.

  “God, I’m glad Jared didn’t hear you say that,” said Lisa.

  “Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’s the big industry trade show,” Matt said. “Everybody demos their next-gen games for the press. Everybody—Japan, Europe, Australia, whoever. It’s a pretty big deal.”

  “It’s more than a big deal,” Lisa said. “It’s how we get funding. We need all that press to get a publisher. And we need to look like we know what we’re doing so Focus won’t shut us down. If we kick ass, somebody’s going to pay to publish our game.”

  “Kick ass. You mean, if we look like we’re way, way more fun,” I said.

  “Nobody re
ally cares if a demo is fun, to be honest. It’s about whether the graphics look good.”

  “So at least I’m off the hook.”

  “Partly,” she said. “I think half of it is, are you going to appeal to the hard-core Realms fans? But the rest of it’s going to be about bells and whistles. Graphics and stuff, showing we have the next big thing that no one else has thought of.”

  “You mean, your thing. The renderer.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Me. I’m getting us a rough version of the graphics engine at the end of this week.”

  “What does rough mean?” Matt asked.

  “Well, not fully optimized, I guess, but you can load existing data into it. We can play the levels,” Lisa said. “It will probably not crash horribly every single time.”

  “So, um, what does it look like?” I’d long since given up on making my questions sound informed, at least in the leads meeting. At least here, no one was under any illusions about me.

  “It’s like we’ll have the same world, but faster, more detailed, prettier, I guess. Except for a hundred thousand large and small problems that I can’t explain to either of you,” Lisa added.

  “We just need it to look better than everyone else,” Matt said.

  “It will,” Lisa said, but she seemed to be holding something back.

  “Yeah, but it’s going to have a new engine, too, right?” I said.

  “Everyone will. It’s one of those years,” Matt said. “Quake and Unreal, both, and whatever Sony’s doing.”

  All we had to do was put up a better game demo than everybody else, a small section of game, five minutes’ worth of gameplay, maybe, that would say everything about our game’s design, our look, our vision, and most of all demonstrate our crushing technical superiority over the opposition, which is to say everybody else in the world. Against the richest and smartest developers in the entire world, all the bearded arcade-era veterans and pissant teenagers who built their own force-feedback joysticks and all the corporate juggernauts with movie-size war chests and focus groups and market research—against them we would put Black Arts Studios, me and Lisa and Gabby and Don, and our demo.