You

by Austin Grossman

  When the new renderer came online, no one else was allowed to see it at first; Matt had it installed on Don’s computer in his office, and the four of us—Matt, Don, Lisa, Gabby, and I—sat down to look at what Lisa had made us.

  The renderer is simply the part of a game’s software that displays the world; it stores all the data, all the models, all the terrain, all the textures; it knows where they are and where the point of view is, and draws them on the screen in proper perspective. A better renderer will draw more detail in less time—more complex 3-D objects, higher-resolution textures. If possible it will offer a little flash, tricks like mirrored surfaces; silvery, liquid water; translucent polygons; realistic-looking fire, showers of sparks, mists. Multiple light sources, colored lights, moving light sources. Objects that cast shadows. And always, more detail drawn faster. Every year game companies add new features that make the otherworld that much more invitingly, lusciously real. Part of it is just programmers wanting to make other programmers think, “How the fuck did he do that?” Part of it is that sensation, that “pop,” every time you see the game world drawn realer than before, that shift to sharper detail that makes everything that was the state-of-the-art ten seconds ago look dowdy, blurry, and a bit sad—it’s that “pop” that makes you that year’s new hot game and makes it more likely that retailers will stock your game instead of other people’s.

  Lisa’s renderer was… odd.

  It was certainly fast. It handled the gnarliest, most convoluted sections of the world without any visible slowdown. Matt panned across a broad, expansive scene of assembled warriors, distant trees and castles, a nightmarish number of polys, and Lisa’s renderer just shrugged it off without thinking. It did what we needed it to—it was fast enough to let you forget it was just drawing a bunch of data; it felt like a camera looking into the world we had built, a world you were suddenly part of, immersed in.

  But it wasn’t the next-gen tech everyone was expecting. It was almost as if it didn’t want to be. The problem facing realistic real-time computer games is that the real world isn’t a bunch of polygons, it’s rounded and rough and lumpy, and computer games do their best to mimic this, even though it’s the thing they are basically the worst at doing. They’ll use cleverly drawn textures and soft focus and tricky shading and anything else possible to make their world seem just as curvy and squashy as the real one. The world Lisa showed us was overtly angular—faceted, like crystal. The hard planes in the geometry were too apparent. It was all technology, no art. It looked a little like the graphics demos we would occasionally receive from autodidact would-be game programmers, a surprising number of whom lived in former Soviet-bloc nations. They’d have a characteristic look, garishly colored miniature jewel-toned labyrinths built solely to show off their particular arsenal of tricks—giant rotating mirrors and fountains of sparks and glistening waterfalls.

  Lisa knew all the tricks, but she seemed to have deliberately turned most of them off. She clearly had some translucency going, and shadowing and specular highlights (the sharp glints you get off metal or water), but she didn’t bother with some of the smoke-and-mirrors stuff.

  But the more I looked at it, the more it seemed to have its own style of beauty. In its own way, it was like nothing I had ever seen before.

  Whatever else it did, it didn’t strain for effects it couldn’t quite produce. One of the paradoxes of 3-D game technology is that the closer games get to looking as realistic as film, the more they want to just get there, and as a result they spend a lot of time in the uncanny valley, a concept that Gabby taught me. The idea of the uncanny valley is that when you draw people, there are two ways to do it well. You can draw something really simple, such as a smiley face, and it looks okay; or you can have a very detailed and realistic human face, such as a photograph or a Renaissance painting, and that looks okay, too. But in between those two extremes it starts to feel creepy, the way a department-store mannequin does—not obviously unreal or cartoony, but not real enough to seem like a portrait of a real person. Uncanny.

  We’d left behind the world of arcade games, with their tiny little icons jumping around; and the technology was moving toward becoming as realistic as the movies. But right then, we were hanging around in the middle, straining to look as good as movies do—good enough to compare ourselves to film, but not looking as real as they do. It was an uncomfortable place to be. Even the flashiest games of any given year only make you want next year’s version sooner. In a way, the earliest arcade games were more comfortable being games.

  Lisa’s renderer showed a world that looked… solid. There was nothing it drew that wasn’t legitimately there in the game world—no fake foliage, no doors that were drawn on walls that you couldn’t open. There was a curious, solemn music to it. It didn’t look like anything else. And—thank God—it started up really fast. You ran it and you were in the game.

  “Huh,” Don said. I could see it through his eyes—or, rather, I could see him seeing it through the shareholders’ eyes. It wasn’t going to do the job; at least not by itself. The rest of us were going to have to work.

  At the end of five weeks, Lisa was curled up in a sleeping bag under her desk. The people working nearby were keeping a respectful silence; the previous night she’d gotten the sky done in a single, heroic fourteen-hour burst of programming. The thing now displayed animated clouds and an incandescent sun that whited out the viewpoint if looked at too long. The sun took ten minutes to pass from one horizon to the other, followed by two mismatched moons that spun overhead through the Endorian night. Both were lumpy and heavily pockmarked, as if battered from too many arcane celestial combats or manifestations of divine wrath.

  We were ready, just about. I’d singled out the twenty-minute sequence that ran the engine through its paces, demonstrated at least three of our modes of gameplay (stealth, combat, 3-D movement), and formed its own tidy little dramatic and narrative arc. I’d played through it at least forty times. Not everything was finished, but Lisa and I had hacked together some crude workarounds to make it work as the finished game would. Everything was going to go fine, as long as I followed the script exactly.

  I watched a rental car pull into the lot at eight fifty-five, tires crunching the oak leaves no one ever swept out of the lot. With his thick black hair brushed straight back from his forehead, pink button-down shirt open at the collar, and navy blazer, he looked like a high school kid dressed up as an executive for a theater production. But if they wanted, Focus could shut us down tomorrow and cut their losses. I was sure it had been talked about.

  “I’m Ryan from Focus Capital. Great to meet you all.”

  He shook hands with each of us in turn—Don, Lisa, Gabby, and me—and there was a rapid exchange of business cards. I had never given my business card to anybody before.

  I wasn’t sure how to dress for the meeting. In the end I decided they would want people who looked like a hacker would look in a movie—T-shirt and jeans, unwashed hair. I tried to oblige, but when I checked myself in the washroom mirror I looked more like one of the runaways that hang around Harvard Square.

  We went to the conference room, where Matt had set up the demo machine, which was about 30 percent faster than anything we developed on and by far the most expensive computer in the office.

  I’d been told that Ryan was there as part of due diligence, mostly just to see if we were there at all or if we had stripped the office of its furnishings and fled in the night. But it was clear that he wanted to see the game. He didn’t have any games expertise, but that probably wouldn’t stop him from having an opinion, because everyone everywhere has an opinion about whether they’re having fun and why. In practical terms, he could tell us, “Make the lead character a lovable puppy or else we’ll shut you down.”

  Don gave a presentation, talking about our strict adherence to the schedule, our bare-bones budget reduction. He ran through a short list of competing games also slated to come out near Christmas, and ticked off the three USPs�
��unique selling points—that would distinguish us from other games. After hours of discussion we had decided that these were the game’s high-res textures, its advanced simulation techniques, and its epic story, set in the award-winning Realms of Gold universe.

  Don spent twenty more minutes performing the timeworn routine game companies always recite to investors, the story of how they are conquering the world. Precipitous growth of the market through the 1990s, “fastest-growing sector of the entertainment industry,” “young male demographic,” and the inevitable clincher, “In the coming year, video game revenues will equal or exceed that of the motion picture industry.” Everyone had heard it before, but it felt good to say it. He made it sound like—against the evidence of the senses—everyone who had ever touched the game industry was rich. The truth, however, is that games are ridiculously expensive and only the top few games in a given genre make significant money. But whatever happens, we’re still the future of entertainment, right?

  I walked Ryan through the level, just as I’d rehearsed it, pausing for slow, cinematic pans over the most impressive areas of the city—the palace, the merchant’s tower. He watched, as passive as if the scene had been on TV. Exactly twice he gave a tiny nod and a “hm” sound—once when I shot a fire arrow into a group of soldiers and once when we cut to the animation of the princess giving her congratulations speech. He didn’t ask any questions.

  He thanked us, then he and Don went into Don’s office for an hour-long meeting while the rest of us pretended to work. I later learned the meeting consisted of Ryan making two points: “Add more fire arrows” and “Make the girl fall in love with you.”

  Realms of Golf (1992)

  “Oh, Jesus,” Don said. “Do you have to play that? We lost so much money.”

  “I have to,” I explained. “I’m playing all of them.”

  The half elf sliced the fourth hole approach shot badly. “Again!” he shrieked. If only the multiverse hadn’t been depending on him.

  The game opened on the immortal foursome dressed incongruously for a pleasant day’s play, Leira in a particularly fetching miniskirt, all at the start of what appeared to be an ordinary eighteen holes. The initial interface wasn’t very different from a normal reflex game.

  But starting at the second hole, playing conditions began to degenerate, as the grass thickened and became disturbingly animate. Farther along, a hole was revealed as the eye of a monstrous beast; skeletons emerged from the putting green; fairways twisted and vanished through wormholes or became battlegrounds for contending armies or became boards for absurd alien chess games the characters were forced to play through. In the back nine they began to be dogged by a lone rider who swatted their drives with a broadsword and broke their concentration with arrows. There were bogeys.

  No one, it turned out, wanted this game. Golf games were Father’s Day presents, by and large, but it wasn’t clear whose father this one was intended for. But I dutifully played through, facing down the dark rider, who proved to be Death himself, who had gathered the Heroes there so that they could compete for his favor. At the conclusion, the foursome went their separate ways without saying good-bye, as if to say, “Let us never mention this sorry episode again.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Don lay on his back in the lounge. I sat on a beanbag chair.

  “We can’t just say, ‘Draws prettier,’ ” he said. “We need a buzzword, like… GameScaping. TooReal picturation algorithms.”

  “You can’t just make up a word,” I said.

  “Pentium isn’t a word,” he replied. “That’s why they could copyright it.”

  “Cineractive immersion. Next-gen caliber market ration.”

  “The new name for adventure is… Trillionth.”

  “But… it is going to be better looking, right?” I asked. “Like, better than Quake II? And that Half-Life thing they’re doing?” I’d seen pictures in CGW.

  He sighed. “Lisa’s working on it. I honestly haven’t looked at what she’s doing yet. But even if we are better, it’s not enough if nobody hears about it. I mean, we could be really fucked if this doesn’t work out. People don’t know what kind of margin this company operates on.”

  “Why don’t they know? And, um, what kind of margin does it operate on?” I asked.

  “It’s my job not to tell them. That’s, like, half of my job.”

  “I thought we were next-gen. How are we not next-gen?”

  “We are, we are. Sort of. I was just hoping…”

  “What?”

  “So okay, I have a theory. Simon put us a decade ahead of the competition when he was fifteen years old, right?” he said. “I mean, in a way we’ve been next-gen for the past thirteen years because of the WAFFLE engine. Simon ported that code but we didn’t replace it, ever.”

  “Simon was pretty fucking smart,” I said.

  “That’s the thing. You remember how Simon was. And you weren’t here, but he just got more that way. He was just too smart and too driven to have stopped there. And he worked all the time, he just didn’t always show it off.”

  “Maybe he just burned out,” I said. I wanted to tell him about the phone call. Or the dreams, but that seemed stupid.

  “I refuse to believe that Simon did his most interesting work as a junior in high school and then… nothing. I don’t know what it is, but Simon didn’t just sit around. He’d walk around and hack on things, spot-fix issues with the WAFFLE API, tinker with the latest renderer. And then he’d just be in his office coding without an explanation.”

  “You checked his machine, right?”

  “That’s just it, there was nothing. Once in a while I’d notice WAFFLE’s file size had changed and there were time stamps for recent changes, and maybe it would… feel different, but you could never tell. It’s not like Simon had a change log. And he spent a ton of time on his own stuff.”

  “So maybe… WAFFLE is next-gen right now, and we don’t even know about it.”

  “Huh. I guess we could just say that in the press release. Who’d even know?”

  “Have you looked?” I asked. “Hidden improvements? Undocumented features?”

  “God, did we.” Don sat up and shook his head. “Darren hated WAFFLE. He kept hiring guys to try and replace it. Every six months he’d have a new programmer in—some eighteen-year-old, and you know the way he is, he’d say, ‘This is the guy! This is the guy!’ He has that way of making you think you’re the smartest guy in the room. Guys would drop out of college just for the chance.”

  “To be the next Simon.”

  “Like Toby, he was one of those. None of them got it, not even close, and they’d burn out. Not dumb guys, I’m not saying that. But their version was too slow, too random. It didn’t feel like a world.”

  “Yeah.” I could see it. We all cared about games for our own reasons, but Simon was plugged into something extra. Simon had, in his way, taken on reality itself. He hadn’t hedged his bets. I remembered visiting the Pantheon in Rome. The inscription above Raphael’s tomb said, as my classics-literate roommate translated, “Here’s Raphael. While he lived, Nature herself feared he’d outdo her; but when he was dying, Nature thought she’d die, too.”

  Before we left for E3, Don confided in me that the only reason Black Arts was still running at all was the money Darren had paid to license the Clandestine intellectual property. That night, I dreamed that Lorac the wizard leaned over my bed to whisper in my ear.

  He said, “Everything is changing.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  We set down at Hartsfield-Jackson airport around eleven forty-five at night. Lisa managed to get some sleep on the plane, but I was studying my speaker’s notes for two days from now. At one thirty in the morning we met and walked together down the connecting corridor from the hotel to the convention center. I tried to do a cartwheel and failed. I felt like I was finally living. We were showing at E3 1998. We were really in it. At least there’s this, I thought. I didn’t finish law school, bu
t I’m part of this.

  We finished at six in the morning and woke up twenty minutes before the show floor opened at nine. I sat on the edge of the bed, leaning over, hugging myself. My body kept making these small spasms, a mini laugh or sob or heave. After a minute or two I felt ready to stand upright.

  No point in changing one Black Arts T-shirt for another, so I put on my show tags and jeans while Matt did the same. The sunlight on the sidewalk was blinding, but the warmth calmed down the fatigue-shuddering.

  I was waved through security and wobbled up a wide flight of stairs to the cavernous Georgia World Congress Center. There were tiny plastic cups of coffee on long tables in the convention center hall. By the time I made it to the show floor I had managed to achieve an almost pleasurable remoteness from whatever I was feeling. I was going to be functional. I made it to the show floor in time, but it took me ten minutes to find our booth, where Don glared at me a little. Lisa had left only a little while ago, after making sure the demo could run for a half hour straight.

  We’d convinced Focus to pay for a small plot in Exhibit Hall C, near an entranceway for maximum traffic. We had a space about ten feet by fifteen feet against one wall. There was a plastic-molded-stone archway and two computers inside, one running Solar Empires, the other Realms of Gold. It had looked a lot larger last night. The hall was, in football-field math, maybe three long and one and a half wide. We were lost in it.