You

by Austin Grossman

  At eight fifty-five, the booths began to power up. What at first sounded like a very strange orchestra tuning up became a long, monstrous, rumbling crescendo, a synthesizer factory sliding down a mountainside only to collide with a monstrous pipe organ next door to a construction site inside an echo chamber. It reached a climactic, thunderous blare not unlike an eight-hour explosion or a daylong cage match between a robot and a monster truck. Every minute it seemed like it must start to die off, but it simply sustained itself, on and on.

  I didn’t have booth duty until eleven, so I set off to walk the show floor. I could see already how miscalculated our booth was. Most booths had enormous screens mounted on scaffolding along with giant-size cardboard cutouts. Microsoft had a brushed-steel pavilion. Electronic Arts had erected a full-size professional wrestling ring on the show floor. Sony had claimed a mansion-size stretch of territory, upon which twenty-five-foot plastic busts of its signature characters looked down like gods. Several booths incorporated full-size automobiles or custom-built suits of powered armor; many were stage sets of scenes from games—blighted city streets or spaceship corridors. Glittering archways coated in LEDs pulled visitors in. In that company the Black Arts booth looked tawdry and sullen. Guests wandered through like bored toddlers, whipping the mouse back and forth across the pad and gazing up at the screen, disappointed. The games were too complex, depended too much on a long investment in time and attention. No one would stay to watch a colony launch a light-sail barge and wait the few minutes to see it dock at another star. A bearded man in a canary-yellow T-shirt stayed a moment to pan the view across the forest, then dropped the mouse and filed out, ducking eye contact.

  “Let me know if you have any questions!” I shouted after him, but no one could hear anything. The booth on our left, an Atlanta company offering children’s games, had a speaker stack and a projection TV that played a video short on continuous loop, a shrill cartoon voice saying, “I’ve got the most star tokens! You can’t beat me! This will be the greatest Spin-a-Thon ever!” We heard this once every twenty seconds, which made roughly one thousand and forty times in the course of a day. On our right, four grimly serious Frenchmen had a display of looping CG film noir scenes and a patented way of branching movie narratives they couldn’t quite explain to me. Somebody else had licensed “Tubthumping.” I kept hearing the phrase “Ocarina of Time.” But most of the first day was watching conventiongoers file past, dull-eyed with overstimulation. Lacking as it did a strobe light or flamethrower, our booth didn’t even register.

  People were aware of us, that much I could tell. It was no secret that Black Arts had lost its marquee talent—not just Darren but the whole upper echelon—and had replaced them with a bunch of no-names hired off the street. The fan community was already clogging the message boards with catcalls, predictions that we were going to turn the hallowed Black Arts name into a joke, kill the Realms franchise, and ruin everyone’s memories of the early games. There was a vocal minority arguing that this had happened long ago, that anything good about Black Arts ended with Simon’s death. It didn’t seem as if anyone even knew Lisa’s or Don’s name. For the fans, Black Arts was the Simon-and-Darren show.

  I could sense the world turning. Carmack and id Software debuted Quake in 1996 and did the same trick they’d done with Wolfenstein 3D and then with Doom—they’d again become oxygen, become the standard of high-speed illusion, and their system was either being licensed or cloned twenty different ways, with different tweaks to the DNA. I knew the names of the derivatives because Matt tracked them on a whiteboard: Half-Life, Prey, Duke Nukem Forever, Daikatana. And there was already a Quake II engine coming.

  There was a rivalry I didn’t understand but that everyone talked about, in which a designer named John Romero left id Software to form another company. Jared pointed him out to me, a small, long-haired, solid guy, butting through the crowd at the head of an entourage in red-and-white T-shirts. He showed me Carmack, too, who had a Kevin Bacon squint and walked with a stiff bounce, before he disappeared into a closed-door meeting. Ours wasn’t the only world whose creators were at war.

  Four o’clock came, and even the show floor’s manic energy seemed to flag. Matt went out to collect sandwiches. A man and a woman accosted me. It took me a moment to realize they weren’t just in medieval dress—they were the first Lorac-and-Leira cosplayers I had ever seen. He was also the youngest man I had ever seen with a full beard.

  “What are you shipping on?” he asked without preamble. I soon discovered that encounters with Realms fans came with an abrupt and total sense of intimacy, as if we all knew the important things about one another and there was every reason to cut to the chase.

  “Windows only.” He gave a quick nod, as though I had confirmed a long-held suspicion.

  “Who do you play?” the girl said.

  “It’s a secret.”

  “Do you meet Lorac?” she asked. They seemed to hang on the response.

  “You meet Dark Lorac,” I said eagerly. “You meet everybody! It’s going to be awesome!”

  “Cool, man,” he said, and offered me his hand. “I’m Mark.”

  They nodded and moved on.

  On the second day, a couple of journalists quizzed me on the game’s release date and system requirements, and copied down my e-mail address. One asked for my feelings about Darren’s departure.

  “Darren is a legend in the game industry and we at Black Arts wish him well.”

  “I heard the departure was pretty sudden.”

  “I’m going to respect Darren’s wishes, obviously.”

  “You’re not feeling a little nervous, then, stepping into his shoes?” He leaned in, I guess to express the idea that the two of us were having an intimate chat. I had the feeling he was doing something he’d seen a reporter do on television, and that he was somewhere under twenty years old.

  “We—well, I think our product speaks for itself.”

  Jared had been listening, and he added, “We’re pretty nervous that Darren’s going to see our game and cry like a little bitch.”

  The reporter copied it down and thanked us for our time.

  “Come back! You haven’t seen our weapons upgrades!”

  Two or three times, I’d seen a man or woman spend ten or fifteen minutes at one of our kiosks, face carefully neutral. Not playing, exactly, but doing odd maneuvers like looking at the same object at different distances. I noticed their tags were turned around so I couldn’t see their name, title, or company, which at first I didn’t understand, but Jared explained—these were the enemy, the competition. Whatever Lisa had done, they were taking it seriously. They wanted to find out if we were a threat, if we could actually win.

  “I’m just really looking forward to this Spin-a-Thon,” Jared said.

  Ryan got all of us invitations to the different corporate-sponsored parties. Sony’s was in a parking garage and featured a band that I thought seemed addicted to doing Soul Asylum covers, until I realized they were Soul Asylum. Wasn’t one of them dating Winona Ryder? I looked around for her. Anything seemed possible. Nintendo had the B-52s.

  I was picking up on things everybody else already knew. The booths were built out of marketing budgets to impress the journalists and most of all to attract retail buyers, the representatives for Walmart and Best Buy and Software Etc. Microsoft and Sony and SEGA and Nintendo were at war, rival hardware platforms gearing up to capture the upcoming sixth-generation console market. Activision, Acclaim, Eidos, Capcom, Electronic Arts, and the other big software publishers were fighting over different pieces of the software market. The hardware giants used high-profile game releases as lures to grab market share. Mario sold Nintendo game consoles just as Sonic the Hedgehog and Soulcalibur sold SEGA consoles. I began to see how much money was involved, and that we’d lost control of the whole thing. Not that we’d ever had any. This wasn’t about kids trading floppy disks anymore. As actual game developers, we were the only amateurs in the room. We were wandering
around, thinking we were the point of it all, when the real contest had almost nothing to do with us. The grown-ups were finally in charge again. No, they’d been there all along, and I was just the last to notice.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The speaker room was just another conference room with slightly nicer snacks. Coffee, bottled water, bagels, and pastries. The other tables were occupied by small groups, mostly huddled around laptops, mostly engaged in serious conversations. All of them looked like they were making deals, or were demoing, secretly, the next big tech advance, or like they at least knew what was going on in the world. It was six thirty in the evening—dinner hour, not exactly prime time for a product demo. But then, I wasn’t exactly ready for prime time.

  That morning I’d stood in the doorway and watched for a few seconds as Darren ran through his act at the Vorpal press event. Darren was onstage with a headset mike, being interviewed by the editor of a prominent gaming magazine.

  “Simon and I were like brothers, you know? And the games we did, they have their niche, right? We love them, we really do.” There was a pause, staged or not. There was an industry rumor that Darren could in fact cry upon command.

  “But games have changed, it’s bigger now. I want to make games for everybody. It’s about more than just action, it’s about telling a story. It’s about character. We’re up against the big guys, the movies, right? We’re ready to take our place in the world. And we will, and we’re going to kick their ass. That’s right, Spielberg. I’m calling you out!”

  I left as the applause line hit and dissolved into laughter. I knew what I was up against. I knew enough to understand the media narrative they were hoping for: Black Arts Studios sells out, loses the genius duo that made it special, falls on its face. That was the story worth showing up to cover. The presentation hall itself was like an enormous engine specifically designed to leach charisma from the person speaking at the front of it. Pale bald developers dragged themselves onstage to deliver a marketing presentation with the stumbling cadence of a man dribbling an underinflated basketball.

  The hall was more crowded than I expected, about two-thirds full—two hundred people, maybe. I guessed it was an even split between hard-core franchise loyalists, people (journalists, particularly) who’d come expressly to see us fall on our faces, and people making sure they got a seat for the Sony press conference that followed us in the same venue. But there was a buzz to it. There was a narrative here, and we were going to get written up. I was going to get written up.

  A woman from IT gave me a small microphone to clip to my collar. I typed RoGVII.exe at the keyboard tucked inside the podium and pressed F8. The demo splash screen came up on-screen behind me. I torqued half around, in the awkward characteristic pose you get into, demoing a game on a screen above and behind you. The demo was on two screens, and on a third there was me. I was seeing myself on a forty-foot-tall screen. I swayed a little. I wasn’t hungover; rather, I thought I might still be a little drunk.

  “The latest game—this exciting new entry—in our award-winning Realms of Gold franchise, Realms VII: Winter’s Crown, is designed to appeal to those new to gaming and hard-core gamers alike. Whether you are new to the Realms or a longtime resident, it will offer familiar delights and a few new surprises.”

  Most of the first four rows of the hall were full, with a few stragglers standing at the edges and back.

  “The time…” It seemed a little too soft, so I started again, leaning into the microphone a little. “The time”—too loud!—“is late in the Third Age of Endorian History!”

  I gestured up at the screen showing the calligraphed words WINTER’S CROWN as the music built to a climax and the hall lights dimmed.

  The screen cleared to reveal a young woman standing in a city square, a crimson-and-violet sunset behind her. The inevitable joker in the audience gave a wolf whistle, but she wasn’t much of a pinup figure. She wore a gray cloak over worn and scratched leather armor. Her idle animations were set to “nervous,” meaning that if I weren’t issuing any commands she’d stand where she was and tap her foot, glance around, touch her sword hilt just to make sure it was hanging right. As the sun set she was illuminated more clearly by light spilling out of a tavern window.

  “As you can see here… the Realms engine has been enhanced and updated…” I panned across the square and instantly regretted it as the frame rate chugged a little while the renderer choked on all those polys. For a moment I was paralyzed by the thought that I can’t take a breath or speak a word that isn’t going to boom through the hall. The microphone felt like a bee stuck to my lapel.

  “… improved magic system… an array of weapons…” There was an agreed-on and exhaustively rehearsed list of features. In the course of the ten-minute demo I had to hit them all. I was saying something about mipmapping that a programmer had told me to point out. Did other games have it? I didn’t know.

  I didn’t know what it was, but I could feel the collective boredom of the audience. The journalists had been to, at the minimum, a dozen of these press events in the past three days, each one pushing to be bigger than the last, each one in its own way at once technically dazzling and utterly boring. Every year the technology got better but the stories were the same recycled Joseph Campbell or knockoffs of two-years-ago hit movies. When was the last time something surprising happened at one of these?

  “We’re at a point midway through the game. By the time you get here, a dozen adventures, chance meetings, and decisions brought you to this city. You could be anyone, depending on the life you’ve led and the choices you’ve made.” I underlined the words by cycling through a few different sets of possible starting conditions for this scenario, each one randomly generated.

  “It could be you…”

  We saw the exact same scene, but this time it was dawn and rainy and you were a stocky, pale man with a black beard and a battle-ax and an expensive-looking coat, navy blue with brass buttons.

  “… or you…”

  I switched again and it was a clear, moonlit night and you were a tall, gaunt man in a coarsely woven shirt, with a long sword slung over his back and pointed ears on either side of his scarred and ravaged face, its one remaining eye wanly glowing. Even his posture was different, slumped a little but somehow determined.

  “… or you.”

  It was a good trick, one that Lisa had cooked up, and I heard the murmur as it hit. I flipped back to the initial character, then ducked her into an alleyway. I found a shadowy spot, backed up, sprinted, leaped, and caught the low eaves of a stone building. My feet scrabbled on the wall a moment before I hauled myself up to the peaked roof. Then I was off and running, leaping from one moonlight-drenched slate roof to the next, heading toward a mansion that loomed up in the dark, two stories above its surroundings.

  “As you can see, it’s a fully explorable environment. Our mission tonight is a bit of intrigue. A young baron has stolen the exquisite Gem Imperial and plans to return it to claim a reward—the hand of the young and beautiful princess R’yalla of the city-state, a path to the throne itself. Our contact in the Thieves Guild learned of the scheme and our job is to steal that gem from the baron and return it ourselves. Young love!”

  Was that—? A flash of color in the street, a watchman running past. I’d done this a dozen times in rehearsal and hadn’t noticed it. But this was an unscripted game—these things could vary. I slipped through an open window of the baron’s mansion, into an empty storeroom, and then into a silent, dim hallway hung with tapestries.

  “Your friend in the Thieves Guild promised it would go down easy. Nobody but you knows the jewel is here. And when you get back to the palace, you’ll be able to name your own reward. The source of the information was the Thieves Guild in this case, but it might have been the Faerie Underground or the Sons of Autumn. Cities in Endoria are teeming with rival factions, and your path through them banks heavily on your own choices. You need that gem, maybe to pay off a sorcerer, maybe to cour
t a high-born lady, maybe to hire a mercenary, maybe to feed a drug addiction. All up to you.”

  I first knew it was going wrong when I heard a guard shout an alarm, followed by a clatter of blades and a shouted, “Who’s there?” We’d rehearsed this; no AI should be alert at this point. Matt glanced up at me. He held up two hands in a Ctrl-Alt-Delete gesture and nodded toward the computer—did I want to reboot and start again? I shook my head.

  “Looks like they’re on to me,” I said. I dropped down into a courtyard a level below. My fall knocked off a couple of hit points. Was something wrong with my pants? I was increasingly sure there was a problem with my pants, but there was no possible way I could check.

  The guards shouldn’t be in search mode. I retreated into an antechamber, but it wasn’t empty—an elderly servant was on patrol pattern. He wasn’t a combatant—at the sight of an enemy he’d run off and raise the alarm.

  “Okay, I’m just going to—here.” The sound effect was unpleasantly meaty. A woman in the front row winced.

  “He’s fine, everybody,” I said, dragging the body into a corner. “Just unconscious.”

  We were well off-script, but if I hurried there was no reason we couldn’t get back on track. Out a window; the wall was tagged as climbable. Maybe the second floor was still quiet.

  “We’re rendering well into the distance here…” I panned the view out over the moonlit skyline, then instantly regretted it—the frame rate chugged for a second as it tried to draw half the city. But then I was in an upstairs hallway, crouching behind an artfully placed dresser as a chambermaid patrolled past. Silence set in as I waited for her to finish.

  “One of our new weapons is the fire arrow—allows you to light a torch from a distance, or set fire to almost anything.” There was an unlit torch in a sconce just outside the bedroom. I swapped inventory, aimed, and shot the fire arrow. The torch lit nicely, as did the chambermaid just crossing the threshold. This time there was an audible gasp from the house.