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“But what exactly was it?” I asked.

“I mean, it wasn’t a con or anything. They were just so stupid! He took the Endorian economy and made it stand in for America’s. Of course we did a lot of tweaking on the world. I mean, more dwarves. Way more dwarves, quite a lot of dwarves, they stood in for the oil industry, everything heavy industry. Then the high tech and software were modeled as elves—you know the way they live off in forests and spin stuff out of nothing? Agricultural sector, humans. We suppressed all combat in the marketplace. Feed it the right parameters, it’s a little toy industry.

“And there were no graphics, just spreadsheets on what the market was doing, price fluctuations, and… you know. And then we just let the sim run.

“We gave it a title screen like
GLOBAL FUTURES MARKET ALGORITHM GENERATOR
. But if you open up the code, it’s all elves and dwarves, a couple of good and evil wizards playing the federal agencies, who stepped in if things skewed too far. The actual thing that made the calls for them? A modded version of the semidivine necromancer Boris, wearing a plus-four Ring of Cunning and a Mild Prescience Aura. Brutal, brutal hack.

“And you know what? It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It basically did rational things. It was like everything Simon did on that engine. God, he was smart.”

“Did they make money?” I asked.

“I have no idea. They talked about using it in the Hong Kong market, but this was right in October of eighty-seven—Black Monday, remember?”

I did, the same way I remembered Walter Mondale running for president.

“A stock market crash.”

“A pretty big one. They lost their money, or so we assumed. We didn’t care—they were laughing at us the whole time anyway. It was like doing business with Biff from
Back to the Future
. We never heard from them again.”

“So you never found out if it worked?”

“It was a nice little system, and it had a logic to it, just the way the game does, but who knows if it worked in reality? Darren walked away with ten thousand dollars and put it all into revamping
Realms III
for the commercial version. That’s how we seeded Black Arts.”

In the final reckoning,
Tomb of Destiny
got a C plus because it was buggy and, as a piece of code, it didn’t solve even its reasonably simple problems elegantly, but it was not a terrible game when you got used to the lack of graphics. More than once, I played until two in the morning, and after a while the &s and +s and all the letters and numbers fell away and it was all the same to me, like looking through the black screen and glowing letters to a darker, hidden place—daemons and sepulchral stone chambers and stairways and landings corkscrewing down into the earth. Maybe the story wasn’t complicated, but maybe “downward” was all the story I needed just then, simple and elementally real. I tapped forward grid point by grid point, braced for the next horror to spring out at me in the form of some friend or foe. All you know is to go downward from stair to stair, down into the unknown, in spite of the dangers, keystroke by keystroke, further into the data. I delved into the substanceless phosphorescent earth for that priceless treasure, always elusive, the transcendent loot of memory.

O
n April 14, Darren Ackerman, lead designer and legitimate game-industry legend, quit. He came in at eleven and spent maybe twenty minutes in Don’s office, and then walked through the empty office, ponytail bouncing briskly, past the Excellence in Game Design awards, past the cubicle maze, past the testers playing split-screen
Mario Kart
in the conference room, past the life-size cutout of a man wielding an ergonomically impractical sword, and out of the building forever, past the two shaggy guys still porting
Solar Empires III
to Mac.

I watched him Frisbee his security card far out into the weeds, get in his signature Rolls-Royce, and drive away. About twenty minutes later, Don sent a company-wide e-mail explaining that over the weekend Darren had “chosen not to continue his journey with us.”

Twenty minutes after that, another e-mail came with a list of fourteen other employees who were also not making said journey. Most of them I didn’t know, but the employee directory put them as nearly all the senior design and programming staff. It seemed that Darren had taken his pick of the developers before he left. He must have been arranging it for weeks. He didn’t take Lisa.

A few minutes later I got a private e-mail from Don asking me to come talk to him in his office.

His door was ajar, but I knocked anyway. No one at Black Arts would wear a tie, but Don wore the nearest equivalent, the scaled-back management uniform of blue button-down shirt with khakis, the shirt
bulging in the middle a little and giving him the overall look and feel of a Best Buy employee. He looked uncomfortable, as if I were trying to return a copy of
Quake II
after the ninety-day deadline without a receipt.

He owned part of the company, but I couldn’t tell if that made him rich or not. I was starting to realize how little I knew about how Black Arts worked.

“Hi, Don.”

“Hey, Russell.”

Everything at Black Arts was so purposely informal that when actual business conversations had to happen they became ten times as uncomfortable. Or else maybe people came to Black Arts because they were innately terrible at this kind of thing.

“How are you liking it here so far?” he asked. Uh-oh.

“It’s—it’s really great,” I said. “I’m pretty much trained up on existing tools, just waiting for the new engine to happen.”

“Okay, good, great.” Don sighed—not like I’d passed a test; more like I’d left him no way out.

“So, this weekend…” he began. Was I really being fired? I had never been fired, not even from a job taking tickets at the box office of a summer-stock theater over an exquisitely lonely summer on Cape Cod—not even after drunkenly losing half a night’s receipts.

“This weekend the company was sold to Focus Capital. It was a decision between Darren and myself. Darren holds—held—a majority stake, which he no longer does. This is confidential, for now.”

“Okay,” I said. Did Don think I knew about things like this? Did he want advice? It looked like he hadn’t slept much. Also like one of his oldest friends had betrayed him.

“But this turned out to be part of a—maneuver—Darren had been planning, I think for some time,” Don went on. There might have been a slight quaver in his voice. “He left and took a lot of senior developers
with him to a new start-up. It was perfectly legal. No one ever signed a noncompete agreement.

“I know you’re wondering where this is going. The partners at Focus are… well, they’re not too happy. They thought they were buying up the talent that was Black Arts’ principal asset, but that’s not what they got. What they have in Black Arts is a slightly rickety code base, a whole bunch of intellectual property, and game franchises. And a bunch of desks and computers and a pretty high burn rate. I’m being candid here.

“So I guess what I’m getting to is, there’s been a restructuring. The partners reviewed a lot of the personnel files and they’ve decided to ask you to take on a bigger role here. We’d like you to be design lead on
Realms
RPG.”

“Oh. Oh, wow. Okay. I mean, thanks,” I said. There was more, about compensation and stock options; I keep saying thanks and nodding and waiting for the meeting to be over.

“Look, can I—” he began. It’s funny that I was thinking of him as much older than I was, but it came to me that he wasn’t out of his late twenties; he was Darren’s contemporary.

“Sure. Sure. I know it doesn’t make sense. Making me that,” I told him.

“If I can be honest, design got hit a lot harder than programming. Focus doesn’t know that much about games, and I think your chess background weighed pretty heavily. I said we would do it, but to some degree it’s going to be in name only, at least until we see how you’re doing.”

“Of course! Of course,” I said. Maybe he’d hoped I was going to refuse the position, which might have been sensible.

“I’ll see you at the leads meeting Tuesday morning,” he said. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

He leaned forward and put out his hand and I shook it by reflex, and
that was our good-bye. All I could think was the profoundly unprofessional thought: Thank God. I’m in the club now.

I left and went to the kitchen and shouldered through the fire door to the loading dock. I didn’t have an office so there was nowhere else for me to go if I needed to be alone for a moment. It was raining but not for real, just enough to speckle the warm sidewalk.

I walked a little ways across the parking lot, feeling the unfamiliar midday brightness through the clouds, the warmth and smell after half a day indoors. It was just after one o’clock on a Monday, and Arlington Avenue was jammed. The land around Cambridge and Somerville gave off a peculiarly exhausted feeling, feeble wetlands mingled with land that had been built on and paved and rebuilt on since colonial times.

I shook my head and walked down to the Mobil station. I went there a lot for Skittles and raspberry Snapple, both of which I could perfectly well get from the office kitchen but I liked the walk, and I liked the smell of gasoline.

I went to badge back in but I’d left my security card on my desk, so I just stood there until one of the workers from one of the other offices—blue shirt, tie, ex-jock demeanor—opened the door for me. Everyone recognized the Black Arts guys; we’re the middle-class adults wearing T-shirts. Sometimes I felt superior to the people in the other offices—I make dragons, what the hell do you make?—and sometimes I felt like a loser.

Inside, everyone was recovering from the news and there was a feeling of mixed panic and relief fizzing on top of the usual post-shipping daze. It looked like nobody knew about my promotion yet. Don sent out a “don’t panic” e-mail to say things were being handled, then a private one to me saying he was holding off on a formal announcement until Tuesday morning.

Darren was the lead writer and designer, the force that had held
several successive Black Arts products together, the animating creative voice of the product line. Darren was Black Arts. From what I understood, he also held regular temper tantrums and blamed anything and everything possible on the programming staff. He was a relentless micromanager, mitigated only slightly by the fact that he was right 98 percent of the time. He and Simon had been the rock stars of Black Arts Studios, and after that Darren held that post alone. Depending on how you looked at it, Darren was our Mick Jagger (designated swaggering extrovert) to Simon’s Keith Richards (quietly virtuosic, blatantly self-destructive). Or else Darren had been Paul McCartney (chirpily commercial) and Simon had been John Lennon (moody, introspective, possessed of quasi-mystical insights).

Darren/Paul/Mick had left, and Simon/Keith/John was long gone, and I, hypothetically a backup singer or maybe just the guy who shakes a tambourine at the side of the stage, was in his place. A few other designers were in a huddle around one of their desks—including Peter and Jared, who graduated from Harvard together three or four years ago. I could tell they were talking about who would step up as lead designer. It made sense that it would be one of them, especially Jared, who had taken point on revamping the combat system and tools chain in the last cycle.

They were going to be surprised on Tuesday. Well, let Don explain it to them. Nothing else was going to happen today. I wondered why I wasn’t more panicked, but also I knew I had a right to this.

I had been handed it back on a platter, a second chance to be Simon. I thought of Brennan and his lost inheritance, and the crown of the true king lying at the bottom of a cave somewhere in the world, just waiting to be picked up.

A great deal of
Realms of Gold
RPG was going to come from me. This was so terrifying as to make it almost impossible to sit in my own chair. I wrote in my notebook the things I knew so far:

Place: Endoria.

I was slowly finding out more about that.

Time: The end of the Third Age.

Genre: Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

That was the hard part. It was going to be told in the weird format known as the computer fantasy role-playing game, a literary form that did not exist until about 1970 but had already become as strictly formalized as Kabuki.

I didn’t know the genre especially well, but I did know enough to realize that it was an almost unbearably dorky storytelling form that was, roughly, a series of jury-rigged, slowly evolving attempts to marry the feeling of storytelling to the feeling of controlling a character.

I understood what its creators were trying to do, but their games didn’t do it for me, at least not that way. The computer wasn’t a human storyteller; it couldn’t respond if I talked back to it. Little Red Riding Hood was a good story, but it wasn’t interactive. Sooner or later I wanted to say “no, I may be Red Riding Hood but I don’t care about my grandmother; what I want is heroin and only heroin,” whereas the game had only “over the river and through the woods” to offer me. Which was a good story, it just might not be mine.

I still wanted adventure. I wanted to see places untouched by human hands. I wanted to make mistakes and learn from them; I wanted to fight battles I knew weren’t rigged. The longer I worked at Black Arts the more I felt like it had to be possible.

I was going to bump up against the same problems Simon and Darren had. I was going to go to war against the same forces they had. I had to learn their tricks. And I had to see their mistakes.

I hadn’t seen the Heroes for a while, so it was a surprise when Brennan showed up on his own that night. It made sense that it would be Brennan,
as he was always the default character choice. He had the distinction of being, typologically, the hero.

Brennan, of the House of Aerion

Strength:
High

Reflexes:
Medium

Intelligence:
Medium

Endurance:
High

Special ability:
Can wield dual weapons at no penalty

Goal:
Restore the true king