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At lunchtime the following day Simon discovered three sheets of notebook paper tacked up in the same spot, written in blue ballpoint in an unfamiliar hand. He took it down. It was code. The style was alien to him, but reading and rereading it he gradually understood that it was a program that, added to the game, would set up an AI pet that followed the player around, fetching useful items and nipping at enemies. The pet could be a dog, cat, hawk, or iguana, each with different behaviors and special abilities.

That evening there were two more code samples in two new sets of
handwriting. There was a primitive lighting model that found lines of sight and the strength of different light sources, and could reveal or conceal the world accordingly. There was also a rewrite of the wind direction code that incorporated the basic idea of moving hot and cold air masses and the position of mountains and oceans in the landscape. A day later Darren came back to the lab to find that someone had printed the source code and annotated the entire length of it with scribbled taunts in the margins alongside code optimizations and fairly witty critiques of Simon’s amateurish code architecture. On the fourth night Darren called a full-scale camp meeting in a note tacked up in the same spot. We’d meet at eleven thirty in the dining commons. Bring a pen and a flashlight.

It’s a moment I think back on, a moment Darren instinctively grasped and owned. The product pitch was its own minor performance-art form, and Darren was born a master of it. Standing on a bench in the dining commons, lit by a few flashlights, Darren already had the bobbing walk and mischievous almost-grin that would be so devastatingly charismatic on the stage at CES and Macworld, and he never really needed the stagecraft of a fifty-foot-high projection to make you want what he was selling. He had his own hyperdorky magnetism, a controlled contagious excitement crossed with adolescent cool. He gave you the sense that he really, really hated to show you what he was working on, but he couldn’t resist because it was so cool he couldn’t hold it back any longer. A bit like the mean but terribly charismatic older brother who was busy all the time, whom you couldn’t help longing to hang out with, who just once was going to let you into the clubhouse.

He talked about the game we’d make, its ambition, its potential. He sketched the outlines, and then he opened a copy of that month’s issue of
Creative Computing
magazine.
WarGames
wasn’t the most important gamer-related media event of June 1983. That was also the month when the most important advertisement in the history of computer games
came out. It ran in
Creative Computing
magazine and took up two full pages. On the left-hand page, two columns of text were spanned at the top with the sentence
CAN A COMPUTER MAKE YOU CRY?
The right kind of person understood the question intuitively as a challenge. The text underneath began:

Right now, no one knows. This is partly because many would consider the very idea frivolous. But it’s also because whoever successfully answers this question must first have answered several others.

Why do we cry? Why do we laugh, or love, or smile? What are the touchstones of our emotions?

Until now, the people who asked such questions tended not to be the same people who ran software companies. Instead, they were writers, filmmakers, painters, musicians. They were, in the traditional sense, artists.

We’re about to change that tradition. The name of our company is Electronic Arts.

Darren read it aloud: “In short, we are finding that the computer can be more than just a processor of data.

“It is a communications medium: an interactive tool that can bring people’s thoughts and feelings closer together, perhaps closer than ever before. And while fifty years from now, its creation may seem no more important than the advent of motion pictures or television, there is a chance it will mean something more.

“Something along the lines of a universal language of ideas and emotions.”

He broke off and looked up at the crowd, letting them all get it, feel the hubris of it, the vision and the sheer swagger. Everyone felt like summer camp just began for real.

For me it was the photograph that ran on the right-hand page that almost rendered the text superfluous. It said anything anyone needed to
know. Seven men and one woman, all wearing black, shadowed dramatically, few of them smiling, all looking into the camera. Bill Budge of
Pinball Construction Set
fame wore what looked like a leather glove with metal studs; John Field, creator of
Axis Assassin,
held the center with folded arms and an arrogant sprawl. They were setting these unglamorous software developers up as icons, self-consciously, a bit of theater that sent a message. It said, “We’re making ourselves look like rock stars or movie stars just to show you what it would be like if our work meant as much as theirs does, and to make you imagine for a second that it can.” And once you’ve imagined it, you know it’s possible. For certain people in a certain generation it was that first moment when someone looked us in the eye and challenged
US
to take ourselves seriously.

“So who wants to do this?” he said. “Who wants to make spreadsheets and plot data points and whatever bullshit the counselors want to hand us? And who wants to make something the world has never seen before? Who wants to make the language of dreams?”

W
e’d already talked it over and set the outlines of the new project. The new game wouldn’t be about dungeon levels; it would be set aboveground, in the world of Endoria. And the scale would be epic. You wouldn’t be a tiny + sign at the mercy of &s; you would be a king, directing peasants and ships and whole armies of +s. You wouldn’t fight to stay alive; you would make war for a place in history, for the survival of the Elven lands or Dwarfholm.
Realms II
was about the grand strategy.

We had sign-up sheets ready, broken down by general areas of interest. The ad hoc
Realms
Committee would oversee code architecture and control what features would and wouldn’t go in. It would also, collaterally, codify the camp’s nerd hierarchy.

It still might never have happened if it weren’t for 1983’s rainy summer, which unleashed a downpour for five days of the second week. KidBits had laid in jigsaw puzzles, two Ping-Pong tables, board games, and a small library of worn paperback fantasy, science fiction, Mark Twain, and Faulkner, leavings from one of the counselors’ freshman American lit classes.

Because we were trapped indoors, there was a kind of imaginative fermentation that took place in the common rooms and computer lab. Campers broke off in twos and threes, tasked with bits and pieces of the world, rules for siege warfare or cavalry charges or the interface for diplomacy or troop psychology and morale or the rules governing
succession in the rare case of a royal’s death on the battlefield. They sat in circles and perched on tables or huddled at computers, each of the fastest typists and thinkers surrounded by onlookers, all rapidly conversing. Kim, a high school freshman who had revealed himself as the phantom coder, recruited a steely-eyed brother and sister to port the entire original code base into C. Hours would pass uninterrupted with only the sounds of low voices, the hollow clattering of keyboards, the occasional roll of thunder, and the steady ticktack of the Ping-Pong tables.

On the fourteenth day of camp, the first full beta of
Realms II: The Second Age
debuted at KidBits. Open computer lab started at seven that evening. I drew the short straw, so it was Darren, Kim, Lisa, and Simon who solemnly took their places at the keyboards. Someone at the back of the room dimmed the lights, and the first
Realms II
tournament began. It would conclude, interrupted by three restarts and two full recompiles, six hours and 872 Endorian years later.

Realms II
was still unmistakably the direct descendant of
Realms I,
just enormously enhanced and reworked in certain directions—world simulation, multiplayer control, different viewing scales, simultaneous combats resolved en masse.

The alphanumeric characters were replaced by minuscule tiles, twenty-four pixels by twenty-four, each one a tiny miracle of miniaturization. Like the mosaic tiles in a Byzantine church, they made a virtue of simplicity. A tiny tree stood for a forest; a tuft of grass stood for a plain. A tiny cave mouth. A knight with sword upraised. A castle with a flag bravely flying. A horse, a three-masted sailing ship, a peasant clutching a spear. (Stacks of photocopied paper, a combined bestiary, almanac, and gazetteer, identified each feature with numbing precision, detailing its capabilities, strengths, and weaknesses.)

The tiles stood together in insane profusion—districts, duchies, city-states, nations, and continents, the Lewis Carroll chessboard landscape
come to life. Years later they would remember it in color, as it was in subsequent editions, but in the summer of ’83 it was all black-and-white.

The geography was recognizably the layout of KidBits spread to continent size, the hills become mountains, the pond an inland sea, the whole thing a quilt of small nation-states, forests, mountains, badlands, and mysterious blank areas. Players zoomed and tracked across multiple screens to encompass it.

It was a crazy, kitchen-sink work of simulation and strategy, with a profusion of subsystems running diplomacy and AI management and a dozen other tiny disciplines.

The effect, which might have been sterility or confusion, was one of richness, of possibility. This was a world, or an outline of a world, in which you could do anything. The tiles themselves were static but evocative; the numerical blood of the simulation engine flowed through them, giving each one life, choice, consequence, a tiny destiny. A story was going to unfold, tonight.

The foursome had played before, of course, even sped through a game, but never in earnest, never for blood. Everyone knew the rules of the game, but they were learning at the same time what strategies would and wouldn’t work, and what exactly was going to happen when players were at each other’s throats.

They took turns moving. By house rules, the game played silently. People in the crowd shifted once in a while; the ceiling fans rotated. Someone got a soda from the machine. Every few turns a new feature would come to light, rules for mining or applying wind direction as a modifier to naval movement, and its author would lean over his or her neighbor or camp best friend and say, “That’s mine,” or, more often, “There’s ours. I can’t believe it’s working!” The four monitors were the brightest things in the room, but from time to time the players would glance up and see the crowd perched on chairs and bookcases and
desks, occasionally shifting to another side of the room to follow the action from another perspective.

I watched from the sidelines. It was interesting to see Simon as a player and not a programmer. Whereas Lisa held a decidedly ironic distance from the action—playing the game was a systems test to her, merely an artifact of the coding process, and I was surprised she turned up for it at all—Simon played as if it mattered, and seemed always slightly surprised, as if he’d written the code but never in a million years expected it to work.

Simon and Lisa had the fortune or misfortune of starting out relatively close together, which might have made for a preemptive death struggle, but they lost no time in establishing embassies and trade relations through the diplomatic interface. The Second Age was founded on a human-elven alliance.

After a few turns a rider appeared from the southeast, announcing peaceful intentions from a wizard king, and Kim’s capital appeared on the map, sequestered in a forested bowl between two mountain ranges. A good portion of the world was still in darkness. In the corner by the soda machine, Darren was working alone, four or five campers clustered behind him.

Years flashed by. Nations grew and changed. It became apparent that the players were working in vastly different styles. Simon’s territory was expanding in steady, regular blocks of farmland, harmonious and efficient, sprouting feudal castles as it went.

Lisa, in decidedly unelven fashion, was rapidly stripping her forests of timber, the purpose of which was revealed twelve years into the game, when a large cluster of catapults, siege towers, and elven foot soldiers appeared outside the walled city of Carn. The elf queen had brought overwhelming force, and the elves breached and overran the walls simultaneously after only a few turns of action. They pillaged, garrisoned, and trundled on.

Kim wasn’t visibly expanding at all. Only a set of mine shafts ringing his capital—and a rapidly growing surplus in precious metals—showed what he was doing. Everyone knew there were other resources underground, though, if Kim managed to hit one.

Darren’s people finally came into view in a series of raids on Simon’s coastal settlements. He had opted not to have a capital city at all, only a moving fleet of pirates and a rogue band of horsemen who poached caravans here and there. When Simon mustered a well-armed citizen militia, the first player-on-player battle occurred.

The action stopped while a battle screen replaced the world map on Simon’s and Darren’s screens. The view shifted from displaying a continent to an expanded view showing a ring of seven hexagonal tiles. From viewing the world from ten miles up, we went to seeing it from five hundred feet, as though we were in a Goodyear blimp hovering over a football game.

The terrain in each hex was randomly generated depending on its type. When viewed from up close, a plains hex was mostly level grass with a few trees and boulders. A forest hex was trees with a few paths and clearings, and so on. The troops fought it out until the battle was resolved, then zoomed back out.

The icons representing platoons and cavalry detachments were laid out on a field of speckled tiles evoking grass. Darren’s nomadic cavalry was a collection of fearsome riders armed with spears and wicked scimitars, but Simon had prepared well for the encounter and his pikemen were formed up in neat squares. Darren’s horsemen charged the line, but the pikemen were revealed to have sky-high discipline scores. They refused to break formation, and in the end only a few bloodied horses managed to escape the encounter.