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We were in the sewers; no one had expected them to show at E3. No one should be seeing this part. They looked good enough; Matt had at least textured them properly. The audio system modulated background noise into slightly musical echoes. We needed a little narrative.

“Farther from the dead guards and the jewel you lost, and the princess who was waiting for you. Farther from home, farther from your roommate, who doesn’t do the dishes, farther from your body, getting softer with each passing year. Overhead, the night sky is pierced by hard white pixels under black glass. You can see your reflection in the screen. Outside it’s still midafternoon. God, why aren’t you at work? Aren’t you twenty-eight or something? Aren’t you tired of talking to people through a conversation system that hasn’t changed since
The Secret of Monkey Island
came out? That was, like, ten years ago.”

Finally, we passed out through a stone archway at the base of a cliff.
The city was far above us now. The moon was starting to set. We were entering a space of open-ended wetlands.

I cleared my throat. “Did I mention that
Realms of Gold
is a mix of indoor and outdoor action-adventure?”

The wagon bumped up against mud. I got out and leaped to the shore, leaving footprints that faded in a few seconds. It was a small, low island hidden in miles of marshland. The night was quiet except for crickets and a bullfrog. At least somebody had tagged this area with the marsh sound palette.

“The cries of panic and alarm have long since faded behind you, and the night’s gone still and silent. But in the lands beyond, the world is tilting on its axis. You know it. We all do,” I said—where exactly was this coming from? “Everything’s changing. You’re going to have to find something to hold on to.

“You reflect on what brought you here,” I said. “The losses.” I made sure they could see the burn scars—unlike regular hits, fire damage in
RoGVIII
leaves a permanent mark. “The victories. The choices.” I rotated the camera until we could see the tattoo snaking down the side of Leira’s neck. It marked her as a criminal assassin back in her homeland, although they wouldn’t know that.

I had lost track of where we were now. Some procedurally generated wilderness landscape no one ever bothered to visit before. I just wanted to find something interesting for people to look at. I zoomed the camera out from its usual close-over-the-shoulder position and upward as we approached the center of the clearing. From overhead you could see now where you were, at the edge of a circle of standing stones. Up and up went the camera.

“The choices you made are the story you told. For better or worse, it’s part of you now, and it’s your story, not ours. Take it with our blessing.”

As the camera kept rising, I could see an ancient plaza, light and dark stone in a pattern I finally recognized.

“Long ago, before the waters came, there was a temple here.”

Our character was growing smaller and smaller as the camera was rising. Now you’re just a pixelated dot in the center of an enormous rune the size of a traffic circle.

“This is the Sign of Auric, whose temple it was. Auric, the Endorian god, patron of mercy, of late harvests and last resorts.

“
Realms of Gold VIII
, everybody.
Winter’s Crown
. Coming this Christmas.”

I signaled Matt, and the lights came up. Most of the audience had either left or sat staring expectantly for my next trick as if I couldn’t see them, as if I were on TV. I unclipped the mike, shut off the monitor and the computer, grabbed the CD. I wanted to walk offstage, but of course in a conference hall there’s no backstage, just a long walk up the aisle to the exit.

I
thought it best to remain in my hotel room for the next seven hours. Calls came in on the room phone, four or five before I lost count. The message light blinked and blinked while I watched movies and ate room-service pizza, then a slice of cheesecake and a glass of fairly sketchy white wine, then more cheesecake slices and more and better wines. After the first hundred dollars plus tips, it seemed easier to keep going. The staff and I were developing a cheery rapport, and there was a Cary Grant retrospective on television. I practiced an attitude of amused detachment and thought of how attractive I was becoming. This was going to work.

Around nine thirty there was a tentative knock at the door.

“Russell?” It was Don.

The hotel window was one of the ones that only opens about an inch and a half. I abandoned the tantalizing smell of freedom and answered the door.

“Hey,” I said.

“I came to see if you were doing okay. I heard the demo was a little rocky.”

Behind me, the bed was covered in plates and napkins and trays, except for a me-size zone in the center.

He looked it over. “I hope you expensed that.”

“I didn’t think of that.” Probably Cary Grant would have said that, especially if he were four or five glasses of wine into the evening.

“Maybe we should go out.”

The Hyatt lobby had been colonized by industry conventiongoers on their final night out, and it had become a seething pit of heavy guys in black T-shirts huddled in little clusters of three or four over gin and tonics, exchanging notes and gossip. Here and there a navy-blazered biz-dev type could be seen, generally signing for the drinks. The crowd was about 80 percent men. Like the men, the women were split between the put-together business types, with late-era Rachel hair, and the T-shirted geek tribeswomen. People threading their way through would be hailed every few steps and forced to exchange business cards before they could go any farther.

It was staggeringly loud, but I thought I distinguished an extra buzz and scattered applause when I came into view. Certainly a detectable amount of nudging and pointing.

As we struggled to the bar, one of the suits grabbed Don’s elbow and whispered what seemed like urgent information in his ear.

He stopped me before I could order.

“VIP party, room sixteen twelve. Open bar,” he said, steering me back to the elevator.

“The demo kind of got away from me,” I said.

“I heard. Probably we’re going to be okay.”

“How so?”

“A couple of people got it. You still gave a good look at the feature set. I’ve got meetings set up. And a lot of people are talking about it.”

“I’m not fired or anything. Or am I?” I said.

The elevator went up one, two, three floors.

“You know, maybe we shouldn’t go to this.”

“It’s a moral imperative,” I said.

The suite party was a smaller version of the scene in the lobby, except now most of the people had blazers on. I guessed this was by and large the management layer of things, plus a few star techies. I recognized a few genuine industry moguls—Romero, Molyneux, Spector. Far in the back, a poker game was in progress.

Don was being glad-handed to death, so I plunged into the crowd. I’m five foot eight and a half, which is only an inch and a half below average, but for some reason everyone seemed to be over six feet tall. I got to where the bar was, more or less by mashing my face into the back of three different navy blazers. The bar was unmanned. I stepped behind it, kicking aside empty cans of Red Bull as though they were dry leaves, and rummaged through bottles until I’d united gin, tonic, and a plastic cup.

I turned around and, surprisingly, Lisa was there. I handed her an airplane-size bottle of Jameson that she tapped against my glass.

“Nice demo.”

“Thanks.”

“Seriously,” she said. “You coped.”

“How’s the party?” I asked.

“Peter Molyneux’s fly is open. So there’s that.”

“So let’s get to a corner. I need to ask you something,” I said.

“Okay.” Her lips compressed slightly and she took her distance, bracing for whatever was to come. It occurred to me that women in tech probably got propositioned a lot.

“So look. We’re here at E3, right? You showed up for this,” I said.

“There’s a lot of tech stuff you don’t have to go to, but I do.”

“That’s exactly it.” Another blazered giant elbowed between us, giving me another face full of high thread count. “And I came to run the demo. I slept, like, three hours last night, and I was humiliated in front of hundreds, if not thousands, of my peers. And I would still have killed to come here. Killed. I’m not like you. I’m in a suite party at E3 and that is the center of my universe, and you’re totally unaware that this…”

I paused, and noticed again there must have been a hundred people here in a hotel room that legally allowed sixty-three, and apart from Lisa every single one of them seemed to be laughing, or shouting to make a point about video games.

“… this… rules. It actually rules. But you act like it’s a complete
chore. Like you’d rather be anyplace else in the world. It makes me feel like a loser. Why do you even come here if you hate it?”

“Because,” she said carefully, “I like solving problems. And I got into this because the technology is going to be more important than the games. And for a reason I don’t want to tell you. You’ll laugh.”

“Today isn’t my day to laugh at people.”

“I wanted to make cyberspace.”

“Like VRML? That 3-D Web thing?”

“Games. Games were going to be everything. Why doesn’t anybody remember what it was like in 1984? We had
TRON
. We had
Neuromancer
. It was logical.”

“Wait. Wait. Are you saying you’re in games because you think we’re building cyberspace? Like in
Neuromancer
? Like
Snow Crash
? For real?”

“It was logical. Everything you do in games are things you want to do in a computer anyway. Manipulate data, change it, look at it. Early text adventures were almost the same thing as command-line interfaces with directory structures. I think real-time 3-D environments are going to be how we do a lot of things with computers.

“We all thought WAFFLE was going to be… the backbone of things. The information infrastructure. It was going to be the Internet, because the Internet was going to work like a game. It made so much sense. Who wouldn’t want cyberspace to happen?”

“But… no one wanted—”

“I know no one wanted it. I
know
2-D was more ergonomic. I
know
no one wants to spend the cycles. Thank you. I know. Nobody wants cyberspace. It sounded great when
Neuromancer
came out, but… nobody wants the Internet to fly around and visit giant spheres and stuff. Heads floating in space. Turns out, if you can just click on bits of text that’s all you need.”

“So that was how you were going to be rich?”

“That was how I was going to matter.”

T
he Monday morning leads meeting was unusually solemn.

“I have some unfortunate news,” Don said. “It seems there is a major bug in our software.”

“You know, we could always spin this as a feature,” Matt said. “Darren would put it on the box in big letters: ‘Now with Enhanced Mayhem Generation.’”

“I thought of that,” Don said. “But that’s not even the thing that worries me. Even if it’s a feature in a game, it’s not a feature in AstroTrade.”

“Why do we care about that?” I asked. “I thought AstroTrade went out of business.”

“It did. But the way it went out of business was by selling its assets to a company called Enhanced Heuristics, which existed for about ten minutes then sold out to a thing called Paranomics. Which sends us a check every month on the original license, which is one of the major reasons we’re still in business.”

“Why didn’t you tell us any of this?” Matt said.

“Because it was a nice idea to think that Black Arts makes all its money from games. And usually we do, it just hasn’t been a great few years. Obviously I didn’t make this public, but
Solar Empires III
didn’t perform as well as expected.”

“I told you not to use that title,” Lisa mumbled into her laptop.

“That’s what it’s called,” Matt said.

“I’m not going to argue that point again,” Don said. “At this rate, Focus isn’t even going to wait for us to publish before shutting us down.”

“I’ve been making a little headway,” I said. “It’s happening more reliably, anyway.”

“That may not be a good thing.”

“I’ve been through the object database for every version of
Realms I
could get access to, and it’s just not there with the rest of the magic items.”

“I think it’s obviously not that simple,” Lisa said. “It’s not going to be just a piece of bad data. There’s code running that trolls the available objects, chooses one, changes its color to black, and gives it Mournblade’s powers. The bug is composed of both code and data, and one alters the other to create it.”

Data and code are like matter and energy, the two essences that, united, make up the world of entertainment software, a world that is in some basic way broken, misshapen, riven at its core. There was a basic rift in the world, and Mournblade lived in the center of it.

“Great,” Don said. “You and Russell and Matt are now the company-destroying bug eradication committee. The fate of the realm, my friends, is in your hands.”

Matt was tasked with, among other things, checking in on the various Black Arts fan sites and newsgroups to extract any usable feedback and get early warning on major postrelease bugs. In the days following the E3 demo he was spending two or three hours a day online, occasionally posting under a pseudonym to try to spin the event as positively as possible. He sent me an edited transcript from one of the Usenet discussion groups.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2988

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “Mandemonium”

Date: Sun Jun 07 10:02:30 EDT 1998

> I think at this point we can agree everyone saw it, which means at least some of the previous reports of sightings are almost certainly true

thank you, belatedly

>… shred of credibility…

*snip*

I’ve been playing Black Arts games since
Realms III
and I’ve seen it four times. Twice in
Realms,
once in
Clandestine (LNTT),
once in
SEII
. NPC shows up with a standard weapon except MATTE BLACK and it KILLS EVERYTHING. Most of us agree that’s the pattern.

Approximate sequence is, the weapon appears, whoever wields it is driven to attack those around it, lethally, and are extremely tough although at least in one case not invulnerable.

When all opponents are dead, after an interval the wielder dies. It’s totally random—I’ve replayed games the exact same way but it doesn’t get the sword back.

Works like digger wasp or parasitic fluke? Takes over the host & makes it do what it wants. The functionality is the same.

The sword whispers things at intervals but I haven’t yet made it out. I was a little distracted.