It's All in the Game

1988 began quite well, and the year just seemed to fly by. Marsha's new romantic relationship didn't quite pan out, nor did the one after it, but she was back in the game to stay and by the end of the year had a new steady boyfriend, Jeff, that seemed to suit her well enough that she often now sometimes spent nights at his home. Despite all odds, I found that I liked him and we got along well together.

He was a member of The Church and was a nudist at home, but always wore clothes when visiting our house. I just never could get into the whole nudism thing and my pasty white skin virtually never saw the sun, but I didn't begrudge anything that made someone else happy in their own life. Now that I was eating regular meals again I was also putting back on weight and was getting very self-conscious of that, but not quite enough to diet.

They stayed together for several years, but she never quite 'moved in' with him although her clothes were about evenly scattered between the two houses fairly quickly. She also sometimes 'forgot' what house she was in, and I got a good many looks at a very pretty naked Marsha walking down the hall or into the kitchen before she'd laugh and go put on a robe. I swear, sometimes I think she even did it on purpose!

Don't say it -- I was an idiot in those days!

This year also saw the genesis of my first and possibly favorite game 'series', and I owed it all to Olivia and Ashley. They were playing together one Friday night right after dinner and Marsha had gone out for the evening with Jeff. I was sitting in the living room rather low on ambition and reading a graphics manual while listening to the girls play. To my surprise their conversation seemed more and more interesting than my book and soon I was listening to them with fascination.

It seemed one of their dolls, "the Princess", needed to get on a horse and ride to get help for her father the King, but something was always going wrong, and some last piece she needed always remained missing. It was an elaborate story telling plot that the girls were concocting and the Princess had to do a great many quests and gather many necessary things first before she could actually ride off to save her father.

It all clicked to me at once. A graphic 'Quest' story that both boys and girls could enjoy that didn't involve much (if any) hacking and slaying of nasty monsters to complete. Solving riddles and getting helpful information from other game characters would be far more important than slaying dragons or leaving a battlefield covered with dead Orcs. By their bedtime, I had the entire storyline worked out in my head, and I started coding a rough modular outline of all of the individual quest steps. I worked all night long without a break until Marsha returned the next morning. She loved the new concept and, with the help of the girls, created a map for me that contained all of the locations that would be travelled to in the game, all the necessary 'clues' and important characters with the information essential to complete the different quest stages. Finally we ran everything by Olivia and Ashley to make sure that the game's plot pathing was all directly linear and easy enough for a child of eight to twelve to follow.

Now the serious programming began as I created a 3D modeled world, very rough but 'state of the art' for the time, and slowly the game took shape. The hardest part of course was the 3D graphics, the tools available to me were not that sophisticated and I soon began to grumble about wanting to create my own 'graphics engine' and manipulation tools instead.

The game took six months to code, and that only really covered about a third of our original plot outline. No matter, I had something done to show for my twelve to eighteen hours a day of programming during this time, and it was a game I was very, very proud of.

Marsha pulled out all of the stops and found a local artist to paint us a box cover and a pretty piece of fantasy art to be used for the advertising. I asked Marsha to create a 1/4 page ad proof for "Princess Quest", but the result was so pretty that we sent it out as an outrageously expensive full page ad for several of the new computer game magazines. This expense once again nearly bankrupted us and almost forced us into eating Ramen noodles once again, but if anyone cared they didn't mention it.

That done, I launched into another ten months of creating "Princess Quest II" that continued the next third of the story. I could have done it a bit faster except SVGA video (1024x768 with 256 colors and up to 2Mb of video memory) had been launched and I had to redo a big chunk of my modified graphics engine. Prettier and more beautiful is always better.

PQ-I was an overnight sensation, and probably broke all sales records for a 'self published' computer game. The industry reviews of the game were all fabulous, with the words 'genius' and 'truly unique' often repeated by each reviewer. We didn't win 'Game of the Year', or sell the most game boxes, but many folks wrote to us expressing their love for our game.

Our part-timers were soon back with us, and we were able to give our local printing shop in Lovett nearly all of the work they could handle for a few months just churning out game boxes, maps and the documentation booklet.

We started to get letters of inquiry from software distribution companies asking if we were interested in having a publication and distribution deal for retail stores. I wasn't sure, but Marsha thought that the days of self-publishing software were pretty much over. It was decided that we would split the difference. We continue to design and print the game materials (to help keep our local print shop in business) but we would allow PQ-II to be distributed solely via normal retail channels and 'see what happens'. We would make much less money per box, but maybe we'd sell a whole lot more boxes. Lower Gross but maybe high Net profits, and that is exactly what happened. PQ-II sold over ten times as many boxes as the original had done.

At last I could quit my 'day job' for good, and I bought Marsha a new car to replace the one she had sacrificed to keep the company afloat when times were hard. For the first time we now had money to go along with our ideas for company growth.

Now we were no longer worried about rent and grocery money, the question started to emerge about what to do with all of this money that was coming in now faster than we could spend it. I bought the house we had been renting for all of these years and dropped a chunk into getting her all fixed up like a proper Victorian painted lady. The small cellar was enlarged to become my main office and programming area for all of my computers. I now had about six and was adding new ones as fast as Compaq could release a newer and faster model. Besides the car I'd bought Marsha, I'd even bought one for myself, a midsized 4WD SUV to handle the piss poor local County roads that could become dangerous quickly in bad weather.

I dutifully started work on PQ-III but the game was really becoming larger than I could now handle alone. I really now needed some programming assistance, but none of the kids locally had the necessary skills as the local high school just had a few tired Apple's and an old 286 computer. As a gift from Marsha and myself jointly, we bought a dozen good Compaq 386/25's for the high school to establish a computer training lab and after-school computer club, and we donated another group of cheaper 386/20's to both the local elementary and middle School so that the youngsters could have an early start at gaining some computer skills.

This was undoubtedly the best money we ever spent. It didn't pay off immediate returns of course, but it set the stage for Lovett to eventually become one of the most 'wired' towns in the country. For help now, I would have to look elsewhere.

We placed a small help wanted ad around some of the bigger BBS's (sort of the popular public precursor to the Internet - local computer 'Bulletin Boards' where a few users with modems could log in at one time and chat, share files or leave messages for each other). Nearly overnight we started to get resumes from all over the country. We picked out the three best and paid for them to travel down and visit us, and picked two of them to join us as full time employees. Money was relatively unimportant to these newcomers, they just wanted to be able to 'create'. We gave them the opportunity for both.

Dennis, the older of the two, was a better analytical coder than I was and soon handled the lions share of the main programming. He followed my notes for exactly how I wanted the games code modules set up and 99% of the timed churned out exactly what I wanted. The other 1% of the time he usually came up with something better. He was young and barely out of college, tall and extremely thin and wasn't especially sociable; he just lived to code. When he started to 'discover girls', especially the cute, very underdressed ones we had no shortage of here locally, his social skills and manners began to improve.

Clyde, called "Barker" by everyone, was a short roly-poly and flamboyantly happy kid straight out of high school that seemed to be a graphics genius, and instantly had dozens of ideas on how to improve our limited and rather basic graphics design tools. It was too late to change much of PQ-III, but I bought a couple of huge chalkboards for the walls of the basement and we started to plan out what we could do differently for PQ-IV. Barker, despite his youth and lack of an impressive male physique, was a natural babe magnet and soon developed an outrageous and very full social life. He didn't work the insane hours that Dennis and I tended to put in, but his work somehow got 'done' right when it had to be. What more can you ask?

A final new addition came a few months later, literally walking right into our front door. Erica was a want-to-be computer artist and had an excellent portfolio of superb conventional "fantasy" style art. She had driven down to see us from her home in Indiana on virtually no sleep. She didn't have the computer 'experience' we would have preferred, but no one else we had found yet really did either. We took her on-board 'on trial' and she slept mostly on the couch. Dennis and Clyde were sharing the last available bedroom. She learned the necessary skills fast, and contributed enough interesting new ideas that PQ-IV actually turned into quite a different new game entirely.

This new game "PQ-IV: Roger, the Squire" was in much of the same vein as the first PQ trilogy, and took place in the same Kingdom and shared many of the same cast of characters. In fact, this time it was the Princess who was now missing, and undoubtedly much in need of rescue, which the poor bumbling and hapless Squire managed to do in three annual installments, concluded by a Royal Wedding at the end of PQ-VI, as he eventually won the fair Princess's hand and heart.

The girls, getting older every day it seemed, provided the bulk of this new plot line and created many of the sometimes hilarious side adventures. Clyde and I developed a new 3D graphics engine to power this series that took twice as long as we had hoped, but looked in the end about twice as good as we had expected. RtS was a little late getting to our Publisher and we missed the crucial Christmas delivery window to the retail stores, but it didn't matter much at the end. RtS outsold any of our previous PQ titles and won for us our first serious 'Game of the Year' award.

This was the first and last gaming industry show that I would go to for a very long time. If Marsha hadn't been at my side keeping me from running away, I probably would have. I was treated as if I was a rock star, but I didn't know at all how to react. I felt like a small boy dressed up in my fathers best suit wearing shoes several times too large for me. I think it was my appearance at this computer industry trade show that created the lasting public image of me as the 'eccentric and reclusive genius that was very ill at ease with fame and fortune.' I wouldn't at all argue with this.

They were probably exactly correct. Other than my daughter and co-workers, I had no one to share the little joys and triumphs of my life with. I had found out some time before that Becky had finally divorced from Tony (his short NFL career was now over and was considered to be very much an utter failure) and she was living back at home with her mother. I didn't see her on any of my very irregular visits home, but Olivia did go over to her grandmother's house a few times to visit, and we did speak together a few times on the phone. She was doing 'better' and trying to get her life straight. She was back at the local Junior College and hoping to get a better job as a secretary or something in business after graduation in a year or two.

I wished her well and offered her a little financial assistance if she would accept it, which she gratefully did. Our old times together were not discussed, and that seemed to leave a huge hole right in the center of our conversations, as if each of us wanted very badly to speak of things that we dared not do. I think Olivia and her mother spoke a bit more freely, and the two of them would phone at least monthly now to 'catch up', but Olivia would rarely offer me any details of their conversations. My hurt feelings aside, for the way I had been treated, Becky was still my daughter's mother and Olivia wanted her to have at least a small place in her life.

About this same time, Marsha's long term relationship with Jeff seemed to run its course, highlighted by some sort of disagreement that occurred at the big Lovett Fall Harvest festival on Halloween day. I was not present, but Ashley supposedly was. She naturally told Olivia, who eventually gave me a few very censored account of the details. Supposedly, Marsha had sat for a Fortune Telling reading with Sarah Hampton, Lovett's beloved fabric store and quilt shop owner, and was told a great number of very unsettling things.

That was definitely mistake number one. Anyone with an ounce of common sense knew that Sarah wasn't a 'fake', and while she didn't have the powers that her own mother had allegedly possessed, anything that she predicted would be very, very likely to occur. For the locals, it was very much a case of never asking Sarah any question that you really didn't want to hear the answer for. I liked Sarah a lot, and knew that her gift was erratic and not entirely dependable, but even I had the sense never to ask her anything beyond what the next day's weather was likely to be. Sarah very much had her principles and

never

volunteered anything that was not directly and specifically solicited from her.

Her oldest daughter Lorelai didn't have her gift at all (she was already quite troubled enough with other problems) and neither did her youngest daughter Susan, who was the happiest young lady I have ever met in my life. To hear her laugh and joke you would never know that she had been in a wheelchair since she was 10 years old (hit on her bike by a car that ran a stop sign). Lorelai's daughter, Sarah's granddaughter, Lucy, was just a toddler but allegedly she already showed signs of being 'extremely fey'.

Marsha split with Jeff fairly abruptly afterwards, and by the following spring he was engaged and soon married to a nice gal that worked at the horse riding stable on the nudist colony near the beach. She moved the rest of her things back into our house to stay and announced that she was 'done with romance for a while', and later gently rebuffed my one vague attempt for us to go out on a date of our own together.

We already had one 'office romance' as Dennis looked up from his monitor one day to realize that Erica was indeed the prettiest woman that he had ever beheld before. Their romance was fairly hesitant, sometimes comically so, as neither of them possessed much in the way of interpersonal skills. They resolved to try and learn some together, and soon they were very much attached at the hip. Clyde cheerfully gave up his half of the bedroom and took over the sofa, and let Dennis and Erica share the bedroom together. They're a complicated couple and enjoy a bit a drama in their relationship, but they seem to fit each other perfectly and I don't think anyone has ever heard either of them utter a single word in anger to the other.

*****

By 1994, the company had grown way beyond our house. We now had ten full time employees and another dozen or so part-timers that handled the oddball stuff so everyone could remain focused on their core responsibilities. We currently had two very successful game franchises, and a number of smaller games that each added new little pieces of the 'World' we had created. Olivia and Ashley were now young teenagers and were also virtually full time employees themselves, when not in school.

Olivia had become our 'Keeper of the Keys'; she was the last and final word for what was 'canon' and established game lore for our gaming world. She compiled the master list of every in-game character that players could ever possibly meet, and created for each of them an unique identity, giving each motives (good and not so good) and possibly a secret or two for players clever enough to ask the right questions to discover.

Ashley was the more visual of the two, and soon she was Erica's shadow and learning all there was to know about computer artwork. She became our Art Director and her opinion about a games 'look and feel' was usually the last and final vote. More than once, we tore up thousands of hours of development on a game to fix things until they became 'just right'. Her instincts were very good, and in the long run everything was much better than it otherwise would have been otherwise.

We needed a bigger workspace, a real office where everyone could work without being all crammed in like sardines next to each other. I sent Marsha off to do some office hunting, but there really wasn't much available. Lovett has never been filled with big commercial office buildings, and I think the tallest structure in the city is the City Hall/County Office/Courthouse building that is just four stories tall. Nothing on the Town Centre was large enough, and that mostly left us with the idea of either buying another larger house or else having a brand new building constructed. Everyone grumbled, but no one had the perfect solution, so we decided to suffer in silence for awhile longer.

We also had the problem that we were now a multi-million dollar company, but we were being run like it was still just the four of us. It was getting to the point that all of Marsha's time was being spent doing administration and I was spending more time talking to our CPA and our business attorney than I was doing actual game development. In theory, my job was to 'create concepts' and flowchart a modular software design for the game that the others would then complete into a working game, and I was getting less and less done, and feeling far from creative whenever I got the chance to do it. There was a solution to this, but I was not at all sure I'd like it. Everyone agreed though we needed some sort of 'professional management'.

I called a company meeting of everyone, including the part-timers, and we exhaustively listed all of the pros and cons of bringing in some more outsiders to help manage things at the expense of maybe losing some of our previous independence. The listing of the Pro's ended up being much longer than the negative. In theory, we could have full time administration being handled by folks who were trained (and hopefully good at it), leaving the 'creative' folks free (and hopefully inspired) to be more inventive.

We just had to make sure that the new people would fit in well with our rather peculiar company culture, let alone able to deal with the normal weirdness of Lovett. We needed smart, but mentally (and morally) flexible folks, and that seemed to be a hard combination to find.