California was calling—not just Disneyland, but Silicon Valley. I knew I had to be back in the US to learn what I needed to make it as a programmer. I strongly believed going to college was a necessity. Despite signing letters with “John Romero, Ace Programmer,” I didn’t think I could get a full-time job as a programmer, especially straight out of high school. My parents suggested Oxford and Cambridge, but in my head, all I could think was, I need to make video games, and I need to go to college in the US, closer to where this is happening. To me, what was happening in Silicon Valley was massive and the center of the universe. So, the logical next step seemed to be to live with my biological dad in Salt Lake City and go to Utah Technical College (now Salt Lake Community College). Sure, it wasn’t California, but it was college, and it was closer to Silicon Valley than Alconbury. It was a good next step.
My mother, Ralph and I flew back to Los Angeles in the summer of 1985 and celebrated my graduation in Disneyland as planned. Maria, a family friend, lived in LA, and put us up.* Disneyland was my favorite place in the world. I loved the rides, the junk food, and the illusions that the park created.
I was five years old the first time I went to Disneyland. I especially remember the Matterhorn, the massive alpine roller coaster at the center of the park. We got on the bobsleds, and as I ascended, I looked down and saw nothing but the beams holding the Matterhorn together. When we reached the top of the ride, the power went out. This was freak-out-level scary to a five-year-old, but it was also cool to be frozen above the park, looking into the guts of a nonexistent mountain. My five-year-old brain didn’t process this moment as one where the curtain had been pulled back and the secrets of the great and all-powerful Oz (or in this case, Walt Disney) were revealed. That was what took place, though, not that it made the Magic Kingdom any less magical.
Looking back at my younger visits, both as a five-year-old and as a teen fresh from high school, I wonder, did the park resonate so powerfully with me because everything about it touched on the same elements as game construction or vice versa? Did Disney influence me as a game designer, or did I like it so much because I was one? Every inch of Disneyland is meticulously designed so that visitors have not just a shared experience, but the same experience. Considerable detail and planning go into every aspect of the park to heighten expectations and deliver even bigger payoffs. If the Matterhorn inadvertently opened my eyes to Disneyland’s constructed illusions, I saw their mastery when I was older. From the level design of the waiting lines to the colors and shapes of its buildings, the experience design in Disneyland is magnificent. Imagineers—Disney designers—deploy techniques to create illusions. For example, Main Street grows narrower as it nears the castle, making the building seem much bigger than it is. Meanwhile, the humdrum elements of Disneyland, the garbage bins, the transformers, and so on, are painted “no-see-’em green.” Why green? The human eye sees more green than any other color, so green is the natural color choice for camouflage. All these elements are important to a game designer trying to design both an illusion and an experience.
Decades later, my wife Brenda and I regularly piled the kids into the car and drove eight hours from our home in Santa Cruz to the Magic Kingdom. For me, each visit became a quest to learn something new about the park. I’d ask cast members questions: “What is something about the park or your job that nobody knows?” I’d study the level design of a ride, list elements of environmental storytelling, or consider the parallels between NPCs and cast members who provided both information and quests, if asked. I loved learning new things about the park each time we visited.
Of course, at age seventeen, I wasn’t exactly thinking about game design or Disney in these terms, but I was still thinking about game design nonstop. With the money I saved, I ordered my own Apple IIe and waited for it to be delivered to Maria’s house so I could get cracking. My plan was to take my new machine to Utah, where my father lived. I would enroll in college and begin my ultimate gaming quest—to land a job as a game programmer.
After Disneyland, Mom and Ralph went to Tucson to visit family for a few weeks. I stayed behind to work with Maria to earn more money before moving to Utah and starting college, and boy, did I work. If I’d known I was going from living in decent conditions in the UK to state-of-the-art Los Angeles sweatshop hell, I might have looked for other options. I didn’t know what I was getting into at her place. Every morning at 6:45, I hopped in the back of her pickup truck, and she drove around collecting her crew of undocumented Mexican immigrants. We’d arrive at her machine shop, located in an industrial complex of many different machine shops, and work until 11 p.m., assembling rivets and clinches. It was brutal work performed in furnace-like conditions; the shop wasn’t air-conditioned. I was given a block of metal with twelve poorly drilled holes in it, and my job was to pop rivets into the holes, attach a clinch, and then use a press on every one of them to make them solid. I moved thousands of these pieces every day, nonstop from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m., and when we got home there was little relief—Maria didn’t have AC there either.
I baked in 90-plus-degree weather the entire time, trying to communicate in Spanglish with my workmates. The only saving grace of the job was that there was a radio in the shop and the dial was set to KNAC—LA’s legendary metal radio station. I couldn’t believe bands like Accept, Poison, Mötley Crüe, and so many others were on the air. It was my one, solitary escape. I was so exhausted at the end of the day that I didn’t even think of coding. It was hard work, and I got paid only in room and board. However, she promised me a few hundred bucks at the end of my time that I could use toward college. All in all, I was happy for the work and glad to be back in the US. When Mom and Ralph returned from Tucson, my Apple IIe arrived, and we drove to my mom’s friend Opal’s home. I was thrilled to leave the sweatshop behind.
My mom and Ralph returned to England, and my dad eventually drove from Salt Lake to fetch me, my computer, my clothes, and not much else. I hadn’t seen him in about three years. He looked a bit older than I remembered, but he was still very much the same guy. Lean, powerful, muscular, well-groomed (even drunk, my father cared deeply about how he looked). It was obvious to both of us that we were on new terrain. We loved each other, but now we didn’t really know each other that well. Yes, he was my dad, but I was older, bigger, and smarter. I was no longer just a kid.
Like my mother and John Schuneman, my father didn’t really care about computers or gaming. He just loved playing pool. So while I could talk to him about my achievements, the games I’d made and sold, and the jobs I’d gotten, much of it was over his head. This was true of most people in the mid-’80s. Computers were typically the domain of researchers, scientists, and some office workers. Electronic typewriters were still the rage.
He lived outside Salt Lake City in Midvale with his new wife, Kaaryn, and was now a building superintendent for EIMCo, a large mining operation. He was out of the mines and managing the twelve buildings that surrounded them. He was different, too. Being surrounded by scientists day in and day out changed his perspective and educated him. Even though he didn’t have a day of college in him, he was a naturally curious man who liked to learn and absorbed whatever was happening around him.
I was given a room in their basement, where I set up my Apple IIe on a computer desk, complete with a kneeling chair—the cutting-edge ergonomic furniture of the day. I programmed and bided my time until I could register for school at Utah Tech.
Strange as all this was, it was a much better setup than the last time I’d seen my dad, which was the summer of 1982, before we moved to England. Summer vacations in my tweens and early teens with my dad were always fraught. At that time, he was dating a Mexican woman named Francis, who had three young kids. They were living in a trailer, and his idea of childcare was to give me a list of chores to do. I was fourteen and bored out of my skull. One day, I found his .22 rifle and started firing it out our window, shooting out windows of neighboring trailers.* The cops came, of course, and I lay low as they went around knocking on doors. I didn’t answer when they knocked on ours. This is not my proudest moment.
One day, we drove out to the desert home of Francis’s parents. My dad barbecued and drank while I supervised the kids—Johnny, Dina, and Ronnie. By the end of the night, my dad was loaded, but he packed up his now-empty cooler of beer and ordered me and Ralph to get in the car. Francis and her kids planned to stay behind at her parents.
“Are you sure you can drive, Al?” Francis asked.
“Oh, sure. No problem,” my dad insisted.
We got in the car and drove off. About a mile down the road, he pulled onto the shoulder.
“Mijo, sit here in front of me and drive.”
“What?”
“Come on,” he said, pushing himself back into his seat. “On my lap. You can drive.”
Fortunately, I knew how to operate the gas pedal and the brakes, because within no time at all, my dad passed out behind me. The tough thing was figuring out how the hell to get back to Tucson on dark roads at 2 a.m. Somehow, I remembered and guessed my way back, surprised that I recognized major streets.
At one point, we came to a big intersection with a Church’s fried chicken place on the far-left corner. As a rookie driver, I was in the wrong lane when I realized I needed to make a left. I was waffling in no-man’s land, the car pointed toward the fast-food joint.
“I don’t know where I’m supposed to turn!” I yelled, panicked.
Suddenly, my dad grabbed the wheel and jerked it to the left, guiding us into the correct lane.
“Oh, man,” I said. “That was close!”
“Yeah, we almost had fried chicken,” my dad said.
One minute later, he was asleep again.
Here in Utah with his new wife things seemed different—more organized, less chaotic. My dad and Kaaryn drove to work together in his Honda Accord, so my new stepmom said I could use her Toyota 4-wheel-drive truck to get around town. I couldn’t believe my luck. That was the kind of gesture I never expected a stepparent to make! The only hitch was I didn’t have a driver’s license. I got my license almost as fast as I said “thank you” to Kaaryn.
Registration at Utah Tech was a fiasco. The (mis)guidance counselor put me in the wrong program: data processing, not computer science. Data processing had nothing to do with programming a computer. Sure, it involved using computer systems, but using a system is different than creating one, and many of the classes had a business angle that didn’t feel relevant.
This could have been a rough time for me. I’d just turned eighteen in a strange town, my ex-girlfriend, who I still cared about, was thousands of miles away in England, and the college experience I hoped would change my life pointed me in the wrong direction. My living situation was so-so. I got along with my dad pretty well. He’d come down to my room and have a look at the games I was working on, but he didn’t really connect with them. He was still a major drinker. Spending time with him, I noticed one trait hadn’t changed: He’d become ornery and mean if he was sober, and far more sociable and friendly when he had booze in his bloodstream. He still liked to go to bars. Alone. So, on many evenings, I’d be home with Kaaryn. To top things off, I didn’t have any money. Everything I had saved from Maria’s was going toward my tuition. I had to borrow money just to put gas in Kaaryn’s car to get to school. As always with my dad, money was scarce, and after a month of school, he told me I needed to get a job.
Fortunately, Kaaryn’s sister had a brother-in-law who owned a computer store. He hired me to work the floor as a salesman. I was in heaven, surrounded by PCs, Commodores, and Apple IIs. Having spent the better part of the last six years reading everything I could about computers, I was the ultimate salesman. Harnessing my undiminished passion and appreciation for the machines and the software, I was an evangelical fanboy, eager to share my knowledge with anyone who wanted it. My fervor resonated with customers. I sold the hell out of our inventory. My secret? Talking my head off. All of my passion was genuine, though. Back then, computer enthusiasts were few and far between, so if I had an audience—a tech ally—I relished the conversation. The combination of sincerity, enthusiasm, and knowledge didn’t just help close sales, it also built relationships. Customers became friends as we bonded over the new technology.
Phone calls with two of my old pals in California, Rob and Christian, and my programming work also kept my spirits up. I sent out games as they were finished, and the games I published in computer magazines broadened my universe. Each of my game instructions also listed my address. So, I got mail. Often the letters were from people who claimed my code didn’t work, and I wrote back explaining that it did work, and they most likely made a typo when entering the code. This was still a time when “publishing a game” meant getting a listing of your code in the pages of a magazine. I also got fan letters from people who liked my games. One letter, from a guy in New Jersey who owned a machine shop, asked if I was interested in doing some programming for his business. He paid me in games—pirated games on floppies—but that was as good as money to me.
After crawling through the first semester at school, I’d had enough. The courses were a waste of time. I mean that in the literal sense. The computer revolution was moving fast. As I sat there studying data processing and flowcharts, others outside college were mastering Assembly language, making games, creating new ways of interacting with players. Time spent in class was time not spent getting ahead. In other words, every minute I spent in class was time I was falling behind. I told my father I was in the wrong program, and I was quitting to work full-time at the store. My dad asked me to start paying rent. That marked the beginning of the end of my time in Utah. I didn’t want to have a career at a computer store, as fun as that was. I wanted to make games for a game company, and if I was going to have to work to pay rent, I’d rather be near my closest friends or in California, the epicenter of America’s computer revolution. I just had to figure out where, exactly, to go.
Rob Lavelock rescued me. Over the phone, I told him I was done with Salt Lake and needed to figure out my next move. I wanted to get back to California, but I wasn’t sure how to make it happen.
“Why don’t you come here? You can stay with us.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“That would be awesome, but I’m not even sure how I would get there.”
“We’ll come get you. My mom and me. We can put your stuff in the back of our truck.”
I couldn’t believe it. It was the perfect out. I wouldn’t have to pay rent. I could focus on my games, and I would get to hang out with my best friend.
“Oh man. That would be so great. Are you sure your mom is cool with it?”
“Totally.”
It was hard to tell my dad this. He was less than thrilled, but he knew things hadn’t exactly gone as planned with school. He also understood that I wanted to be closer to the game industry in California. I packed up my things, thanked my dad and Kaaryn for everything, and got chauffeured to the Lavelocks’ new home in Yuba City.
Looking back, I am grateful for my time with my dad and Kaaryn, and thankful for Kaaryn’s influence in his life. I think Kaaryn was the only woman my father really, deeply loved. He treated her well, and he regularly told her, “I adore you.” I know she loves him to this day. Kaaryn was good to me and to my brother, writing us letters, calling, and keeping us connected with our dad. She loved us, and we loved her, too. She told me how proud my father was of me and my games. When his drinking turned to drug use, she gave him an ultimatum, and as is the case with many addicts, the drugs made the choice for him. I’m sure it was one of the hardest choices she ever made, but it was the right one for her. My dad returned home to Tucson.
Years later, in 2013, I was at a conference in Salt Lake City, and Kaaryn arranged to come and meet me, Brenda, and the kids for lunch. As I walked toward her, she smiled, gasped when she saw me, and then started to cry. She brushed the tears away, but they kept coming. We enjoyed the afternoon, sharing memories, looking at old photos, and reminiscing. When we left, Brenda said something that hadn’t occurred to me.
“I can’t imagine how wonderful and difficult that was for her.”
“Difficult? What do you mean?” I asked.
“Imagine loving one man your whole life, but not being with him. Then, here you come, the spitting image of that man, and nearly the same age as when she last saw him, too.”
It hadn’t occurred to me, and I’m sure Brenda was right. I’m grateful Kaaryn is still in my life.
When I left Salt Lake and bid goodbye to my father and Kaaryn, I was beyond happy to be at the Lavelocks. Rob had just graduated high school, but he was already a budding entrepreneur with a business designing aquariums for rich people. His parents had built their new house in Yuba City, which was about thirty miles from our old stomping ground of Rocklin. It was rural and naturally scenic. The house was roomy and had a great pool in the backyard. Rob and I spent lots of time swimming, lounging, and growing our respective careers.
I worked on my games and got better and better at designing them. In June, I cranked out a new creation in eleven days. Rob, who was deep into his aquarium design business, gave me the idea of a seaworthy game I called Twilight Treasures. Players took the role of a diver in scuba gear who moved vertically, hauling treasure from the bottom of the ocean and evading sharks, piranhas, deep-sea mines, and other obstacles. It was a fun game, and the editors of Nibble magazine agreed.*
Rob and I decided to get to work in earnest, and we had a plan. We started work on a role-playing game called Aberration. Rob’s parents would provide funding for the game in the form of housing and feeding me, and in return, we planned to give his parents a percentage of the game’s eventual proceeds. There was just one problem: We hadn’t cleared this with Rob’s parents. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get too far with my pitch. Rob’s dad didn’t know anything about games and wasn’t interested in starting now.
In late June, after about three months of living at Rob’s house—although I started working at Taco Bell to make some cash—Mr. Lavelock mentioned it might be time for me to move to greener pastures. I totally got it. I’d been living there rent-free, and Mrs. Lavelock was feeding me. I think Rob’s father may have also had it with Rob and his live-in business partners. Believe it or not, I was not the first. In another room lived the aquarium business cofounder, Scott. Three teenage boys under a single roof is a bit much for anyone. After all their kindness, I did not want to wear out my welcome with the Lavelocks.
I called my mom to help me develop a plan B. At the time, she was getting ready to leave England and move back to Rocklin with Ralph in the middle of August. My stepdad would follow three months later, after he packed everything up and sold the house and the car. My moving back into the house in Rocklin was not a sure thing, however, because my stepdad considered my decision to live with my biological father an act of betrayal. Mom said she would lobby him, though. Hopeful, I moved in with my mom and Ralph, counting on her to iron things out before he arrived. This seemed like a workable idea.
My mom convinced John to let me move back home on one condition: I attend Sierra College, the same college where I had taught myself to code seven years earlier. I didn’t care much about college, but it seemed like the thing to do while I figured out how to land a gig in the game industry. By the time my stepdad returned in November, I was already enrolled and taking classes while working on my games at night.
The only thing I had to figure out was transportation. Mobility in Northern California was a major issue for any eighteen-year-old who wanted a semblance of independence. My ten-speed bike was nice but didn’t cut it. I went to a local Burger King and got a job for $3.50 an hour. I cleared $100 after taxes for a thirty-five-hour week, and that meant I could afford the $121 monthly payments on a Yugo.
The Burger King was owned by former NFL star Jim Otto of the Oakland Raiders, and we were constantly being told it was the top-rated BK franchise in California, and we worked hard to keep it that way. That sense of accomplishment was important to the whole team. Working nights, I had to clean the fryers and broiler, disassembling and washing them in acid at the end of every shift. I was asked to be an assistant manager repeatedly and said no every time. I had no intention of getting deeper into the fast-food business. In my nine months at Burger King, the most interesting thing that happened to me was that a young woman passed me a note at the cash register.
“Hi. My friend likes you. She asked me to give you her number.”
I looked up and saw the friend, a beautiful woman around my age. Apparently, I hadn’t given her a second look when she’d placed her order a few minutes earlier, and that made her curious about me. Her name was Kelly Mitchell. She was a year younger than me and still in high school. Before long, we started dating. Things progressed quickly for us. I got the sense that Kelly’s family was not too happy about the relationship, though. They were devout Mormons, and I was a devout atheist. In my experience living in Utah, most of the Mormons I met were friendly, warm people. They reminded me of model TV families from the ’50s: positive, happy, clean cut, and living clean. Kelly’s family wasn’t mean or nasty to me—and her mother even bought me a bunch of expensive clothing for Christmas—but it was clear to both Kelly and me they hoped we would break up.
One night I got home around midnight and Kelly swung by. Normally, we’d just talk outside, but it was a chilly night. My stepdad had made clear that no extramarital sex was to happen in his house. Ever. It was a message I’d received loud and clear. So when I suggested Kelly come in, there were no ulterior motives in my nineteen-year-old brain. I knew what a strict and sometimes punishing disciplinarian my stepdad could be. We hung out for about an hour, and then I walked her to the door and said goodbye. I turned around and heard his voice calling me to the living room.
“I told you: no girls in the house. You disobeyed me.”
“It’s freezing out. I just invited her in to talk.”
“I’ll bet. That’s it. That’s the end. You are going to find another place to live tomorrow.”
“I have nowhere to go,” I told him. I was respectful. There was no way talking back to him would make it any better.
“That’s your problem. You are done here. Tomorrow, go find someplace else to live. You are not welcome here anymore.”
Part of me couldn’t believe it, but that was life with John Schuneman. The most dependable thing about him, from my point of view, was that he was always the most hard-assed adult in the room. For years, the frustration I dared not express came out in the Melvin comics I drew. The stepdad choking Melvin to death, Melvin’s head stomped in, Melvin’s eyes bulging out of his skull. If my kid had been drawing those comics, I’d be more than just a little concerned.
I spent the next day scrambling, looking for cheap places to live. Surviving on my Burger King salary was not an option. I needed to make more money. My mom appealed to John to give me more time. Otherwise, I’d drop out of school and all that work I’d done would be wasted. I got a temporary reprieve until the end of the spring semester, but the writing was writ large on the wall. I quit Burger King, signed up with a temp agency, and got a series of nine-dollar-an-hour jobs with tech companies around Sacramento and Rancho Cordova.
Two months later, I had my own apartment in Citrus Heights, a few towns away from Rocklin. When Kelly graduated high school, she moved in with me. At that point, I abandoned school. I didn’t need someone at the front of a room to tell me how to program in C at a snail’s pace. Too often, the lowest common denominator set the pace in our classroom, and the pace didn’t feel quick enough for me. Because I knew Assembly and BASIC, C was easy for me. I worked my way through the C programming language textbook in the first week. I learned at a much faster speed on my own, and I was only too aware that there were people out there who had a decade of experience on me and had already graduated college and learned what they needed to learn. I didn’t have any time to spare.
I was out on my own and no longer dependent on John Schuneman for anything.
It felt great.
At the same time, nine dollars an hour wasn’t living large. In fact, between Kelly and me, and given where we lived, it was definitely living small. I knew I could do more. All around me, the game industry was booming, and although I could code in Assembly language, C, and Pascal, I still wasn’t a part of it. That needed to change.
On September 15, I gathered up copies of my games on Apple II discs and went to AppleFest 87 at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco. The first thing I saw in the pavilion was the UpTime booth. UpTime, a magazine that billed itself as “The Disk Monthly,” sold floppies loaded with software for various computer platforms. The booth had terminals set up, and as I got closer, I saw a familiar sight on some of the screens—my newly published game Zippy Zombi! I couldn’t believe it. In a way, I was already in the industry; I just hadn’t known it. Zippy Zombi was in the new UpTime release, and many people were playing it. On the screens, a creature named Fuzzy jumped from cube to cube on a pyramid, changing the color of the cube with each touch. An evil snake tried to get Fuzzy. When the entire pyramid has changed color, the player got to a new level.
I introduced myself to Jay Wilbur, who ran UpTime’s Apple II products. We had been corresponding for about two years, and Jay, of course, was the guy who bought my games. So we already had an unspoken mutual admiration society going on, and it was great to meet in person. I also met Lane Roathe, who handled Apple IIgs programming for Jay. He was the first hard-core Apple II programmer I’d ever met, and I was one of the first he’d met, so we had a lot to talk about—we spoke a language that few others did. As I left the booth, I made sure to say goodbye to Jay. The publisher of UpTime, Bill Kelly, was also there.
“We could use you in Rhode Island, John,” Bill said. “How about you come work with us?”
I was floored by the offer, but I played it cool and told him I would think about it. As I walked away, I was thinking, “This is the best thing ever! I got a job offer from the first booth I visited!”
I walked over to the Softdisk booth. They were UpTime’s competitors, and I told them that not only had I published with UpTime but that my game was featured at their booth. That raised some interest.
“We would love for you to send your games to us,” the rep said, trading contact information. I was two-for-two!
Eventually, I made my way to the Origin Systems pavilion. If there was one game company I dreamed of working for, it was Origin, the company behind Ultima, one of the most important and beloved role-playing games to date. I was a total fan of the franchise, which involved many classic fantasy elements—dungeons, dragons, character creation and development, exploration, quests, and combat. I’d played every Ultima game since the series launched in 1981, eagerly waiting for each new release and lining up to purchase it on launch day.
Richard Garriott, the creator of the Ultima series and the cofounder of Origin Systems, was a rockstar of the game industry and was, like game developers Bill Budge and Nasir Gebelli, god-level to me. Richard was doing what I wanted to do at a level I had yet to attain. I could do all the same things—design, code, create art, and write—but he was doing it at a huge scale and with a team of developers, turning out gold with every game. At the time, they were developing Ultima V, and there were advertisements for it at AppleFest: “Coming October 31st!” Even being in the Origin booth felt magical to me, not unlike going to Disneyland. I had not yet made it into the industry, but I was standing at its front door. I kept my eyes peeled for Richard, or Lord British—the childhood nickname the English-born Texan was widely known by throughout the industry. I knew exactly what he looked like, and to this day, I’m sure he has a long, thin braid reaching to his mid-back and a silver serpent around his neck. I was confident in my abilities, but I knew I had so far to go to get to where Richard already was. He was a huge role model to me—he started out publishing his games in baggies, taking them to his local computer store, and now here he was defining the industry, and one of its true celebrities.
One of the games Origin was promoting at the pavilion was a new edition of Ultima I that they converted to Assembly from its original, much slower BASIC programming. I stood in front of the computer displaying this new game and decided this would be an opportune moment for show-and-tell. I removed the Ultima I floppy and popped in one of my disks, which contained my newest work: Lethal Labyrinth. I used a new graphics mode called “double hi-res.” This was a calculated move on my part. Few people had mastered double-res, which rendered graphics in sixteen colors. To anyone who saw it, I hoped it would speak volumes about my programming ability.
However, I needed to make sure someone saw it. Commandeering a computer—a computer that was there expressly to promote another game—seemed like a perfectly good idea. Now? I cringe at the audacity of this maneuver. It was a risky thing to do. The Origin director of marketing immediately walked over, which was the whole point. As soon as the game came up, her attitude switched from “Hey, what’s going on over here?” to “Oh wow, that looks really good. What is this?”
I told her it was a game in double hi-res and shared my enthusiasm about what double hi-res meant for games going forward. I said, “It has more colors than most Apple II games you’ll see in this building,” which led her to ask for my contact info. I gave her my phone number and address.
“By the way,” I said, “I’m looking for a job, and I would love to work at Origin if there were a position available.”
She explained that she worked in the marketing division but would put me in touch with the right people in the company’s New Hampshire office. I took out my disk and put Ultima I back in the machine, rebooted it, and got it running again. Then she gave me her business card. I felt like I’d just gotten the golden ticket, Willy Wonka style. I was walking on air. My head was full of the possibility of landing my dream job.
That Monday, I went back to my temp job as technical editor at a company called Jones Futurex that made encrypted communication peripherals for bank PCs to transfer sensitive data between banks. Twice a week, during lunch, I called the Origin marketing director’s phone number to find out if there was any opening. This went on for three weeks, until she said that she could get me in touch with someone who could help. My new Origin contact lived up to her word, connecting me with John Fachini, a programmer in New Hampshire who was responsible for porting Origin games onto new platforms—in other words, making a game that was coded for an Apple II work on a Commodore 64. In October, he told me a position was opening up.
“We need a Commodore 64 programmer to convert our role-playing game 2400 A.D. from the Apple II to the Commodore 64.”
I’d never worked on a Commodore 64, but I said, “Awesome, I’m ready to do that.”
“Okay. We’ll schedule you for a phone interview. Our final candidate will come to the main office in New Hampshire for the final interview.”
The next day, I went out and bought a book called Mapping the Commodore 64. I consumed the book. In two days, I felt I understood the entire machine—the operating system, its memory capability, the architecture, everything. A few days later, three programmers interviewed me on the phone, and I answered every question instantly and confidently. I studied for the “test” the way lawyers study for the bar. Since I’d just absorbed the Commodore 64 bible, I was hard-selling them on what you can do with a machine I’d never touched, but I was clear about that. At no point did I lie about my own hands-on experience. The next week they called; I beat out four other Commodore 64 programmers. It was time to fly to New Hampshire for the final interview.
I tried to act casual and wise, like I’d seen everything before, but I had never set foot in a game company office, so just being at Origin was a thrill. I was led into a conference room with nine other Apple II programmers. Seeing them didn’t intimidate me. If one could be over-prepared for a test, I was as over-prepared as they came. I wanted this job. For me, this was less an interview than a party with members of my tribe. I knew everything about the Apple II the same way some kids know everything about their favorite sports team or band. In that room, I was with people who cared about programming, who loved games the way I did. For years, I had existed as a tribe of one (or two, counting Rob), studying and worshipping computers, games, and Apple IIs. Now, it felt like I was among my people. Gamers. Game developers. My future may have been hanging in the balance, but the interview was a fun, liberating experience.
Until this interview, I had no idea where I stood in comparison to other programmers, especially ones who worked inside the game industry. Working in solitude for eight years, I always felt behind, anxious the technology (and folks like Bill Budge and Nasir Gebelli) was outpacing me. I coded constantly and read everything I could get my hands on. This was the first time I would put my technical knowledge to the test, the first time I would see myself not in isolation, but comparatively. I also had no idea what a programmer interview was supposed to be like. Was I going to write code in front of them? Would they quiz me on 6502 opcodes? Would they give me buggy code and ask me to fix it? I had no idea.
I walked into the room and the nine programmers stared at me. Never before had I seen a group of programmers collected like this. I’d never seen nine programmers, period! My anxiety was being displaced by an overwhelming feeling of excitement. I could not wait for this to happen. Let’s do it. Ask me anything, I thought. I didn’t think there was anything they could ask that I didn’t know. “Think,” of course, is the operative word here. You never know what you don’t know until someone asks it.
“Have a seat,” John Fachini said. He was the project manager.
I took a seat. I wanted to start talking, but thought I should wait for the questions.
Steve Meuse went first. “So, you’re here to do porting between the Apple II and the Commodore 64. Can you tell us about the similarities between the two computers?”
Where to even start? I didn’t want to risk leaving anything out, so I started at the beginning.
“They are 8-bit computers that have 64K of RAM and a ROM bank that controls all the functions of the computer. There are special memory locations that control hardware specific to both computers. The Commodore has a 6510 CPU and the Apple II has a 6502 CPU, which means they both have the same instruction set, but the Commodore has an 8-bit bidirectional I/O port on the back.”
No one stopped me, and so I kept going.
“The great news is that you can switch out the ROM and I/O on the Commodore, so you have a full 64K of memory. The Apple II has bank-switched memory that can also get you close to that, but you cannot switch out the $C000 range since that controls hardware. The C64 has a sixteen-color mode that can display even more colors than the Apple II, so I plan on using that. Really, most of the port would be handling input and graphics and sound output to maximize the Commodore hardware.”
Nodding, the programmers pivoted: “We’d like to talk to you about your knowledge of 6502 assembly.”
This was the moment that I was waiting for. I was so eager, and it showed.
“Ask me anything. Instructions, ROM locations, anything at all about the Apple II. I can answer anything.”
Some of the older programmers smiled and looked at one another. Sure, kid.
And so they did. They asked me anything and everything. It was the most fun I’d had in weeks, talking with nine experts about a language I loved. I was so grateful for the experience and enjoying the conversation so much that I think I lost sight of it being an interview.
I found I could talk their talk and walk their walk. It was a watershed moment. I felt energized and liberated. Concerns I had about being behind the curve left me and were replaced by a drive to get ahead.
One perfectly timed coincidence helped set the mood for the interview: My new game, Major Mayhem, had been accepted by Nibble magazine. When they asked me what I’d been doing, it was a timely thing to mention, and it served as a lead-in to all the other games I’d created. Even though I was younger than everyone else in the room, just going through my games and the magazines that published them was a tangible way to communicate that I knew my stuff and let them know I could handle the work.
They offered me the job, and I accepted.
I was now part of the game industry—and that made my existence in the real world easier. Finding a good job was more important than ever because Kelly was pregnant. We decided to get married, at my parents’ insistence and much to her parents’ dismay, and then drove across the country to my new job.
I was barely twenty and bound for glory, or so I hoped, anyway. My starting salary? $22,000. It was a certainly a livable salary at the time, particularly since I would have done all of it for free. I was exactly where I wanted to be.
* Not her real name.
* It never occurred to me that there might be people inside or that doing this could possibly hit them. I shake my head in shock every time I think of this.
* Nibble magazine accepted the game, but they did not release it until December 1989, when they put it on the cover. It was my first game to be accepted for a cover, but not the first printed cover.