AS 1982 progressed and the second anniversary of his company rolled around. Ken Williams was beginning to lose patience with John Harris, and with young hackers in general. He no longer had the time, nor the inclination, to give hours of technical assistance to his hackers. He began to regard the questions his programmers would ask him (How can I put this on the screen without flicker? How can I scroll objects horizontally? How do I get rid of this bug?) as distractions from what was becoming his main activity: hacking On-Line Systems as it grew in logarithmic leaps and bounds. Until now, when a programmer would call Ken and frantically howl that he was stuck in some subroutine, Ken would go over, cry with him, and fiddle with the program, doing whatever it took to make his hacker happy. Those days were ending.
Ken did not see the shift in attitude as making his company any less idealistic. He still believed that On-Line was changing lives through the computer, both the lives of its workers and the lives of its customers. It was the beginning of a computer millennium. But Ken Williams was not sure that the hacker would be the central figure in this golden age. Especially a hacker like John Harris.
The split between Ken Williams and John Harris symbolized something occurring all over the home computer software industry. At first, the artistic goals of the hacker coincided neatly with the marketplace, because the marketplace had no expectations, and the hackers could blithely create the games they wanted to play, and adorn business programs with the nifty features that displayed their artistry.
But as more nontechnical people bought computers, the things that impressed hackers were not as essential. While the programs themselves had to maintain a certain standard of quality, it was quite possible that the most exacting standards those applied by a hacker who wanted to add one more feature, or wouldn't let go of a project until it was demonstrably faster than anything else around were probably counterproductive. What seemed more important was marketing. There were plenty of brilliant programs which no one knew about. Sometimes hackers would write programs and put them in the public domain, give them away as easily as John Harris had lent his early copy of Jawbreaker to the guys at the Fresno computer store. But rarely would people ask for public domain programs by name: they wanted the ones they saw advertised and discussed in magazines, demonstrated in computer stores. It was not so important to have amazingly clever algorithms. Users would put up with more commonplace ones.
The Hacker Ethic, of course, held that every program should be as good as you could make it (or better), infinitely flexible, admired for its brilliance of concept and execution, and designed to extend the user's powers. Selling computer programs like toothpaste was heresy. But it was happening. Consider the prescription for success offered by one of a panel of high-tech venture capitalists, gathered at a 1982 software show: "I can summarize what it takes in three words: marketing, marketing, marketing." When computers are sold like toasters, programs will be sold like toothpaste. The Hacker Ethic notwithstanding.
Ken Williams yearned for the bestsellers, games whose very names had the impact of brand names. So when his star programmer, John Harris, mentioned that he would like to try converting a popular coin-op arcade game called "Frogger" to the Atari Home Computer, Ken liked the idea. Frogger was a simple yet bewitching game in which the player tried to manipulate a cute little frog over a heavily trafficked highway and across a stream by making it hop on the backs of logs and turtles; the game was popular, and, if well hacked, might well be a bestselling computer game. "John Harris saw it and said it was really neat. He told me he could program it in a week. I agreed it looked trivial," Ken later recalled.
Instead of having Harris copy the program and give it another name, Ken Williams played by corporation rules. He called the owner of the game's rights, the Sega division of the Gulf& Western conglomerate. Sega did not seem to understand the value of their property, and Ken managed to acquire computer-disk and cassette rights for a paltry 10 percent royalty fee. (Sega licensed cartridge rights to the Paricer Brothers game company; the marketers of "Monopoly" were breaking into the videogame market.) He set John Harris to work immediately on the conversion of the game to the Atari computer. He also assigned a programmer to do an Apple version, but since the Apple graphics were not well suited to the game, it would be the Atari which would showcase the excellence of Ken's company.
John Harris guessed that it would be a quick and dirty three-week project (his original one-week boast had been an idle one) to do a perfectly admirable Atari version of Frogger. This was the kind of illusion with which hackers often begin projects. Working in the office he had set up in the smallest of three bedrooms in his rambling orange-wood house a room cluttered with papers, discarded hardware, and potato-chip bags John put the graphics on the screen in short order; during that period, he later recalled, "I glued my hands to the keyboard. One time I started programming at three in the afternoon. After cranking out code for a while, I looked out and it was still light outside and I thought, 'It seems like I've been typing for more than a few hours.' And of course it had already been through the night and that was the next morning."
The work went swiftly, and the program was shaping up beautifully. A friend of John's in San Diego had written some routines to generate continuous music, using the three-voice sound synthesizer chip in the Atari to mingle the strains of the original Frogger theme with "Camptown Races," all with the gay contrapuntal up-beat of a calliope. Harris' graphic shapes were never better the leaping frog, the little hot rods and trucks on the highway, the diving turtles and the goofy-looking alligators in the water ... every detail lovingly denned on shape tables, worked into assembly-language subroutines, and expertly integrated into game play-It was the kind of game, Harris believed, that only a person in love with gaming could implement. No one but a true hacker would approach it with the lunatic intensity and finicky artistic exactitude of John Harris.
It did not turn out to be a quick and dirty three-week project, but no one had really expected it to. Software always takes longer than you expect. Almost two months into the project, though, John was well over the hump. He decided to take off work for a couple of days to go back to San Diego for Software Expo, a charity benefit for muscular distrophy. As a leading software artist, John was going to display his work, including the nearly completed Frogger. So John Harris packed the pre-release Frogger into his software collection, and took the whole box with him to Southern California.
When traveling with a cargo as valuable as that, extreme care was called for. Besides including the only version of Frogger, the most important program John Harris had ever written (John had a backup copy, of course, but he brought that along in case the primary disk didn't boot), John's library included almost every disk he owned, disks loaded with software utilities self-modified assemblers, routines for modifying files, music generators, animation routines, shape tables ... a young lifetime of tools, the equivalent to him of the entire drawer of paper-tape programs for the PDP-1 at MIT. One could not turn one's back on a priceless collection like that; one held it in one's hand almost every moment. Otherwise, in the single moment that one forgot to hold it in one's hand and turned one's back on it for instance, during a moment of rapt conversation with an admirer well, as Murphy's Law holds ("Whatever can go wrong, will"), one's valuable software library could be tragically gone.
That was precisely what happened to John Harris at the Software Expo.
The instant that John Harris ended his interesting conversation and saw that his software collection was gone, he knew his soul had been wounded. Nothing was more important to John than the floppy disks in that box, and he felt the void deeply. It was not as if the computer had chomped up one disk and he could go into mara-thon mode for a few days to restore what he had lost onto the screen. This was a full-blown masterpiece totally wiped. And even worse, the tools with which he had created the masterpiece were gone as well. There was no worse disaster imaginable.
John Harris went into a deep depression.
He was much too upset to boot up his Atari and begin the laborious task of rewriting Progger when he returned to Oakhurst. For the next two months, he wrote no more than ten lines of source code. It was hard to even sit in front of the computer. He spent almost all day, every day, at Oakhurst's single arcade, a small storefront in a tiny shopping center across the street from the two-story office building that On-Line was moving into. As arcades went, this was a hole, with dark walls and nothing for decoration but the videogame machines themselves, and not even the latest models. But it was home to John. He took a part-time job as cashier. He would exchange game tokens for quarters, and when he wasn't on duty he would play Starpath and Robotron and Berzerk and Tempest. It seemed to help. Other times he would get in his four-wheel-drive truck, go off-road, look for the biggest hill he could find, and try to drive to its crest. He would do anything, in fact, but program.
"I spent almost every hour of every day down at the arcade waiting for some girl to walk in there," he later recalled. "I'd go home and play a game on my computer and then try to slip in the program disk and try to start programming as if I were playing the game." None of it worked. "I could not motivate myself to write two lines of source code."
Ken Williams' heart was unmoved by John Harris' loss. It was hard for Ken to have sympathy for a twenty-year-old boy to whom he was paying several thousand dollars a month in royalties. Ken felt a sense of friendship toward John, but Ken had also developed a theory about friends and business. "Everything is personal and good friends up to about ten thousand dollars," Ken later explained. "Once past ten thousand dollars, friendship doesn't matter." The possible earnings of Frogger were worth many times that five-figure threshold.
Even before John had once again proved his idiocy to Ken Williams by his carelessness at the Software Expo, Ken had been impatient with his ace programmer. Ken thought John should have written Frogger in less than a month to begin with. "John Harris is a perfectionist," Ken Williams later said. "A hacker. He will keep working on a project for two months after anyone else would have stopped. He likes the ego satisfaction of having something out that's better than anything else in the marketplace." Bad enough, but the fact that John was not working at all now, just because he suffered a setback, drove Ken wild. "He would say his heart wasn't in it," Ken recalled. "Then I would find him in the arcade, working for tokens!"
In front of John's friends, Ken would make nasty remarks about how late Frogger was. Ken made John too nervous to think of pithy rejoinders right on the spot. Only away from Ken could John Harris realize he should have said that he was not Ken's employee, he was a free-lance programmer. He had not guaranteed Ken any delivery date. John could do whatever he wanted. That was what he should have said. Instead, John Harris felt bad.
It was torture, but finally John dragged himself to the Atari and began to rewrite the program. Eventually he re-created his earlier work, with a few extra embellishments as well. Forty-four colors, the player-missile graphic routines fully redefined, and a couple of neat tricks that managed to make the eight bits of the Atari 6502 chip emulate ten bits. John's friend in San Diego had even made some improvement on the three-voice concurrent sound track. All in all, John Harris' version looked even better than the arcade game, an astounding feat since arcade games used custom-designed chips for high speed and solid-color graphics, and were almost never approximated by the less powerful (though more versatile) home computers. Even experienced programmers like Jeff Stephen-son were impressed.
The dark period was over, but something had changed in the relationship between Ken and John. It was emblematic of the way that On-Line was changing, into more of a bureaucracy than a hacker Summer Camp. Whereas the procedure for releasing John's previous games had been impromptu testing on-site ("Hey! We got a game to play today! If everyone likes it, let's ship it!"), now Ken had a separate department to test games before release. To John, it seemed that it now took about fifty exchanges of interoffice memos before anyone got around to saying that he liked a game. There were also logjams in packaging, marketing, and copy protection. No one quite knew how, but it took over two more months two months after John had turned in his fully completed Frogger for the game to be released.
When it was finally on the market, everyone recognized that Frogger was a terrific conversion from arcade to home computer. John's check for the first month's royalties was for thirty-six thousand dollars, and the program went to number one on Softsel Distributors' new "Hot List". of programs (which was compiled weekly and patterned after Billboard's record chart), staying there for months.
Ken Williams never forgot, though, the troubles that John Harris had given him during the depressed stage, when it looked like John would never deliver a working Frogger. And by the summer of 1982, Ken began to plan for the day that he would be free of all the John Harrises of the world. As far as Ken Williams was concerned, the age of the hacker had ended. And its end had come not a moment too soon.
Like his early role model, Jonas Cord of The Carpetbaggers, Ken Williams loved making deals. He would call a prospective! programmer on the telephone and say, without any shame and only a slight sense of parody, "Why don't you let me make you rich?" He also liked dealing with executives from giant corporations on a peer basis. In 1982, one of the early boom years of the computer revolution, Ken Williams talked to many people, and the kinds of deals he made indicated what kind of business home computer software was becoming, and what place, if any, hackers, or the Hacker Ethic, would have in the business.
"On-Line's crazy," Williams said that summer. "I have this philosophy that I either want to pretend to be IBM or not be here."
He dreamed of making a national impact on the mass marketplace. In the summer of 1982, that meant the Atari VCS machine, the dedicated game machine for which bestselling games were not counted in tens of thousands, as Apple software was, but in millions.
Atari regarded the workings of its VCS machine as a secret guarded somewhat more closely than the formula for Coca-Cola. Had it been a formula for a soft drink, the schematic plan of the VCS which memory location on the chip triggered color on the screen, and which hot spot would ignite sound might well have remained within Atari's vaults. But this was the computer industry, where code-breaking had been a hobby ever since the lock-hacking days at MIT. With the added incentive of heady profits obtainable by anyone who topped the rather mundane software offerings that complacent Atari sold for its machine, it was only a matter of time before the VCS secrets were broken (as were the Atari 800 secrets).
The first companies to challenge Atari on the VCS, in fact, were start-ups formed by the former Atari programmers who had been called "towel designers" by Atari's president. Almost all of Atari's VCS wizards jumped ship in the early 1980s. This was no small loss, because the VCS machine was hopelessly limited in memory, and writing games on it required skills honed as finely as those required in haiku composition. Yet the Atari programmers who left knew how to extend the machine far beyond its limitations; the games they wrote for their own companies made Atari's look silly. The improved quality of the games extended the market life of the VCS for years. It was a stunning justification of the hacker insistence that when manuals and other "secrets" are freely disseminated the creators have more fun, the challenge is greater, the industry benefits, and the users get rewarded by much better products.
Meanwhile, other companies were "reverse engineering" the VCS, dissecting it with oscilloscopes and unspeakably high-tech devices until they understood its secrets. One such company was Tiger Toys, a Chicago-based company which contacted Ken Williams to set up an arrangement to share his programming talent.
Williams flew three hackers to Chicago, where Tiger Toys taught them what a bitch the VCS was to program. You had to be penurious with your code, you had to count cycles of the machine to space out the movements of things. John Harris in particular hated it, even though he and Roberta Williams had sat down one night and figured out a nifty new VCS layout for lawbreaker which looked less like Pac-Man. John Harris was used to the much faster routines on the Atari 800 computer, and was indignant that this other machine refused to accept similar routines. He considered the VCS ridiculous. But John really wanted to do a program that would blow Atari's VCS version of Pac-Man out of the water, and with the new Jawbreaker scheme he was able, in his opinion, to accomplish that task. Atari's VCS Pac-Man was full of flicker, a big loser; John's VCS program had no flicker, was colorful, and was blindingly fast.
Ken Williams' dealings did not stop with the VCS market. Since computer games were becoming as successful as the movies, he was able to pursue ties to that industry. The world-famous creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, was coming out that Christmas with a $20 million movie called Dark Crystal that had the earmarks of a blockbuster. Ken and Henson made a deal.
While Ken guessed that the idea of tying a computer game to an unreleased movie was risky what if the movie bombed? Roberta Williams loved the idea of writing an adventure game based on Dark Crystal characters. She considered computer games as much a facet of the entertainment world as movies and television, and thought it natural that her genre should merge with those glamorous counterparts. Indeed, other videogame and computer companies were working on projects with movie tic-ins. There was Atari's "E.T.," Fox Videogames' "M.A.S.H.," and Parker Brothers' "The Empire Strikes Back." A computer game company named DataSoft was even working on an adventure game based on the television show "Dallas." This was quite a step from the early days, when all a programmer had to work with was creativity. Now he could work with a bankable property. If Dark Crystal was not quite the big leagues, the next deal was. For this one, Ken Williams was dealing with the biggest company of all.
IBM.
International Business Machines, toe-to-toe with the Coarse-gold, California, company that did not exist two years ago. White-shirted, dark-tied, batch-processed IBM'ers coming to Ken's new corporate headquarters, which consisted of a series of offices in the same building that housed the little office where Oakhursters and Coarsegoldians paid their electric bills, a little furniture store on the ground floor, and a beauty parlor next to the office where Ken ran marketing and advertising.
To On-Liners, hackers, and Oakhurst natives dressed in Summer Camp shorts and T-shirts, IBM's cloak-and-dagger behavior was absurd. Everything was so solemnly top secret. Before IBM would divulge even an inkling of its intentions, its poker-faced personnel insisted that everyone who might possibly know about the deal and this was to be kept to the smallest number of people possible sign lengthy and binding nondisclosure forms which mandated severe tortures and complete frontal lobotomies, almost, to anyone leaking the name of the three-initial company or its plans.
The predictions of Computer Lib author Ted Nelson and others that the personal computer revolution would put IBM "in disarray" had proven a pathetic underestimation of the monolithic firm. The Hulking Giant of computer companies had proven to be more nimble than anyone had expected. In 1981, it had announced its own computer, the IBM "PC," and the very specter of this entry led many in the small computer industry to make preparations for rolling over and dropping dead for IBM, which they promptly did when the IBM's PC machine was put on the marketplace. Even people who hated IBM and its batch-processed philosophy rolled over and dropped dead, because IBM had done something which represented a virtual turnaround from everything they had previously stood for: they opened their machine up. They encouraged outsiders to write software. They even enlisted outside firms to help design the thing, firms like Microsoft, headed by Bill Gates (the author of the original software piracy letter, directed at the Homebrew Altair BASIC copiers). Gates wrote the IBM operating system which almost instantly became a new industry standard. It was almost as if IBM had studied the Hacker Ethic and decided that, in this case, it was good business sense to apply it.
IBM did not plan to apply the Hacker Ethic too much, though. It still valued secrecy as a way of life. So IBM waited until all the nondisclosure forms were signed before its men in the white shirts told Ken Williams what they had in mind. IBM was planning a new machine for the home, cheaper and better at playing games than the PC. It was code-named Peanut, but would eventually be known as PCjr. Would On-Line like to do a new kind of adventure interpreter, more sophisticated than anything that came before it? And also write an easy-to-use word processing program for the PCjr? Ken thought they could, no problem, and while Roberta began charting yet another adventure plot. Ken set about hiring a top secret team of wizards to hack code for the project.
It would cost On-Line a lot of money to participate in some of these high-rolling ventures. But Ken Williams had taken care of that by the most significant deal of all. Venture capital. "I had never even heard of venture capital," Ken Williams later said. "I had to be convinced to take it." Still, On-Line was spending money very quickly, and the $1.2 million the company received from the Boston firm called TA Associates (plus two hundred thousand dollars for Ken and Roberta personally) was essential to maintain cash flow. In return, TA got 24 percent of the company and consultation rights on various aspects of the business.
The woman at TA who made the deal was vibrant, gray-haired Jacky Morby, with precise features, a studied intensity, and the ability to insinuate herself as a distant godmother to the company. Jacky Morby was very experienced in situations where brilliant entrepreneurs begin companies that grow so fast they threaten to get out of hand, and she immediately advised Ken Williams, in such a way that he knew this was not merely casual advice, to get some professional management. She recognized that Ken was not an MBA type not one who would properly nurture his company to take its place in the traditional line of companies that make this country great and venture capital firms like TA very rich. If On-Line Systems were to go public and shift everybody into Croesus Mode, there would have to be a firm rudder to guide it in the waters ahead. Ken's rudder was bent. He kept veering to wild schemes, crazy deals, and hacker Summer Camp blowouts. Someone would have to come in and supply a new rudder.
The idea was not unappealing to Ken, who had announced to So/talk as early as March 1981 that he was "firing himself from the On-Line staff in hopes that [he'd] be able to get some programming done." And surely it was clear that something had to be done about the managerial mess that was thickening as the company sold more software, took on more deals, tried to get hold of more programmers, and shuffled more paper, even if a lot of the paper was in the form of data handled in Apple computers.
The problem came from Ken's hacking On-Line as if it were a computer system, tweaking a marketing plan here, debugging the accounting there. Like his computer hacking, which was characterized by explosive bursts of innovation and inattention to detail, his business style was punctuated by flashes of insight and failures to follow through on ideas. He was among the first to recognize the value of a low-cost word processing package for the Apple (a culmination of the idea MITs Model Railroad Club hackers had when they wrote "Expensive Typewriter" on the TX-0), and had the patience to support the program through innumerable revisions the program, eventually called "Screenwriter II," would gross over a million dollars in sales. But his friendly competitors would laugh at his habit of writing huge royalty checks for programmers on the same checkbook he used for his supermarket accounts. He would help develop a program called "The Dictionary," which corrects an Apple user's spelling, but then would place a magazine advertisement for the product which contained ten spelling errors, including a misspelling of the word "misspell."
Ken's new office was just about buried in junk. One new employee later reported that on first seeing the room, he assumed that someone had neglected to take out a huge, grungy pile of trash. Then he saw Ken at work, and understood. The twenty-eight-year-old executive, wearing his usual faded blue Apple Computer T-shirt and weatherbeaten jeans with a hole in the knee, would sit behind the desk and carry on a conversation with employees or people on the phone while going through papers. The T-shirt would ride over Ken's protruding belly, which was experiencing growth almost as dramatic as his company's sales figures. Proceeding at lightning pace, he would glance at important contracts and casually throw them in the pile. Authors and suppliers would be on the phone constantly, wondering what had happened to their contracts. Major projects were in motion at On-Line for which contracts hadn't been signed at all. No one seemed to know which programmer was doing what; in one case two programmers in different parts of the country were working on identical game conversions. Master disks, some without backups, some of them top secret IBM disks, were piled on the floor of Ken's house, where one of his kids might pick it up or his deg piss on it. No, Ken Williams was not a detail person.
He knew it, too. Ken Williams came to believe that his company had grown so big it had to be run in a more traditional manner by someone without hacker tendencies. Finally, he came up with a candidate. His former boss, Dick Sunderiand.
Ken knew Dick Sunderiand as a representative of the vague qualities that a respectable business should have, qualities that On-Line conspicuously lacked: predictability, order, control, careful planning, uniform outlook, decorum, adherence to guidelines, and a structured hierarchy. It was no accident that these missing qualities were things that hackers loathed. If Ken had set out to find someone who best represented the antithesis of the Hacker Ethic, he would have been hard-pressed to top his former boss. The act was akin to someone acknowledging that he was sick, and perversely choosing the worst-tasting medicine as a restorative.
There was something more insidious in the choice as well. One reason why Ken had left Informatics several years earlier was that Dick Sunderiand had told him, "Ken, you have no management potential." The idea of being Dick Sunderland's boss, therefore, appealed greatly to Ken's affection for toppling the established order.
For Dick Sunderiand, the prospect of working for Ken Williams initially struck him as absurd. "Come up and run my company!" Ken had chirped to him over the phone from this mountain complex near Yosemite. This was no way to recruit executives, thought Dick. There is no way, he told himself, I am going to get mixed up in a deal like this. Dick was completing an MBA program, a move which he felt would put him in line for the very top positions at Informatics. But by the time Ken called him a second time, Sunderiand had been worrying about his future at Informatics, and had been thinking of the booming microcomputer field. In early June, Dick drove up, and had lunch at the Broken Bit with the motley crew of Oakhurst retreads and college dropouts that made up Ken's upper management. He looked at the venture capital deal and was impressed. Eventually, he came to think that On-Line, as he later put it, "had a hell of a potential, something I could work with. I could bring what was missing cohesive leadership to make things jell." Dick realized the home software industry was "new, like clay ... you could mold it and make it happen, make a winner ... BOOM! It was the opportunity of a lifetime for me."
On the other hand, he would be working for Ken Williams. For over a month, Dick and his wife April would spend hours sitting in the backyard of the Los Angeles house they had carefully decorated over the years, kicking around this fantasy that would mandate their evacuation from the house, and it would be clear that the number one risk was the personality of this wild programmer-tumed-software-czar. Dick consulted professionals to discuss what it would be like, a careful manager working for this reckless entrepreneur; he spoke to management experts, even a psychiatrist. Sun-derland became convinced he could handle the Ken Problem.
On September 1, 1982, Dick Sunderland began as the president of On-Line Systems, which coincidentally was also changing its name. Reflecting the proximity of Yosemite, the company would now be called Sierra On-Line, and the new logo had a drawing of Half-Dome Mountain in a circle. A change to accommodate the new age.
A week before Dick arrived, Ken was feeling expansive. It was the day that he drifted over to give his blessing to the hacker who had "auditioned" with his Wall Wars game. After that encounter, he talked to a visitor about the potential stardom of his charges. He admitted that some of his authors had become brand names, almost like rock stars. "If I release a game and put the John Harris name on it, it will sell a ton more copies than if I don't," he said. "John Harris is a household name in [Atari] households. Among Atari computer owners, probably a higher percentage have heard of John Harris than [of] most rock stars."
But now that Dick Sunderland's approach was imminent, Ken was hoping that the programmers' power would be lessened. He was now a hacker who was convinced that hackers should be stifled. He was counting on Dick to get the standard programmer royalty down from 30 percent to 20. "I don't think you need a genius of programming" to make a hit game, said Ken. "The days of needing an A-student programmer to write an acceptable game aren't over, but within a year of being over. Programmers, they're not a dime a dozen, but they're 50K a dozen. Moving the spaceship [on the video display] isn't a problem anymore. What's needed is to guess what the marketplace wants, access to the distribution channels, money, gimmicks, marketing promotion."
Sitting in his office that day, speaking in his startlingly candid what-the-hell tone, guessing that his company would "either be $200 million in sales by 1985 or bankrupt," adding "I'm not real hung up on which," Ken Williams promised to retreat to the mountain, like some high-tech pilgrim, and contemplate the next step in bringing about the computer millennium. But to the surprise of almost no one, Ken Williams did not keep his promise to "fire himself." It would have been as out of character as a hacker abandoning a hot game program before all the proper features were written into it. Ken Williams had presented the company to Dick as if his goal getting a company to a point where it was big enough to be left to a manager were accomplished. But like a hacker, Ken Williams did not see things in terms of goals. He was still enamored of the process of running On-Line, and the clash of cultures between hacker informalism and bureaucratic rigidity threw the company into turmoil.
It was almost as if a fight were being waged for the soul of the industry. Among the first things Dick Sunderland tried to impose at Sierra On-Line was a rigid corporate structure, a hierarchy in which employees and authors would only be permitted to take up problems with immediate superiors. Dick requested the secretaries to distribute copies of the organization chart, with a box at the top for Ken, one underneath for Dick, and a series of boxes underneath, all connected by lines which represented the only authorized channels of communication. That this approach was antithetical to hackerism did not disturb Dick, who felt that hacker attitudes had almost brought the company to bankruptcy and ruin.
Dick particularly wanted an end to Summer Camp. He had heard stories about the rowdy goings-on, the drugs, the impromptu parties, the pranks during working hours ... he'd even heard from the janitorial staff that there'd been actual fucking in the office at night! Those kinds of things had to stop. He particularly wanted Ken to maintain a more executive-like relationship with his employees, and to promote more orderly, rational lines of communication. How can you maintain a hierarchical structure when the chief executive gets in his hot tub with low-level employees?
To Dick's mind, the flow of information should be channeled with discretion, with an unambiguous interpretation controlled by the people at the top. People who don't have the broad view of things should not be upset by getting dribs and drabs of information. What Dick had to contend with at On-Line, though, was an incredible rumor mill, fed by the unfettered flow of information that company had been accustomed to. And Ken Williams, Dick said, "nurtures [the rumor mill] rather than quells it. He has no sense of discretion!" Everything was public record with Ken, from his personal life to his bank account.
Dick was convinced, though, that Ken knew On-Line needed responsible management, or it would die. But Ken was so reluctant to step back. Sunderland could settle the personnel situation, bring in carefully considered candidates, keep the payroll under control ... and then Ken would tell him, bang, that he just hired somebody to be his administrative assistant, a job opening that did not exist until that very minute. "And who did he hire?" Dick would say. "Some guy driving a Pepsi truck in L.A.!"
"This is casebook stuff," Dick said. He recalled reading about it in business school: entrepreneur who gets going on a brilliant idea, but can't handle it when the business gets big. It all came from the hacker origins of the company. Ken was saying that the time for hackers was over; he wanted to limit programmers' power in the company. But he wasn't making it easy for Dick.
It was particularly tough trying to negotiate the royalty down from 30 to 20 percent when the programmers had the impression that the company was rolling in money. It really wasn't, but no one believed that when they saw green just about falling from the windows. Everyone knew about the house Ken was building outside of town. It would be four hundred feet long. A party room that would be the biggest in the area. A crew of over a dozen were working full-time on it ... they had constructed an entire office on the work site, with phone hookups and everything. The house was not even half finished, and already Ken had invited the whole company to come to the site on weekends to play in the built-in racquetball court. It was not the best way to convince programmers to opt for austerity.
Ken Williams' point of view was somewhat different. He had hired Dick, and would often defend him. But he thought it necessary to keep his hand in. Ken felt responsible to the people he had hired, and to the vision of the company itself. He knew the industry as well as anyone; Dick was a newcomer to the family. Also, Ken Williams was having too much fun: leaving now would be like walking away from a crap table when you're on the hottest roll of your life. Or, more to the point, it was like telling a hacker that he could no longer play with the machine. Those words did not register with hackers. Once you had control, the godlike power that comes from programming mastery, you did not want to let go of it.
Roberta Williams would agree. Just as Ken treated On-Line like a complex computer program to be hacked, Roberta thought of the company as a creative project which should be lovingly embellished and elegantly structured, like an adventure game. Like authors of an adventure game, she and Ken had enjoyed ultimate control over the company; turning it over was difficult. She compared the situation to hiring a governess: "You would think, wouldn't it be great to have someone come in and watch the kids every day while I'm doing this thing I want to do. I can design adventure games. But then she starts telling the kids everything they can do 'Oh yes, you can have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.' And I may not believe in peanut butter and jelly. I might prefer them to have beef. That person says, 'Peanut butter is good, there's a lot of protein in peanut butter. You hired me, let me do my job.' That's what we're running into with Dick. He said, 'You gave me the power to do this, you wanted to go off and program.' Now we are saying, 'Yeah, that's what we thought we wanted, but it turns out we don't want to give up control.'"
While the management of Sierra On-Line struggled to find itself, the Third Generation hackers there were glum over the changes in their company. They would talk over frozen dinners at the Hexagon House before playing Dungeons and Dragons. Or they would discuss the deteriorating moral state of the company over pizza and Cokes at Danny's, a bleak roadhouse on Route 41 with picnic-style tables covered with plastic checkered tablecloths. Most of the customers were local families who didn't seem to like the On-Line people much, but it was almost the only place in town where you could get a pizza and play videogames, which the hackers played compulsively, with no visible sense of involvement or even interest, while they waited for their food.
They were proud of their positions, and almost puzzled at their good fortune in getting paid for work they loved. In the early 1980s, hacking games was about the only form of commercially viable artistry where, with almost no capital, you could truly be an auteur: single-handedly you could conceive, script, direct, execute, and polish a work, completing an objet d'art which was every bit as good as the bestselling game on the market. This Third Generation found itself in an artistically privileged position. The fact that publishers competed for their wares made things pleasant on the one hand, but confusing on the other. There were no rules for this kind of thing. It was a rare twenty-year-old hacker who had the business acumen and intestinal fortitude to cope with a negotiator as forceful as Ken Williams, or as formally intimidating as Dick Sunder-land. Since money wasn't the main issue for the hackers, they'd agree to almost anything if they thought it was fair. Business wasn't as much fun as hacking was.
Still, in the fall of 1982, it was the most creative programmers who drove the industry. Broderbund was riding high on "Choplifter," written by a twenty-eight-year-old former artificial-intelligence hacker named Dan Gorlin. The game was based on the Iran hostage crisis: a chopper crossed enemy lines and tried to rescue sixty-four hostages little animated figures who waved when they saw the helicopter. It was the big game of the year, and consistent with the Carlstons' classy approach to the business. They loved their hackers. They talked all the time about what great artists their "game designers" were.
Sinus had been developing its own superstars, but Gebelli, the designer who had done almost all their games in the first year of Sirius' existence, was not one of them. According to Jerry Jewell, Gebelli thought that Sirius was not the best agency for display and sale of his artworks this after receiving a quarter of a million dollars in his first year, noted Jewell incredulously and, along with a defecting Sirius executive, began his own company, modestly named Gebelli Software. It did not join the top ranks of the industry.
Sirius survived the loss by importing teen-age hackers from other parts of the country, and they delivered some hit games called "Beer Run," "Twerps," and "The Earth Dies Screaming." Jerry Jewell acted as a sometimes rowdy big brother to his young programmers. What Jewell really lusted after was the mass VCS market, and after signing a major deal to develop games for Twentieth-Century Fox's new videogame division he was afire with visions of his products as household words, not just in the Apple or Atari world, but everywhere. He figured that some of his programmers might make as much as a million dollars a year.
At On-Line, where the VCS had been a mere flirtation, Ken Williams and Dick Sunderland were not talking about a million dollars a year for their programmers. They were trying to cut the royalty down from 30 to 20 percent. And when On-Line hackers gathered at places like Danny's, they would compare notes and find that they were in agreement: 30 percent was fair, and 20 percent was not. Br0derbund and Sirius were still offering higher royalties. Some of the hackers had been approached by an exciting new company called Electronic Arts. It consisted of ex-Apple people who promised to treat hackers as culture heroes, like rock stars.
Ken and Dick had tried to convince them that 20 percent was a fair figure in light of the drastically increased costs of promoting and testing and distributing a game in this new, more professional stage of the industry. On-Line was increasing its advertising, hiring more support people, boosting its promotional staff. But the programmers saw Sunderland and his regime as bureaucracy, to which, as hackers, they had a generic allergy. They missed the days of Summer Camp and handshakes for contracts. John Harris, for instance, chafed at the idea of paying a lawyer to help him negotiate a six-figure contract ("They charge one hundred dollars just to read it!" he howled). Harris and the other On-Line hackers would see all these managers and support people being hired, just to do the same thing that the company did before release the games that the hackers wrote. From their point of view, it seemed to indicate another hacker sin inefficiency. Along with an emphasis on the sizzle of marketing rather than the substance of hacking.
For instance, On-Line spent a lot of money for colorful new boxes in which to package their games but did not see fit to include the name of the programmer on the package. Ken had thought it sufficient to give that credit only in the instruction manual stuffed inside the box. "The authors should realize that this will give us more money for advertising and royalties," he said. It was indicative of a new "professionalism" in dealing with authors.
But to listen to the conversations at Danny's during the fall of 1982, it was clear that an atmosphere conducive to hacking was far more important to those programmers than a mantle of "professionalism." And the consensus was that almost every programmer was thinking of leaving.
Even if Ken Williams was aware of a potential programmer exodus, the problem seemed of little concern to the founder of the company. Williams was busy hiring a staff of programmers quite different from the potential detectors. Impatient with the hackers who had come to him with their assembly-language skills and uneven work habits fully formed, Ken decided to try an alternate source: he would utilize the messianic power of the computer to create programming gurus where none existed. After all, the now testy hackers who were complaining about the royalty cuts had come to him with, at most, the experience of a game or two. Now they felt he owed them the world. Why not find people before that first game, people who had some programming skills but were not yet assembly-language wizards, and let them develop under him? Surely they would not be so ungrateful as to leave him for some random offer from another firm. But more important, this daring kind of recruitment would be in keeping with the vision that Ken had for his company: the place where the computer future comes to the people, improving their lives.
He set up On-Line's old office above the TV sales shop on Route 41 as an office especially for in-house programmers. Some of the people working there were royalty-basis programmers whom Ken had offered free living space to, like Chuck Bueche, a twenty-one-year-old programmer who drove to the Sierras from Texas in an old Jaguar XKE and who wrote under the nom de computer of "Chuckles." Dick liked one specific part of Chuckles' first game, a maze-chase called "Creepy Corridors": the piercing, hideous scream heard when the little man you were moving through the maze got caught by the monster who chased him. Considering the relatively brain-damaged sound capabilities of the Apple, the scream was quite an achievement. Chuckles had screamed the most hideous scream he could into a tape recorder, and used a digital analyzer to print out five long pages of data that, when fed into the Apple, would exactingly POKE the memory location to duplicate the scream. It took almost a fifth of the available memory of the machine, but to Chuck it was worth it. The purer programmers at On-Line were appalled at the inefficiency.
A few of the newer programmers, though, were so far behind Chuck that issues like that were almost incomprehensible to them. The qualifications of these newcomers ranged from college degrees in computer science to a passion for getting stoned and playing videogames. Two were students of Japanese extraction whom Ken had hired because someone had told him that Orientals were fantastically devoted workers. Some were attracted because of the excellent skiing at nearby Badger Pass. Others hoped to convert On-Line games from one machine to another by day, and hack The Great American Computer Game by night. All in all, in the space of a few months Ken had hired almost a dozen inexperienced, non-hacker programmers for bargain-basement wages, in hopes that they would grow as quickly as the industry was growing.
Of all Ken's new programmers, none exemplified his zeal for reforming lives by computer power as much as did Bob and Caro-lyn Box. Bob Box was in his fifties: they had lived in the area for well over a decade and worked at their ranch-style home five miles from Oakhurst, in the almost undetectable hamlet of Ahwahnee. Bob, who had dark hair, soulful eyes, and a nose of basset-hound proportions, was approximately four feet in height. He was a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. Carolyn Box was slightly over five feet tall, had long brown hair and a world-weary attractiveness, and was the current Guinness Book of World Records champion in gold panning. They'd married twenty-six years ago, when Carolyn was fifteen. For the past few years, they'd been running a gold-prospecting supply business and searching for gold in the Presno River, which ran in their backyard. The Oakhurst-Coarsegold area was on the southern rim of the California mother lode, and the gold the Boxes dredged up from the river one morning they came up with two thousand dollars' worth in a half hour financed their programming courses at a Fresno trade school.
They had realized that the gold of the 1980s would be software, and their goal was to work at On-Line. Though Carolyn Box had been apprehensive about dealing with a computer, she instantly understood the required concept, as if computers were a language she'd always been talking. It was almost supernatural. She was the first one in the history of the school to get a 4.0 average in her courses. Bob did well, too: programming was like gold panning, he realized you proceeded in logical steps, and concentrated while you did it.
But when they presented themselves to Ken, he was skeptical. He told them that programmers usually peaked at nineteen and were over the hill at twenty even Ken, at twenty-eight, was just about washed up. (Not that he believed it.) Ken wanted to give the Boxes a chance, though, because they fit right in with the dream he had about On-Line and the great computer future. So he told them to put up something on the screen using assembly language, in thirty days. The Boxes' school had taught them programming in high-level languages on mainframe computers; they knew nothing about Apple assembly language. But working day and night, they came up with an 82-line program only five days later. It moved a dot around the screen. Ken asked them to try something else, and, again working almost every waking hour, the Boxes created a 282-line program with a little airplane moving around the high-resolution screen. Ken hired them, and set them to work programming a pet project of his, an educational game.
Soon the Boxes were hard at work getting a little dog, whom they named Dusty after their own dog, to walk across the screen. They would proudly explain to visitors that their hack used a sophisticated technique called exclusive-or-ing, which allowed for zero-flicker animation. They felt they'd given life to Dusty Dog. "This dog is like our pet," Carolyn Box would say. When Ken first saw Dusty Dog move across the screen, the little basset legs moving with steady, non-flickering fluidity, he almost burst. "It's days like this that make you proud to be in this business," he told them. Even these middle-aged gold prospectors could be software superstars ... and Ken was the Moses who led them to the promised Computer Land.
To Roberta Williams, it all represented something: the rehabilitation of the Boxes, Ken's community-minded efforts, her own ascension to the rank of bestselling game designer, the big Dark Crystal collaboration with Henson Associates, the artistic efforts of their software superstars, and above all the fantastic way that computers had nurtured what was a mom-and-pop bedroom operation to a $1O-million-a-year company that would soon be employing over one hundred people. She considered their story inspiring. It said a lot about the power of the computer, and the different, better lives that people would be leading with the computer. In the two years of On-Line's growth, Roberta had shed some of her shyness, exchanging a bit of it for a fierce pride in their accomplishments. "Look at us!" she'd sometimes say in conversation, partially in disbelief and partially as an all-purpose trump card. "People ask me," she said that fall of 1982, " 'Don't you just sit around and say "Wow"? Doesn't it do something for you?' The answer is that we're just so constantly amazed all the time that it's almost a state of mind."
Roberta wanted the message of On-Line spread to the world. She insisted that On-Line hire a New York public relations firm to promote not only the programs, but the people behind them. "Programmers, authors, are going to be the future new entertainers," she explained. "It might be presumptuous to say they might be new Robert Redfords ... but to a certain extent [they will be] idolized. Tomorrow's heroes."
Dick Sunderland did not share Roberta's enthusiasm for the New York public relations firm. He had come out of an industry where programmers were anonymous. He was worried about On-Line's programmers getting big heads from all that attention. It's tough enough to deal with a twenty-year-old who's making a hundred thousand a year can you imagine how tough it will be after he's profiled in People magazine, as John Harris would be that winter?
The spotlight was beginning to find its way to the mysterious software company whose letterhead still carried the address of the Williamses' A-frame wooden house from which they had run the company when it was a two-person operation. Mudge Ranch Road, Coarsegold, California. The world wanted to know: What kind of computer madness had taken hold out there in the sticks, and what sorts of millions were being made, there on Mudge Ranch Road? There was no subject in the media hotter than computers in the early 1980s, and with the New York public relations firm helping channel the dazzled inquisitors, a steady stream of long-distance phone calls and even long-distance visitors began to arrive in Oakhurst that autumn.
This included an "NBC Magazine" camera crew which flew to Oakhurst from New York City to document this thriving computer-age company for its video magazine show. NBC shot the requisite footage of Roberta mapping a new adventure game at her home, Ken going over his phone messages, Ken and Roberta touring the building site of their new home. But the NBC producer was particularly anxious to speak to the heart of the company: the young programmers. Whiz kids writing games and getting rich. The programmers, those in-house and those working for royalties, were duly assembled at the programming office.
The NBC producer, with his gray hair, bushy moustache, and twinkling eyes, resembled a carnival barker who knows the gruesome ropes, yet has maintained compassion. He urged the programmers to play at the terminals so his crew could shoot an establishing shot of a thriving factory that measured production by lines of computer code. One of the hackers immediately began concocting a program to create a twenty-one-sided flower on the screen a program involving the retention of the value of pi to the sixth decimal place. Even after the NBC crew finished the establishing shot, the teen-age programmer felt compelled to finish the display hack.
The producer by then was interviewing one of Ken's twenty-one-year-old whiz kids.
"Where is the industry going?" he asked him solemnly.
The whiz kid stared at the producer. "I have no idea," he said.