There were still the born hackers, those blessed with the unrelenting curiosity, the Hands-On Imperative. The last chosen in basketball and the first in arithmetic class to divine the mysteries of fractions. The fifth-graders who would mumble, when adults pressed them for explanation, that they “like numbers.” The cowlicked kids in the back of the junior high classroom who got so far ahead of the class that the math teachers gave up on them, let them skip to future chapters in the text, and finally allowed them to leave the room and wander downstairs to discover, with much the same wonder as Peter Samson stumbling upon the EAM room at MIT, a terminal connected to a time-sharing computer at some university. A gray teletype terminal in the basement of a suburban school, a terminal which held, wonder of wonders, games. You could play the games, but if you were hacker-born, that would not be enough. You would ask, “Why can’t the game do this?” “Why can’t it have that feature?” And since this was a computer, for the first time in your life you would have the power to change this into that. Someone would show you some BASIC, and the system would be at your command.

It happened exactly like that with John Harris. Though he was tall and not unattractive, a towheaded blond with a goofily appealing smile and the breathless verbal delivery of someone whose enthusiasm runs too high to acknowledge cycle-wasting grammatical interrupts, he was a social outcast. He would later admit cheerfully that he had been “the worst English student in school and the worst in P.E.” His roots were in the upper-middle class of San Diego. His father was a bank officer. His siblings, a younger brother and two older twin sisters, were uninterested in technical matters. “I was completely, a hundred percent technical,” John later said with endearing redundancy. It seemed he had no more intimate confidant than the remote computer—he did not even know its location—connected to his school’s time-sharing terminal.

John Harris was not one of those methodical, plodding geniuses who dazzled folks in science fairs. Impressing adults was not his forte. John Harris’ art hinged on impressing people who shared his passions, which were few and well defined: science fiction (films and comics—not books, because John was not much of a reader). Games. And hacking.

At one time, the apex of existence for a person like John Harris might have been to find his way into a computer center like the MIT AI lab, where he would have loitered and learned until he got his chances at a terminal. It might have felt like delivery into heaven, as it had felt to fourteen-year-old David Silver when he was initiated by the ninth-floor hackers and allowed to take the sacrament of the PDP-6. But Harris came of high school age after the revolution that began with the Altair. John Harris’ generation was the first that did not have to beg, borrow, or steal computer time from a distant mainframe attached to teletype terminals. In the lush suburbs around San Diego, it was not uncommon for a high school kid in 1980 to cajole his parents, or even earn enough money from a part-time job, for a large purchase. Most kids wanted cars. But as the early computer store owners knew well, other kids were asking for computers.

When John Harris was in eleventh grade, a senior he knew let him use his Commodore PET computer. John later recalled: “I started playing games on his system and started programming on his system, a Star Trek game. And a couple of other things in BASIC that I had learned and that were a lot more fun than any of the time-sharing stuff was. It was quicker, was much more interactive, had graphics and sound effects . . . Teletypes were OK, but I hadn’t known anything else existed, and I went, ‘Wow, this is great . . .’”

For John Harris’ Third Generation, which followed the pioneering generation of mainframe hackers and the second generation of hardware hackers who liberated computers from the institutions, access to computers was easy. You could own one, or use a friend’s. The computers were not as powerful as those in institutions and there were no communities of wizards, no Greenblatts or Gospers to urge you to abandon loserdom and engage in The Right Thing until you could be called a winner. But those facts of life did not bother this Third Generation. They could get hands on computers now. In their bedrooms. And whatever they learned about hacking, and whatever elements of the Hacker Ethic they picked up, would be determined by a learning process that grew from the hacking itself.

John Harris was fascinated with the PET. You could do things so much more easily with a personal computer. John was particularly impressed with the full-screen editing capability, a great improvement on the teletype-style edit-one-line-at-a-time process he’d been stuck at before. But the best part of the PET and other personal computers were the games.

“I’m obsessed with all forms of games,” John Harris later said. “It’s just me. I guess!” It was only natural that a junior high school electronics junkie would be dazzled by the batch of space warfare arcade games appearing in the late seventies: Harris did not know that their inspiration was Slug Russell’s Spacewar hack. For a time after that, John fell in love with a game called Crazy Climber, where you try to get a guy to the top of a building, avoiding dropped flowerpots, people who close windows on your hand, and a giant gorilla who tries to swat you off. What impressed him about Crazy Climber was its groundbreaking creation of a unique and artful scenario. It did something that no one had ever done before.

John Harris strove for that level of originality. His attitude toward games was similar to his attitude toward computer languages or his preference for a certain computer over another: an intense personal identification and a tendency to take offense at an inefficient, suboptimal way of doing things. John came to feel that games should have a certain degree of innovation, a certain degree of graphic razzle-dazzle, and a certain degree of challenge. His standards of “playability” were rigid. He took personal offense at cases where a programmer could have made the game better in some obvious (to John Harris) way, but did not, whether because of technical ignorance, a lapse in perception, or—worst of all—laziness. Details made a game really great, and John adopted the firm belief that a game author should include every possible frill to make the game more enjoyable. Not neglecting, of course, to perfect the basic structure of the game so that it was essentially bug-free.

To fulfill his own exacting standards, John needed his own computer. He began saving money. He even cut down on playing arcade games. John was out of high school by then, enrolled in a local college in electrical engineering, and working at a bank’s data processing center. One of his friends owned the hottest hacker home computer around, the Apple, but John did not like the machine’s editing capabilities or its quirky graphics.

With money in hand he went computer shopping, for a PET. The salesmen sneered at him. “The only person who buys a PET is a person down to his last penny,” they told him. “A person who can’t afford an Apple II.” But John Harris did not want Wozniak’s creation. He had seen more of his friend’s Apple and was convinced more than ever that the Apple was severely brain-damaged. His contempt for the Apple grew beyond all bounds. “Even the sight of that computer drives me up the wall,” he would later say. At the very mention of the machine, Harris would recoil and make the sign of the cross, as if warding off a vampire. He could explain at length just why he felt this way—no full-screen editor, the necessity of loading the machine up with more hardware before it really cooked, the limited keyboard . . . but this loathing went beyond reason. Somehow Harris felt the Apple stopped you from doing what you wanted to do. Whereas other hackers considered the Apple’s limitations as challenging hurdles to leap over or as a seductive whisper saying, “Take me further,” Harris deemed them ridiculous. So he asked the salesman at one of the stores about this other machine, the Atari computer.

Atari had just come out with its 800 (and its lower-powered companion, the 400), its competitor to the Apple. On first sight, it appeared to be some sort of jazzed-up game machine with a keyboard. In fact, it had a slot to put cartridges inside, a mark that the machine was geared at least in part for novices too befuddled to handle even a tape cassette, let alone a floppy disk. There wasn’t even a decent manual. John Harris played with an 800 in the store, and discovered that, like the PET and unlike the Apple, it had full-screen editing. But he wanted to know what was inside it, so he went to another store, where a salesman slipped him a piece of paper with some commands for this new computer. Like some secret code for use by the French Resistance. No code-breaker devoured a message as avidly as John Harris did these papers. He discovered that the Atari had a set of keystroke graphic symbols, a high-resolution mode, and a separate chip for sound effects. In short, exciting new features, every feature Harris liked on the PET, and even the things he grudgingly considered worthwhile on the Apple. He bought an 800.

He began programming in BASIC, but very soon realized that he would have to learn assembly language to do the games he wanted to do. He quit working at the bank and got a job at a company called Gamma Scientific, which had needed a programmer to do assembly-language work on its system and was willing to train someone.

Transferring his new assembly-language skills to the Atari was difficult. The Atari was a “closed” machine. This meant that Atari sequestered the information concerning the specific results you got by using microprocessor assembly-language commands. It was as if Atari did not want you to be able to write on it. It was the antithesis to the Hacker Ethic. John would write Atari’s people and even call them on the telephone with questions; the voices on the phone would be cold, bearing no help. John figured Atari was acting that way to suppress any competition to its own software division. This was not a good reason at all to close your machine. (Say what you would about Apple, the machine was “open,” its secrets available to all and sundry.) So John was left to ponder the Atari’s mysteries, wondering why Atari technicians told him that the 800 gave you only four colors in the graphics mode, while on the software they released for it, games like Basketball and Super Breakout, there were clearly more than eight colors. He became determined to discover its secrets, the mysteries of its system, the better to extend it and control it.

For the quest, John enlisted a friend who knew assembly language. They got hold of a cassette-tape disassembler written in BASIC, something which broke down programs into their object code, and disassembled the software sold by Atari line by line. Then they would take these weird instructions, which accessed all sorts of oddball memory locations on the 6502 chip inside the Atari, and poke them into the machine to see what happened. They discovered things like "display list interrupts,” which enabled you to use a greater number of colors on the display screen; “user definable characters”; and, best of all, something that they would later know as "player-missile graphics,” which was no less than an assembly-language method of accessing a special Atari chip called "Antic" that handled graphics on its own, letting you run the rest of the program on the main chip. Since one of the more difficult aspects of programming games was parceling out the activities of the main chip between sound, graphics, and game logic, player-missile graphics gave you a huge advantage. How could a company that did something so neat in its machine be so Scrooge-like in letting you know it existed?

Harris and his friend had cracked the secrets of the Atari. They wanted to use their knowledge to liberate the machine, distribute the technical data, break the Atari marketplace wide open. But around that time some bootleg hardware manuals appeared. It seemed that some pirates inside Atari had procured copies of its internal hardware and reference manual and were distributing them for high prices to interested parties. The manual, however, was written in such a way that only people who were already the equivalent of Atari design engineers could divine it. As Harris later put it, “It was written in Atari, not in English.” So the bootleg manual wasn’t much help except to those people who had integrated the workings of the Atari 800 into their own mental cosmology. People like John Harris.

Eighteen-year-old John Harris used this knowledge to write games. He wrote games that he would like to play, and his desire to make the games flashy enough and exciting enough to please him as a player incited him to learn more about the Atari system. As a science-fiction fan who often attended the “Cons”—the conclaves of sci-fi nuts, where people lost in technological fantasy were considered normal—he naturally gravitated to space warfare games. He would create spaceships, space stations, asteroids, and other extraterrestrial phenomena. From his imagination he would make these shapes appear on his display screen, and then he would control them. Putting them up on the screen and controlling them was much more important than the eventual fate of the game itself: John Harris could be careless, and he often lost entire programs by saving files on the wrong side of the cassette tape, or expanding the code so the program would crash—finding out only then that he had failed to make a backup tape. He would feel bad about it, but keep hacking.

Hacking was the best thing in his life. He had started working full-time at Gamma Scientific to support himself. The pay was less than ten thousand dollars a year. He liked the job insofar as it allowed him to work on the computer. At home, he had his 800, now equipped with a disk drive for fancy assembly-language programming. But without a tightly knit community like the one the MIT hackers had, he found that hacking was not enough. He yearned for more social contact. His relationship to his family was shaky. He later claimed he was “kicked out” of his home because his father had expectations John could not quite match. He describes his father as less than enthusiastic about his mania for programming games on an Atari 800 computer. So Harris moved into a house with a few fellow sci-fi fans. He would attend the Cons with them, wild affairs where they could stay up for days at a stretch, prowling the hotel halls with plastic dart guns. But it often seemed to John that his friends were planning some neat excursion without inviting him. John Harris was a friendly, loping, puppy-dog youngster, and very sensitive to these apparent rejections.

He wanted a girlfriend. The isolated times when he’d been out with members of this desirable yet elusive gender always seemed to end in some kind of disappointment. His housemates were often involved in romantic intrigue—they jokingly called the house "Peyton Place of Outer Space”—but John was rarely involved. There was one girl he saw for a couple of weeks, and had even made a New Year’s Eve date with. But she’d called him just before New Year’s. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said, “but I met a guy and I’m going to marry him.” That was typical.

So he kept hacking games. Just like the MIT hackers, or the Homebrewers, his reward was the satisfaction of doing it. He joined a local Atari users’ group and borrowed programs from their library to make them run faster and do neat things. He took, for instance, a version of the arcade game Missile Command and sped it up, jazzed up the explosions when one of your ICBMs stopped the enemy nuke from destroying your city. He’d show his work to others and they’d get a kick out of it. All his hacking automatically reverted to the public domain; ownership was a concept he never dealt with. When someone in the users’ group told John Harris that he had a little company that sold computer games and he’d like to market a game of John’s, Harris’ reaction was, “Sure, why not?” It was like giving a game away and getting money for it, too.

He gave the man a game called Battle Warp, which was remarkably like the old MIT Spacewar, a two-player game where ships “fly around and shoot at each other,” as John was later to describe it. Harris made around two hundred dollars from Battle Warp, but it was enough to get him thinking about having his stuff distributed more widely than through the users’ group network.

In March of 1981, Harris went to the Computer Faire in San Francisco, primarily to attend a seminar on programming the Atari given by one of Atari’s best programmers, Chris Crawford. John was extremely impressed with Crawford, a mousy fellow who bounced around when he talked and was skillful at explaining things. John Harris was on a high after that, wandering around the densely packed aisles of Brooks Hall, looking at all the hot new machines, and checking out the dozens of new software companies that had taken booths that year.

John had gotten the courage by then to ask a few companies whether they needed any programs on the Atari. They generally said no. Then he reached the booth rented by On-Line Systems. Someone introduced him to Ken Williams, who seemed nice, and John told Ken that he was an assembly-language business programmer, but he was kind of fed up with it.

Ken Williams at that time had been discovering that people who could write good assembly-language games were rare finds. He wanted to lure these assembly-language programmers to Coarsegold, California. On-Line Systems had seen explosive growth—at the last Computer Faire, Ken had been testing the waters for Mystery House, and one year later he was an established game publisher in need of products. He had placed an ad in Softalk headlined “Authors Wanted,” promising “highest royalties in the industry . . . No need to ever work anyone else’s hours again.” The ad mentioned another benefit: a chance to work with Apple guru Ken Williams, who would “be personally available at any time for technical discussions, helping to debug, brainstorming . . .” Ken was smart enough to realize that the programmers to create these products were not necessarily veteran computer workers. They might well be awkward teenagers. Like John Harris.

“Well,” Ken said to John Harris, not missing a beat, “how would you like to program amongst the trees?”

As appealing as that sounded, it meant working for On-Line Systems, which John Harris knew a little about. He knew they sold mostly Apple software. “I don’t know the Apple system,” he said, tactfully omitting that as far as he did know the Apple system he wanted to flush it down a toilet.

Ken said the magic words. “We want to expand to the Atari system. We just haven’t found anyone who can program it.”

John was almost speechless.

“Can you program it?” Ken asked.

Within a month, Ken Williams had bought John Harris a plane ticket to Fresno, where he was picked up at the airport and driven up Route 41 to Oakhurst. Ken promised Harris a place to live, and then they started talking salary. John had just gotten a raise at Gamma, so the one thousand dollars a month Ken offered him would actually have been a pay cut. John found the courage to say that he was getting more than that now. Did Ken think he could pay twelve hundred a month, and throw in the free place to live? Ken looked over at Roberta (at that time any employee in the tiny On-Line office could at any time look over at anyone else working there) and she said she didn’t think they could afford that.

Williams said, “I tell you what. How about if I put you on a thirty percent royalty basis and you won’t have to work with the company? You work out of your house and I’ll give you seven hundred dollars a month to live off of until you finish your first game, in two or three months. If you don’t have a game finished by that time, you won’t make it in this business anyway.”

John thought that sounded great. When he got home, though, his father told him he was being taken advantage of. Why not get a bigger salary and a lower percentage of royalties? What security did John have? John, who had been intimidated by the blustery Ken, did not want to jeopardize his chance to live in an atmosphere built around hacking games. He really wanted to get out of San Diego, hack games, and be happy. Even though it might mean less money, he’d hold on to the thirty percent royalty.

It was the most lucrative decision he ever made.

Ken Williams had purchased several houses around Oakhurst for the benefit of his programmers. John Harris moved into the one called Hexagon House, named after the shape of the upper floor, which was the only part visible from the road: it jutted above the rest of the house like a large solid gazebo. From the front door, the living room and kitchen were visible; the bedrooms were downstairs. Living there with John was Ken’s twenty-year-old brother, John Williams, who ran On-Line’s advertising and marketing division. Though John Williams liked Harris, he considered him a nerd.

The first project that John Harris had mentioned to Ken was inspired by the arcade game Pac-Man. This was the hottest coin-operated game in 1981, and would soon be known as the most popular coin-op of all time. John Harris saw nothing wrong with going to the arcade, learning the game in and out, and writing his own version to run on the Atari 800. To a hacker, translating a useful or fun program from one machine to another was inherently good. The idea that someone could own Pac-Man, that clever little game where ghosts chase the dot-munching yellow Pac-Man, apparently was not a relevant consideration for John Harris. What was relevant was that the Pac-Man game seemed a natural fit to the Atari’s features. So even though he personally preferred games with space scenarios and lots of shooting, John suggested to Ken that he do an Atari 800 Pac-Man.

Ken had already been marketing a Pac-Man look-alike for the Apple under the name of Gobbler. The program had been written by a professional scientific programmer named Olaf Lubeck, who had sent Williams the game, unsolicited, after seeing the “Authors Wanted” ad. The program was selling around eight hundred copies a month, and Ken had arranged with Lubeck to duplicate it for the Atari home computer.

John Harris, though, was appalled at the Apple game. “It didn’t look spectacular, no animation,” he later explained. “The collision detection is very unforgiving.” Harris did not want Olaf to compound the error on his beloved Atari by translating the Apple game bit by bit on the 6502 chip, which the Apple and Atari shared. This would mean that none of what John considered the superior Atari features, most of which were housed on separate chips, would be utilized. The thought was horrifying.

John insisted that he could do a better-looking game within a month, and Ken Williams took Lubeck off the project. John Harris embarked on a period of intense hacking, often wrapping around till morning. John’s style was freewheeling. He improvised. “Whatever my mind is doing, I just let it flow with it . . . things come out pretty creative,” he later explained. Sometimes John could be sensitive about this, particularly at times when a more traditional programmer, armed with flowcharts and ideas about standard structure and clear documentation, examined his code. When John left Gamma Scientific to move to Coarsegold, for example, he worried that his replacement would be someone like that, who would throwaway all his clever code, replacing it with something structured, concise . . . and worse. As it turned out, Gamma considered six programmers, five of whom “had degrees coming out of their ears,” John later said. The sixth was a hacker with no degrees; John begged his bosses to hire the hacker.

“But he wants as much money as the people who have degrees,” the boss told John.

John said, “He’s worth more.” His boss listened. When John broke this new employee in and explained his system, the new hacker became very emotional over John’s code. “You program like I do!” he said. “I didn’t think there was anyone in the world that does this!”

Working with large conceptual blocks and keeping focused, John had a Pac-Man-style game running on the Atari in a month. He was able to use some of the subroutines he had developed in earlier efforts. This was a fairly good example of the kind of growth that creative copying could encourage: a sort of subroutine reincarnation in which a programmer developed tools that far transcended derivative functions. One day, John’s subroutines would be modified and used in even more spectacular form. This was a natural, healthy outgrowth of the application of hacker principles. It was only too bad that this Third Generation of hackers had to write their own software tool kits, supplementing them only by haphazard additions from users’ groups and friends.

The Pac-Man game looked remarkably like the arcade version. It might well have been one of the best assembly-language programs written so far for the Atari Home Computer. But when Harris took his work to Ken Williams, there was a problem. Lately, some companies were insisting that the copyrights they owned on coin-operated games made unauthorized home computer translations illegal. One of the biggest owners of copyrights was Atari, and it had sent the following letter to small publishers like Brøderbund, Sirius, and On-Line:

Ken Williams knew that Atari had spent millions of dollars for the rights to Pac-Man. After looking at John Harris’ brightly colored, fast-moving, nonflickering duplication of the arcade game, he realized it was such a faithful copy that it was unmarketable. “It looks too much like Pac-Man,” he said. “You’ve wasted your time, John Harris.” He suggested that John alter the game. Harris took the game home and reprogrammed the graphics. This new version was virtually the same; the difference was that the ghosts, those goofy little shapes that chased the Pac-Man, were wearing tiny mustaches and sunglasses. Incognito ghosts! Perfect ironic commentary on the stupidity of the situation.

It wasn’t exactly what Ken Williams had in mind. For the next two weeks, John and Ken consulted with lawyers. How could they keep the essence of Pac-Man and still keep Atari at bay? The lawyers said that the only thing Atari really owned was the image of the character, what the game looked like.

So a new scenario was developed, with the unlikely theme of preventive dentistry. Ken’s brother John Williams suggested the ghosts be replaced with “happy faces.” They would spin and flip around. John Harris replaced the yellow Pac-Man with a set of clicking false teeth. Instead of dots, John drew “lifesavers,” and programmed a routine that would occur when the player cleared the dots—a toothbrush would appear and brush the teeth. None of this was difficult to program. John Harris simply drew the new images on shape tables and wrote them into his existing machine. One of the wonderful things about the computer was that you could change the world on impulse.

The lawyers assured Ken that this new Jawbreaker scenario presented no problem with Atari. They did not know Atari. It was a company owned by the Warner Entertainment Conglomerate; it was ruled by a former textile executive who saw little distinction between computer software and any other consumer item. Since engineers no longer ran Atari, the company had been characterized by a bureaucracy which stifled hacker impulses. Programmers at Atari were paid far less than the astronomical sales figures of their games would seem to call for, and convincing the marketing “experts” to release an innovative game was a formidable task. Atari would not include the name of the game programmer on the package; it even refused to give this artist credit when the press requested an author’s name. When some of the company’s top programmers complained, the textile alumnus who ran Atari reportedly called the hackers “towel designers”: Those hackers were among many who quit to form companies which would decimate Atari’s market share of game cartridges.

Atari did not seem to address this loss outright, but instead focused its creative efforts on litigation and high-rolling licensing of seemingly failure-proof properties from other media, from coin-operated games to movies. A prominent example was Pac-Man, for which Atari spent millions. The idea was to first convert the game to the VCS game machine, then to the Atari home computers, the 400 and 800. The two divisions were separate and competitive, but both shared the problem of disappearing programmers. So imagine the joy of the executives in Atari’s Home Computer Division when one day, out of the blue, some random person sent Atari a copy of a program that had been circulating around the users’ groups that summer of 1981. It was a brilliant version of Pac-Man which ran beautifully on the Atari 800.

It was the result of a classic John Harris real-world goof-up. When John had been working on the Jawbreaker revision, some people at a computer store in Fresno heard rumors of a brilliant Pac-Man hacked by the skinny, nervous kid who would often drop by and check out peripherals and software. They asked John Harris to show them the game. Without a thought to such nonhacker restrictions as corporate secrecy, John Harris drove down and proudly watched them play the version in progress, and saw nothing unusual about their request to borrow a copy of the disk. He left a copy there, went back to the Hexagon House, and continued writing his revision.

Copies of the game began circulating through users’ groups across America. When it reached Atari, people there called all the software companies they could think of to find its author. Eventually, they spoke to Ken Williams, who later recalled an Atari executive telling him that he was in possession of a Pac-Man game of obviously superior quality and was looking for its creator.

“Tell me about the game,” said Ken, and the Atari man described it as having happy faces. “That’s John Harris!” said Ken. The Atari man said he wanted to buy the program from John Harris. Ken had John Harris return the call to Atari’s head of acquisitions, Fred Thorlin—from Ken’s office. According to Ken, Thorlin was wild about John Harris’ game. He promised Harris a large royalty, mentioned a contest Atari was running for best software program, with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize, and said none of the entries so far had come close to Harris’ game.

But John Harris remembered how mean Atari had been when he had been trying to learn assembly language. He knew that it had been Atari’s letter to On-Line that was forcing him to do all this revision in the first place. Atari had acted, John later said, like “a bunch of babies,” holding on to information like a selfish kid protecting a toy from his playmates. John Harris told Ken that he would not consider having his name on anything published by Atari (not that Atari had mentioned putting his name on the program), and that he would finish Jawbreaker for Ken.

Jawbreaker was an instant bestseller. Almost everyone who saw it considered it a landmark for the Atari Home Computer. Except Atari. The men who ran Atari thought John’s program infringed on their right, as owners of Pac-Man, to make as much money as they could from the game, by marketing it in any way they saw fit. If Ken Williams released a game that gave a player the feeling he was playing Pac-Man, especially if John Harris’ version was better than the one Atari’s programmer might come up with, that player would not be likely to buy Atari’s version of Pac-Man. And Atari felt that its purchase of the Pac-Man license entitled it to every penny to be earned from home computer games that played like Pac-Man.

It was a challenge to the Hacker Ethic. Why shouldn’t Atari be happy with a royalty paid by people who wanted to hack Pac-Man code and eventually improve the game? Did the public benefit from one company “owning” a piece of software and preventing others from making it more useful?

Atari did not see merit in that argument. This was the real world. So after Jawbreaker’s release, Atari began pressuring On-Line Systems. On one hand, it wanted Ken Williams to stop marketing the game. On the other hand, it wanted to buy John Harris’ program.

Ken had no desire to fight Atari, He was not an unconditional supporter of the Hacker Ethic, so he had no political problem, as John Harris did, with selling the program to Atari, When Atari’s Fred Thorlin invited Ken and John Harris to come up to Sunnyvale, Ken agreed.

John Harris, who seemed only rarely to handle the simple mechanics of living as masterfully as he evoked magic from the guts of the Atari 800, missed his flight, and got to Atari’s complex of low-lying glass-and-concrete buildings in Sunnyvale after the meeting ended. He had been lucky.

Ken later recounted the experience under oath. Fred Thorlin had ushered him into an office where some of Atari’s in-house lawyers were waiting. Atari’s associate general counselor, Ken Nussbacher (who was not at the meeting), later described his company’s approach to publishers like On-Line as “carrot-and-stick,” and this might have been a classic example. According to Ken Williams, one attorney told them that he would like to see On-Line agree to produce a Pac-Man game for Atari so that they could quietly resolve the problem of infringement which Jawbreaker had created (the carrot). Ken said he would be happy to deal with Atari and he hoped to hear a proposal.

A second attorney delivered the stick. According to Ken, this attorney began shouting and cursing. Ken recalled him saying “he had been hired by Atari to find companies infringing on Atari’s copyrights and put them out of business . . . he said [Atari] would be able to afford much, much more legal support than I would and that if I did not play ball with them, they were going to put me out of business.”

Ken was so scared he was shaking. But he told the attorneys that a judge might be better qualified to see if Jawbreaker was a copyright infringement.

About that time, Fred Thorlin asked the attorney to calm down and consider the prospect of the two companies working together (the carrot). They discussed how long it would take John Harris, the nineteen-year-old hacker who loved Atari computers but despised Atari and was lost somewhere between Coarsegold and Sunnyvale, to finish a new Pac-Man game for Atari. But Thorlin’s offer of a five percent royalty was insultingly low. After Thorlin told him “You have no choice,” Ken’s fear began to turn to anger. He decided he would rather let Atari sue him than give in to blackmail. To signify his distaste, he threw the specifications for converting Pac-Man on Thorlin’s desk, and returned to Coarsegold without a deal.

For a while it looked like Atari would close down On-Line. Ken’s brother John later recalled that one day someone let him know that Atari had gotten an injunction to confiscate any machinery that might copy disks of Jawbreaker—every computer and disk drive in the company. The marshal from Fresno was on the way. John Williams, twenty years old and running the company that day, could not get hold of Ken and Roberta, so he ordered everyone to carry out the computers before the marshal arrived. Otherwise, the company couldn’t have run for another day.

Al Tommervik, who drove a wheezing Toyota all night to get to court to be by Ken during the injunction hearing, suggested that Roberta mail down all the masters to him for safekeeping. He said he’d find a place for On-Line if Atari closed down its offices. It never came to that, but there were some very tense times in the fall of 1981.

John Harris was particularly shaken. He had been getting enough in royalties to buy himself a house outside of Oakhurst, a big, orange-colored wood structure. He also bought himself a four-wheel-drive pickup. He was working on a new game for On-Line, another maze game called Mouskattack. Despite this upswing in his fortunes, it was a very nervous John Harris who appeared for deposition in early December.

It made an odd picture. John Harris, a nineteen-year-old hacker in jeans and T-shirt, facing the best pin-striped legal talent of one of the biggest entertainment conglomerates in America. On-Line’s legal team was headed by one Vic Sepulveda, a flip-talking Fresno lawyer with short gray hair, large, aviator-style black glasses, and a laid-back confidence. His previous experience in copyright law was in a case in which some printers had insisted that the text to the homily “Desiderata” was in the public domain.

During the deposition, John Harris was so nervous he could not keep still. Atari’s lawyer began by asking him about his early programming efforts, his job in San Diego, how he met Ken, how he wrote Jawbreaker . . . all questions John could easily answer, but because of his tenseness he kept getting entangled and correcting himself—at one point cutting himself off and saying, “Oh God, that sounded awkward.” John was usually a person who liked to talk about his work, but this was different. He was aware that this lawyer’s goal was to make him say something he didn’t mean, to trip him up. Supposedly a deposition is a search for truth, where the most effective questions are asked to get the most accurate responses. It should work like a smooth program in assembly language, where you have given the fewest instructions to access the 6502 chip, direct information in and out of memory, keep the proper flags on the registers, and, out of thousands of operations taking place each second, get your result on the screen. In the real world it did not work that way. The truth that you found in a computer was worthless here. It was as if the lawyer were feeding John Harris bogus data in hopes of a system crash.

While the hacker in John Harris was appalled at the adversarial nature of the legal system, the legal system had its difficulties adjusting to him. The rules of evidence were somewhat more rigorous than John’s own archival standards. Ken Williams, in his own deposition, had warned Atari’s lawyers of this when they had asked him about the status of Harris’ source code for the program and he had replied: “I know John Harris and I’m positive there’s nothing written down. He doesn’t work like that.”

Doesn’t work like that? Impossible! A programmer at Atari, like any “professional” programmer, probably had to submit code regularly, allow for proper supervision. What Atari’s lawyers did not realize was that Ed Roberts, Steve Wozniak, and even the designers of their own Atari 800 had wrought a Third Generation of hackers, idiot savants of the microprocessor, kids who didn’t know a flowchart from Shinola, yet could use a keyboard like a palette and hack their way to Picasso-esque peaks.

It couldn’t have been too much of a surprise to Atari’s lawyers, on the second day of John Harris’ deposition, that he was unable to find the copy of the pre-Jawbreaker Pac-Man game he’d written. On-Line’s Atari machines were in use copying Wizard and the Princess, and John’s equipment was broken, so he couldn’t even find the disk it was on. “It’s not labeled on the front,” John explained, saying, “As far as I know it should be somewhere in my library.”

So Atari’s lawyers continued with John Harris, probing the difference between the versions of his game. And as the examination continued, the line between creative freedom and plagiarism got fuzzier and fuzzier. Yes, John Harris consciously copied from Pac-Man in programming his game. But some of the routines he used were written before he’d ever seen Pac-Man. Since the Atari 800 was radically different from the Pac-Man arcade machine, using different chips and requiring different programming techniques, John Harris’ code bore no resemblance at all to the Atari code. It was completely original.

Still, his first game had looked like Pac-Man, using the characters protected by copyright. But Ken had refused to market that version, and John had changed the characters. Atari insisted that this change was insufficient. Atari had its marketing chief come in to explain “the magic of Pac-Man" to the judge, calling it “a game with a little guy, a little Pac-Man” who gobbles dots and power pills, which enable him to “turn the tables” and go after the goblins who have been devouring him. The marketing man went on to say that the “magic of Atari” rested in its commitment to buying the rights to popular arcade games.

Vic Sepulveda insisted that John Harris had simply taken the idea of Pac-Man from Atari, and cited law which stated that ideas are not copyrightable. Vic’s brief listed side by side the differences between Pac-Man and Jawbreaker. Atari’s reply was that despite the differences the game was Pac-Man. Of all the mazes John Harris could have chosen, Atari’s lawyers noted, he chose the Pac-Man maze. By On-Line’s own admission, they had simply performed cosmetic surgery on a virtual copy of Pac-Man!

But the judge refused to grant Atari a preliminary injunction to force On-Line to stop marketing Jawbreaker. He looked at the two games, figured he could tell the difference, and ruled that, pending a full trial, On-Line should be allowed to keep marketing Jawbreaker. Atari’s lawyers seemed stunned.

David had temporarily smitten Goliath. Still, Ken Williams was not as thrilled with the decision as one might have expected. Because On-Line had its own games, and its own copyrights. It was becoming clear to Ken Williams that in the bottom of his heart he identified with Atari’s point of view much more than he cared about the Hacker Ethic. “If this opens the door to other programmers ripping off my software,” he told Al Tommervik immediately after the decision, “what happened here was a bad thing.” He would settle the lawsuit before it came to trial.