In December of 1982, Tom Tatum, lanky, dark-haired, mustached, and as cool as his lazy Southern drawl implied, stood at the ballroom podium of the Las Vegas Sands. Behind him, sitting uncomfortably on a row of chairs, were ten hackers. Tom Tatum, former lawyer, lobbyist, and Carter campaign aide, now a leading purveyor of video “docusports” programming, thought he had serendipitously latched on to a jackpot bigger than that of any slot machine in the casino only yards away from where he stood.

“This is the event where Hollywood meets the Computer Age,” said Tom Tatum to the crowd of reporters and computer tradespeople in town for the Comdex show. “The ultra-contest of the eighties.”

Tom Tatum’s creation was called Wizard vs. Wizards. It was to be a television contest where game designers play each other’s games for a set of prizes. Tatum had gathered programmers from companies like On-Line and Sirius because he sensed the arrival of a new kind of hero, one who fought with brains instead of muscle, one who represented America’s bold willingness to stay ahead of the rest of the world in the technological battle of supremacy: the hacker.

Unlike Tom Tatum’s previous sports productions, which included the 1981 Maui Windsurfing Grand Prix and the Telluride Aerobatics Invitational, this Wizard vs. Wizards had the potential to draw a new audience to the docusports genre. “Only a small percentage of the population will own a Super Cross bike,” he later explained. “But when you look at people computing at home, it’s awesome.”

Obviously, the contests people cared about were now occurring in arcades and in front of Apple computers. Imagine how many would tune in to see pros compete. What’s more, as Tatum put it, “the sizzle in this show is the double whammy” of the authors themselves—those weird, sci-fi computer guys—competing against each other.

“These are the new stars!” said Tom Tatum in Las Vegas, but the new stars seemed ill at ease being paraded on a Las Vegas stage like so many misshapen Miss Universe contenders. The beauty in hackerism was Taoistic and internal, blindingly impressive when one could perceive the daring blend of idealism and cerebration, but less than compelling when presented as a chorus line in a Las Vegas ballroom. The hacker smiles were wooden, their suits ill-fitting (though a few were wearing specially made—though still ill-fitting—athletic warm-up suits). Even the most obtuse observer could divine that most of them would rather be home hacking. But with mixed motivations of curiosity, pressure from their publishers, a desire to spend a few days in Vegas, and, yes, vanity, they had come to the Sands to compete in the hottest thing Tom Tatum had ever done, with the possible exception, he later conceded, of the Miller High Life Super Cross Finals.

The contest would include hackers from seven companies. Jerry Jewell was on the scene with Sirius’ two most awesome arcaders. On-Line would arrive tomorrow. After the presentation, Jewell bragged to one of the competitors that one of his men might well be the world’s best videogamer. “I’ve seen him play Robotron for four hours,” he said.

The hacker was not intimidated. “You see this?” he replied in a shrieky voice, holding his hand out. “This is my Robotron blister. I usually stop after an hour because my hands are so sensitive.”

Later, in his hotel room, Jewell watched as his hackers practiced the games scheduled for the competition. Jewell was exultant about his company’s deal with Twentieth-Century Fox Games. The VCS cartridges his programmers now designed were widely distributed and heavily marketed by Fox; his was the first company of the Brotherhood to have its games advertised on television, and distributed in mass-market outlets. “It’s one thing to see your Apple product on the wall of a computer store,” Jerry Jewell was saying, “but when you see a rack of your stuff in K-Mart, you know you’ve arrived.”

Ken Williams arrived in Las Vegas in time for a pre-contest meeting that Tatum held for the twelve contestants and their sponsors. Having bounced back quickly from the fire, Williams was ready to be the only competitor in the show who was actually a publisher. He and the others drew chairs in a semicircle to hear Tatum describe the rules.

“This is a new kind of contest,” Tom Tatum addressed the group. “It wouldn’t happen except for television. It is created for television. The rules have been developed for television.” He explained that two sets of conflicting values were involved in this new kind of contest: Value One was the urge for an honest, fair competition, and Value Two was the need to do everything possible to make things look good on television. Tatum said that both values were important, but whenever the two values conflicted he would choose Value Two.

Then Tatum described the image with which the show would begin: a shot of the nighttime Las Vegas neon strip with a wizard—symbol of the hacker—looming over it, bolts of lightning streaming from his fingertips. An omnipotent New Age icon. This image seemed to impress the computer people, as did the picture Tom Tatum drew of the benefits of competing in a television event. It might boost them, Tatum said, to the status of household names. “Once this show hits and other shows start to happen, things will start to happen,” Tatum said. “You can earn income from other sources, like advertising products.”

On the morning of the television show, before the cameras were turned on, the meager audience in the Sands Ballroom was able to witness something that ten or twenty years before would have been considered beyond the imagination of Heinlein, Bradbury, or even MIT’s resident visionary Ed Fredkin. Makeup specialists casually were applying pancake makeup to the faces of antsy young computer programmers. The age of the media hacker had begun.

Tom Tatum had hired a soap opera actress, coiffed to kill and armed with a tooth-polish smile, to host the show. She had trouble with her opening line about how this was the first time in intergalactic history that the world’s computer wizards and techno-geniuses had gathered to compete; it took fifteen iterations before a take. Only then did the competition begin, and only then was it woefully clear how boring it was to watch a bunch of hackers sitting at long tables, joysticks between their legs, each with one sneakered foot curled under the chair and the other foot extended under the table, jaw slightly slack, and eyes dully planted on the screen.

Unlike more compelling forms of video competition, the programmers were undemonstrative when clearing a screen of aliens or getting wiped out by an avenging pulsar ray. Discerning spectators had to watch very carefully for grimaces or for squinty frustration to tell when a wrong move ended in a video explosion. When players were confronted with the despised GAME OVER signal before the five-minute time limit was reached, they would sadly raise a hand so one of the judges would take note of the score. A lackluster agony of defeat.

Tatum figured that this videogenic deficiency would be remedied by quick cutting, shots of the computer screens, and pithy interviews with the silicon gladiators. The interviews generally went like the one that the soap opera star conducted with Sirius’ nineteen-year-old Dan Thompson, who quickly established himself as a front-runner.

Cut! Can we do this one again? The second time, Dan did not shrug. Once more, please? By now, Dan Thompson’s digital logic and problem-solving technique had been applied to the puzzle. As soon as the question left the soap opera star’s mouth, he leaned to the mike, eyes to the camera.

“Well, it feels wonderful. I just hope I can continue this . . .” He had synthesized the superficialities of jock-speak.

Thompson, beneficiary of hours of joysticking at a Chuck E. Cheese Pizza Time Theatre in Sacramento, won the contest. Ken Williams had performed admirably, considering he barely had a chance to look at some of the games before he played them; the fact that he placed sixth overall was testament to his ability to instantly get to the heart of a computer game, and the fact that at twenty-eight he still had some reflexes left.

In Tatum’s suite that night, the video impresario was beside himself. “I think we’ve seen the most revolutionary television event in years,” he said. He predicted that these hackers would capture the imagination of America—athletes who don’t take a physical beating, but emanate a transfixing intensity. He raised his liquor glass to the future of the hacker as the new American hero.

One On-Line programmer who had shown signs of becoming a media hero was Bob Davis, the former alcoholic whom Ken Williams had elevated to the status of game author and considered a best friend. Williams had cowritten with Davis the adventure game Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and the closing lines of Margot Tommervik’s Softalk review read like a triumphal justification of Ken Williams’ decision to go into partnership with the computer to change the world:

The package Sierra On-Line sent to entice prospective authors included an open letter from Bob Davis, who told of his experience of being “bitten by the computer bug,” seeing his game go through a painless production process, and receiving royalties, “more than ample and always on time.” Davis concluded by writing: “So now I just spend my time skiing the slopes of Lake Tahoe, watching my video recorder, driving my new car and living quite comfortably in my new three-bedroom house. I strongly suggest you do the same.”

Yet not long after Ken’s return from Las Vegas, Bob Davis could not be reached at the ski slopes, behind the wheel of his car, or in his new home. He was receiving visitors only at the Fresno County jail. Davis wore a scuffed red prison jumpsuit and a haunted look. He had long, bright red hair, an unkempt red beard, and worry lines in his face that made him seem older than his twenty-eight years. Since the glass between prisoner and visitor was thick, his discussions were conducted through telephone receivers at either side of the glass.

Bob Davis had not received many visitors in his few weeks in jail. He had been trying to get Ken Williams to bail him out, so far unsuccessfully. He had gone from alcoholic to software superstar to drug-addicted convict, all in months. He had thought the computer would deliver him. But the computer had not been enough.

For a high school dropout turned boozer who secretly liked logic puzzles, programming had been a revelation. Davis found that he could get so deeply into it that he didn’t need to drink any more. His fortunes in the company rose as he headed the Time Zone project, cowrote his adventure game, and began to learn assembly language for the confounding VCS machine. But just as suddenly as his life had changed for the better, it began to fall apart.

“I have a little bit of trouble handling success,” he said. The heady feeling he got from a being a bestselling software author made him think he could handle the kinds of drugs that had previously made his life miserable.

There had been drugs around On-Line, but Bob Davis could not indulge with the moderation that others managed. It affected his work. Trying to learn VCS code was hard enough. But Davis’ quick success with Ulysses, written in Ken Williams’ relatively simple Adventure Development Language, had geared him to instant programming gratification, and he became frustrated. “I tried to make up excuses,” Davis later said. “[I said] On-Line was becoming too corporate for me.” He quit, figuring he’d write games on his own and live on royalties.

He had been working on a VCS game, but despite hours of trying to get some movement on the screen, he couldn’t. Though Ken Williams realized that Bob was the kind of person who got his breakthroughs only when someone guided him—“If someone’s there, he’ll be there [working] till 4 A.M.,” Ken once commented—Ken could not take the time to help his friend. Davis would try to reach Ken and tell him how unhappy he was, but Ken was often out of town. Bob would take more coke, shooting it directly into his veins. At odds with his wife, he would leave the house when shot up, all the time yearning to be home, back in the new, computer-centered life he had begun: the kind of software superstar life he had talked about in that first-person testimonial that On-Line was still including in the package sent to prospective authors.

Bob Davis would return home late at night, find his wife gone, and begin calling everyone he knew at On-Line, all the programmers’ houses, places where he knew she couldn’t possibly be, in hopes someone might know where she was. Even strangers who answered the phone would hear his plaintive voice, scraped to bare bones of panic. “Have you seen my wife?” No, Bob. “Do you know where she might be?” I haven’t seen her, Bob. “It’s very late, and she isn’t home, and I’m very worried.” I’m sure she’ll come home. “I hope she’s all right,” Bob would say, choking back sobs. “No one will tell me where she is.”

Everyone felt horrible about Bob Davis. It was one of the first things that tipped off Dick Sunderland that On-Line was not just another company in just another industry: the very night Dick was hired, Davis was out on one of his Oakhurst crawls. Here was this ghost, this haunting blight of the computer dream, this golden opportunity missed. Like an unrelenting conscience, Bob Davis would plague his former friends with calls, often begging for money. Programmer and Jehovah’s Witness Warren Schwader, who had liked Bob despite his frequent swearing and smoking, once offered to pay his mortgage bill directly, and Bob, wanting cash instead, slammed down the phone . . . but later convinced Warren to lend him a thousand dollars.

Like everybody else, Schwader wanted to believe that Bob Davis could come back to the computer and program his way out of his drug-ridden whirlpool. Eventually they all gave up. People like steady programmer Jeff Stephenson, who tried to enroll Bob in an AA program, got disgusted when Bob began passing bad checks. “My habit ran from three hundred to nine hundred dollars a day,” Davis later explained. “I wound up driving my wife out. I tried to kick the habit twice.” But couldn’t. He asked Dick Sunderland for advances on his royalties, and when Dick refused, he offered to sell his future royalties “for a pittance,” Sunderland later said. But soon Davis’ royalties were going straight to the bank to pay off past debts. He was selling the furniture to get more money for drugs. Finally, he sold his Apple computer, the instrument of magic that had made him into somebody.

It was a relief to the people at On-Line when Bob Davis wound up in jail. Arrested at a motel. People assumed the charge was passing bad checks, but Davis himself said it was for cocaine, and that he’d pled guilty. He wanted to get into a drug rehabilitation program to start over again. He’d been trying to get a message to Ken, but Ken figured that Bob Davis was better off in jail, where he might shake the habit.

The author of the twelfth-bestselling computer game in the country, according to Softsel’s Hot List, spoke into the prison telephone and explained how he’d blown it, how he’d seen the dazzling light the computer gave, basked in it, but could not live up to it. He was in mid-sentence when the phone went dead and visitors to Fresno Jail had to go back into the night. The visitor could make out his words as he screamed them into the glass before he was led off: “Have Ken call me.”

Bob Davis’ plight exemplified the disarray at Sierra On-Line that winter. On the surface it seemed a company approaching respectability—conglomerates still tendered buyout offers, the most recent for $12.5 million plus a $200,000-a-year contract for Williams. But underneath the veneer of a growing, thriving enterprise was nagging doubt. This was heightened by a December 1982 announcement that Atari’s sales figures of videogames had plummeted. People at On-Line and other computer game companies refused to see this as indication that the field was a fading fad.

Disorganization had only increased with Sierra On-Line’s new, unwieldy size. For instance, one game which Dick had thought compelling, a multilevel game with a mining scenario, had been languishing in the acquisitions department for weeks. The programmer called to make a deal, and by the time Dick managed to trace its path through the company, the college student who had programmed the game had given up on On-Line and sold the program to Brøderbund. Under the name Lode Runner, the game became a bestseller, named “1983 Game of the Year” by many critics. The story was an eerie parallel to what had occurred when Ken Williams had tried to sell Mystery House to Apple less than three years before—the young computer company, too muddled in management to move with the lightning-quick responses that the computer industry demanded, did not get around to expressing interest until too late. Was Sierra On-Line, still an infant company, already a dinosaur?

The conflict for control between Ken Williams and Dick Sunderland had grown worse. The newer, sales-oriented people supported Dick; most of the early employees and the programmers, though, disliked the president and his secretive management techniques. Feelings toward Ken were mixed. He would speak of On-Line spirit; but then, he would speak of the company “growing up,” as if computer software was something that required a traditionally run company, replete with business plans and rigid bureaucracy. If this were true, what did this say about the hacker dream of relying on the computer as a model of behavior that would improve and enrich our lives? It was a moral crisis that haunted all of the industry pioneers who had begun their businesses thinking that the magic technology they had to offer would make their businesses special. Mass marketing loomed in front of them like some omnipotent Tolkienesque ring: could they grab the ring and not be corrupted? Could whatever idealism existed in their mission be preserved? Could the spirit of hackerism survive the success of the software industry?

Ken worried about this: “When I used to work for Dick, I used to bitch about working eight to five [and not in the freewheeling, hacker mode]. Now I want a programming staff that works from eight to five. It’s like going from being a hippie to being a capitalist or something. I think there’s a lot of programmers [here] who feel betrayed. Like John Harris. When he came up, it was open house, my door was open anytime. He could come in, we could talk programming techniques. I’d take him places. We never did business with a contract. Didn’t need it. If we didn’t trust each other, we shouldn’t do business together. [Now] that’s changed. I don’t know what my goals are anymore. I’m not sure which is the way to run the company. Somehow, by hiring Dick, I copped out. It’s the uncertainty that bothers me—I don’t know if I’m right or wrong.”

Inexplicable events kept occurring. Like the incident in the programming office. A young man working overtime drawing computer pictures for the overdue Dark Crystal adventure game, an On-Line employee from nearly the beginning, put down his graphics tablet one day and began screaming, pounding the walls, pulling down posters, and waving a long knife at the terrified young woman who had been tracing pictures beside him. Then he grabbed a stuffed toy dog and furiously stabbed it, tearing it to shreds, its stuffing flying around the tiny workroom. The programmers in the next room had to stop him, and the young man waited quietly until he was calmly led away. Explanation: he just lost it, was all.

Hacker Jeff Stephenson, working on the secret IBM project (also behind schedule), expressed the overall frustration: “I don’t know who the company is being run for, but it’s not the authors, who strike me as the bread and butter of the company. The attitude is ‘So you’re John Harris, who needs you?’ We do. He’d made a lot of bucks for this company. But they seem to think that as long as you can get fancy packing and nice labels, it’s going to sell.”

Indeed, John Harris had noticed this trend. The talkative game designer who had written two of the most popular programs in microcomputer history was torn between loyalty and disgust at the way the Hacker Ethic was being ignored. Harris hadn’t liked the fact that authors’ names weren’t on the new boxes, and he certainly hadn’t liked it when, after he mentioned this to Dick, Dick replied, “Hold on—before we do anything, when is your next game for us done?” Quite a change from the Summer Camp days. Harris believed that the times everybody would stop working and pull pranks—like going to Hexagon House and turning everything in the house, even the furniture, upside down—were the best times for On-Line; everybody worked better and harder for a company that was fun to work for.

John Harris was also upset by what he considered the company’s retreat from high artistic standards. John took it as a personal offense if the company released a game he felt was brain damaged in some way. He was absolutely horrified at the Atari and Apple versions of Jawbreaker 2. The fact that the games were official sequels to his original game design was nettling, but John wouldn’t have minded if he’d felt the games were superbly executed. But they weren’t—the smiley faces were too big and the ends of the chutes in which the faces moved back and forth were closed. John resented the drop in quality. He felt, in fact, that On-line’s newer games in general weren’t very good.

Perhaps the worst thing of all about On-Line as far as John was concerned was the fact that Ken Williams and his company had never sufficiently genuflected to what, in John Harris’ mind was the undeniable greatness of the Atari 800. He had a savage identification with that machine. John sadly concluded that at On-Line, Atari would always have second billing to the Apple. Even after the Frogger debacle, when John’s Atari version was state-of-the-art and the Apple version was relatively a mess, Ken did not seem to take the Atari seriously. This depressed John Harris so much that he decided he would have to leave On-Line for a company which shared his views on the Atari.

It was not easy. On-Line had been good to John Harris. He now had a house, respect, reporters from People magazine coming to interview him, a four-wheel-drive truck, a projection television, a hefty bank account, and, after all those travails from Fresno to Club Med, John Harris now had a girlfriend.

At a science-fiction convention, he’d run into a girl he’d known casually in San Diego. She had changed since then—“She looked great,” John would later recall. “She lost weight and had got a nose job.” She was now an actress and a belly dancer in Los Angeles. She had even been asked to dance, John explained, at the most prestigious belly dancing location in Hollywood. “In San Diego, she’d always seemed to be with someone else; this time she wasn’t. She paid more attention to me than [to] anyone else. We spent nineteen out of the next twenty-four hours together.” He saw her often after the sci-fi convention; she would stay at his house for weeks, and he would go to L.A. to see her. They began to talk of marriage. It was a happiness that John Harris had never known.

He knew that his mentor Ken Williams had been instrumental in bringing about the change in his life. It would seem logical, then, that John Harris, harboring these deep doubts about the company with which he was so closely identified, would have taken his objections directly to Ken Williams. But John Harris could not bring himself to talk to Ken about how close he was to leaving On-Line. He no longer trusted Ken. When John would try to explain why he felt cheated by On-Line, Ken would talk about all the money John was making. At one point, Ken told a reporter from People that John was making $300,000 a year, and when Harris had tried to correct that figure, Ken had embarrassed him by giving John his most recent royalty check. The four-month check (Harris was paid monthly, but sometimes would not get around to picking it up for a while) was for $160,000. But that wasn’t the point; Ken never talked about the money On-Line was making from John Harris’ work. Instead of telling Ken this, though, John would just agree with whatever Ken proposed. He didn’t know if it was shyness or insecurity or what.

So he did not talk to Ken Williams. He visited his new girlfriend and he worked on a new assembler for the Atari and visited the local arcade {setting a high score on the Stargate machine) and thought up ideas for his next game. And talked to the people at Synapse Software, a company that took the Atari 800 seriously.

In fact, Synapse was almost exclusively an Atari Home Computer software company, though it was planning to do conversions to other systems. The games Synapse produced were full of action, explosions, shooting, and brilliantly conceived graphics. John Harris considered them awesome. When he went to visit them in Berkeley, he was impressed that the programmers were catered to, that they swapped utilities and communicated by a company-run computer bulletin board. When John Harris found out from a Synapse programmer that part of a sound routine on one Synapse game had been literally lifted out of the object code from a copy of the Frogger disk stolen from John at the Software Expo—that theft which had plunged John into his deep and painful depression—he was less angry at the violation than he was delighted that a Synapse hacker had gone through his code and found something worth appropriating. Synapse promised John that he would get all the technical support he needed; he could join their community of programmers. And they offered a straight twenty-five percent royalty. In short, Synapse offered everything to an Atari hacker that On-Line did not.

John agreed to do his next project for Synapse. On-Line’s software superstar was gone.

John was sitting in his house wondering how to tell Ken Williams when the phone rang. “Earth,” John answered, as usual. It was Ken. John was flustered. “I’m programming for Synapse now,” he blurted out, in a tone that Ken took to be insufferably cocky. Ken asked why, and John told him because they were offering twenty-five percent royalty instead of Ken’s twenty percent. “That was kind of stupid,” Ken said. But John had many things to say. In a rush, he began to finally say all the things to Ken about On-Line that he’d been too intimidated to say before. Even more things than he’d previously thought of: John later would shudder at the memory of it—telling the president of the company that had done so much for him that the company’s products were garbage.

John Harris, with all his lost programs, quirky source codes, perfectionist delays, and Atari 800 chauvinism, had been the hacker soul of Sierra On-Line. He had been both the bane of Ken Williams’ existence and the symbol of Ken’s accomplishments. His closeness with Ken had been representative of the new benevolence that companies like On-Line would substitute for the usual chasms between boss and worker. Now John Harris was gone, having delivered a jeremiad on the way On-Line had abandoned its original mission. What he left behind was Frogger—for weeks now the bestselling program on the Softsel Hot List.

Far from being shaken by the loss of John Harris, Ken seemed ebullient in the aftermath. It was as if he had not been crowing several months back that John Harris’ name on an Atari program would sell games. Ken was certain that the age of the independent game-hacking auteur was over: “I think I have a view of authors which is different from authors’ views of authors, and I pray I’m right. Which is, the [hackers] I’m dealing with now just happen to be in the right spot at the right time. John Harris was. He’s a mediocre programmer who’s not creative at all who happened to be programming Atari at the right time.”

Instead of a hacker wasting time trying to make a product perfect, Ken preferred less polished programs that shipped on schedule, so he could start building an ad campaign around them. Not like Frogger, which was held up because one day John Harris decided he just didn’t want to work. “You can’t run a business on people who get depressed when their stuff gets stolen. You need people who will deliver when they say they will, at the price they say they will, and are able to work their problems out by themselves. John Harris wants you to go drinking with him, get on the phone, go to Club Med, get him laid. I’m a real expert on John Harris and his emotional problems. I wouldn’t want to be basing my 1983 game plan and placing orders for $300,000 in ROM cartridges based on a game John Harris is supposed to deliver. If his girlfriend didn’t like him, or said he was bad in bed, he’d be gone.”

“If you can do [Frogger] with the silly talent we have in place, imagine what’ll happen when we have a real company in place. We’ll be unstoppable. If I go on depending on guys who could leave me at any minute because somebody’s offering more, or could suddenly quit working one day because their girlfriends are seeing somebody else, then the company’s doomed ultimately. It’s just a matter of time. I have to get rid of the crybabies.”

To Ken, software, the magic, messianic, transmogrifying, new-age tool, had come to that. Business. Cut off from his own hacker roots, he no longer seemed to understand that the hackers did not make decisions based on traditional business terms, that some hackers would not consider working for companies where they did not get a warm feeling, that some hackers were reluctant to work for companies at all.

But then, Ken did not care very much at all what hackers thought. Because he was through with them. Ken was seeking professional programmers, the kind of goal-oriented people who approached a task as responsible engineers, not prima donna artistes hung up on getting things perfect and impressing their friends. “Good, solid guys who will deliver,” was the way Ken put it. “We’ll lose our dependence on programmers. It’s silly to think programmers are creative. Instead of waiting for the mail to come, for guys like John Harris to design something, we’re going to get some damn good implementers who aren’t creative, but good.”

Ken felt he had already found some latent game wizards who’d been buried in corporate programming jobs. One of these goal-oriented pros Ken recruited was a local programmer for the phone company. Another was a Southern California family man in his forties who had worked for years doing government contracts using digital imagery, he said, “with obvious military implications.” Another was a rural Idaho vegetarian who lived with his family in a wooden geodesic dome.

On Ken went, trying to replace the hackers with professionals. He already deemed the great experiment taking place in the old office on Route 41, where he attempted to turn novices into assembly-language programmers, an overall loser. It took too long to train people, and there was really no one around who had both the time and the technical virtuosity to be a guru. Finding enough assembly-language programmers was tough, and even a dragnet of headhunters and classified ads could not guarantee the winners Ken needed in the next year. He would need many, since his 1983 game plan was to release over one hundred products. Few would involve original creative efforts. On-Line’s programming energy instead would go into converting its current games to other machines, especially the low-cost, mass-market, ROM-cartridge-based computers, like the VIC-20, or Texas Instruments. On-Line’s expectations were stated in its “strategy outline”: “We believe the home computer market to be so explosive that ‘title saturation’ is impossible. The number of new machines competing for the Apple/Atari segment in 1983 will create a perpetually new market hungry for the winning 1982 titles. We will exploit this opportunity . . .”

The company’s energy became focused into converting product into other product. It was an approach that shifted the hacker joy of creating new worlds. Rather than building on past successes in a quest for brilliant programs, On-Line was trying to maximize sales by duplicating even moderate successes, often on relatively limited machines on which the games looked worse than the originals. Nowhere in the flurry to convert was there provision for rewarding an effort like Harris’ Frogger, which was so artistically accomplished that it hit the market with the force of an original work.

Back at his unkempt electronic split-level, John Harris was philosophizing that “professional” programmers—any programmers who didn’t have a love for gaming in their hearts and hacker perfectionism in their souls—were destined to make soulless, imperfect games. But Ken Williams was not talking to John Harris, who after all was programming for Synapse now. Ken Williams was about to hold a meeting that would put On-Line in contact with a new enterprise—one that would deliver an entire assembly line of professional programmers to do conversions. At dirt-cheap prices!

It sounded too good to be true, and Ken entered into the meeting with suspicion. His contact in this new venture was a shoulder-length-haired, Peter Lorre-eyed businessman named Barry Friedman. Friedman’s fortunes had risen along with the crazily swelling tide of the home computer industry. Originally, he had represented artists who did illustrations for the advertisements and packaging of On-Line products, then had branched out to eventually handle all the art work for a few computer companies. From there, he began to service software companies with all sorts of needs. If you wanted to know where to find the best price for ROM cartridges, he could act as middleman to get you cheap ROMs, perhaps from some obscure Hong Kong supplier.

Lately, he had been hinting of access to tremendous sums of capital to those who needed it. The other day, Ken said, Barry had called him up and asked how much an outsider would need to buy On-Line. Ken pulled a $20 million figure out of the air and hung up. Barry called back that day saying $20 million was fine. Ken, still not taking it too seriously, said, “Well, I’d need control, too.” Barry called back not long after, saying that was OK, too. The crazy thing about it was that as dubious as Ken was about Barry Friedman and his growing stable of companies (you never could be sure which corporate name would be on the business card Barry or his colleagues handed you), he always seemed to deliver on his promises. It was as if Barry Friedman were the beneficiary of some Faustian bargain, Silicon Valley style.

This new deal sounded the most astonishing of all. Friedman was escorting to the meeting with Ken Williams the two founders of a start-up company he was representing. A company that did nothing but conversions. The rates seemed bargain-basement—a ten-thousand-dollar fee and a five percent royalty. The company was called “Rich and Rich Synergistic Enterprises,” Rich being the first name of both the founders.

Barry Friedman, wearing a yellow polo shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a gold chain that complemented his silver-and-diamond bracelet and gold watch, led both Riches and one of his partners, a short, blond, button-nosed man dressed in a somewhat punk suit. This was Tracy Coats, a former rock music manager who represented backers from “a very wealthy family.” This piece of information was conveyed sotto voce, with a knowing raise of the eyebrow.

With little further fanfare, they took seats around the long, wooden conference table in the boardroom which adjoined Ken’s office: a perfectly nondescript carpeted and white-walled room with wooden bookcases and a blackboard; a random, anonymous room that might exist in any small office complex in any kind of company.

“Rich and Rich . . .” said Ken, looking over the resumes of the two programmers. “I hope you’ll make me rich.”

Neither Rich laughed, and if their unwrinkled visages were any indication, laughing was not something in which the Riches indulged to excess. They were all business, and their resumes were even more no-nonsense than their appearance. Both had held responsible positions in the digital-intensive area of the recently completed Tokyo Disneyland (“The whole place is based on silicon,” said Rich One), but that authoritarian fun factory was the closest thing to frivolity in their resumes, which were crammed with phrases like snake circuit analysis, Jet Propulsion Lab, nuclear control, missile systems analyst, Hound Dog Missile flight internal guidance and control system. Both Riches wore sports jackets without ties, and the clothes had the well-maintained air that clothes take on when draped over compulsively maintained bodies. Both looked in their thirties, with well-cropped hair and attentive eyes, constantly scanning the room for indiscretions.

Rich Two spoke. “Our people are from more of a professional arena than others in the home computer field. People who have been in a more controlled environment than home computer types. People who know how to document and write code correctly.” Rich Two paused. “Not hacker types,” he added.

Their company would develop a set of tools and techniques for game conversion. The techniques, algorithms, and cross-assemblers would, of course, be proprietary. Because of that, Rich and Rich would routinely keep their source code. It would be sequestered at Rich and Rich’s offices in Southern California. No matter how brilliant the tricks were, no matter how elegant the bum, it would not be available for hacker reading pleasure. Only the product would be available. Opacity. People buying programs as product, with the programming deeply hidden, as unimportant as the machinery that makes grooves in records that play music. Likewise, the programmers at Rich and Rich would be anonymous. No hacker egos to cope with. Just submit a wish list of games and the assembly line would churn them out.

Ken loved the idea. “It will make them rich and make me money,” he said afterward. If the two trial projects he gave to Rich and Rich worked out, he said, “I could do all my conversions with them! This is much better than John Harris!”

Ken was feeling at the top of his game. Besides Rich and Rich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal was in town, talking to him and Roberta for a piece about the company. As he often did in the middle of the day, he rewarded himself by leaving the office and heading out to the site of his new house. Today, they were lowering the seven twenty-five-foot-long roof beams which would go over the mammoth game room in the house, not far from the indoor racquetball court. He put a flannel shirt over his ragged, blue Apple T-shirt and he drove over to the muddy site and watched the hydraulic crane lift the beams, and the twelve-man work crew settle each one into its niche. It went smoothly, like a well-written subroutine that worked the first time the code was assembled, and Ken stared with a dazed pride at what he was building. “Isn’t it weird?” he kept asking. “Isn’t it weird?”

The house went on and on, rambling down the hill for a hundred and forty feet; the frame finally filling out, with stairs you could climb and doorways to peep through. Right now the house was open to the elements, for wind to blow through and rain to fall through, and no doors or walls prevented free movement. A perfect, endless hacker house. But the builders would soon put walls to keep the world from peering in the house, and doors to keep the people in the house from bursting in and violating a person’s privacy. No one in his right mind would want it any different.

The same with hackerism, perhaps . . . no one running a business could want it really run by the Hacker Ethic. Sooner or later you had to cope with reality; you would yearn for those old, familiar walls and doors which were always considered so natural that only madmen would eliminate them. Only in a computer simulation maybe, using the computer to hack Utopia, could you preserve that sort of idealism. Maybe that was the only place you could preserve a dream. In a computer.

Ken walked around the house a few times, talked to the builder, and then was reminded that he had to get back. He had to speak to the reporter from the Wall Street Journal about the strange little mom-and-pop software company that had started with an adventure game.

Ken and Roberta Williams held the housewarming party on Labor Day weekend, 1983. Over two hundred people wandered through the ten-thousand-square-foot cedarwood house, admired the stained-glass pictures, marveled at the fireplace of river rock, participated in a tournament on the racquetball court (which had a full-color Apple Computer logo embedded in the gleaming wood), sweated in the sauna, relaxed in the hot tub, played tug-of-war in the backyard Fresno River, spiked volleyballs on the court, watched video piped in from the satellite dish outside, laughed at the comedy troupe flown in from San Francisco, and played the six coin-op arcade games in the giant game room with the full-length wet bar.

It was a bittersweet occasion. Between the competition from big-money newcomers, the slump in the economy, the huge capital outlay for ROM cartridges fitting low-end machines like the VIC-20 (outlays which would never be recouped), and Sierra On-Line’s lack of a new, innovative, Third-Generation hacker-coded hit, the company was headed for a year with revenues lower than the previous year. Ken had been forced to seek more venture capital, three million dollars of it. A half million had gone directly to him, considerably less than the cost of the new house.

Earlier that summer, Ken had asked Dick Sunderland to meet him at the Broken Bit. Before they exchanged a word, Ken handed his former boss a note which read, “You are hereby terminated as president of Sierra On-Line.” Dick Sunderland was furious, and eventually filed a lawsuit against Ken and On-Line. “I’m mad,” he would explain. “I have my reputation. I’ve built him a company that can be run, and he wants to run it.” Other On-Liners, especially those who fondly remembered the Summer Camp days, rejoiced. They took Sunderland’s name plate from his parking space and stuck it on the door to the women’s lavatory. They took a pile of memos dating from the Sunderland regime, which was dubbed “The Age of Oppression,” and tossed them into an impromptu bonfire. For a fleeting moment it was as if the employees of a company could reduce the bureaucracy to ashes.

There were other optimistic notes. Ken had hopes that his new, low-cost word-processing program would bring in money, and that he would do well with a million-dollar deal to license the cartoon characters from B.C. and The Wizard of Id. He was negotiating with John Travolta for use of the actor’s name in a body fitness program. But despite these projects, the software business had turned out to be more precarious than it had first appeared.

One only had to talk to Jerry Jewell to find out why: Jewell of Sirius did come down from Sacramento, and he was lamenting the disastrous end to his Twentieth-Century Fox Games deal—the cartridge games that his company had written had been lost in the 1983 videogame glut, and he had received almost no money in exchange for focusing his entire market thrust on the Atari VCS machine. His company was hanging by a thread, and he doubted whether any of the Brotherhood would be able to survive in the next few years. His top programmers had left him, days before he was about to lay them off.

Ken Williams was still having programmer problems, too. There was the hacker who was running the IBM project, far behind schedule. There were some of the “professional” programmers who, not familiar with the pleasures of immersion into a computer-game universe, were unable to synthesize those pleasures themselves. There was even a dispute with Bob and Carolyn Box: the two gold-panners-turned-programmers had rejected Ken’s criticisms of the game they showed him, and had left the company to be independent software authors.

And then there was John Harris. Lately, he and Ken had been feuding over a royalty disagreement on Frogger, still On-Line’s bestselling program. Parker Brothers wanted to buy the program to convert to cartridge, and Ken offered John twenty percent of the two-hundred-thousand-dollar buyout. To John that was not enough. They discussed it in Ken’s office. It had ended with Ken Williams looking at his former software superstar and saying, “Get out of my office, John Harris. You’re wasting my time.”

That was the last time they had spoken before the housewarming, to which Ken had not invited John. Nonetheless, Harris had showed up with his girlfriend, who was wearing a large diamond engagement ring he had given her. Ken greeted the hacker cordially. It was not a day for animosity, it was a day for celebration. Ken and Roberta Williams had their new, eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house, and no dark clouds hung over the Sierras, at least. The computer had delivered them all to riches and fame they had never dared dream of, and as dusk peeked over Mount Deadwood, Ken Williams, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, danced happily to the tunes of a bluegrass band he had shipped in from Southern California. Later on, just as he always dreamed, he sat in the hot tub with friends, a millionaire in his twenties with a hot tub in the mountains. As the friends sat in the hot tub, their arms ringing the side, they could hear the faint electronic sounds of the arcade games in the nearby game room, mingling incongruously with the rustling Sierra forest.