Austin Grossman - You

What if the player puts a bag of holding inside a bag of holding? What if he turns it inside out? Cuts it open? Sets it on fire? Quit fucking around.

What if the EXACTLY WHAT KIND OF ASSHOLE ARE WE DEALING WITH HERE?

It was becoming clear that high-end game development had a bizarrely sadistic chicken-and-egg quality. During preproduction we’d all sat around and designed a game as we’d imagined it, inventing features and game mechanics and systems and telling ourselves how much fun they were going to be. And so we’d begin building levels months before the game was actually playable. When we actually began playing the game we’d discover that everything worked entirely differently from the way we thought it would, and the things we thought would be fun weren’t; the things that were fun, on the other hand, would be things we’d never even thought about. But by then the game would mostly be built and we’d have to scramble to change everything and resign ourselves to all the missed opportunities and promise to do everything correctly in the sequel, which would take another two years to build and would have an identical set of problems. The exact same thing was true for the look of the game; half the art would be built before we had a solid idea what the renderer really looked like. Not just technical specs, such as frame rate and resolution, but the intangibles—how the light fell, how solid the shadows felt, what exact register of realism or stylization it seemed to occupy. Don said it was like we had all the problems of shooting a movie while simultaneously inventing a completely new kind of movie camera and writing the story for a bunch of actors who weren’t even going to follow the script.

There was an arcade-style cabinet that sat in the corridor that ran between the library and the kitchen. It wasn’t a real arcade machine, but a PC running an emulator that let you choose from an encyclopedic menu of vintage arcade games, from Space Invaders to Japanese-only knockoffs of NBA Jam titles. It was the type of device I would have sold either of my parents for when I was nine. I was pretty sure it was illegal.

Lisa was playing an old-style vector graphics game, a world sketched in plumb-straight green and red lines. It looked like Asteroids but was more complicated; there was gravity and terrain. In fact, it was a distant descendant of Lunar Lander . She scowled as she piloted a triangular ship above a hostile landscape, dodging flak, managing the fuel supply. As I watched, she picked her way through a cave system on precisely gauged spurts of acceleration. As I watched, she bombed an enemy fuel tank and her fuel meter jumped up.

“Why would shooting their fuel give you more fuel?” I asked.

“Do you want fuel or do you not want fuel?”

She killed all the enemy bases and grabbed all the fuel, then jetted off into the void, while behind her the planet exploded into jagged, candy-colored shards.

“Why does the planet explode?” I couldn’t help asking. “Was… was that necessary?”

“Because it knows there’s a triangle out there that can take all its stuff.”

I’d long ago noticed that there was a sort of bubble in the middle of the spring schedule not connected to anything else. This turned out to be the five weeks given over to prepping the E3 demo.

Matt and Lisa were hanging out in the Sargasso Sea of office chairs.

“What’s E3?” I asked.

“God, I’m glad Jared didn’t hear you say that,” said Lisa.

“Electronic Entertainment Expo. It’s the big industry trade show,” Matt said. “Everybody demos their next-gen games for the press. Everybody—Japan, Europe, Australia, whoever. It’s a pretty big deal.”

“It’s more than a big deal,” Lisa said. “It’s how we get funding. We need all that press to get a publisher. And we need to look like we know what we’re doing so Focus won’t shut us down. If we kick ass, somebody’s going to pay to publish our game.”

“Kick ass. You mean, if we look like we’re way, way more fun,” I said.

“Nobody really cares if a demo is fun, to be honest. It’s about whether the graphics look good.”

“So at least I’m off the hook.”

“Partly,” she said. “I think half of it is, are you going to appeal to the hard-core Realms fans? But the rest of it’s going to be about bells and whistles. Graphics and stuff, showing we have the next big thing that no one else has thought of.”

“You mean, your thing. The renderer.”

“Yes,” she said. “Me. I’m getting us a rough version of the graphics engine at the end of this week.”

“What does rough mean?” Matt asked.

“Well, not fully optimized, I guess, but you can load existing data into it. We can play the levels,” Lisa said. “It will probably not crash horribly every single time.”

“So, um, what does it look like?” I’d long since given up on making my questions sound informed, at least in the leads meeting. At least here, no one was under any illusions about me.

“It’s like we’ll have the same world, but faster, more detailed, prettier, I guess. Except for a hundred thousand large and small problems that I can’t explain to either of you,” Lisa added.

“We just need it to look better than everyone else,” Matt said.

“It will,” Lisa said, but she seemed to be holding something back.

“Yeah, but it’s going to have a new engine, too, right?” I said.

“Everyone will. It’s one of those years,” Matt said. “ Quake and Unreal, both, and whatever Sony’s doing.”

All we had to do was put up a better game demo than everybody else, a small section of game, five minutes’ worth of gameplay, maybe, that would say everything about our game’s design, our look, our vision, and most of all demonstrate our crushing technical superiority over the opposition, which is to say everybody else in the world. Against the richest and smartest developers in the entire world, all the bearded arcade-era veterans and pissant teenagers who built their own force-feedback joysticks and all the corporate juggernauts with movie-size war chests and focus groups and market research—against them we would put Black Arts Studios, me and Lisa and Gabby and Don, and our demo.

When the new renderer came online, no one else was allowed to see it at first; Matt had it installed on Don’s computer in his office, and the four of us—Matt, Don, Lisa, Gabby, and I—sat down to look at what Lisa had made us.

The renderer is simply the part of a game’s software that displays the world; it stores all the data, all the models, all the terrain, all the textures; it knows where they are and where the point of view is, and draws them on the screen in proper perspective. A better renderer will draw more detail in less time—more complex 3-D objects, higher-resolution textures. If possible it will offer a little flash, tricks like mirrored surfaces; silvery, liquid water; translucent polygons; realistic-looking fire, showers of sparks, mists. Multiple light sources, colored lights, moving light sources. Objects that cast shadows. And always, more detail drawn faster. Every year game companies add new features that make the otherworld that much more invitingly, lusciously real. Part of it is just programmers wanting to make other programmers think, “How the fuck did he do that?” Part of it is that sensation, that “pop,” every time you see the game world drawn realer than before, that shift to sharper detail that makes everything that was the state-of-the-art ten seconds ago look dowdy, blurry, and a bit sad—it’s that “pop” that makes you that year’s new hot game and makes it more likely that retailers will stock your game instead of other people’s.