Austin Grossman - You

“We all thought WAFFLE was going to be… the backbone of things. The information infrastructure. It was going to be the Internet, because the Internet was going to work like a game. It made so much sense. Who wouldn’t want cyberspace to happen?”

“But… no one wanted—”

“I know no one wanted it. I know 2-D was more ergonomic. I know no one wants to spend the cycles. Thank you. I know. Nobody wants cyberspace. It sounded great when Neuromancer came out, but… nobody wants the Internet to fly around and visit giant spheres and stuff. Heads floating in space. Turns out, if you can just click on bits of text that’s all you need.”

“So that was how you were going to be rich?”

“That was how I was going to matter.”

The Monday morning leads meeting was unusually solemn.

“I have some unfortunate news,” Don said. “It seems there is a major bug in our software.”

“You know, we could always spin this as a feature,” Matt said. “Darren would put it on the box in big letters: ‘Now with Enhanced Mayhem Generation.’”

“I thought of that,” Don said. “But that’s not even the thing that worries me. Even if it’s a feature in a game, it’s not a feature in AstroTrade.”

“Why do we care about that?” I asked. “I thought AstroTrade went out of business.”

“It did. But the way it went out of business was by selling its assets to a company called Enhanced Heuristics, which existed for about ten minutes then sold out to a thing called Paranomics. Which sends us a check every month on the original license, which is one of the major reasons we’re still in business.”

“Why didn’t you tell us any of this?” Matt said.

“Because it was a nice idea to think that Black Arts makes all its money from games. And usually we do, it just hasn’t been a great few years. Obviously I didn’t make this public, but Solar Empires III didn’t perform as well as expected.”

“I told you not to use that title,” Lisa mumbled into her laptop.

“That’s what it’s called,” Matt said.

“I’m not going to argue that point again,” Don said. “At this rate, Focus isn’t even going to wait for us to publish before shutting us down.”

“I’ve been making a little headway,” I said. “It’s happening more reliably, anyway.”

“That may not be a good thing.”

“I’ve been through the object database for every version of Realms I could get access to, and it’s just not there with the rest of the magic items.”

“I think it’s obviously not that simple,” Lisa said. “It’s not going to be just a piece of bad data. There’s code running that trolls the available objects, chooses one, changes its color to black, and gives it Mournblade’s powers. The bug is composed of both code and data, and one alters the other to create it.”

Data and code are like matter and energy, the two essences that, united, make up the world of entertainment software, a world that is in some basic way broken, misshapen, riven at its core. There was a basic rift in the world, and Mournblade lived in the center of it.

“Great,” Don said. “You and Russell and Matt are now the company-destroying bug eradication committee. The fate of the realm, my friends, is in your hands.”

Matt was tasked with, among other things, checking in on the various Black Arts fan sites and newsgroups to extract any usable feedback and get early warning on major postrelease bugs. In the days following the E3 demo he was spending two or three hours a day online, occasionally posting under a pseudonym to try to spin the event as positively as possible. He sent me an edited transcript from one of the Usenet discussion groups.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2988

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “Mandemonium”

Date: Sun Jun 07 10:02:30 EDT 1998

> I think at this point we can agree everyone saw it, which means at least some of the previous reports of sightings are almost certainly true

thank you, belatedly

>… shred of credibility…

*snip*

I’ve been playing Black Arts games since Realms III and I’ve seen it four times. Twice in Realms, once in Clandestine (LNTT), once in SEII . NPC shows up with a standard weapon except MATTE BLACK and it KILLS EVERYTHING. Most of us agree that’s the pattern.

Approximate sequence is, the weapon appears, whoever wields it is driven to attack those around it, lethally, and are extremely tough although at least in one case not invulnerable.

When all opponents are dead, after an interval the wielder dies. It’s totally random—I’ve replayed games the exact same way but it doesn’t get the sword back.

Works like digger wasp or parasitic fluke? Takes over the host & makes it do what it wants. The functionality is the same.

The sword whispers things at intervals but I haven’t yet made it out. I was a little distracted.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2989

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “nonborn”

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:08:02 EDT 1998

I don’t know if it’s relevant but I’ve come across a dead planet in SEIII , all inhabitants. Gone.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2990

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “aeris-477”

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:08:45 EDT 1998

Same here but it was a Mittari trader. Dead.

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2991

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “ender”

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:17:09 EDT 1998

Screenshots or it didn’t happen!!!

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2992

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “aeris-477”

Date: Sun Jun 07 11:17:36 EDT 1998

pix would be nice

rec.games.computer.black-arts.history (moderated) #2993

Subject: Re: poser/wannabe/etc (was: E3 rumors—who saw what?)

From: “Mandemonium”

Date: Sun Jun 07 14:21:21 EDT 1998

as you wish…

[MB1.jpg]

The first attached photo was from the most recent Realms of Gold . It showed a 3-D scene of a desert; a merchant caravan in chaos, one of its carts actually on fire. At the bottom left, there was a lizard woman holding a black sword. Behind her, a trail of blood spatters, and the bodies of three men and two horses.

And…

[MB2.jpg]

The next photo showed a very different game in the same graphics engine: a pale young man, skinny, dressed in the tattered remains of a blue jumpsuit. He was standing in a steel corridor, and behind him a window framed a starfield. He was holding a sword, too—it had the basket hilt of a saber but was inlaid with glowing lines. The blade was a flat black; it seemed to shed darkness the way a lightsaber sheds light. An older man who looked like a relative was dead at his feet.

[MB3.jpg]

The third photo was of a narrow cobblestone street, daytime, the close-set stone buildings seeming to lean in overhead. But it was a modern city, with illuminated signage in some eastern European language. The street was littered with corpses. In the top right, a black rifle barrel, circled in red, projected from the window of a church.

also including earliest shot that I know of [not mine!]

[bug2.jpg]

A rainbow-bright eight-bit game, cartoony little sprites running around in a grassy meadow dotted with flowers, except one of them had a little black stick, and the others were exiting the screen in panic, and about a third of the screen was tiled red with bloodstains.