You Read Online Free PDF Page A

from death. A poster showed the Milky Way galaxy with four enormous faces looking down on it, along with the words:
Solar Empires III: Pan-Stellar Activation
.
    “Mostly people are on break from shipping
Solar Empires,
that’swhy nobody’s here.” He stopped at a U-shaped formation of maybe a dozen desks. It was mostly empty. “This is the design pit, where you’ll be.”
    The short guy from my job interview was at a desk, playing a version of
Doom
modified to have Flintstones characters instead of space marines. He was wearing a top hat.
    “Hey,” he said without looking up. “I’m Jared.”
    “We met,” I said.
    “I guess Russell’s going to be working on the new thing,” Matt explained.
    “Wait; what’s the new thing?” I asked.
    “It’s still secret,” Matt said. “Darren will tell us when he’s ready.”
    “It had better not be space. I’m so fucking sick of space.” The voice came from the other side of the divider, an older man, bald, who wore a leather vest over a dark blue button-down shirt, like a Radio Shack manager who moonlighted as a forest brigand. I’d noticed him as we passed because his monitor showed a 3-D image of a brick wall, and he’d been sitting there pushing the camera a quarter inch to the left, then a quarter inch to the right, over and over, watching for some infinitesimal change.
    “The market wants sci-fi, Toby,” Jared said.
    “I’m so fucking sick of drawing planets.” He slumped in his chair and went back to tapping the arrow keys.
    “Here’s where you’ll be sitting,” Matt said. “We’ve got your work machine set up.”
    I’d had only one computer since freshman year, a Compaq Presario with a 486 CPU and a thirteen-inch monitor that at the time had looked like the last computer that ever needed to be made. The off-white slab felt expensive and contemporary and powerful. But over the next four years the white casing acquired smudges and Rage Against the Machine stickers; it sagged and slowed under the load of next year’sword-processing software and the cumulative weight of cat hair clogging the cooling vents and being shoved under too many cheap desks in too many low-rent apartments, only to be yanked out three months later. I hated that machine.
    Matt explained that the computer in front of me had a 200 MHz Pentium MMX processor, 32 MB of RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, a 12x CD-ROM drive, a fifteen-inch monitor, external speakers, and subwoofers. It was built for the overspecced world of 3-D gaming, and viewed all lesser tasks with an appropriate contempt.
    Matt showed me a file called RoGVIed.exe, and suggested I “play around with it.” I shrugged and said, “Sure.” When he was gone, I clicked on it.
    For a few seconds there was nothing, then a torrent of text scrolled by, too fast to follow. Then the screen blanked, then showed only the Black Arts logo for about a minute. Just when I thought the computer had frozen on me, the screen changed to a startlingly complex collection of buttons, widgets, icons, and maps. It was like a mad, complicated puzzle box, but I knew I’d found something—one of their treasures.
    I was feeling a little terrified, but also thrilled—however tentatively, I’d pulled back the curtain on this dorky reality. I knew this must be the game editor, the designer’s basic tool, the thing that lets you do everything a designer does—build the geometry of the levels, place monsters and people and objects in it, put in any traps and surprises and, generally speaking, create a world in which you can menace and persecute anyone fool enough to enter. Here were the nuts and bolts of the world.
    Only… I’d expected it to be a high-tech piece of wizardry—a 3-D display, rotating cubes and graphs and blue-green numbers. This—this thing looked like crap. No one had ever spent time making the editor pleasant to work with, and in fact its ergonomics were almost abusivelywrong. The screen was divided into four quadrants, with no