All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture (23 page)

For Roberta, typing in her Cave commands and waiting for the computer to answer was not unlike lying awake at night and starring in her own adventures. In her mind, she would wander around underground caverns and meet a little dwarf who would shoot arrows at her. She might get stuck in some interminable maze. Gigantic snakes might block the way. Gruesome trolls would ask for money. Sometimes she typed in the word “Xxzzy,” to teleport magically to another location. Roberta died a lot while playing the game. But she always came back. Sometimes she could not stop thinking about Colossal Cave. She couldn’t stop playing, even to change the kids’ (she now had two) diapers. She couldn’t sleep, staying up all night, thinking about how to move past a dragon. What words would she type in? What was the proper logic to use to move forward?

All the while, she thought about two things. “If I’m addicted to this game, other people must be, too. And I always fancied myself as a writer. I can make a game that’s as good as Colossal Cave. Maybe I can even make it better.” While Ken was away working during the day, she mapped out a game on paper based loosely on Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None
, the bestselling mystery novel of all time.

She called it Mystery House, and when the writing was completed two weeks later, she was proud of herself, full of a new
self-esteem. Roberta was so psyched that she wanted Ken to program it. But he wanted nothing to do with it. So she did what every spouse does when there’s an abiding need to make the other partner see your point of view. She decided to get Ken drunk. At the Plank House Restaurant, the fanciest place in town, she said, “Just give me five minutes.”

Ken made a face like he didn’t want to hear about it, like the idea was silly and stupid. Really, he was interested in creating a word processing program in Fortran. He thought that was the fastest way to success. But he saw the look in Roberta’s eyes. She really meant it. And then there was the booze. He gave her the five minutes.

“Look, I don’t get obsessed over, well, anything. But if a housewife like me likes games like this, there are others, too. I have it all figured out.” She showed him everything—the design, even some rudimentary graphics she had done. The look in his eyes changed from steely and bored to mildly interested and then to raptly enthusiastic. Soon he was talking about how to program the game, even how to add her pictures to it.

Ken was on a roll, thinking he could do all the programming on the brand-new Apple II for which they had scrimped and saved $2,000. “I can write the algorithm that includes graphics,” he told her. “It hasn’t been done before, but I can do it.” He forgot all about his Fortran program.

For the next three months, they rarely got any appreciable amount of sleep. Roberta was making more drawings in black-and-white while Ken worked well into the night to code the software engine, the way the game would understand what you typed in. In a eureka moment, he was even able to add a few colors, a first for an Apple II game. Roberta felt they were really on to something big; she told friends that every pore in her body was gushing with creativity. When they were done, they had the first adventure game in the world that included graphics.

Roberta put several Mystery House disks into Ziploc bags with a Xeroxed flyer that showed the price, $24.95. Ken took their small inventory to the computer stores that were springing up around Los Angeles, doing his own distribution with some help from Roberta’s father. He would drop five games at one store, maybe ten at another. The proprietors were often dumbfounded that the game included pictures. When they saw colors, they were delighted. The Williamses’ print marketing effort included one ad. Roberta cut the words out of a magazine and pasted them together for a quarter page, $120 ad in
MICRO
magazine.

Mystery House’s artwork today seems undeveloped, almost as if the drawings were made with an Etch A Sketch. An evergreen outside the Victorian manse looks as much like a housedress on a pole as it did a tree. But the words remain alluring: “You are in the front yard of a large, abandoned Victorian house. Stone steps lead up to a wide porch.” What else could you do but go inside and discover the gruesome murders within as you played amateur detective? But it was more than that. If Ken could use colored lines to gussy up Roberta’s pictures in a computer game, maybe all you needed was just a little more RAM to make a full-color game. Or how about a graphics card that would deal with all the art and all the colors, shades, tones, and hues? Technologically, Ken and Roberta had opened the door to a new world of graphics, one that would in the coming years be as emotionally thrilling as seeing the Northern Lights for the first time.

Then the torrent of orders began. All Roberta did all day long was copy disks, which took about a minute each, put them in plastic bags (which Ken bought in bulk), and place them in packages for the UPS man to pick up. By August 1980, after just three months, the game had brought in $51,000. This was their wildest dream come true; they were on their way to becoming millionaires. As Roberta conceived of a new game, the two were thinking about moving to a house near the California mountains, a place near Roberta’s parents’
house, surrounded by nature for the kids to grow up around. They chose an A-frame house in Coarsegold, California, an obscure former mining town best known for its proximity to the Sierra National Forest and for its abundance of tarantulas.

From the mountains the mom-and-pop company they named On-Line Systems grew by leaps and bounds. While Mystery House sold about ten thousand copies, Roberta’s new fantasy adventure, Wizard and the Princess, sold sixty thousand at $32.95 each. At night, when the kids were asleep, she and Ken would sit outside and clink their wineglasses as they looked up at the stars, wondering aloud at their luck. By 1981, their office down the road in Oakhurst bustled with activity as Ken proselytized to potential young programmers: “This is like the gold rush. You better come up and join us. You could be a millionaire too.”

Ken lured teen hacker geniuses like John Harris to the mountains with a 30 percent royalty rate and a rent-free house in which to live. Harris, still pimply and working all through the nights like a kid possessed, would come up with a Pac-Man knockoff for the Atari 800 in just a couple of months. Ken was psyched. But when Atari sent out an industry-wide cautionary note stating it would prosecute pirates, the name was changed to JawBreaker. Pac-Man was replaced by evil-looking chomping teeth that bit into candy inspired by Life Savers. Atari still sued. Not only that, their lawyers threatened Ken with such gusto, the young entrepreneur literally vibrated from fear. Before the case went to court, Ken and Roberta settled the suit with Atari. Harris, a smart, trusting kid with groundbreaking coding chops, also made a version of Frogger for the Atari 800. But he took his code—and all of his software tools—to the Software Expo in San Diego, and while Harris casually spoke with a fan, someone ripped off the whole kit and caboodle. And he didn’t have a backup copy. It took the depressed kid a long time to recover, but he rewrote the code
and Frogger succeeded. His royalties for the first month of sales were more than $35,000.

Ken’s biggest problem was dealing with the constant expansion of On-Line Systems. The crowded offices, packed to the gills with employees, were not neat, and neither was Ken. Sometimes he couldn’t find contracts amid the piles of papers and boxes on the floor. Sometimes he couldn’t find disks that had essential computer code on them. Music blared to the point of cacophony. There was drinking to drunkenness on Fridays, and on Tuesdays there was Men’s Night, which included more boozing. Pot smoke filled the air too, and sometimes employees howled like banshees in the company bathroom, screwing with abandon. Nevertheless, the money was still coming in, a ton of it. It was then that Roberta and Ken had a serious discussion. If they wanted to keep growing, they knew they needed a manager who had business school experience. That didn’t mean they still couldn’t have fun making games. They just needed to tighten and streamline the process.

In early September 1982, Ken hired Don Sutherland, his boss from his software programming days. Sutherland tried his best to tighten things up, but both Ken and Roberta were resistant. After all, they had created this multimillion-dollar company and they wanted to have their say. It all nearly fell apart when the Atari-induced videogame crash came. Sierra On-Line, the new name of the company (sporting a logo that featured a mountain peak reaching for the sky) nearly became a victim. Roberta blamed Sierra’s venture capitalists, who, after putting $10 million into the company, had pressured them into making cheesy Atari games for naught; after all, Atari’s greed was the cause of the crash. Roberta told Ken that taking the money was the worst mistake they ever made. Both of them felt they were being treated like hicks by the money people from New York and Boston. At a meeting in San Francisco, those money people
said the only way out was to sell the company to Spinnaker Software, an edutainment software firm with dubious titles like Fraction Fever.

In a kind of fuck-you voice, Roberta, knowing she and Ken controlled 60 percent of the company, said, “We’re not selling anything. This is our lives.”

“Then you’ll go down. You’ll die with the company,” said a bespectacled man in an expensive suit.

At that point, the Williamses walked out of the meeting and got the hell out of Dodge. Back in the mountains, they eliminated nearly three quarters of the staff, which took its toll on Ken, who rarely relished firings of any sort. After the carnage, Sierra was down from 129 employees to 29. Ken and Roberta leveraged their house and maxed out their credit cards to keep the other employees. Through all this, Roberta was plotting a comeback with a new adventure game. To save money, she wore many hats, including heading up Sierra’s purchasing department. Sutherland was gone, and Ken was both CEO and COO of a company that people began to think of as a mere fad. The smartest money analysts and Wall Streeters in the country felt that Sierra On-Line was on life support.

“We have to get back to our core,” Roberta told Ken as they walked together in the woods near their home. “Let’s do what we do best.”

“Forget all that Atari crap,” agreed Ken. “That’s over. That’s water under the bridge.”

Their critical center was in adventure games, in particular an ambitious project Roberta called King’s Quest: Quest for the Crown. It would be the first adventure game to feature an animated world to explore. Ken had wangled a deal with IBM, which would be producing a computer it hoped would be as popular as the Apple IIc. The PCjr, which would be available in March 1984, had so much marketing muscle behind it, you couldn’t avoid seeing it on TV or in magazines. To help launch the machine, which sported two ports
for joysticks, IBM asked the Williamses for an adventure game. The fantasy game, which took place in the fanciful kingdom of Daventry, was a $700,000 gamble for Sierra. It took six full-time programmers eighteen months to create. But Big Blue didn’t even ask for exclusivity, so Ken sold a version of King’s Quest to Tandy for their home PC, the Tandy 1000, which was distributed through RadioShack stores across the nation.

Confident that the code was clean, polished, and well tested, the Williamses unleashed King’s Quest in May, to much acclaim. Even though the PCjr was a failure, due to its high price and badly designed wireless keyboard, King’s Quest was a critical hit on that machine and very popular on the better made Tandy 1000. It did so well that Sega, Apple, and Atari came knocking to license it.

“We’re back, baby,” Ken would say to his creditors as if it were his own version of the Bronx cheer. Not much more than a year after the tempestuous meeting with venture capitalists in San Francisco, Sierra had paid all of its outstanding bills. It was a remarkable rise from the ashes, one that led the money people to trust the Williamses again.

From that point on, Sierra seemed to be unable to do any wrong. At an Apple Fest, Ken signed up Richard Garriott, the son of a Spacelab astronaut who was so far ahead of his time that his Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress fantasy role playing game had thousands of orders before it was released. Ken and Roberta also brought in Al Lowe, who worked on the pun-filled and slightly naughty Leisure Suit Larry, featuring a protagonist whose one goal in life was a simple one: to get laid. There was a deal with NASCAR for racing games and a deal with Hoyle, the one-hundred-year-old United States playing card manufacturer, to make poker games. Soon Sierra became so flush, Roberta and Ken moved north to swanky offices in Bellevue, Washington. From Washington, they acquired a dozen smaller companies. Ken knew precisely what he wanted in
games, and he could tell if they were right for Sierra in a matter of minutes. Partially, Roberta and Ken’s success came because Sierra fans were forgiving. If there were minor errors in a game, the fans of a popular series would still buy it, as long as it stayed true to its roots. By the time Roberta’s King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Younger was unleashed in late 1990, the frenzy for Roberta’s games showed no boundaries. With its hint-giving, bespectacled owl, Cedric, King’s Quest V sold more than 500,000 copies, making it the bestselling computer game of its time. By then, Ken and Roberta ruled their kingdom with elegance and strength, just as the royalty of her fictional kingdom of Daventry ruled theirs. Ken and Roberta weren’t like JFK and Jackie. But within their milieu, they lived in a sort of Camelot—if only because there were no other husband-and-wife game company moguls in the industry.

At the time, Roberta was becoming bored with the King’s Quest series. She wanted to do something that was a bigger, better version of Mystery House. In 1991, she began voluminous research into the horror genre that extended beyond games. She read horror classics. She watched so many scary movies that she’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling that she’d been bitten by a vampire or haunted by a ghost. She asked everyone she met what their favorite eerie camp-fire story was. She had notebooks full of stories, outlines, and general thoughts on horror. The Seattle area itself was the perfect place to go deep into what makes up the essence of fear. You could see strange beings in the misty rain if you tried, and the mystery of the Green River Killer, a man who was murdering dozens of women, was often in the news. For a year before she started writing the game, it was all horror, all the time for Roberta.