The Impossible Fortress(37)

“Mary found our address in the White Pages,” Mom explained, like this was a feat worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself. I could tell she was over the moon; it was her first time welcoming a straight-A student into our home. “She says your game is so good, you could use it for college applications. Like a special essay.” She hadn’t looked so excited since Prince Charles married Lady Diana, and I hated to burst her bubble.

“The game doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s a failure.” Mary’s copy of How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days was open on the table, and I felt like flinging it across the kitchen. “We did everything that stupid book says. We followed the instructions to the letter. But it doesn’t work.”

“Exactly,” Mary said. She was leaning across the table, her face glowing, bursting with a secret she couldn’t conceal any longer. “I kept thinking the same thing: We did everything the book said. We followed the instructions to the letter. And that’s when it hit me, Will: What if the book was wrong?”

At first I didn’t realize what she meant. I was raised to believe that everything in a book had to be true. Books were written by Writers and edited by Editors. They were created by smart, educated professionals who triple-checked everything before the text was printed. This was 1987 and I was fourteen years old, and there was no such thing as a wrong book.

Mary turned the pages to a map of the 64’s memory. “We’ve been putting the ML at 4915,” she said, “but that number has to be a misprint. Look at the map. There’s a missing digit, a missing two. We want 49152.”

This was so obvious, I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner. All the type-in programs in my hobby magazines were loaded into 49152. It was the largest swath of free ML storage in the 64’s RAM. Of course it was 49152!

“You’re totally right,” I said.

“I know,” Mary said.

“That has to be it.”

“I know!”

“Back up a minute,” Mom said. “What’s 41592?”

There was no time to explain. I wanted to try it immediately, but my copy of the game was back at the showroom.

“I wish I had the disk,” I said.

Like a genie, Mary reached inside her purse and produced a floppy disk with the Planet Will logo on it. “Where’s your 64?”

I ran back to my bedroom to power up my computer. I hadn’t made my bed in a decade. The floor was a minefield of dirty underwear, dirty dishes, and splayed-open hobby magazines, but there was no time to tidy up or to be embarrassed. I kicked a path from the door to the computer desk, and Mary trailed behind me in a sort of awe. The walls and ceiling were covered with posters of swimsuit models—Elle Macpherson and Paulina Porizkova, Kathy Ireland and Carol Alt. They were crawling and prancing and preening all over my walls in various states of undress, a panoramic fantasy surrounding my bed.

Mom followed along, too. “We don’t get a lot of guests,” she explained to Mary. “Most days, I just keep his door closed and try to ignore it.”

I loaded the game into memory and tweaked the code, changing the 4915 to a 49152. When I typed RUN, the screen went black and nothing happened. I braced myself for the inevitable error message.

But then a mountain sprang up from the bottom of the screen, rising above the land with an earthshaking, lava-spitting fury. Seven ogres were scrambling atop its peak—seven different ogres, all moving independently, seemingly with minds of their own. The princess flailed in her cage, suspended by chains over the top of the mountain.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

My mother smacked my shoulder.

“Move the hero,” Mary said. “See if the ogres chase him.”

The hero was crouched at the bottom of the screen, ready to storm the fortress. I reached for the joystick, and he sprinted forward, racing up the side of the mountain, suddenly evading ogres that swarmed from all directions. It was all a hundred times, maybe a thousand times faster than before. I pressed the fire button, and the hero swung his sword, neutralizing an ogre with a satisfying swish. The game looked and played almost exactly as I’d first imagined it.

“Does it work?” Mom asked.

I turned and hugged her, and she gasped with surprise. It had been many months since I last hugged my mother. But I had to do something. I worried that if I kept looking at the screen, I might start to cry.





1900 REM *** VICTORY SCREEN ***

1910 PRINT "{CLR}{12 CSR DWN}"

1920 PRINT "YOU ESCAPED THE FORTRESS!"

1930 IF LIVES>3 THEN SCORE=SCORE+500

1940 IF LIVES=3 THEN SCORE=SCORE+300

1950 IF LIVES=2 THEN SCORE=SCORE+200

1960 IF LIVES=1 THEN SCORE=SCORE+100

1970 PRINT "YOUR SCORE IS";SCORE

1980 PRINT "YOUR RANK IS";RANK$





1990 RETURN




THE NEXT TWO DAYS, Mary and I worked nonstop. Having fixed the main loop of the game, we started cramming in all of the little design details that made gameplay enjoyable. We created a victory screen for players who rescued the princess before the timer ran out; the hero and the princess hopped up and down, dancing to the chorus of Wang Chung’s “Everybody Have Fun Tonight.” There was even a bonus round where players could boost their scores.

All of this was tremendously difficult, but it felt like play. The finish line was in sight; now that we were close, nothing could dampen our spirits. We talked, we laughed, and we no longer cared when a customer interrupted our progress, asking where we kept the binder clips. I even sold my first typewriter, to a desperate Rutgers student scrambling to finish a term paper.