“Give me an example.”
“Okay, say you and your group have been in Sarxos. Maybe building up a carnival complete with goods and jousting tournaments. Something to draw the populace and line your own pockets with gold. Another bunch of players decides the game has gotten too dull in that area, and they go attack goblin or bandit camps. They get all the goblins or bandits stirred up. Next thing you know, the goblins or bandits come tearing out of the hills and totally raze the carnival. The second group got the excitement they wanted, but the first group loses all their investment time. On one hand you got guys saying you’ve got a great game. But on the other, you’ve got a lot of unhappy campers.”
Matt nodded. He’d seen it happen more than once.
“Different people like to play the game at different speeds,” Oscar said. “The hack and slashers want action and a Monte Hall dungeon. But the builders want a game they can basically build another existence in; a place where they can chill out from a stressful world. That was one of the major draws Pete had with the new game engine. It was designed to offer the option to integrate with any ongoing campaign.”
“So each adventure could be individual and at a pace the particular gamer wanted.”
“Yes.”
Matt thought about the concept. “That’s almost like building a million different games at one time.”
Oscar grinned. “You’re getting it now. Individually tailored for the individual player.”
“The programming must have been intense.”
“I saw some of the coding Pete wrote for it. Groundbreaking stuff. And that game, when it hits the market, is going to go huge. Pete’s already got story arcs mapped out for the game.”
“What kind of story arcs?”
“Plagues. Invasions. In one of them a magic spell tilts the whole planet on its axis, causes a year-long winter to fall over the world. Can you imagine that?”
Matt shook his head. He couldn’t, but the whole idea sounded fascinating.
“This world is going to be more interactive than Sarxos for the gamer,” Oscar said. “The people who put Sarxos online have kind of had to maintain the status quo. No coloring outside the lines. No huge story or environment changes. With Pete’s world he could introduce anything he wanted to. The players could play it then, later, or not at all.”
The idea was staggering. Matt wasn’t as informed and as excited about Net games as Mark and Andy were, but he liked them on occasion. Realm of the Bright Waters sounded nothing short of awesome. “You said Peter thought he might need your help.”
“Yes. He had some game engine problems. See, I taught Pete everything he ever learned about game engines. We started tinkering with them at the orphanage. Pete and I were both state raised.”
Matt nodded.
“I think that’s why he’s so good at building worlds,” Oscar said. “He was always a quiet kid. Polite. Didn’t ever raise a big stink about things. He stayed to himself a lot. I didn’t know what to think of him. But when the home got online and brought in implant chairs, that’s when I saw Pete really come alive. It turned out that I had some skill at programming. Pete wanted to learn. That’s how we met. I could write programming and teach it to Pete, but he’s the one with the ideas. I can do a little world-building, setting up environments, and pulling a cohesive storyline together, but I can’t keep up with him. Nobody could.”
“Why did he go off on his own instead of signing a deal with a major publisher?”
“Because he wanted the control. Publishers have their own ideas about things. Too many hands in the pot. And, basically, I think Pete was building his own world that he could share with others. It’s supposed to be a place where he can stay and control things. No car wrecks. No losing his parents. Total control.”
“And he wouldn’t want to give that up.”
“No. No way.”
“How did he get along with Eisenhower Productions?”
“Everything with them was hurry. They’d have had the game out six months ago if they could have.”
“Peter held them up?”
“Yeah. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t have a choice. Part of it was their fault. When he asked me to help with the game engine, they told me I couldn’t. They maintained that much control.”
“Did they say why?”
Oscar shrugged. “They didn’t want anything about the game getting out was what they told him. I think it was a petty vengeance thing. He told them wait on the game; they told him he couldn’t use me.”
“Did he ask anyone else?”
“No. Pete wouldn’t have.”
“So he worked through the game engine problems himself?” Matt asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he say what they were?”
“We talked about it a little. What he was having was a bleed-over problem.”
“Bleed-over?”
“Sure. You have more than one player in a multi-user game, you have to build in boundaries so one player doesn’t affect the other player’s gameplay. What Pete was trying to do was isolate whole worlds, yet at the same time have them all remain accessible. So the concrete facts remain concrete. If he wanted to introduce a new creature or a new spell, he needed to be able to integrate as a sys/ops change, not have to write new programming for each offshoot a player had made. Understand?”
“Separate but equal,” Matt said.
“Kind of lame,” Oscar said, “but that’s the general idea.”
Matt remembered last night, when Peter Griffen and the dragon had invaded Maj’s veeyar. “Is it possible that the bleed-over you’re talking about could affect other games?”
“You mean the way they did at the convention today?” Oscar asked.
“Yes. I was in one of those games. I saw that dragon.”
Oscar grinned. “Yeah. A lot of people did. I’ll bet they never forget it, either. I never saw the bleed-over that Pete was talking about, but from his description that was exactly how it was. I was going to go over to him and talk to him about it. You could see the surprise on his face. He had no clue.”
“He thought he had the bleed-over fixed?”
“Pete had to have thought he had it fixed,” Oscar said. “Otherwise that game would never have seen the light of day.”
“He’d stop the release on Saturday?”
“In a heartbeat.”
That, Matt figured, might be a good reason for Eisenhower to get Peter out of the way. Maybe Peter figured the overlap into Maj’s veeyar was just a fluke, a small hiccup in the programming the night before. But there was no way to mistake what had happened at the convention.
“Pete didn’t know the bleed-over bug was still there,” Oscar said. “I’d bet my life on it.”
“Do you have any notes Peter sent you regarding the game engine bleed-over?”
“He called me last night,” Oscar said. “I wasn’t here because I was out wining and dining some game developers who are interested in some ideas I have. I think the message is still on my veeyar at home. Maybe I’ve got a few other e-mails still lingering around. A lot of Pete’s e-mail had jokes and stories in them that I like to read over occasionally.”
“Can you get whatever you have?”
“Sure. I talked to Pete last night after I got in. He thought he had it under control again then. We were going to get together after his presentation today. But that didn’t happen.” Oscar paused. “Do you think Pete’s okay?”
“So far,” Matt said, “there’s not any reason to think otherwise.”
Oscar nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.
Matt’s foilpack rang unexpectedly. He excused himself and opened it.