On Thursday Duke flew north to the Atari lab, flashed his badge at the security desk, and was waved through.
Nolan had said the engineers would need a few weeks. And he had been gone for more than a few weeks.
The drive from the airport took him past the last apricot orchards in the valley, the ones the office parks had not swallowed yet.
Not long ago this whole stretch had been fruit trees. Now every other building carried the name of a chip company.
The lab in El Gato still smelled like hot solder, but something was different when Duke reached the main floor, and it took him a moment to place it.
The place was mostly quiet.
A radio on a shelf was playing "Bette Davis Eyes" for what had to be the 100th time that month. 'I fucking hate this song already.'
He was already considering banning it from the Paramount Lot.
A dozen engineers stood in a half circle around a single arcade machine. The only sounds were the clatter of buttons and a low groan whenever someone made a mistake.
Duke walked up behind them. Nobody noticcing him.
On the screen, colored blocks fell through a black screen. Each piece was made of four squares, and the player turned and slid them as they dropped, trying to make them fit.
A bar. A square. A T. A Z and its mirror. Two Ls facing opposite ways.
A row filled across the bottom, flashed, and vanished.
"This is so satisfying," said the man at the controls.
John Avery was the best programmer Nolan had. He wore sandals and had mended his glasses with a strip of tape, and was too focused on playing to notice anything.
Nolan appeared at Duke's elbow with one arm tucked behind his back.
"Duke. You're early."
"What's behind your back?"
Nolan sighed and produced a gray cartridge with a handwritten label.
"I pulled it off the floor yesterday. Accounting called me this week. Nobody on the third floor has turned in a time sheet in 3 days, too much playing."
Duke tried not to laugh and mostly failed.
"I owe you an apology," Nolan said. "When you drew those napkins, I thought you were pulling my leg."
"You folded them very carefully for a man who thought that." Duke smiled as he turned again to look at the people playing in the arcade machine.
"I was being polite." Nolan nodded at the screen. "If this works, I might frame a napkin for my office."
Avery lost and pulled off from the machine, another engineer entering his spot inmediatly to play his own round.
Avery looked at his superior Nolan and the Chairman just talking around relaxed and quickly walked over. 'Hello, we are testing some new settings.'
Duke shook his hand and nodded. "Understood. Did people here liked the game setting?"
The engineer nodded, "It fits a lot to the ideal game for our new console." he casted his gaze upon the table where the black console stood.
The Atari 5200 on the bench had 16 kilobytes of memory to work with. In Duke past life, a single photo on a phone would take up thousands of times that much.
So in 1981 every screen was built from small pieces and clever shortcuts, and every program was written in assembly language, one tiny instruction at a time.[
Tetris suited that kind of limit. The falling shapes needed almost no memory and almost no art, only a good system.
"Where are we on the schedule?" Duke asked.
"Early 1982 it will be ready." Avery said. "I might even beat it, but i'd rather keep polishing."
"Polish it. It launches with the 5200, and it has to feel right on day one."
"There's one trick i did polished." Avery said, and he looked a little proud. "The pieces."
A chip in 1981 could not pick at random the way a person shuffles cards, so Avery had borrowed from the player instead.
The exact moment someone pressed the first button decided the order of the pieces, and no two games ever began the same way.
Basically, the moment the game booted up, an internal register started counting up at an incredibly fast rate, often thousands or millions of times per second.
All the while, the player, operating on human reaction time, could not possibly sync their button press to the microsecond.
Whether they pressed the button at microsecond 45,231 or 45,232 was entirely unpredictable, making the number pseudo-random.
Avery walked him through what they had changed.
The first version had spun each piece around the wrong corner, so the shapes jumped sideways every time you turned them.
The second version sped up every 15 seconds, which had defeated every person in the building. They had slowed it down so that the pace picked up after every ten lines instead.
A small window in the corner now showed the next piece before it fell. Gene said that had changed everything. Since it gave players an opportunity to plan.
Duke nodded, he once became a sweatty Tetris player during the Covid Pandemic and remembered how he had to learn to use that little window.
Avery had also done something Duke had not asked for.
Engineers would play anything with numbers in it, so he had handed a copy to the woman who ran the employee kitchen.
She played for an hour and asked if she could keep it.
That was the test that mattered. If someone from outside the industry could not put it down, the game would sell.
"What does the name mean?" Avery asked. "I put it on the label, but I don't know why."
"Tetra means four," Duke said. "Every piece has four blocks. And tennis, because I like tennis. Together its Tetris."
Avery looked like he had a few more questions, but he let it go.
Then Duke heard the music.
It came from a small speaker on a desk, a quick, bouncing melody in bright electronic beeps.
The sound engineer, Lisa, had built it note by note after Duke hummed it to her over the phone. The chip had only a few voices, so she had to choose carefully which notes to keep.
"It's a Russian folk song," Duke said. "Nobody owns it. It's older than all of us."
Folk songs from the 1800s belonged to everyone. Still, the United States had boycotted the Moscow Olympics a year earlier, and the two countries were barely speaking. Nolan frowned.
"Is that wise? A Russian tune in an American game?"
"Music doesn't check passports. Also... do you think the average american will know about the origins of this song?" Duke said. "Play it again, Lisa."
Down the hall, a second team had a plumber on a screen, jumping between platforms.
It was far rougher than Tetris. The jumps felt floaty, and the sound was a few beeps.
"Give him weight," Duke told the programmer. "A tap should be a hop, and holding the button should send him high. And when he bumps a platform from below, make the piece shake."
The programmer wrote it on the back of a document.
"Two buttons and one idea," Duke added. "If a kid can't pick it up in 30 seconds, it's too complicated."
The second plumber, the green one for a friend to control, was still a gray rectangle with a mustache drawn on in marker.
Duke decided not to mention it.
When they returned to the crowd, Avery guided him to the tetris arcade again. Duke took it and played.
He was better than they expected, because he had played versions of this game for years.
The pieces dropped and he slid them into place without thinking, and the lines vanished one after another.
After five minutes, the room had gone silent.
Someone behind him whispered, "He's good," and somebody else said, "Of course he is, he made it," and the circle laughed.
5 minutes was a long time.
At this time, it was incredibly difficult to last 5 minutes on a classic Tetris arcade machine.
Like most arcade games, the hardware was 'optimized' by developers to limit a single credit's play session.
The standard target across the industry was to design games so an average player would lose within 2 to 3 minutes, so that people spend more quarters.
When he finally let a tower reach the top, the screen flashed and went dark, and they all groaned together as if it were their own loss.'
"Is it my turn?" said a voice from the back.
Steven Spielberg was leaning against the wall by the break room, a spiral notebook under one arm.
He wore the same bomber jacket as at the screening, his face amicable but his eyes shinning as he looked at the Tetris prototype.
"How long have you been here?" Duke asked.
"Since 10 am. Nolan let me in. I lost an hour to that machine in the corner."
Duke had known him for years, and one of the things he liked best about him was that he played games for fun.
Most directors treated them as a toy for children. Spielberg treated them like a puzzle box left open in a hallway.
"That's the notebook," Duke said.
Spielberg held it to his chest. "It's a little embarrassing."
Then he set it open on a workbench.
The pages were full of tiny handwriting and drawings of a hat.
A map room where a beam of light had to land on the right spot, another where Indiana would have to jump to escape a cave and the last where a boulder was supposed to pursue him.
One page was labeled "Riding rhyno into battle???"
"56 ideas," Spielberg said. "Most are bad. But maybe a couple are good."
Duke took the notebook and started going through it.
He took a moment and sideyed him. "Sun Wukong? On a Indiana Jones movie? An army of gorillas that like to kill Nazis... At least, you havent lost your creativity."
"Which ones do you feel the best for?" Duke asked. He actually felt the more he read that the notebook was a combination of very small ideas and of extremely high ideas.
Spielberg turned a page. "I have never done a game, but you know, maybe we can do a more fantastical story than the movies."
"Amblin has a small games group now," he said at last. "Two programmers to test things first. We'd like to help."
"Then help," Duke said. "Your team works with Atari's, not for it. Same room, same credits. And I'm calling George tonight to invite him too."
Atari and Paramount owned the Indiana Jones license outright, so Spielberg did not need anyone's permission to fill a notebook.
What he needed was a seat at the table, and he did not know how to ask for one.
There was also the matter of time.
In 1981 most cartridges were written by one programmer working alone for about six months, and a team of five was unheard of. Spielberg's two people would be a real addition.
Spielberg let out a breath that seemed to have been waiting all morning.
"I had a speech," he admitted. "Three pages. It started with how much I respected the business side."
"Did it have jokes?"
"One. It wasn't too good."
Duke was fairly sure George would say yes before he finished the sentence. George always did when a project involved building something.
"One more thing," Duke said. "E.T. needs a game, and I want it started soon."
"...you mean now? We haven't shot a frame."
E.T. was a small film by studio standards, a boy, a backyard, and a visitor from space, and it would start shooting in September under a plain working title so nobody would guess what it was.
Paramount had said yes to it for around 2 years now, the project was still in pre-production.
"That's the point. When the film opens next summer, the game should be finished and fun."
In his past life, a game for that film had been built in about five weeks, shipped for Christmas, and buried by the truckload in a New Mexico landfill.
This time it would have a year for development.
Spielberg looked at the notebook, then at the machine, then at Duke. "I'll start a new page," he said.
Someone asked if he wanted a turn at Tetris.
He sat down, and the music began.
____
Next chapter- pitch for Indiana Jones game, idk what to do with the ET game.