Spielberg lasted forty minutes at the Tetris machine.
It took Nolan, a promise of lunch, and Duke holding the door open to get him out of there.
Lunch turned out to be a conference room, a couple of pizzas, and a woman with a rolled-up map under her arm.
"Duke, this is Ruth Calloway," Nolan said. "She's running the Indiana Jones game project."
Ruth shook his hand fast, a pencil was stuck in her hair, and she had clearly forgotten it was there.
Project manager was a new kind of job in 1981.
Atari had grown from a handful of engineers into a campus, and games were no longer built by one person alone in a room.
Somebody had to keep track of who was making what, and when it would be finished.
Specially when it came to succesful IP adaptations
"Before you show me anything," Duke said, "how many people do you have?"
"5 developers and two part-time on sound."
"And how long do you want?"
"A full year... My release time was for the 5200 release day."
"Take it," Duke said. "Now show me what you guys got."
She pinned the map to the wall.
It was a jungle cut into a grid of squares, with winding paths, caves, a river, and a golden building at the center.
"Every square is one screen," Ruth said. "Walk off the edge and you enter the next one."
Duke leaned back and smiled. In his past life he had played a game built the same way, starring a boy in a green tunic who liked ssmashing clay pots.
Ruth's inspiration was closer to home.
A game called Adventure had come out for the 2600 the year before, with one room per screen and a sword and a key you carried from place to place.
It was the first time a console game was Open-World. And it would later inspired the design of Legends of Zelda.
Duke stood and tapped the starting square. "What do I do in the first thirty seconds?"
Ruth blinked. "You walk."
"Why?"
"Because... there's more map?"
"A kid won't walk empty jungle because there's more map," Duke said. "Give me a reason on screen."
Ruth wrote it on a paper.
Spielberg, already half out of his chair, wrote nothing.
"We have something small to show you," Ruth said, and nodded at a programmer sitting by the 5200 on the table.
A picture came up on the monitor. A man made of about twenty pixels stood in a green clearing, wearing a brown hat.
"That's Indy," Ruth said, with a straight face.
Duke's eyebrow twitched.
He remembered all the times in his past life when he had mocked old games for their graphics, and he understood now how rude that had been.
"That's the best hat I've ever seen," Spielberg said, leaning in.
"Can I?" Duke asked, and took the controller before anyone answered.
He pushed right. The little man walked to the edge of the screen, and the jungle slid sideways into a new one with a pond and a stone formation.
Nobody spoke. Even Nolan was grinning, looking around with his eyebrows raised, clearly proud.
Ruth explained that the whole map fit in a few kilobytes, which was why it looked so plain.
Every tree was the same tree, drawn once and used over and over.
Duke pressed the fire button, and a thin line snapped out in front of Indy. It was only a few dots long, but when it hit a pixel-sized snake, the snake jumped back.
"Whip," Ruth said. "Unlimited uses. The revolver kills things, but you only get 20 bullets in the whole game and you need to find them around the game."
'20... even Resident Evil is more generous-'
She walked them through the rest with her pages, one at a time.
A water pouch in the corner of the screen drained when Indy got hurt and filled when he found clean water representing his HP bar.
A room needed a torch to explore and push snakes out of the dark room path.
Then you had three small temples that each hid a piece of a medallion, and when you put the three together, the building at the center opened.
It was a new adventure set before the movie, so nobody would pay to replay a story they had already seen.
By the third paper, Spielberg could not stay in his chair.
"Can I say something?"
"Please," Ruth said. She sounded like she had been waiting for someone to interrupt her already.
"The first screen needs a boulder." Spielberg stood and started pacing. "Not to hurt the player. But it rolls past, as an easter egg. Then they walk to the next screen and it's gone."
Ruth eyes widened and nodded, writting it on a card.
"And the snakes, since Indy hates snake when he walks into a dark room, the little guy could flinch."
"And the hat," Spielberg said. "If he loses it, you see it on the ground. He can go back and pick it up, and you get a little bit of music."
"Music," he added, turning to a young woman at the end of the table. It was Lisa, the sound engineer from the Tetris tune. "How many voices does the chip have?"
Lisa held up four fingers.
"Then give me one voice that only plays when he's in danger and another when the snake wakes up, so that you hear it before you see it." Spielberg tapped the table.
"And between the temples, a card, like the old serials. Black screen, white letters. 'Meanwhile, deep in the jungle...' or a message like that."
"A text screen costs almost nothing," Ruth said, scribbling faster.
"And somebody should be chasing you. A rival who wanders the map in a white suit and takes a medallion piece if he catches you."
Then Spielberg opened his notebook to a page covered in arrows. It was the beam of light from the map room, bouncing off a set of mirrors until it hit a single stone in a wall.
"Mirrors you can turn like in the movie," he said. "Get the light on the right spot and the door opens."
"We already have block puzzles," Ruth said. "One where the player push a stone onto a switch-"
"Put them together," Duke said. "Push the block to hold the door, turn the mirror to open it. Two simple ideas make one good one."
He took a marker from the tray and walked to the whiteboard.
He drew three columns and wrote at the top of each. NOW, LATER, NEVER.
In a normal meeting this was the point where good ideas died, buried under a pile of other good ideas.
Duke had seen it happen too often, and he had no intention of letting it happen here.
"Boulder," he said, writing it under NOW. "Snake flinch and dropped hat, basically things that are easy and aachievable."
"The rival in the white suit goes under LATER. I like the idea, but he needs his own brain and his own sprite, and I want the temple finished first."
"The mirror room goes in the middle temple, and only one of them."
Spielberg leaned over the board. "What's NEVER?"
"Your waterfall level."
"What waterfall level?"
"Page 41, you wrote about a Indy going down a waterfall using a barrel, and then stealing a canoe from a villain."
"That's a very good page," Spielberg said, wounded.
"It's a very good sequel," Duke said, and wrote it under NEVER with a small arrow pointing to the right.
The room laughed.
Duke put down the marker and picked up the controller again.
"Now some practical things. First, the items."
He pointed at the 5200's keypad. Most games ignored its twelve buttons, but this one could use them.
"Press 1 for the torch, 2 for the revolver, 3 for the canteen. If players have to stop the game to change tools, the game stops being fun."
Ruth crossed something out on her card. "That's much better."
"Second, the stick." He picked one up from the table and let go. It stayed tilted to one side.
The 5200's sticks measured how far you pushed, which was why Nolan was so proud of them.
But they did not snap back to center, and a kid trying to run in a straight line would end up in the river.
"We'll put springs in," Nolan said, and wrote it on the back of his hand.
"Third, the whip, it does three things." Duke held up a finger for each.
"It hits. It swings so he can cross places. And it grabs, so he can pull a key toward him. One animation, three uses."
"That saves memory," the programmer said, sounding surprised.
"Fourth, saving." Duke shook his head. "A cartridge can't remember where you stopped. So after each temple the game shows a four-letter code. Type it in and you start from there."
"Passwords?" Ruth said.
"Kids will write them on their hands," Nolan said.
"For all i care, they can write them on the school bus window," Duke said. "If they do they will be talking to each other about it."
"What do we call it?" Nolan asked.
Spielberg wrote INDIANA JONES ADVENTURE on a clean page in big block letters.
"That's the name of a ride at our theme park already," Duke said.
"The Sun Medallion?" Ruth offered.
"Close. A title has to fit on a cartridge label, and a kid has to be able to shout it across the playground." Duke wrote it on the board. "Indiana Jones and the Sun Medallion."
Six people muttered it several times.
"It works," Nolan said, sounding surprised.
Someone suggested "Temple of the Sun," and Duke shook his head. "No temple."
"But the game has three temples," Ruth said.
"In the game, they can be temples. On the box, they're ruins."
They looked at him. He shrugged and left it there.
In the future, a film called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would come, and a videogame with a similar name might confuse people.
Spielberg turned to a clean page, wrote the title across it, and underlined it twice. Under it, he added two small words.
Working title.
___
Shorter chapter
Decided to play some League of Legends and wow, wont you know, the CIA send 4 teammates to grief me.