By Bill Mahin
How Ken Olsen, 31, had gotten here–leaving behind a computer consultancy in Atlanta and a wife with a teaching contract to complete–was one of those accidents of proximity. In Orlando, growing up, Olsen knew J. M. Albertson, who’s now Virtual World’s manager of software research and development. In 1994 Albertson convinced him to come to Virtual World.
Three years ago Virtual World hired Albertson as a consultant to work on three projects. He finished all three in seven weeks. Only after that did they tell him they’d have been happy if he’d finished one. He began working full-time 80-hour weeks. He knew he’d finally “hit a wall” when he got into three fights in two days and realized he was wrong in two of them. So he joined a health club and cut back to 40 hours for a week or so. Up to 80-plus again, he said he was so tired he could sleep for a month. What he really wanted was for “the pressure to be off and my job to be fun again.”
Jordan Weisman and Ross Babcock, the two founders of VWE, dreamed up these games. Ten programmers, five artists/animators, and a couple of software engineers made them happen. At the moment, though, just about everyone’s time was devoted not to developing new adventures but to upgrading the ones they had to System 4. As the nights wore on last April and May, you began to sense the first whiffs of tension, the beginnings of desperation.
An acronym for the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH, said Wired magazine last summer, “has come a long way from 1973, when it was just a bunch of academics trying to figure out how to draw realistic-looking images. This year’s conference will attract almost 30,000 people and will have . . . an exhibit hall full of bleeding-edge interactive entertainment systems.”
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Trying to come up with an analogy to explain how the basic system worked–be it System 2, System 3, or System 4–J.M. Albertson said that if Virtual World had designed my laptop computer, then Dave McCoy, VWE’s creative director, would have been the one primarily responsible for the design of its type fonts. Once the broad parameters of a VWE game had been determined by the game designers, McCoy was responsible for the look of the adventure, from the overall martian setting for Red Planet to such specifics as the pitted concrete bunkers of BattleTech.
