By Dennis Rodkin
“Steve’s living the dream of every nerd,” says a former employee. “As a kid, he was awkward and probably didn’t socialize much, but now he’s a multimillionaire who drives a Lamborghini and has a beautiful girlfriend with major breasts and a huge house and three healthy kids and a great reputation in his industry. What nerd wouldn’t want all that when he grows up?” Harris got all that–plus the time and money to fly down to his hometown anytime he wants to watch his beloved Kansas City Chiefs play football–by finding a niche that he could scratch better than anybody.
What sets Harris apart from all the video junkies who talk big ideas but never get rich off them, Lane says, is that “he’s fearless in business. It’s a big risk to start an enthusiasts’ magazine. You’re putting yourself on the line–your personality and your money. But Steve believed that the information that people like him wanted was lacking, and he had to get it out to them.”
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Harris has been playing video games since he was ten years old; he long ago mastered the simple habit of watching the score counter spin out of the corner of one eye while keeping his real gaze fixed on the game. So while the money piled up, he registered it but stayed tuned to the magazine game he was playing. When I met Harris two years ago, his company had just passed the $30 million-a-year mark and he had it pointed toward $50 million for 1995. I could almost see the counter spinning in the bottom left corner of his glasses when he promised Sendai would hit $100 million a year by the end of the decade. Instead, with the sale of the company, the score’s now up to a bunch of corporate types from New York.
“I don’t get 300 E-mails a day anymore from the staff,” Harris said a month after the sale. “That’s the good side.” In an interview, Harris is friendly and candid–but not too–and he sits as still as possible in his chair the whole time. When he’s searching for words, he fills the pause with a whining sound that makes him sound pained to have to talk to you. He seems most comfortable when his public relations woman jumps in to answer a question for him and keeps on talking, giving him a break from the scrutiny.
In a recent issue of EGM2, readers got six pages of strategy and character bios for the Sega game Guardian Heroes. It’s crammed with the kind of obsessively detailed stuff that most people don’t even know about the cars they drive. Such as: “When playing as Han, hack through to Stage 8, where only he can obtain a more powerful sword” and “The Graviton Thunder spell’s size is adjustable” and “The Royal Robot cannot dash forward.” In the same issue they learned that in the game Worms, the Cluster Bomb is a great way to take out a huge crowd of the mutant worms guarding a chunk of postnuclear terrain, while in the arcade game War Gods, the nearly naked female character called Vallah “not only [has] Projectile Axes, but she can chop you down up close too. In addition, she has a variety of Containments, charges and range attacks.”
When the first issue of Internet Underground, the youngest of the Sendai spawn, appeared in late 1995, “we got a very effusive three-page memo from Steve saying what he liked about it,” remembers Kat Flynn, who edited the magazine until leaving for Microsoft in June. “After that we never heard anything good, bad, or indifferent about it from him about the editorial content. He decides what goes on the cover, but otherwise he may never have looked inside the magazine after that first issue.”
