Microserfs

“Q: According to Cats magazine, should you tranquilize your cat before taking it on an airline flight?”

“A: No.”

The two of them irritated all the Sony people, because everyone was trying to be so smooth and Hollywoodish tonight, and not be geeky, and Michael and Amy were destroying the illusion. And then they started smooching, and this confused everybody further. Geeks smooching?

You could tell the LA people there — the attitude — they all looked like — minifigs, I guess. Wait … am I being tautological? But really, Los Angelenos are like a completely different species from Bay Area people. There really is this whole North/South dichotomy in California. They truly are two different states.

Michael said, “Los Angelenos dress like they’ve been focus-grouped.” We decided that in game shows in the future, contestants will win a free focus-grouping, where they spend six hours with ten demographically preselected focus-groupers commenting and criticizing all aspects of their lives. Then, they get to watch the next winner get ripped apart behind a two-way mirror. Forget year-supplies of Rice-A-Roni and bedroom sets.

We were talking with another woman, also named Lisa (which wasn’t hard to remember because every single woman we met there was named Lisa). “Last year all of the studio executives were bluffing it about multimedia,” she said, “but this year they’re starting to panic — they don’t have a handle on what they’re doing and it’s starting to show, and mistakes are costing them a pile of money — trying to spooge Myst into a feature-length movie; trying to spooge movies into CD-ROMs. It’s a mess. And New York still doesn’t have a clue. Usually they’re first, but with multimedia, they’re babies and it annoys the hell out of them. The people who really do know what’s going on are the people who aren’t posing as visionaries.”

I thought about it and she’s right — the geeks aren’t flying down to LA to take studio executives out to schmooze dinners at Spago. Spago has to come to the geeks. Spago must hate that.

Amy suddenly piped up and said to the Lisa-unit, “Exactly. I’m working on the Tetris property for Castle Rock, and I can’t believe how many bozos are calling the shots in a medium they have no expertise in! They’re all faking it!”

The Lisa believed her — hook, line, and sinker! She obviously had never even seen Tetris. This was fun.

Amy continued, “In the history of games-into-movies, I think only Tron has begun to scratch the surface of what can be done … and that came out in ‘82. Just because a game has characters doesn’t mean it can tell a story … Take Super Mario Brothers. Whoever okayed the $45 million budget for that lemon must have had a lot of explaining to do.”

Lisa nodded and asked, “So what’s your budget?”

Amy smiled and said, “The live action sequences are really going to add up — I think we’re shooting for around 30 mil.”

Lisa, “Do you have a card? Let me give you mine …”

Across the room, Anatole was busy chatting up a Lisa-unit, misguidedly trying to impress her with his “extreme knowledge” of Sony products.

“The good thing about Sony products,” said Anatole, “is that they always say exactly what they are right on the front of them. For example, the CFD-758 CD-radio cassette recorder, or the TMR-IF310 stereo transmitter, or the 9-band ICF-SW15 FM/MW/SW receiver.”

But evidently his Frainch accent made the above conversation sound alluring, and he and his Lisa were pair-bonded for the evening. Karla said, “Ever notice how when Anatole’s around girls, his accent thickens?”

Susan was chatting with a male Lisa-unit solely to torment Emmett, but he’s used to it by now. Susan was a real cachet addition to our party. She’s become such a cult figure with Chyx. It was like Jim Morrison had entered the room, and she was swamped with admirers.

Then Amy said in a loud and unbelievably embarrassing voice, “What the fuck is with this place? Every single chick here is named Lisa.”

Michael swam in to smooth things over: “She’s from Canada.”

“Michael, you promised we’d have martinis and lose a hundred dollars at roulette. And the food here stinks and you know it.”

“And right you are.”

And the two of them vamoosed off to the MGM Grand.

Karla and I and a few Lisas tried to guess what the charades hand signal would be for “interactive multimedia product.” A movie is where you turn a camera reel; a song is where you hold your hands up to your lips; a book is two palms simulating open flaps. All we could come up with for multimedia was two hands going fidgety- fidgety in space. A definitive interface is certainly needed, if only to make charades an easier game to play five years from now.

After we left the Sony party, we wandered around the grounds of the yuppie hotel, and I never realized it, but Todd’s a mean drunk. Maybe his new haircut is bringing out “The Asshole Within.” He went around the pathways kicking muffins into the hot tubs and sticking pilfered beta versions of Sony CD ROMs down the hotel’s miniature fake rivers, and screamed at all of us, calling us geeks. Hellooooo … like, this is some big surprise, or something? I suspect that becoming a father and spending the last two months (as did we all, Dusty included, barely able to reach her keyboard over her watermelon stomach) pulling trip after trip to Kuwait while tweaking code for the Oop! beta version for Las Vegas — it all got to him and he’s releasing the pressure. We all feel it. Tomorrow and Sunday we find out if Oop! (and Interiority Co.) have a strong future.

Todd was wearing his Secret Squirrel trench coat, but we dared not mock it. And then he vanished, probably to pick a fight at a sports bar.

We checked out the burning lava water show in front of the Mirage and the people in the city began weirding me out. Las Vegas must be the only place left where it’s politically correct to wear a fur coat. They were just the sorts of people who would have gone to Las Vegas, not Boulder, in The Stand, and here they were.

We were standing next to this huge sculpture of post-human white lion tamers Siegfried and Roy not far from the lava, and then Bug and Sig got into this discussion about how Henry Ford made Model Ts for ten straight years without one change, and then GM came along with something spiffy, and Henry laid everybody off, retooled, came out with the Model A, and then built that without a change for another five years, and then Plymouth came out with something spiffy and Ford finally had to accept the notion of competition and styling.

We tried to imagine making a product without any changes for five years, but we couldn’t. Then we noticed that all the cars on the Strip look the same: Chryslers and Tauruses and Toyotas … they all have “bubble-butts” that look like they came from the same mold. So by default we’re right back to Henry Ford again. We figured that tail fins would come back in, simply because people are going to have a consumer revolt against how boring and blob-like cars are becoming.

At the mall in Caesar’s Palace we bumped into the BuildX team at the Warner Brothers store. We bought our Marvin the Martian coffee mugs and house slippers, glared at the BuildX team, and left.

I wonder if Bill ever runs into John Sculley or Steve Jobs at a 7-Eleven.

We all wanted to go to the Luxor and play the games and do the rides there, inside the pyramid’s interior. Emmett informed us that SEGA has its only showcase arcade there, where you can play the brand-new-almost-beta games. It’s a brilliant marketing idea because normally arcade games don’t enjoy the same kind of brand recognition and loyalty that home games do, but after visiting the SEGA arcade, the logo is burned into your brain permanently. It’s like allowing a McDonald’s orange drink machine at your child’s birthday party. Later, we ran into Dad and we were gamed-out, so we all went to the Tut’s Hut. We were starved.

The Tut’s Hut kitchen was closed and we were begging for food — any sort of food — and the waitress brought over a plastic cup full of garnishes: pineapple wedges, maraschino cherries, and strawberries. I made a joke to her, that my Dad was an alcoholic barfly, and that growing up I ate garnishes as meals almost every night — but then the waitress got all weird, and Karla reminded me that people often move to Las Vegas to forget things,