behind her. “Matt’s in danger. That’s how they knew I was here. Don’t forget.” Then he ran, wishing there were someone else in the hallways to help Maj, wishing he didn’t think he was such a coward for running.
But he ran as hard as he could, taking the first corner to the left that he came to. Releasing the holo form, he jumped back to his veeyar.
“Peter’s a brilliant guy,” Oscar Raitt said. “He’s always got a head full of ideas. Twists on programming no one else has ever even thought of. If there was ever anyone born to work in the gaming world, it was Pete.”
Matt sat at the small desk in the hotel room where Oscar was staying. “You don’t think Peter disappeared on his own?”
“No way.” Oscar was adamant. He was at least six feet eight or six feet nine, with the broad shoulders of a woodcutter or a linebacker. He sat on the bed, obviously more at home there than in one of the hotel’s regular-sized chairs. He wore a tank top and shorts, his massive feet clad in Roman sandals. A chocolate mint was stacked on top of the pillow behind him. “That production number Pete had up front? That was his show, man. In his book, this would be an all-time low.”
“Had you been in touch with him much?”
“Sure. We talked a lot.” Oscar grinned. “We saw each other at least once a month. He was the reason I got to know Paris so well.”
“Paris?”
Oscar nodded. “Yeah. You know. Paris, France. Eiffel Tower. Arch of Triumph. Napoleon.”
“Got it. What was Peter doing in France?”
“Developing Realm of the Bright Waters. That’s where Eisenhower put him up to do the design work.”
“I didn’t know Eisenhower Productions had a Paris office.” Leif had mentioned that Eisenhower was based in Seattle.
Oscar lifted his broad shoulders and dropped them. “Beats me. But that’s where Pete worked on the game. He didn’t take much time off, but when he did, he usually called me, and we spent some time prowling the city. Art museums because any video graphics designer is going to tell you that you just can’t see enough stuff. And we spent some downtime at the cyber cafes. A true game junky just can’t get away from it.”
“What did you talk about?” Matt asked.
“The usual. What he was working on, what I was working on. What we thought of some of the games that were out there.”
“Peter didn’t mention any problems with Eisenhower Productions? How they wanted to market the game?”
“No. Peter didn’t concern himself with that. Realm of the Bright Waters was strictly his baby. They couldn’t make move one without his okay.”
“Isn’t that unusual in the gaming industry?”
“Like finding a frog with wings. In the real world.”
“Don’t the publishers underwrite a lot of a developer’s expenses?”
“Most deals,” Oscar said, “they underwrite entirely. Financial freedom doesn’t come without a price, though. They usually control the milestones and deadlines more than you do, and they can make you release a game that you know isn’t right. It’s hard to blame them, though. They’ve got investors and accountants crawling over them with microscopes.”
“You two worked together on some games in the past, didn’t you?”
Oscar nodded. “Peter said he thought he might need me on this game at the end. He had some problems with the game engine. He built it from scratch, you know, to maximize play possibilities.”
“I don’t understand,” Matt admitted.
“One of the chief gripes of the CRPG players,” Oscar said, “is the whole campaign structure. Take a game like Sarxos. It’s interactive, with a constantly varying number of players online, all with their own agendas. They raise armies, battle each other for regions, cities, rights to water, whatever. But you can’t introduce new elements into the game without playing havoc with a lot of ongoing campaigns.”
“Give me an example.”
“Okay, say you and your group have been in Sarxos. Maybe building up a carnival complete with goods and jousting tournaments. Something to draw the populace and line your own pockets with gold. Another bunch of players decides the game has gotten too dull in that area, and they go attack goblin or bandit camps. They get all the goblins or bandits stirred up. Next thing you know, the goblins or bandits come tearing out of the hills and totally raze the carnival. The second group got the excitement they wanted, but the first group loses all their investment time. On one hand you got guys saying you’ve got a great game. But on the other, you’ve got a lot of unhappy campers.”
Matt nodded. He’d seen it happen more than once.
“Different people like to play the game at different speeds,” Oscar said. “The hack and slashers want action and a Monte Hall dungeon. But the builders want a game they can basically build another existence in; a place where they can chill out from a stressful world. That was one of the major draws Pete had with the new game engine. It was designed to offer the option to integrate with any ongoing campaign.”
“So each adventure could be individual and at a pace the particular gamer wanted.”
“Yes.”
Matt thought about the concept. “That’s almost like building a million different games at one time.”
Oscar grinned. “You’re getting it now. Individually tailored for the individual player.”
“The programming must have been intense.”
“I saw some of the coding Pete wrote for it. Groundbreaking stuff. And that game, when it hits the market, is going to go huge. Pete’s already got story arcs mapped out for the game.”
“What kind of story arcs?”
“Plagues. Invasions. In one of them a magic spell tilts the whole planet on its axis, causes a year-long winter to fall over the world. Can you imagine that?”
Matt shook his head. He couldn’t, but the whole idea sounded fascinating.
“This world is going to be more interactive than Sarxos for the gamer,” Oscar said. “The people who put Sarxos online have kind of had to maintain the status quo. No coloring outside the lines. No huge story or environment changes. With Pete’s world he could introduce anything he wanted to. The players could play it then, later, or not at all.”
The idea was staggering. Matt wasn’t as informed and as excited about Net games as Mark and Andy were, but he liked them on occasion. Realm of the Bright Waters sounded nothing short of awesome. “You said Peter thought he might need your help.”
“Yes. He had some game engine problems. See, I taught Pete everything he ever learned about game engines. We started tinkering with them at the orphanage. Pete and I were both state raised.”
Matt nodded.
“I think that’s why he’s so good at building worlds,” Oscar said. “He was always a quiet kid. Polite. Didn’t ever raise a big stink about things. He stayed to himself a lot. I didn’t know what to think of him. But when the home got online and brought in implant chairs, that’s when I saw Pete really come alive. It turned out that I had some skill at programming. Pete wanted to learn. That’s how we met. I could write programming and teach it to Pete, but he’s the one with the ideas. I can do a little world-building, setting up environments, and pulling a cohesive storyline together, but I can’t keep up with him. Nobody could.”
“Why did he go off on his own instead of signing a deal with a major publisher?”
“Because he wanted the control. Publishers have their own ideas about things. Too many hands in the pot. And, basically, I think Pete was building his own world that he could share with others. It’s supposed to be a place where he can stay and control things. No car wrecks. No losing his parents. Total control.”
“And he wouldn’t want to give that up.”
“No. No way.”
“How did he get along with Eisenhower Productions?”
“Everything with them was hurry. They’d have had the game out six months ago if they could have.”
“Peter held them up?”
“Yeah. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t have a choice. Part of it was their fault. When he asked me to help with the game engine, they told me I couldn’t. They maintained that much control.”
