The History of the Future
Dedication
For Katie, who
stood by my side
as a one-year
project became
three . . .
Epigraph
PEGGY OLSON: You never say thank you.
DON DRAPER: That’s what the money is for.
—MAD MEN (SEASON 4, EPISODE 7)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Ernest Cline
Prologue
Part 1: The Revolution Virtual
Chapter 1: The Boy Who Lived to Mod
Chapter 2: Carmack the Magnificent
Chapter 3: A Tale of Two Trade Shows
Chapter 4: The Scaleform Mafia
Chapter 5: STK
Chapter 6: Pivots, Prototypes, and Partnerships
Chapter 7: Freedom Is Happiness
Chapter 8: That Fateful Promise
Chapter 9: Mount Up
Chapter 10: Valve!
Chapter 11: Kickstarter
Part 2: How to Build a Company
Chapter 12: The King of Pop Software
Chapter 13: Showtime
Chapter 14: The Anomalies
Chapter 15: The Hong Kong Shuffle
Chapter 16: Just Kids
Chapter 17: Oculus vs. Ouya
Chapter 18: Good, Better, and Best at the 2013 CES
Chapter 19: Proverbs 29, Verse 18
Chapter 20: Wall-to-Wall Drama
Chapter 21: GDC
Part 3: The Good Old Days
Chapter 22: Move Slow and Build Things (Aka Facebook 2.0)
Chapter 23: Nine Stories
Chapter 24: The Future of Gaming
Chapter 25: Andrew Reisse
Chapter 26: Ideas so Crazy They Just Might
Chapter 27: The Room
Chapter 28: Jockeying for Position
Chapter 29: Zuckerbro Intrigued
Chapter 30: Blue’s Clues
Chapter 31: The Backlash
Chapter 32: The New Normal
Chapter 33: Enter HTC
Chapter 34: Out of the Woodwork
Chapter 35: Charging Forward
Chapter 36: Canaries in the Coal Mine
Part 4: Politics
Chapter 37: Twelve Days in 2015
Chapter 38: Awaken the Sleeping Giants
Chapter 39: Lockdown
Chapter 40: Entitlement Checks
Chapter 41: The Devil Is in the Details
Chapter 42: Nimble
Chapter 43: Internet Drama
Chapter 44: The Daily Beast
Chapter 45: Exile
Chapter 46: The Heist, the Comedy and The Fantasy vs. The Documentary
Chapter 47: The Verdict
Chapter 48: The Seemingly Impossible Challenge
Chapter 49: Employee Number One
Chapter 50: He’s Back
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Notes
Photo Section
About the Author
Also by Blake J. Harris
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword by Ernest Cline
I WAS BORN IN MARCH OF 1972. IT WAS A PERFECT TIME TO BE BORN A GEEK, because the geeks were about to inherit the earth.
I don’t think I actually realized I was a geek until May of 1977, which was when the very first Star Wars film was released. I was five years old, and when I saw it for the first time I nearly lost my mind. I was suddenly unable to talk or think about anything other than Star Wars. It became my first obsession. Star Wars was the very first thing that I ever “geeked out” over. But it definitely wouldn’t be the last.
The following year, I received an Atari 2600 for Christmas and yet another obsession was born. To me, those Atari cartridges in the old shoebox beside our TV were more than just games. They were computer simulations. They allowed me to simulate driving a tank or piloting a starship through an asteroid field. One of these games—Adventure—even allowed me to take control of an avatar inside a virtual world. I could navigate its labyrinths, pick up items, slay dragons, storm castles, and search for hidden treasure. Sure, my avatar was just a square, and the virtual world was rendered with blocky two-dimensional graphics on my TV screen. But to me, that computer-generated kingdom seemed like a real place. Playing the game was like being transported to another reality, without ever leaving my living room.
I didn’t realize it then, but I’d just become part of the first generation of human beings to have the ability to play video games at home. And a few years later, when I received a TRS-80 Color Computer for my birthday, I became part of the first generation to have home computers, too. Around the same time, my family bought our first VCR, another newly affordable invention that would drastically alter the course of my life.
A few years later, in junior high, I discovered another early form of virtual reality when I began to play fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. These games allowed players to simulate other worlds using the most powerful computer in existence—the human brain. Using paper, pencils, a few rulebooks, and some polyhedral dice, you could create an entirely new reality, which existed only inside the collective imaginations of you and your fellow players. D&D allowed me to experience a crude (but still totally immersive) form of virtual reality long before there were computers capable of generating one.
I didn’t get my first taste of “real” virtual reality until the early ’90s, when I attended Gen Con, one of the world’s largest gaming conventions. I waited in line for over an hour to play a new kind of game called Dactyl Nightmare, on a stand-up Virtuality 1000CS machine. The VR helmet was bulky, the controller was awkward, and the blocky polygon graphics did a poor job of simulating reality. But I still remember being blown away by that brief experience, because of the vast potential the technology showed. Even in this early primitive form, putting on a virtual reality headset felt like being transported into another world—a digital reality where you could interact with other real people, through their game avatar. It was amazing! Once the headsets got smaller and the computer graphics got better, virtual reality was going to change the world by creating a completely new one. It seemed inevitable.
In 1992, a film called The Lawnmower Man was released and it began to play on a seemingly endless loop on HBO and Cinemax. It had a ludicrous story line, but the movie’s depiction of virtual reality’s future potential stoked my anticipation for this evolving technology even further. So did Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, which was published the same year. I was completely floored by Stephenson’s stark vision of a sprawling virtual world called the Metaverse that millions of real people around the world were able to access with a pair of VR goggles. Snow Crash built upon the concept of cyberspace that William Gibson had introduced in his 1984 novel, Neuromancer, by extrapolating VR technology even further. With a programmer’s eye for detail, Stephenson laid out how a persistent globally networked virtual reality like the Metaverse might function. He described its evolution and architecture, along with its culture, laws, and ecology. He also hinted at the potential social and economic side effects of living a dual life, split between the real world and a virtual one.
Reading Snow Crash left my mind reeling with the implications of our virtual future. It also convinced me that the immersive VR technology depicted in the novel was probably only a few years away from becoming a reality.
But it wasn’t. Aside from a few false starts and failed prototypes, virtual reality would continue to languish in an unrealized limbo, just beyond our collective reach, while the final decade of the twentieth century gave rise to a different form of world-altering technology instead—the internet.
I got my first job in the computer industry in 1995, working as a technical support representative for CompuServe in Columbus, Ohio. I spent my days there helping people learn how to access and use the fledgling World Wide Web, and over the next five years, I watched as the internet rapidly evolved from something that most people had never even heard of into a service that nearly everyone was using, every single day, for just about everything. In the blink of an eye, the internet changed nearly every aspect of human civilization and how it functioned. It erased our borders and gave rise to a new digital country—one where the members of humanity all around the world were now connected to one another, every second of every day.
During this time, video games and computer graphics also continued to evolve and improve at an astonishing rate. In 1997, the very first massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Ultima Online, was launched. It was soon followed by other MMORPGs like EverQuest and World of Warcraft. These online games represented the very first persistent virtual reality simulations, which were populated by hundreds of thousands of real people who accessed them from different countries all over the globe. Players began to live alternate lives through their game avatars, even though they could only see the digital world they inhabited through the two-dimensional window of their computer monitor. For a lot of people, even this early crude form of virtual reality already seemed more compelling than the real world.
In several of the call centers and IT companies where I worked during this time, I recall seeing dozens of my coworkers bring a laptop with them to the office every day, so that they could play World of Warcraft from their cubicles while taking nonstop tech support calls. Even more astounding was when I learned that MMO
RPG players had started to sell swords, armor, and other virtual magic items on eBay for real money. These were objects that didn’t actually exist—they were nothing but a collection of ones and zeroes on a game server somewhere. But these virtual items still had value in the real world, because real people spent real hours of their lives inside the game’s virtual reality, and so everything that went on in there was still important to them. If a magic sword made it easier to defeat your virtual enemies or impress your virtual friends, then people were willing to pay real money for it. For the first time in history, people were suddenly able to earn a living in the real world by buying and selling goods in a virtual one.
I also remember how fascinating it was to watch as people began to develop real-world relationships inside these games. People would meet, become friends, and fall in love with each other—sometimes without ever setting foot on the same continent. For many players, the emotional bonds formed in a virtual world were just as strong as their friendships in reality—sometimes even more so, because interacting through avatars gave you total control over how you appeared to others.
I realized I was witnessing the emergence of a completely new kind of human relationship—one that had never existed before in our history.
But even as MMORPGs gave rise to the first virtual worlds, the early promise of virtual reality technology continued to remain unfulfilled and just out of reach. As we reached the dawn of the twenty-first century, VR seemed to have receded back into the realm of science fiction. Films like Existenz and The Matrix presented a fairly sinister vision of VR, placing the technology at the center of a Cronenberg body horror parable, or depicting it as a machine-manufactured prison for the human mind. As Morpheus put it: “The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
I loved those films, but that wasn’t how I believed the future of virtual reality would actually play out, if and when the technology ever actually became available. When I surfed the internet, it already felt like I was entering another reality, one where all the world’s pop culture was mashed up together. It seemed obvious to me that the internet would eventually evolve beyond its two-dimensional origins, into a sprawling virtual universe that was filled with planets instead of websites. Instead of a web page devoted to The Lord of the Rings, the virtual internet I was envisioning would contain a whole planet for Tolkien fanatics—a virtual re-creation of Middle Earth, where fans could experience the fictional world firsthand. Or they could jump into a teleporter and visit any of the planets featured in Star Wars, or Star Trek, or any other fictional world that had ever been concocted by the human imagination. It would be every geek’s dream. The ultimate video game. A virtual utopia where you could go anywhere, do anything, and be anyone. I even had the perfect name for it—the OASIS.
When I began to think about what sort of person might create this virtual utopia, I immediately thought of Richard Garriott, the eccentric video game designer who created all the Ultima games, including Ultima Online. He was known for cosplaying as his video game avatar, Lord British, at press events and conventions. He was also famous for holding elaborate haunted house events at his mansion in Austin, Texas, which was rumored to be filled with hidden rooms and secret passages. His larger-than-life personality also reminded me of the character Willy Wonka, and when I made that connection, an idea suddenly occurred to me: What if Willy Wonka had been a video game designer instead of a candymaker? And what if he held his golden ticket contest inside his greatest video game—a sprawling virtual reality that had replaced the internet?
The moment that notion entered my head, I knew I was onto something. It seemed like a great premise for a screenplay or maybe even a novel. So I continued to flesh it out. I remembered that back when I was playing Adventure on my Atari 2600, I’d managed to discover a secret room inside the game, where its creator, Warren Robinett, had hidden his name. This was the very first video game Easter egg, and discovering it was one of the most thrilling childhood memories. I wondered, What if my Wonka-esque game designer hid his own Easter egg somewhere inside his virtual universe, and then after his death, he held a posthumous contest to find it? The first person to find the egg would win his fortune, along with ownership of his game company and control of his virtual kingdom.
That got me thinking about what sort of tests and challenges my eccentric game designer, James Halliday, would leave behind to find a worthy successor, and another idea occurred to me: all the riddles, puzzles, and clues leading to the hidden Easter egg could be linked to the dead billionaire’s various pop-culture passions—his favorite books, movies, video games, cartoons, and TV shows from his youth. I loved this idea, because I knew that by making Halliday’s passions mirror my own, it would allow me to pay tribute to all the things I loved, by weaving references to them into the story.
My mind was suddenly flooded with ideas for pop culture puzzles, and I began to fill notebook after notebook with them, creating a rough outline for what would eventually become my first novel, Ready Player One. It would take me nearly eight years to finish it, writing in my spare time in the evenings and on the weekends while continuing to work my day job doing tech support. Sometimes I would get frustrated and set the novel aside for a few months to write a screenplay. But I never gave up on Ready Player One. I was determined to finish the book, even though I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to get it published once I did.
I finally finished my first draft of Ready Player One near the tail end of 2009. My agent put the book up for auction a few months later, in April of 2010, and to my shock a bidding war erupted over the US publishing rights, with Random House emerging as the winner.
The very next day, another bidding war broke out in Hollywood over the film rights, which ended up selling to Warner Bros., with me attached to write the screenplay. In those forty hours, my whole life changed. But I wouldn’t begin to get a sense of how profoundly it had changed until the following year, when the book finally came out.
When Ready Player One was published on August 11, 2011, it became an instant international bestseller. What I didn’t know at the time was that my book would soon find its way into the hands of a brilliant young inventor named Palmer Luckey, who was already developing the virtual reality headset design that would finally bring affordable, usable VR to the masses.
I’m still amazed by the timing of it all. In 2009, at the same time I was finishing Ready Player One, Palmer was cobbling together his first prototype VR headset, which he called the PR1. He was only seventeen years old, and he built it in his parents’ garage.
Looking back, I now realize that Palmer and I both had the same goal. I wrote a science fiction novel about virtual reality because I was fascinated by the concept and wanted to imagine its vast potential and limitless application. Where is this technology that I’ve been promised for decades? And what will it look like, if and when it ever actually becomes a reality?
The difference is that instead of just imagining how virtual reality might change the world, Palmer had already set about inventing the technology to make it happen. So naturally, when Ready Player One was published, a lot of people began to recommend the book to Palmer because of its subject matter. When he finally read it, he told me that he found the novel’s depiction of the potential of VR so inspiring that he immediately began to recommend it to everyone who came to work at the new company he was forming, Oculus VR. (He founded the company in July of 2012, less than a month after Ready Player One was released in paperback.)
One of the people who joined Palmer’s new company was the legendary John Carmack, one of the cocreators of Doom—a game that served as another giant leap forward in the quest for VR. Carmack was also one of the inspirations behind the character of James Halliday. (I modeled Halliday’s relationship with his partner Ogden Morrow after Carmack’s partnership with John Romero, as well as the earlier tech titan team of Jobs and Wozniak.) It was incredibly surreal to learn that one of the game developers who had helped inspire my novel had now decided to work on virtual reality, and that he was citing that same novel as one of the inspirations behind his decision. I’d managed to inspire one of the game developers whose work had inspired me. It was the sort of thing every science fiction author dreams will happen.