It's All in the Game Ch. 03

We ran a small advertisement in the Wall Street Journal) looking for a MBA to handle our business affairs along with a CFO that could take over our accounting (which was now way beyond my ability as just a former bookkeeper to deal with). We got a flood of resumes, but most of the applicants were obviously 'too corporate' for our tastes, but a couple did stand out from the pile. We selected the most promising ten and mailed a long questionnaire that we had devised that was intended for us to better scope out their management styles. The winner, by far, was a videotape that we received from a couple of young graduates with the ink still wet on their MBA and CPA diplomas.

Thomas and Justin were old childhood friends who had grown up playing our early Apple, Commodore and PC games and loved what we were doing and insisted that they would almost work for us for free, if hired. Each gave a long interview in which they talked about what they liked very much about our games, but also offering some suggestions for how they would recommend we should grow for the future. Most of those ideas were very good ones and agreed in principle with things we'd already discussed earlier in our company meetings.

We held another company meeting and I played the full tape of this interview for everyone, so they could decide if we wanted to give this kids a shot at managing us. It was unanimous; we had our new CEO and CPA.

That afternoon I gave them a call asking when they could come down for a final interview, and I was told their bags were already packed and we'd see them in about three days. This final interview was just a formality and we welcomed Thomas and Justin into our family. Well, actually, they also both had lovely and talented wives that nearly immediately started work for us as well.

Thomas became our CEO and overall business guru and his wife Roberta took over all of the HR duties and did a superb job. Justin was a brilliant CPA and became our Chief Financial Officer and his wife Mia soon become our Director of Sales and Marketing, which she was obviously a genius at.

Marsha gladly gave up all of her existing duties and become our Senior Vice President and Director of Special Projects, her main job being our 'coordinator between management and talent'. She was the one who knew what everyone else was doing and made sure that all problems got passed up and down the chain and personally saw to it that everything was handled and resolved properly.

I retained my nominal title of President of the company, but my working title was closer to Chief Software Designer. 99% of my time could once again now be spent being creative, and I was soon starting to enjoy every single minute of it.

Once we reorganized ourselves, the paperwork for the next few months was a bit of a nightmare. Technically, Black Software Enterprises (our company name) was really just a limited partnership between Marsha and myself. We now needed to form a proper LLC Corporation with a business address other than my personal home. Fortunately, they had a suggestion for that long standing problem that the rest of us had not considered. On the southeastern edge of town there was an abandoned office/warehouse structure that was long closed and empty. With some relatively simple remodeling we could use this as our main corporate office. Behind the office area on the next street was the old large long closed two-story warehouse building which could be redeveloped into large airy offices for all of the development staff, with just a quick walk across the street to pass between the two areas. It wasn't perfect, but it was the best idea anyone had come up with so far, and I agreed.

We bought these properties and moved our corporate management in nearly immediately. I had a nice corner window office that had a nice view of county road leading into town from the beach, but frankly I never used it much. It took a bit longer and a whole lot more money than was expected to refurbish the warehouse into something everyone was happy with that didn't look as much like an old warehouse. It wasn't quite 'Termite Terrace', but the place still showed its age. Everyone took to working while wearing speaker headphones to block the sounds of construction that lasted much of the year, and the renovation wasn't considered 'done' until after Thanksgiving, by which time our number of employees had once again doubled (and would double yet again every year for the rest of the decade).

I designed a large office space for myself upstairs in a far corner of the warehouse that was completely covered on all walls with whiteboards, where I marked notes and comments constantly for our growing listing of games in development and included a small conference table for the brief morning meetings for the head coding staff for each project. It got to the point where folks would just stick their head inside my door take a look at my latest scribbles and run off to their own computers with their work instructions given. This left Clyde and myself more time to focus on our needs for the future and design ever improved graphical engines.

Dennis was, in theory, now our Chief Coder, but he really had no interest or aptitude for supervising other programmers. We gave him the tricky parts to figure out and let everyone else pretty much report directly to Marsha if there were any problems, and those were rarely ever major ones. With no one actually really cracking a whip, things could be very loose in the "Barn" as we soon called our new home, as we could never really get it heated or cooled properly in any season.

Nearly right from the very start. the corporate dress code started to become extremely casual; in fact once we discovered that the Barn technically fell into the land designated as part of the nudist area, some areas started to quickly become 'clothing optional', especially in the warmer summer months. At first, I worried that this could become a legal problem as we started to get more female employees, but no one but me seemed to think so. Roberta assured me that we were legally covered and protected and to go do something useful other than worrying. Pretty soon, Fridays were designated as 'Pajama Day' and the guys wore boxers with hearts on them (or nothing at all), while the ladies tended to wear lingerie, which was more and more revealing and outrageous as time passed. Productivity on Fridays probably wasn't very good, but we had great employee morale.

I gave up worrying and made sure the 'Sunny' stickers got posted by all of the main doors, letting folks know there were probably some nude folks running around and cavorting about, and I gave up entirely trying to worry it.

*******

Our new 'Corporate Overlords' as the development folks called our new Management, started to earned their keep nearly immediately. Our next retail distribution contract was much more lucrative, and our money was being more wisely spent. Also now for the first time we now had an effective marketing plan that presented our company in a fun but professional manner to the gaming industry and our public. While our payroll continued to increase, our revenues increased even faster.

I soon let Thomas and Mia handle all of our tradeshow events and mercifully I was now mostly entirely out of the public spotlight. Roberta was masterful at finding just the right people and gave preference to local 'homegrown' talent rather than hiring outsiders. Certain we could trust her judgment, we soon gave her full and final hiring authority without needing mine or Marsha's input.

There was only one decision Roberta ever made that I disagreed with, but I did not overrule her. She hired Becky as her assistant and gave her the responsible of handling our company benefits package. I'll explain this situation in a moment.

I guess now is as good a time as any to mention one of the reasons why Thomas, Roberta, Justin and Mia fell instantly in love with our town and bonded so closely and quickly with everyone. They were all swingers, and had been 'sharing their love together' since their college days. They together bought a large house of their own, another lovely Victorian that needed "rescuing" which was on the same street as mine, and made no secret of the fact that they all shared the same bedroom. Furthermore, Roberta and Mia were openly bisexual, and anyone who preferred not to become embarrassed soon learned to knock and wait before entering any shut door that both women were behind. I made that mistake once by entering right after a brief knock and caught them frantically occupied in a 69 position, eating out each other right on top of Mia's desk.

I discovered that my ex-wife Becky had joined the company not too long afterwards, suddenly and with considerable surprise on one Pajama Friday morning when I walked over to our main office to ask Roberta about a quick payroll question. Stepping into her office, I found her and Becky both wearing tiny teddie nightgowns with a nearly transparent robe over them. Dark outlines of nipples were easily visible. I was used to seeing Roberta's rather nice dark nipples by now, but the sight of my ex-wife's barely clothed body threw me for a terrible loop. I backed out and left immediately and, when I found I couldn't concentrate at all in my office, I went home to sulk and stayed there in a grouchy mood all weekend.

Marsha eventually knocked on my office door the next Monday and we had a long and very personal chat, the likes of which we had never had before. She dropped the A-Bomb right way and with little preamble.

"You still love her, don't you?" The truth was I didn't know anymore.

Part of me was still fifteen years old and wanting to take her back into my arms and forgive her once more, but the rest of me (the darker cynical thirty-four year-old part) knew that to trust her yet again would be asking for more heartbreak later. She had betrayed me, and on several occasions. My heart wanted her but my head couldn't trust her one little bit. I was at an emotional impasse, and no longer knew what I wanted to do about much of anything.

I had one pet project I really wanted to get finished and then I thought I'd maybe take a vacation and try to get myself straightened out. Marsha liked the sound of that, and we had a good long hug together. Then she gave me a very lingering kiss on the forehead that I thought I could still feel an hour later when I finally felt able to concentrate on getting some work done.

My current big master project, the work of several years, seemed patently impossible. I wanted to a huge 3D rendering of our entire kingdom world, where there was not just one possible quest outcome, but players could choose their own destiny out of hundreds of possible opportunities. Many players might want to hack and slash, slaying monsters and become a heroic knight guardian of the Kingdom. Some might instead seek to learn magic and become famed wizards or sorceresses to help serve the Kingdom in other ways. Others might prefer a life of a skilled trade; never once lifting a virtual hand in violence.

I wanted a world with limitless capabilities, and even for the possibility of other players being able to dial in on a modem to the host player's computer and for friends to be able to adventure as a group together. The Internet was out there, waiting to be used but few people had heard of it and even fewer had the simple easy to use software to access it. That changed with Windows 95, and we ripped up whole chunks of code to allow remote multi-player game play via the Internet.

It set everything back (including my vacation) for at least a year... but it was worth every minute of the wait.

By the early spring of 1997, "The Kingdom of Blackwood" was 98% finished, and my work was more or less done. Only bug fixes, on-line play glitches and the final user documentation remained to be completed before we could release the game for public on-line Beta testing. Tom and Mia were chomping at the bit to promote this anticipated blockbuster and had made arrangements with our distributer to launch the game in two months at the huge E3 Convention in Vegas.

I had just one task left to do before my vacation break, and it involved a promise I had made to Olivia at Christmas.

Before Christmas, Olivia and I had taken a weekend trip to Houston so she could shop until she dropped at the Galleria, and she had seen a billboard for a DNA testing service with the words, "Who's the Daddy?" Frankly, this was a question that had begun to bother us both, and for Olivia, being a normal and healthy angst-struck 15 year-old girl, this was now very much the burning question in her head. Was I really her genetic father?

Frankly, I did not want to know the answer, as there was no conceivable 'good news' that could result from it. I truly believed that the probable news would be that the asshole Tony had been her sperm donor, and that I had spent my life raising the child of the man who had cuckolded me. I wasn't sure how my ego would take that, but I had made a promise.

We went to the lab and both gave blood, and now two months later the results were sitting in a sealed envelope on my desk. The envelope, in fact, had been on my desk for several weeks, but I could not bring myself to open it. Now that I had absolutely nothing meaningful left to do before my trip, I had no choice but to open it, which I eventually forced myself to do. I couldn't understand most of what it said for the first two pages of lab results, but the concluding paragraph summed it up succinctly. The odds of Olivia being my genetic daughter were so small as to be nearly astronomical. Tony was Olivia's natural father.

It was exactly what I feared.

I resealed the results and wrote a short note to Olivia, put the papers into a new envelope and put it on the top of Olivia's desk. She was at high school at the moment, but normally came into work every afternoon afterwards. She and Ashley were starting to discover boys and sometimes now got a bit delayed on the way here.

I had to look up the phone number in the company directory, as I had never dialed her up before, and for the first time I called Becky at her desk. I told her of the lab results and that Olivia was likely to be very upset and hurt for a while. I told Becky I was now going on vacation and Marsha had already made arrangements to watch after Olivia (she and Ashley being utterly inseparable), but that 'she would be needing her mother' and for her to please be there for her now. I hung up without saying goodbye, but I did give Marsha a sad hug farewell, telling her I'd keep in touch, but this vacation "just might be a long one."

And off I went.