Chapter 2 Chapter 1 Rockstar

On a summer afternoon in 1979, in Rocklin, California, 11-year-old Romero stepped on his bicycle and rode through the beautiful streets of the town towards the Round Table Pizzeria.This slender kid with thick glasses knew he shouldn't go there, it would only cause him trouble, but he couldn't care less because there were game consoles there, especially his favorite "Planet" Crash (Asteroid).In his opinion, there is no better feeling than standing in front of those arcade machines: he tapped the buttons to control the Trident spaceship on the screen to dodge left and right among countless asteroids, while imitating the loud music Background: "Boom, boom, boom!" like other kids imitating TV stars.For such a happy time, Romero is willing to spend the money he earns delivering newspapers, and is willing to risk being beaten and scolded by his stepfather, because no matter what hardships he suffers, he can always come back here, back to the game— — This is his safe haven.

Romero's father left the family five years ago, and his mother is too busy raising him and his younger brother, Ralph, to have time for him.His stepfather, John Schuneman, was a former training instructor who now works for the government on a top-secret job: recovering black boxes from crashed spy planes from around the world.This stepfather had repeatedly warned him not to play games, it would turn him into a little hooligan and ruin his studies and life.His stepfather just said to him a few days ago: "Hey, boy, I warned you!" Romero heeded his stepfather's warning, so instead of the usual Timothy's Pizzeria, he and his friends went to Round Table, which is closer to home.His full name, Alfonso John Romero, with his initials AJR, topped the high-score charts for Planet Impact there, as did every other store in town for the console. Same.He's not just at the top of the list, he occupies every top ten. "Look at this," he brags to his friends, before dropping in a coin and playing again.

But he didn't play for long, and when the round was about to end, a pair of big hands grabbed his shoulders, "What?!" Romero yelled, thinking his friend was trying to mess with him, and then, he His face was pressed onto the screen of the game console.In front of Romero's friends, Romero's stepfather dragged him outside into the van and threw his bike into the back of the car -- Romero's bike was so poorly concealed that his stepfather left work. Saw it on my way home. "Boy, you really asked for it this time." His stepfather said as he led him into the house. His mother and grandmother were standing in the kitchen. His stepfather turned to them and said, "Little Johnny today Going to the arcade again, do you know what he is?! He is like saying 'fuck you' to us!" Afterwards, Romero was beaten into a sausage mouth and panda eyes by his stepfather. After lying down for two weeks, I went back to the game room.

﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡ Ginny gave birth to Romero on October 28, 1967, six weeks ahead of her due date.Romero weighed only 4.5 pounds and was very frail.His parents, who had long lived a hard life, married only a few months before his birth.Ginny was a cheerful, easy-going girl who met Alfonso Antonio Romero, an American-born descendant of Mexican immigrants, in Tucson, Arizona, who was doing maintenance on an Air Force base Work, busy all day fixing air conditioners and heating systems.After they got married, they drove a 1948 Chrysler to Colorado with only three hundred dollars in their pockets.Although their lives improved there, after Romero was born, Antonio returned to Tucson with his family for a job in a copper mine.He worked hard for very little pay.He started to stay out at night, reeking of alcohol when he came home, and soon they had a second child, Ralph.

But Romero's childhood is filled with happy memories: picnics, horse walks.He still remembers being woken up by his father at ten o'clock in the evening: "Get up, let's go camping!" Then his father drove him to the mountains and slept under the stars together.But one afternoon, his father said he was going to do some grocery shopping, and he didn't come back for two years.During this time, Ginny married Scudeman, a man fourteen years her senior, a stepfather who tried hard to befriend Romero.One afternoon, he saw six-year-old Romero draw a sports car lying on the kitchen table. The drawing was so good that he felt that Romero must have copied it from some photo. To verify , he put a small toy car on the table, then watched Romero draw another one like the toy car, and to his surprise, the latter one was equally perfect.Scudeman then asked Romero what he wanted to be. "A rich bachelor," the boy replied.

For a long time, they got along very well. When Scudeman found out that Romero liked to play video games, he would drive him to compete with others. Romero never lost.He can even lead on-screen characters through mazes with his eyes closed while playing Pac-Man.But Scudeman also quickly discovered that the game took up too much of Romero's time and energy, and then there was the previous scene. In the summer of 1979, things suddenly changed.One day, Ralph and a friend came running out of the house, out of breath, and told Romero a big discovery. They had just returned from Sierra University. A mainframe computer given to them by well-meaning college students.Romero immediately hopped into his car and ran with them to the computer lab.

At that time, there were very few people who used computers, and there was no discrimination in this circle. A person who likes computers is a person who likes computers, regardless of gender.Romero and the others had free access to computer labs at the university, which was common at the time. Students had keys to the labs, and as long as the professors were away, no one would let the kids go.Inside, Romero saw a sight he had never seen before: the air conditioner was blowing cold, the terminal was full of students, everyone was playing a game consisting of words on the screen: "You stand at the end of the road , in front of it is a small brick house, a spring flows out of the house, and flows into the stream next to it. You are surrounded by forests, and you can see a glowing white tower in the distance."

It was Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the most popular games at the time, and Romero knew why it was so popular: because it was essentially D&D: Dungeons and Dragons on the computer. Dragons), which was originally a role-playing game based on the player's own imagination on paper, and most of the stories in it took place in a world similar to "Lord of the Rings".Many adults simply see D&D as an escape from reality, and if you want to understand a kid who loves D&D like Romero, you need to understand D&D first. D&D, or Dungeons and Dragons for short, was created in 1972 by two twentysomethings, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and soon It has developed into an underground cultural phenomenon, especially on college campuses, where people tell each other that it can spread rapidly.A student named James Dallas Egbert also disappeared in a sewer at the bottom of Lake Michigan one day, rumored to be for a real-life D&D adventure.A movie called Mazes and Monsters starring Tom Hanks is based on this event.The games have also fueled a cottage industry around the world, generating $25 million in annual sales of novels, games, T-shirts, and rulebooks.

The appeal of this type of game is obvious. "In Dungeons and Dragons," Gax said, "an ordinary person can do some honorable tasks, grow up in the game, and eventually become a hero. In reality, these ordinary people, especially children, They have no power, they have to do what others tell them to do, they can't control the direction of life; but once they enter the world of the dungeon, they can become omnipotent characters and can call the wind and the rain." In "Dragon and In the world of Dungeons, there is no victory in the usual sense.It's more like an interactive fantasy novel. Participants can be two or more people. In addition, there needs to be a dungeon master who is responsible for creating and leading the entire adventure process. In addition, only the rulebook and some special dice are needed. , and paper and pen.At the beginning of the game, except for the city lord, everyone has to choose one of some pre-set characters, including Dwarf, Elf, or Gnome and human ( Human).Then everyone sat around the table, and the city lord slowly opened the rulebook, which contained descriptions of various monsters, magic, characters, and various imaginary scenes: "On the banks of this river, there is a castle shrouded in mist. , the low roar of beasts piercing through the distance, how do you go next?" If the player chooses to follow the distant sound, the city lord will roll the dice to decide the opponent they are about to face: or an ogre , or the fire-breathing banshee Kemira with the head of a lion and the body of a snake, or some other monster.No matter how thrilling the scene in the player's mind, his next fate will be randomly determined by the result of rolling the dice.Therefore, it is not surprising that computer programmers like this kind of game. The first game they wrote on the computer was naturally a game imitating "Dungeon and Dragon": "Adventure in the Deep Cave".

The main content of this computer version of Dungeons and Dragons game is to kill enemies and find treasures in a strange cave. You can enter some commands to explore or fight around. For example, "north" means to go north, and "attack" means to attack. Mello feels that he is the protagonist of the novel.As the character advances in the game, the scene in his mind becomes more and more real. He forgets that he is sitting in the computer room of the university. It is a gust of cold wind, but a gurgling spring.In his opinion, the text scrolling on the screen is indeed a real world.

What excites him even more is that he can also build such a world. Since the 1970s, the electronic entertainment industry has been dominated by arcade machines like Planet Impact or home consoles like the Atari 2600, and programming on these machines requires the expertise of those big companies. support, and buy an expensive development system.The computer is different, it is not so superior, it is already equipped with various tools and development systems, and the people who hold the keys are not those monopolistic dignitaries, but their own people who love computers, they are like-minded partners.Although Romero is young, he feels that he can become one of them in the future, and he can also write his legend in this world. ﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡ Since then, every Saturday at 7:30 in the morning, Romero will ride his bicycle to the computer room of the school, and learn programming with the students there on the HP mainframe as big as a refrigerator. They like Romero's eagerness to learn very much. energy.The machines, all behemoths developed in the 1950s, entered codes by stuffing punched cards. IBM dominated the mainframe and clock market at the time, with sales of $6 billion in the 1960s.By the 1970s, these mainframes and their younger siblings, the minicomputers, were finding their way into commercial companies, government departments, universities, and research institutions, but not yet in people's homes.So computer-obsessed kids like Romero hung out in college computer labs, the only place they could use the machines.After the professor goes home in the evening, the students gather together to study, play, explore, and research.The computer is an unprecedented tool for them. In this world, as long as a person works hard, he can definitely do what he wants to do.These programmers don't go to class, cancel appointments, and don't even take a shower, just wandering in this world.Once they have enough knowledge, the program they have to write is - the game. The first computer game appeared in an unlikely-sounding place in 1958—a U.S. government nuclear laboratory.Willy Higinbotham is the head of the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He was worried that he would have to plan a speaking tour, so he was thinking of something to win them over.So, together with his colleagues, he used a computer to create a very simple tennis simulation program on a circular oscilloscope. He named the game "Tennis for 2" (Tennis for 2). A white line jumps up and down on both sides.The people on the farm were amazed by this novelty, but Willy dismantled the machine when they returned to the laboratory. Three years later, in 1961, Steve "Slug" Russell and other students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) created a small computer called the PDP-1. A game called Spacewar, in which two players drift through a black hole while shooting each other with rockets.Ten years later, in 1971, Will Crowther, a Boston-based programmer and spelunking enthusiast, created a text game that simulated spelunking.A hacker at Stanford named Don Woods saw the game and asked him if he could make some changes to it, add more mythological elements, and there was Adventure in the Cave. ".This game triggered a craze for text adventure games. Students and hackers in computer labs all over the country not only played it, but also modified it, creating all kinds of new stories, some even jumped out of "Dragon and The background of Dungeon, such as exploring in the world of (Star Trek). Romero is a fourth-generation game hacker who grew up in the 1980s.The first generation is the MIT students who developed on minicomputers in the 1950s and 1960s. The relayers from Silicon Valley and Stanford in the 1970s are the second generation. Some start-up small game companies in the early 1980s are regarded as Third Generation.In order to enter this field, Romero needed to learn a computer language that was necessary for game developers at that time: HP-BASIC.He is a student who is both savvy and inquisitive, pestering everyone with questions, and his questions become more and more advanced.Meanwhile, his grades in school plummeted, going from A's to B's to C's and finally D's.His stepfather was initially dismissive of his enthusiasm for games, but after he noticed Romero's decline in grades, he felt that Romero's attention was too easily distracted. Although the child was very bright, games and computers occupied took too much of his energy.Although it was the golden age of video games at that time, and the annual sales of arcade machines were five billion dollars, and even home consoles were worth one billion dollars, Scudeman did not think that doing game development was an appropriate career. Tell Romero: "You don't make money from making games, you make things that people really need, like business applications." What is growing is not only the feud between Romero and his stepfather, but also the various violent scenes in Romero's mind, not only physical violence, but also mental violence.He was the kid who grew up on EC Comic horror comics and all sorts of little movies and heroic comic books like Spider-Man and Fantastic Four.He needed a way to let go of the wild thoughts in his head.At the age of eleven, he picked up a pen and drew a story about a dog named Gummy, whose owner asked him to play baseball. After a hard throw, the ball shot into the gum The eye, whose head was split open and the brains poured out, "End of the play," Romero wrote, and inscribed on the tombstone: "Oh, poor gummy." The comic book titled "Weird" was handed in as an art class assignment, and one chapter was titled "Ten Ways of Torturing" and included "Pricking him all over with needles and after a few days... see He's turned into a big scab," or "Tie him to a chair and set his feet on fire." In another chapter called "How to Drive a Nanny Crazy," he draws: "Take Get out a really sharp dagger and pretend you stab yourself." Or "Put a wire in your ear and pretend it's a radio." The teacher commented, "This is gross, do you have to draw these things? ” Romero got only a B+, and his energy was mainly devoted to writing computer programs. A few weeks after his first trip to the campus computer room, Romero finished his first game, a text-based adventure game.Because those mainframes couldn't store data, programming was done by punching holes in thin cards. Each sheet of paper was a line of code, and a game usually required thousands of lines of code.Every day after school, Romero bundled stacks of cards on the back of his bicycle and rode home; when he went to the computer room next time, he brought the cards from home to the computer room to let the machine run.One day on the way to campus, his car hit a rock, overturned, and two hundred cards flew in the air and scattered on the wet ground.Romero felt it couldn't go on like this. He soon found a new love: the Apple II (Apple II).Its predecessor, the Macintosh, was first introduced to the world in 1976 at a California computer club, and it became popular with hackers who didn't have access to a mainframe.As a computer that can be used at home, it is especially suitable for playing games and making games, all thanks to the two founders of Apple, Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs) and Steven Wozniak (Stephen Wozniak), or, two Steves. Jobs, a college dropout with a passion for Buddhism and philosophy, started his first job at Atari Games in the mid-1970s.The company's legend lies in its founder, Nolan Bushnell, who in 1972 made the hugely successful arcade game (Pong), in which players controlled two A white tape beat a white dot back and forth across the screen, and he made an arcade game called Computer Space, a parody of Space Wars on the PDP-1.What Jobs and him have in common is courage and self-confidence, but Jobs has a bigger dream in his heart. Wozniak, or Woz, was a geek gifted in both math and programming who loved to pull all kinds of pranks, and everyone in the San Francisco Bay area knew his phone number to dial and hear jokes.He also loves playing games, and writing a game fits all of those interests into one.In his game, after the player loses a round, funny words such as "Oh, shit!" will flash on the screen.Jobs summoned Woz to design a game called Breakout for the Atari 2600 home console.Subsequently, Jobs' sensitivity to future development trends and Woz's genius programming ability created their own company-Apple.The original Mac was a prototype in 1976 for members of the HomeBrew computer club, and it cost a whopping $666.66.The next Apple II machine produced in 1977 was aimed at ordinary users. It had a keyboard, was compatible with BASIC language, and most importantly, its graphics were in color. Although it did not have a hard drive, it came with two What looks like a humble gamepad these days - it's for playing games. It was also in the computer room of that university that Romero saw the Apple II for the first time. When the mainframe could only draw some white lines or squares, this stylish gray box could display many Pixels of color, it caught Romero's eye right away.He couldn't wait to learn everything about this machine, and he spent the rest of the day running around the computer room asking people, and then whenever he got to the computer room, he would sit in front of the Apple II and play games. The above games are varied and more and more. Some of these games are arcade-like, like Planet Impact, or Space Invaders.But there are also some innovative elements, such as "Genesis" (Ultima), its maker is Richard Garriott, known as the King of Britain, a Texas Middle English-speaking son of an astronaut, he created this highly successful graphic role-playing series.Just like in "Dungeon and Dragon", players can choose whether to be a wizard or an elf, they can fight dragons, and they can grow up in the game.The terrain in the game is represented by blocks of different colors, for example, green is a tree, brown is a mountain, the player's character is composed of a few simple pixels, and there is no battle scene, the player can only go to the dragon - the other few Pixels—in front of them, and then wait for a line of words to appear on the screen to tell them the result of the battle, but the players don't care about the roughness and simplicity of the graphics, they can perceive the story and the world behind it. "Genesis" also shows the possibility of a new generation of hackers going into business.Geliott fought his way to success in the early 1980s, like many other Mac programmers, by storing games on disks and handing them off to computer stores in ziploc bags.Ken and Roberta Williams, a North Carolina couple, also adopted the ziplock bag method of selling their own graphic role-playing games they made at home and developed a A company with $310 million in annual sales: Sierra On-Line, a company that has become a stage for hippies in the digital age.There was also a 6-foot-9, 320-pound legend: Silas Warner, who founded Muse Software, a company that produced a game that Romero loved. : The gloomy and tense "Castle Wolfenstein" (Castle Wolfenstein), players have to control the villain through those flat mazes, there are various Nazi soldiers along the way, and finally, the player will face Hitler himself. Romero spent so much time gaming that his stepfather decided it would be nice to have a computer at home, too, so they could keep an eye on him.On the day the Apple II was delivered to the house, Scudeman saw Ginny coming up to him as soon as he entered the door, and she begged him: "Promise me, don't get angry." Scudeman looked down and saw the package of the Apple machine on the ground The box is empty. "Johnny has put it all together," Ginny told Scudeman cautiously.There were a few strange beeps in the room at this moment.Scudeman's anger came up immediately. He rushed across the living room and pushed open the door of Romero's room. He expected a mess of wiring boards and parts inside, but what he saw was Romero sitting A whole machine beats in front of it.He froze in place for a while, then walked in and asked Romero to tune out some games for him to see. For Christmas that year, Romero asked for two gifts: one was a book, "Mac Graphics Programming Tutorial"; the other was also a book, "Assembly Line", a book explaining assembly language, a language More obscure than other programming languages, but faster to execute.His stepfather was soon transferred to an RAF base, and the family moved to the Midlands, where the two books became his life partner.In that small town called Alconbury, Romero improved his assembly language skills by writing games, while he also did his own art.Every time he finished a game, he took it to the school to sell, and soon he became a little famous.Scudeman was approached by a top-secret officer simulating air combat training against the Soviet Union and asked if Romero was free for a part-time job, which Scudeman thought was a good thing.The next day, Romero was taken to a cold room with a large computer. In order not to let him see, all kinds of confidential maps, documents, and machines were tightly covered by black curtains.Then officials asked him to convert a program on the mainframe to run on the small one. When Romero saw the original flight simulation interface on the screen, he blurted out: "No problem, I'm the best at the game." The tide of the information age had already emerged at that time, and computers became a symbol of culture. Time magazine even used computers as the cover of its "Person of the Year" in 1982.Computer games showed more glamorous prospects than home consoles. Sales of Atari mainframes fell by $536 million in 1983, while Commodore VIC-20 and 64 home consoles Computers sold a billion dollars, more than even Apple.These computers need games, and they need game makers like Romero.There are only two ways to publish your work in this rising industry. One is through big publishers like Sierra or Electronic Arts (Electronic Arts) - Romero found that they are too high-ranking; One way is through computer enthusiast magazines. In order to save money, they usually print the code of the game directly in the magazine. Those who want to play can only enter the code line by line into the computer. Romero in England spent almost all of his time on the Mac, making games and sending them out for submissions.The decline in his academic performance finally angered his stepfather, and the previous conflict reappeared between the father and son.The plot in Romero's new comic "Melvin" (Melvin) seems to be a replica of this reality, only with more violence and gore: a boy named Melvin always likes to play against his father, and his old Dad is bald with dark glasses like Romero's stepfather. In the comics, Melvin suffers various punishments.In one story, Melvin promised to do the dishes but didn't do it. He ran away to play games. His father didn't say a word when he heard about it. He didn't say a word until he fell asleep, and then rushed into his room and cursed: "You Little bastard!" Then he smashed his head against the wall until his eyeballs burst and his flesh was bloody.Romero wasn't the only kid seeking release in the violent cartoons. Other students at the school would also whisper to Romero the various tragic endings they had in their minds for Melvin, and Romero paid them out. He never let go of any opportunity to show blood, and the other children admired Romero.This superior feeling also changed Romero, who began to listen to heavy metal music - metal bands, mottled people (M? tley Crue), Judas Priest (Judas Priest).He dated several girls, and one of his favorites soon became his girlfriend. She was lively and intelligent, and her father was a respected official. She made Romero wear a shirt with a collar and Decent jeans, she took him to meet new friends.After all these years of running away from his father and beating his stepfather, Romero feels finally in his arms. Romero was sixteen, and he was eager to succeed with his game.After eight months of unsuccessful submissions, on March 5, 1984, an editor at InCider ("The Insider") magazine said they had decided to publish Romero's "Searching for Scouting." Scout Search game.It's a low-res maze game where the player - one point in the game - needs to get ahead of the grizzly bear - another point - and gather the scouts - several points - together.It looks ordinary, but it's fun.Romero was paid a hundred dollars for this, and the magazine was interested in publishing his other games. "I'll start contacting him as soon as I'm sober." The editor wrote. Romero threw himself into the game production, not only as a programmer, but also as an artist.He can even write a game in half an hour.He gave all of these games two-letter names like Alien Attack or Cavern Crusader.He became more and more arrogant. In a letter to a magazine, he wrote, "The champion of your programming competition must be me. My program is very good. Don't set up a prize of five hundred dollars. Just give me the five hundred dollars, and the annual award, yes, the one thousand dollars, all directly to me." Signed as usual: "John Romero, Ace Programmer".Then he won the prize. Romero, eager to share these successes with his biological father, who lives in Utah, scribbled out a piece of stationery bearing the name of his so-called company, which was his only one: Capitol Idea Software, in the letter , Romero recounted his publications, the contests he won, "I've been learning computers for four and a half years now, and I'm about to have a new breakthrough in my programming skills." - John Romero, Ace Program Player, contest winner, future millionaire." He was on his way, he could feel it, but to really become a future millionaire, he had to leave England and return to America, and he was eagerly looking forward to that day. ﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡ Romero returned to California with his family in 1986 and took courses at Sierra University, where he used to play games, when he was only two years into high school.His games became so popular that nearly every one of them was published in magazines, and some were even on the cover.Also, one day while eating fast food at Burger King, he met a girl he had a crush on, Kelly Mitchell, who was the cashier there, and they fell in love instantly.Kelly grew up in a middle-class Mormon family in a nice house on a hill in the city, and while Romero had dated a lot of girls before, none were as interesting as Kelly and hit it off with him , even though she doesn't like games.Nineteen-year-old Romero had never really experienced the warmth of a family. He longed to have a family of his own. He proposed to Kelly, and she agreed. Their wedding was held in 1987. Romero has published ten games, is about to graduate high school, and has a small family.It was time for him to find a job, and what job could he be more attracted to than making games?Romero saw in a computer magazine that a party called "Applefest" (Applefest) would be held on September 16, 1987. The participants were not only ordinary Mac enthusiasts, but also like Origin (Origin). ) and big game publishers like Sierra, and the magazines that published his games: Uptime, Nibble, and Apple Juice. By the time Romero arrived at the convention center in San Francisco, hackers and gamers were busy assembling machines.A table was covered with Quadbit magazines, and Romero's game was on the cover of that issue.At the booth of New Age, a magazine released on disk, a demo of one of Romero's games was also shown on the screen. "Wow, that's my personal game show," Romero thought.Right in front of the New Age booth, he met Jay Wilbur, the editor who published every game Romero sent in, a boy-faced but burly Guy, twenty-seven years old, he used to work as a bartender at TGI Friday night club.在杰伊心目中，罗梅洛虽名气不大，但却是一个值得信赖的程序员，因为他懂得一个成功的游戏需要有哪些要素，这些东西学起来容易，但掌握起来很难。杰伊告诉罗梅洛自己有一份工作想请他来做，罗梅洛故做镇定地说他会考虑的。然后他心情愉快地走到旁边维真公司的摊位上，那里悬挂着一个条幅：“《创世纪5》，10月31日”，“噢，天啊！”罗梅洛嘀咕道：“新版的创世纪！”然后他在一台机器前坐下，插入他的磁盘，摊位上一个女士立即向他问道：“你在干什么？你想拷贝我们的游戏？！你怎么能做这种事！”罗梅洛敲了几下键盘，对她说：“来看！”——屏幕上显示着一个迷宫追踪游戏，这是他刚完成的图像分辨率增加了一倍的复杂程序，看上去非常精细和鲜活，这种所谓双倍分辨率的图像技术在当时是编程领域最顶尖的艺术。就面前这个消瘦的孩子，展示出来的图像比旁边屏幕上的《创世纪V》看上去还漂亮。这个女士只有一个问题：“你在找工作吗？” ﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡﹡ 两个月后，1987年11月，罗梅洛驱车从西海岸穿过整个美国，奔赴位于东海岸新罕布什尔州的维真公司办公室开始他的第一份工作。他满怀憧憬但却囊中羞涩，一路上用支票垫付着各种费用。预产期在明年二月的凯俐和他一起，尽管想起那边寒冷的气候就让她害怕，但罗梅洛的热情感染了她。他作为王牌程序员和未来富翁的人生就要开始了，他保证道。 但罗梅洛的诺言并未兑现。尽管一开始在维真干得很成功，但罗梅洛跟随着他的上司离开维真，新创建了一家公司，这是一次赌博——而他是个运气不好的赌徒：新的公司拉不到业务，他失业了。二十一岁的罗梅洛已经有了个名叫迈克尔（Michael）的儿子，而且凯俐又怀上了第二个孩子，她觉得累了。罗梅洛对她的种种许诺都落了空，为了让第二个孩子离她的父母近些，她回到了加州。电话那头的罗梅洛仍然毫无起色，他在那边什么都没有，没有工作，没有房子，他睡在朋友的沙发上。 但罗梅洛不会就这么躺下等死，他心中装着梦想，他有一个他深爱着的家庭，他还要做一个他自己从来没拥有过的那种父亲，那种不光支持孩子们玩游戏，还和他们一起玩的那种父亲。他给杰伊打了个电话，询问《新时代》那里还有没有职位空缺，杰伊告诉他，他已经离开了《新时代》，加入了位于路易斯安那州什里夫波特（Shreveport）市的另外一家杂志：《软盘》（SoftDisk），他们也是以磁盘方式发行。杰伊建议罗梅洛也来这里试试。罗梅洛没有任何犹豫，他要去什里夫波特，那里有南方温暖的天气，那里有游戏。那里最好再有狂热的玩家，他期望着。