The story of how I got my job here at Bungie Software never fails to amuse me and just about anyone who hears it. I might as well write it all down for posterity...inasmuch as posterity is served by an inherently dynamic medium like the net.

I had a fascination with computers ever since I was a kid. When I was in fourth grade (or what would be the equivalent of fourth grade; the first part of my childhood was spent in Montessori schools where grades were nonexistent), the father of one of the kids in my class donated an Apple II+ to the school. Every kid in the class was alloted thirty minutes of computer time each week; on Monday morning you had to rush to the sign-up sheet near the little "computer nook" to make sure you could block out a convenient timeframe.

To the great dismay of the other students, I soon found myself spending far more than my alloted half-hour in front of the green monochrome monitor. My early experiments were the same as everyone else in the class: playing around with LOGO, directing a small tringle called a "turtle" to draw geometric shapes on the screen. I recall having grand plans for a program called Orbit, which was intended essentially as a graphics demo: the turtle would draw a circle, then another circle, and another, until it had created the semblance of a sphere. Various details would fade in (moons, stars, etc.) until the viewer realized that the sphere was in fact a planet...at which point the turtle would sweep up from behind the planet and fly directly at the screen, growing in detail as it approached until it was clearly a starship. Unfortunately, I don't think LOGO (or the Apple II+) had the horsepower to do what I really wanted; at any rate, I never figured it out, and my many false starts at Orbit were abandoned.

While trying to figure out a way to realize my Orbit fantasy, I moved farther away from LOGO and started working with BASIC. I would spend hours of my school day (in Montessori schools you can do stuff like this) poring over the wirebound manuals that accompanied the computer.

Someone gave me a magazine called Vid Kids for my birthday. It had an article about Steve Wozniak. Thus I was introduced to my first geek hero. I also seem to recall reading an article in the same magazine about this weird new computer called "Macintosh" that Apple had created.

I had a paper route, and spent all my cash subscribing to computer magazines. At the time almost every computer magazine (the ones worth reading, in my opinion) had several pages devoted to programs you could type yourself. I would bring these magazines to school and stay inside during recess, keying in everything from simple drawing programs to skiing games that used ASCII characters. (This is something I miss greatly, by the way. I wonder how many killer apps and computer-literate people would exist if computer magazines would publish some simple app each month, along with commented source code. Even if it were only included as a bonus on a cover CD, I bet there's a whole bunch of people out there who'd love to learn incrementally how to code for their own machine without spending hundreds of dollars on instruction manuals and devtools.)

My parents didn't have a lot of money at the time; my dad works as a steel salesman, and he found himself looking for work more than once during the Eighties (like a lot of people in the American steel industry). They certainly didn't have enough to buy me the Apple IIe I was coveting at the time, but they did their best. The first computer I actually owned was the Timex-Sinclair 1000. My parents bought it at a grocery store for $25. They also got the expansion pack which gave it a whopping 16K of RAM, and a couple of tapes (all the software was on cassette tape; they got Frogger and some kind of spreadsheet program). I plugged it in to this tiny black-and-white TV we had lying around, hijacked the tape player my mom used at her exercise class, and I was in business. The Timex-Sinclair 1000 is legendary as a pathetic, user-unfriendly machine (it didn't have a keyboard with real keys; the front of the machine was pressure-sensitive plastic with a QWERTY layout, so you pushed the letter you wanted and hoped it would register) but it was the size of a slim trade paperback and elegant in its own way. I spent plenty of time playing Frogger and wishing it had a high-res graphics mode so I could work on Orbit.

At school, I had just decided that BASIC was too slow, and started investigating an ugly thing known as "machine language" which I hoped might be fast enough to do Orbit justice, when my parents moved me to a different school. I don't remember their reasoning; I think it had something to do with faculty members at the school being jerks, a problem that I only became conscious of later in my educational career.

They transferred me to a Catholic school in a well-heeled neighborhood. This school had a whole computer room, full of Apple II+s, Apple IIes and even one of the Apple IIcs, which were brand-new at the time.

I thought this was great until I discovered that Catholic schools are very different from Montessori schools. The computer lab was run by a Nazi named Mrs. Skinner, who kept the computer room under lock and key and didn't hold with that free-access hacker ethic.

I distinctly remember our second computer class. (The first class was spent introducing us to heavy concepts like "CPU" and "MONITOR".) Mrs. Skinner handed out a brightly-colored 5.25" floppy to each kid in the class (mine was red) and announced that today we would learn to format a disk.

Having known how to format a disk for a number of years, I put my red floppy in the drive and typed:

]10 REM HELLO
]INIT HELLO

Mrs. Skinner heard the clatter of the Disk II drive and rushed over to my desk, no doubt thinking Only the second class and already this stupid kid has broken something.

"What did you just do?" she barked.

"I formatted the disk."

She looked at my screen to make sure I wasn't lying. When she saw I'd told the truth, she muttered something about following orders and paying attention. I spent four more years at that school, and didn't get much farther. No one was ever allowed to simply explore the potential of the machines. I think the most complex thing we ever got to do was use Print Shop to make banners that said things like HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE and GO ST. VINCENT FRIARS.

Around this time my parents found a Commodore 128 in a crushed box at an outlet store for about $80. I was in love. The C-128 was fully compatible with the Commodore 64, one of the most popular and powerful 8-bit computers ever; it also had an enhanced "128 Mode" with more memory, an expanded BASIC instruction set, 80-column text and 640 x 480 graphics resolution (in monochrome) and a few other goodies...like the ability to run CP/M software! It was a great machine, although it never really caught on quite the way the C-64 did.

The only problem I had with it was that I had no disk drive, and I refused to use a tape drive (that element of the Timex-Sinclair 1000 experience had gotten old really fast). I would spend hours typing in BASIC programs from Compute!'s Gazette and Run and Commodore Users Ahoy!...and then I would play around with them...and then I would have to turn off the computer, and lose everything. After a year of this, my parents took pity on me and bought me a disk drive (I'm sure they would have done so earlier if they had the cash....), which had the added benfit of allowing me to purchase commercial Commodore 64 games which were both cheap and plentiful.

By the way, I'd like to take this opportunity to nominate Commodore Users Ahoy! as the best mainstream computer magazine ever. It was fantastic, and I don't think any platform had a magazine that was equal in content. Maybe I'm just romanticizing though.

I went to a high school with a computer lab filled with Apples. I was eager to regain my chops, but it never happened. They offered a "Computer Science" course and I eagerly signed up, anticipating a semester learning LISP or C or one of the weird languages I'd heard about in the many computer rags I subscribed to.

The first class: "The screen in front of you is called a MONITOR...."

The second class: "Today we'll be learning to format a floppy disk...."

And so on. I never learned anything, although I had plenty of rehashes of stuff I'd figured out for myself in fourth grade. My high school didn't allow students to drop courses; otherwise I would have done so in a heartbeat and slept another 40 minutes each morning.

More time passed, I graduated high school and went to college. I finally got to play around with those weird Macintosh machines in the university computer lab. There wasn't much I could do with them, since they weren't wired to the Internet (which I didn't really understand at the time) but I got to play around with the MacOS and grow to like it. My friend Sean was also instrumental here; he was a Mac expert, and showed me the ropes. Coupled with the fondness for Apple machines I had cultivated since childhood, and the observation that a lot of people in the creative arts used Macs (people like the Residents and Douglas Adams, who I admired and wanted to emulate), the end result was inevitable. I decided to get a Mac. I subscribed to MacUser so I could figure out which model to buy. I procrastinated (they kept getting faster, and I didn't want to buy an obsolete machine and find myself left behind), but a few years later I got student pricing on a PowerMac 7100/66. After it arrived, I spent all my free time playing with it.

I had been interested in the concept of using a computer to network with other people ever since I'd read of a service called QuantumLink, an online service devoted to Commodore users. About a month after I got my Mac I ran out and spent $140 for a Hayes 14.4 modem. I used the enclosed software to get an account on America Online, which seemed the most reminiscent of QuantumLink. (Turns out AOL actually sprang from the ashes of the company that ran QLink.) I spent a lot of time online, and drove up my phone bill considerably.

Like a lot of students, I've had to work at my share of lousy jobs simply because the places I'd want to work won't hire students with weird schedules and no experience. The latest in a series of ugly menial-labor jobs was a spell at an M&M/Mars candy factory on the western edge of Chicago. I didn't actually work for M&M/Mars; I was technically in the employ of Staff Management, who made a business of providing warm bodies to companies that needed assembly-line type work done. M&M/Mars employees made something like $28 an hour; they only had to pay the Staff Management dregs $8 an hour. The work was miserable and dehumanizing, and I was actually glad when they laid us all off in October of 1994. At least I didn't have to crawl under any more conveyor belts with a putty knife and a bump cap, scraping off encrusted chocolate from years gone by.

Being jobless didn't prevent me from logging on to AOL on a daily basis, even though I knew I was running up a tab I had no way of paying. I logged on Thanksgiving morning, and checked out the Download library in the Mac Games Forum as per usual, and saw a demo for a game called Marathon. The description sounded interesting, so I spent two hours (another $7 to AOL) downloading it.

I unstuffed it and played it for a while. It was dark and spooky and smooth on my PowerMac (the 7100/66 was the second-fastest model available at the time). Marathon reminded me of a Commodore 64 game called Project Firestart, the last C-64 effort from Dynamix. Project Firestart was essentially a rewrite of Alien as a computer game: bloodthirsty monsters loose on a small ship. It had a great deal of atmosphere, though, and it remains the only game that has ever actually scared me. Marathon, while obviously very different (it owes more to 2001 than Alien) looked like a Project Firestart for the 90s. I played the demo compulsively for the next month. December 25th rolled around, and nobody gave me anything I liked. Specifically, nobody gave me Marathon. (I was later to discover that the game didn't even ship until December 23, so I guess I can't be too angry about that.) So I called up MacWarehouse and ordered Marathon. The guy who took my order told me they were out of stock, but they were expecting a new shipment in two weeks. I did not realize at the time that he had probably pulled that date out of thin air.

Oddly enough, around the first of the new year (1995) I received my copy of Marathon. "Oddly enough" because

Not that I cared. I had my copy, and that was all that mattered. I played the game almost nonstop for the next two weeks. (Xmas break - I had a lot of free time).

By this time I'd been out of work for two or three months. I'd built up a remarkable debt by stupidly buying Xmas gifts for friends and family, all the while assuming that I would stumble across a job that would pay for it all before I got into any trouble. (And I did look for a job, and filled out all sorts of applications, but I didn't want a seasonal job and I refused to even think about working in any food-related endeavor - I'm just not waiter material - so my options were correspondingly limited.)

My daily Marathon sessions were now interrupted by calls from unpleasant creditors wanting to know when I was planning on paying up. Ugh.

My time was running out, but I found escape from the pressure by playing Marathon almost constantly...and studying the Help Wanted ads in the back of the Chicago Reader every Thursday. And one Thursday I read:

TECH SUPPORT. Casual office seeks person to answer phones, email. Must know Mac, games a plus. Call Doug at (312)...

Hmmm. A Mac game company based in Chicago. I'd noticed from poring over the manual that the guys who did Marathon were in Chicago. Could this be them? It was late, but I dialed the number and heard:

"Thank you for calling Bungie Software."

Wow! I was stoked. The people who'd created the game I'd devoted the last two weeks of my life to were looking for help. And I could do the job they needed help with. I might even enjoy it! Talking on the phone all day, answering e-mail, telling people how to play computer games. What else could you want from a job?

I spent the weekend on the phone. I never got through to a real person; I either got a busy signal or the "general" voice mailbox. I figured they were inundated with calls asking about the job. My heart sank. But I kept calling.

Monday morning I got through to someone named Alexander. Realizing I only had a short time to explain myself, I announced "I know the Mac, I love Bungie's games, and I'm interested in the job."

"You've played our games?" he said. "Which ones?" He sounded as though he didn't believe me. Having spent the last few weeks doing little else apart from Marathon, I found his reaction hard to understand. Isn't everyone sitting around playing Marathon all day? Surely I can't be the only one.

"I've spent the last two weeks playing Marathon, and I've also played the Pathways Into Darkness demo that came with my PowerMac."

"Ah. Could you come down for an interview?"

"Uh...sure. I can do that."

"Is twelve o'clock okay for you?"

"Today?" This was unexpected. "Alright."

"Okay. Just come down at twelve, and bring your résumé."

"Er...I don't actually have a résumé. I mean, I don't have one ready. But I suppose I could write one up in an hour or two."

Silence, then, "Nah, that's okay. Just come down and we'll interview you." He gave me the address and some simple directions and hung up.

I showered, shaved, put on my nicest clothes and drove to the address I'd been given at twelve. I was expecting a gleaming white building with the Bungie logo on a sign in the parking lot. I didn't expect to find a software company in a small, unassuming building in a dingy-looking part of the city.

I was buzzed in, walked up two flights of stairs and down a hallway that looked more like part of a juvenile detention center than a cutting-edge software company. (Little did I know....) Bungie occupied a single office at the end of the hall.

I opened the door and stepped into chaos. Black and blue plastic barrels with raditation signs on the side stood next to the door. An air hockey table was pushed against the wall directly in front of me; a couch and a coffee table sat to my right. I couldn't discern all this at first, though, because every flat surface was piled high with t-shirts, software boxes, joysticks, computer cables, CD jewel cases, Ethernet transceivers, magazines, and a buch of other things I couldn't recognize.

Through it all trudged a lithe, young-looking guy in jeans and a flannel shirt, with lively eyes and a pile of faxes in his hand.

"I'm Alexander," he said. We shook hands, and he asked me to make a spot for myself on the couch and wait while he attended to some pressing business. "Sorry for the mess; we just got back from a trade show," he explained.

I sat and waited. From behind a partition in the room I repeatedly heard a deep voice intoning, "Hello, this is Doug." Based on his other comments I determined that all of the callers were either interested in the job or interested in getting the copy of Marathon they had pre-ordered in August. I don't think Doug ever got off the phone while I was there.

Eventually Alexander came back with looseleaf notebook in hand, cleared some space for himself on the couch and began the interview. Standard interview stuff, or so I thought. Yes, I had a fairly thorough understanding of how Macs worked. Yes, I'd played through almost all of Marathon, and could walk people through any parts where they might be stuck. Yes, I could attend trade shows when necessary. Yes, I was familiar with AOL and could answer questions in the company forum there.

At some point during the interview someone pounded on the door and screamed, "I want my copy of Marathon! Where is it?" I heard a giggle, followed by the sound of a key in the latch (perhaps the door was locked to ward off overzealous customers). The door opened, and Jason Jones strolled in, quickly followed by Alain Roy, another programmer who'd worked on the game. They introduced themselves. Jason wore a shirt that made humorous reference to the Steve Jackson/FBI debacle; I admired it, and said as much. When he found out I was interviewing for the tech support job he asked if I'd played any of Bungie's games. He seemed more shocked than Alex when I told him I'd been playing Marathon for the last two weeks. "No way!" he crowed. "Where'd you find a copy?" I was unaware at the time of just how hard it was to find a copy.

The interview ended, I shook hands with everyone (except Doug, who was never able to leave his desk) and walked back out into a wet January snowfall feeling cautiosly optimistic. I hadn't carried myself that badly. I hadn't stuttered or broken anything or insulted anyone's lineage. I went back home and wondered if they'd even call me to say I wasn't picked. It would make a pleasant change from people calling to tell me I was going to jail, at least.

Seven days later, the phone rang. I picked it up and heard Alexander on the other end, asking if I wanted the job. I said okay. I was actually pretty exuberant about it, not only because the job sounded cool but because I was about to get out of debt. I felt like I had to tell someone about my good fortune, but none of my friends were around to share my moment of joy and release. I ended up calling my mom. She seemed glad.

I started the next week. My job was pretty simple at first: man the phone lines. Seemingly everyone and their parents had ordered a copy of Marathon; very few of them had received it. Those who had often found themselves confounded by the installation process. I found myself talking almost non-stop from the time I got in to the moment I left. At the time Bungie only had three phone lines and an ass-backwards phone system that dumped customers straight into voice mail if Doug or I didn't pick up the phone in three rings or less. I had plenty to do.

After work, I would go home and get online. I had been lurking in the Bungie forum ever since the interview, and I noticed a disturbing trend: a lot of people online weren't happy with us. People who hadn't received their games, or couldn't install Marathon, were stomping all over us in the newsgroups and on the message boards. No one at Bungie had answered any e-mail for two months, simply because they were trying to get the game done; unfortunately, this ended up alienating a large and vocal portion of our customer base. It was a PR nightmare. So one day I went to Alex and suggested that I take on the task of interfacing with Bungie's customers online.

It was all downhill from there.