Free You by Austin Grossman Page A

midadolescences. Rows and then boxes of fantasy and science fiction novels with doubles and triples of anything in the golden-age SFF canon—the Dune books took up their own shelf. Stacked, hand-labeled videocassettes of films someone considered essential reference (
Aliens, The Dark Crystal,
and
Ladyhawke
were visible on top),
Dungeons & Dragons
modules containing scribbled marginalia, Avalon Hill board games, stacks of comic books, an unused dictionary and thesaurus, a separate section for art books, histories of medieval architecture, and color plates of Vallejo and Frazetta and Whelan and Mead and Piranesi.
    And of course stacks and stacks of computer games in no particular order. Most of them were in their original boxes, with worn corners and sprung seams after the long, rough trips from home to dorm room to apartment to apartment before arriving here.
    Old consoles; the beetlelike curve of a SEGA Genesis; the triple-pronged Nintendo 64 controller.
    I picked one up, already dusty and faded only a few years after being state of the art.
Quest of the White Eagle
. On the cover a blandly handsome teenage boy in a white T-shirt and jeans and an eighties feathered haircut hung in midair, frozen in the act of leaping eagerly from the sidewalk into a glowing doorway hanging a few inches off the ground.He was grinning madly, obviously overjoyed to be getting the fuck out. Behind him, a dark-haired girl watched, lost in admiration.
    The boy was already halfway through; his shoulder and arm emerged on the portal’s far side wearing a medieval tunic and gripping a sword. There, the same teenage girl awaited, with an identical expression but wearing longer hair and dressed only in a few shreds of chain mail and a tiara. The back of the box showed an actual screenshot—blocky, pixelated stick figures.
    All the Black Arts games were there, a few still shrink-wrapped, going back to 1988’s
Clandestine,
the official first release under the label.
Realms I
was the kind of game that never had a commercial release. It was an underground classic that had been swapped over BBSes in the mid-1980s and been passed from hand to hand in the form of eight floppy disks bundled with rubber bands. I was sure a few dozen copies were out there lying in basements in cardboard boxes, filed away with cracked copies of
The Bilestoad
and
Lode Runner
.
    I opened a few of the older boxes, shifted piles of loose graph paper, manila envelopes holding mostly 3.25-inch disks (“crispies”), even opened up and shook out a couple of the larger books in case a few floppies had been tucked inside and forgotten. There wasn’t much from 1983 apart from an incomplete set of blue-and-white
Ultima III: Exodus
floppies.
    It turned out there was a whole room in Black Arts that was just all of Simon’s stuff. He had an apartment of sorts but he wasn’t that invested in it. The rest of it was here at the office, where he’d slept most of the time anyway. Don and Darren had gone through Simon’s notebooks page by page in search of the breakthrough they’d announced, and there was nothing, but I looked through their inventory list anyway.
    Items included:
2 wooden stools
    1 folding breakfast table
    1 Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner
    1 SEGA Genesis video game console, controllers missing
    1 set of bed linens, soiled
    numberless paperback books
    countless graphic novels of the 1980s
    1 colander, plastic
    diverse pieces of silverware
    1 bowl
    1 plate
    1 sword
    5 desk lamps w/o lightbulb
    1 dot matrix printer
    4 reams printer paper
    1 shoe hanger, shoeless
    1 Marriott rewards card, expired
    7 unlabeled VHS tapes, which all turned out to hold episodes of
My So-Called Life
    1 framed Boris Vallejo print, signed
    I’d just given up and was looking through the manual of some old White Wolf game when a slip of notepad paper fell out. It was graph paper. Across the top it read REALMS OF GOLD: ADRIC’S TOMB . It held a few short paragraphs in what was definitely Simon’s