Wanna know a secret?

We all do; that’s the short of why I got into technology.

Specifically, though, I didn’t just want someone to tell me secrets. I wanted to find them, and then get something for it. Functionally, this becomes a desire to see How It Works and eventually obtain enough knowledge and resources to Make It Yourself, and then Make It Better.

Realistically though I think I just wanted to be a wizard as a kid, got super annoyed when I discovered magic isn’t real, and refused to accept it.

I think that’s pretty universal, but you can see how this is a bit at odds with itself. You learn science to figure out how to do magic. It’s also an absurdly difficult concept to articulate without sounding INSANELY DUMB, right? Despite how common it is.

I seriously don’t think English has a word for that particular drive that you can find outside of a Dungeons and Dragons manual, but man we really should. It’s also extremely common among essentially everyone in my life who is tech-inclined. I’m going to take a crack at explaining this brain splinter a lot of us probably have, tell me how I do:

I want to find hidden stuff, and I want that hidden stuff to be part of a story, and I want that story to have meaning. What I find genuinely exciting is discovering the unknown; what I find even more exciting is finding ways to manipulate it.

For example, it’s cool to me to find a prototype board for, say, an unreleased video game system. It’s much, much cooler for me to get to crack it open and see how it works and what decisions were made when building it; the best thing would be to fix it, get something running on it, and then publish that information to see what other people do with it.

That’s kind of the selfish but true reason I got into technology. There isn’t any particular desire on my end to better humanity’s ills or cure a particular disease or anything. I’m in it for that rush of “Hey, you wanna see a cool thing?”

Turns out you can do this as a job! That’s how I wound up where I am.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: You learn pretty fast that the most infuriating part of asking too many questions when someone is trying to tell you a story is that the answers start to fall short because those questions were never anticipated. I was the kid watching cartoons, asking stuff like “Where did Daffy get the giant mallet he just smacked that guy with from? Did he just, like, pull it out of his feathers? How the heck did he keep a mallet in there? What’s holding it in there? What else has he got in there!?”

It seriously kept me awake at night when I was five. It drove me NUTS.

Meanwhile, the actual answer was “because it would kill the comedic timing to have Daffy go find a mallet somewhere for a dumb visual prank so they just have him vaguely grab it out of somewhere, now quit losing sleep because you’re overthinking the most inconsequential and overwrought things a five-year-old could possibly comprehend good lord what is wrong with you.”

This is not a terribly acceptable answer to a five-year-old, and thirty years later as someone who’s worked in the videogame industry for a decade now, I still think it’s kind of a crappy answer.

A bunch of people probably have similar origin stories, mine took a kind-of weird tack in the way it manifested though.

We all know Super Mario Bros., right? The first one, for the NES? I’m super showing my age right now, but put a pin in that game, and then we have to go back to a time before the internet. The Dark Ages. 1989.

I lived in a little cul-de-sac in a neighborhood carved out of a swamp at the bottom of Rhode Island. It wasn’t exactly “the middle of nowhere” because Rhode Island is a whopping 50 miles across or so and you’ve got big places like Boston and New York City technically a pretty short drive away, but whatever. It might as well have been located on the moon for all the added entertainment options our coastal proximity provided us.

Seriously, we had like 2 NES systems across about, I dunno, 20 kids in the neighborhood? And between the two system-owning families, maybe access to 7 games total. And like four of them sucked. That was also our sole option for “video” entertainment of any sort. iPads and Netflix are still laughably far off at this point, and VHS was still prohibitively expensive for most families where I lived.

We played SO much Super Mario Bros, you guys. And we were so, so bad at it but we didn’t care because that somehow made it that much more interesting to us.

That game is, in many ways, perfect for inquisitive kids. It’s also dang near pornography for level designers or user-experience engineers. That game’s first few moments are absolutely flawless. Even for a small child, it teaches you every single thing you need to learn in the very first scene. An enemy walks towards Mario he has to jump over or die; it’s positioned in a way that the player is likely going to accidentally smack one of the signature “?” blocks from the series, producing a power-up mushroom that the level geometry encourages them to collide with; Mario grows bigger and can now break blocks with his head.

That’s how you Play Mario, explainable with examples, over in literally 10 seconds max, and comprehensible to a five year old. The entire game is just permutations on this idea. Virtually all videogames continue to struggle to be this elegant with their user tutorials even many decades on.

All this was well and good, but remember: We want secrets.

Because of how it’s programmed, Mario Bros is LOADED with crazy, seemingly impossible stuff sitting beneath the surface if you dig a bit. We had literally nothing else to do, so as kids we dug.

Also, no internet + very localized data pool (just us) = conspiracy theories like woah.

Rumors abounded. There was supposedly a way to get “A hundred lives” by bouncing off a turtle shell in some stair blocks in level 1-3. This was heard through tertiary communications with a friend of a friend’s brother’s uncle who was super good at Mario, but it was all we had to go on and collectively we’d never made it past Word 5, except for one guy who was on a soda binge one night and made it all the way to “the snow level” none of us had ever seen before. We weren’t sure we believed him. He talked about it the way some of our family members talked about ‘Nam.

We burned an entire weekend trying that stupid 100-lives turtle trick. We reset that level so many times.

We never quite got it, and at about seven years old I got my first taste of a group effort collapsing under frustration and mismanagement.

It also collectively blew our minds out of our skulls when one of our group’s older brothers came home, saw four exhausted seven and eight year olds bickering about a turtle coughing up extra lives, immediately deduced what we were trying to do, and then effortlessly snatched the controller out of my hands and performed the 100-lives turtle trick like he could do it in his sleep.

Turns out we’d spent hours and hours and hours attempting it in the wrong spot, and none of us had thought to question our initial location to try the trick. If we’d moved it a couple screens to the right we’d probably have beaten the game atop our giant stack of extra Marios by now.

Again! Great lesson for project management that got dropped on my head before I was even remotely old enough to get what had happened.

Whatever; we’d instantly stopped paying attention to anything else, because the 100-lives trick had yielded something far more unexpected and bizarre. We’d resumed playing with our giant extra lives pool and immediately died to test it out. Normally, you get a black field with a graphic of Mario on it, then “x <Number of Lives>” to show you how many you had left.

We’d never gone past, like four. Turns out once you go past nine, weird stuff begins to happen.

Crowns, letters, what can charitably be described as “melting ice blocks”, and other random symbols began to appear on the lives screen.

Fascinated by this, we decided to try to see what else would show up, but were warned by the older brother to “not go over 100”.

“Why?”
“You die.”

Turns out he wasn’t kidding. With no way to tell where our lives counter was currently at, we tried to eyeball it while replicating the lives trick now that we knew how to do it correctly. We’d try to give Mario about 10 lives, then suicide him into the nearest pit and study the resulting symbols to try to glean their meaning. We took notes.

And, of course, we screwed it up completely. As I’d find out later, the game stores your available extra lives as a value of 1 to 128. If you roll that over, the game reads it as NULL and zeroes it out to avoid a crash, effectively giving you zero lives and thus triggering the Game Over script.

That’s the science. To us, it was mysticism. Here was some forbidden knowledge, a cheat code that may or may not have been intentionally placed there, but push it too far and you lose everything.

And that was just the lives counter. Eventually we discovered that it was, in fact, possible to Jump the Flagpole, but all that was on the other side was a barren wasteland you were trapped in until you died of the timer running out. We spent an entire summer trying to track down a “chocolate factory” that was supposedly hidden in the game, and instead stumbled across the far-weirder Minus World, which was so unexpected that it actually disturbed one of our players badly enough that she left the room, convinced we were “breaking it” and were doing some kind of irreparable damage playing where we shouldn’t be.

She was so disturbed by the unexpected behavior of the game that she put the controller down and straight left the room in tears.

Pretty heady stuff for someone who wasn’t even ten: http://www.mariowiki.com/Minus_World

The rest is history, pretty much. I went from staring wide-eyed at the Minus World for the first time to having stacks and stacks of beta builds of popular games because it’s part of what I do for my job now. It’s been great, and has given me the opportunity to see the intersection of technology and art develop from the front row.

And also from behind the stage. There’s a few weird little easter eggs I’ve left planted in some games I’ve worked on over the years hoping to pique some kid’s curiosity for how the systems actually work. No idea if anyone’s ever found any or if they’ve ever had the intended function but it’s a fun thought.

Wanna know a secret?

We all do; that’s the short of why I got into technology.

Specifically, though, I didn’t just want someone to tell me secrets. I wanted to find them, and then get something for it. Functionally, this becomes a desire to see How It Works and eventually obtain enough knowledge and resources to Make It Yourself, and then Make It Better.

Realistically though I think I just wanted to be a wizard as a kid, got super annoyed when I discovered magic isn’t real, and refused to accept it.

I think that’s pretty universal, but you can see how this is a bit at odds with itself. You learn science to figure out how to do magic. It’s also an absurdly difficult concept to articulate without sounding INSANELY DUMB, right? Despite how common it is.

I seriously don’t think English has a word for that particular drive that you can find outside of a Dungeons and Dragons manual, but man we really should. It’s also extremely common among essentially everyone in my life who is tech-inclined. I’m going to take a crack at explaining this brain splinter a lot of us probably have, tell me how I do:

I want to find hidden stuff, and I want that hidden stuff to be part of a story, and I want that story to have meaning. What I find genuinely exciting is discovering the unknown; what I find even more exciting is finding ways to manipulate it.

For example, it’s cool to me to find a prototype board for, say, an unreleased video game system. It’s much, much cooler for me to get to crack it open and see how it works and what decisions were made when building it; the best thing would be to fix it, get something running on it, and then publish that information to see what other people do with it.

That’s kind of the selfish but true reason I got into technology. There isn’t any particular desire on my end to better humanity’s ills or cure a particular disease or anything. I’m in it for that rush of “Hey, you wanna see a cool thing?”

Turns out you can do this as a job! That’s how I wound up where I am.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: You learn pretty fast that the most infuriating part of asking too many questions when someone is trying to tell you a story is that the answers start to fall short because those questions were never anticipated. I was the kid watching cartoons, asking stuff like “Where did Daffy get the giant mallet he just smacked that guy with from? Did he just, like, pull it out of his feathers? How the heck did he keep a mallet in there? What’s holding it in there? What else has he got in there!?”

It seriously kept me awake at night when I was five. It drove me NUTS.

Meanwhile, the actual answer was “because it would kill the comedic timing to have Daffy go find a mallet somewhere for a dumb visual prank so they just have him vaguely grab it out of somewhere, now quit losing sleep because you’re overthinking the most inconsequential and overwrought things a five-year-old could possibly comprehend good lord what is wrong with you.”

This is not a terribly acceptable answer to a five-year-old, and thirty years later as someone who’s worked in the videogame industry for a decade now, I still think it’s kind of a crappy answer.

A bunch of people probably have similar origin stories, mine took a kind-of weird tack in the way it manifested though.

We all know Super Mario Bros., right? The first one, for the NES? I’m super showing my age right now, but put a pin in that game, and then we have to go back to a time before the internet. The Dark Ages. 1989.

I lived in a little cul-de-sac in a neighborhood carved out of a swamp at the bottom of Rhode Island. It wasn’t exactly “the middle of nowhere” because Rhode Island is a whopping 50 miles across or so and you’ve got big places like Boston and New York City technically a pretty short drive away, but whatever. It might as well have been located on the moon for all the added entertainment options our coastal proximity provided us.

Seriously, we had like 2 NES systems across about, I dunno, 20 kids in the neighborhood? And between the two system-owning families, maybe access to 7 games total. And like four of them sucked. That was also our sole option for “video” entertainment of any sort. iPads and Netflix are still laughably far off at this point, and VHS was still prohibitively expensive for most families where I lived.

We played SO much Super Mario Bros, you guys. And we were so, so bad at it but we didn’t care because that somehow made it that much more interesting to us.

That game is, in many ways, perfect for inquisitive kids. It’s also dang near pornography for level designers or user-experience engineers. That game’s first few moments are absolutely flawless. Even for a small child, it teaches you every single thing you need to learn in the very first scene. An enemy walks towards Mario he has to jump over or die; it’s positioned in a way that the player is likely going to accidentally smack one of the signature “?” blocks from the series, producing a power-up mushroom that the level geometry encourages them to collide with; Mario grows bigger and can now break blocks with his head.

That’s how you Play Mario, explainable with examples, over in literally 10 seconds max, and comprehensible to a five year old. The entire game is just permutations on this idea. Virtually all videogames continue to struggle to be this elegant with their user tutorials even many decades on.

All this was well and good, but remember: We want secrets.

Because of how it’s programmed, Mario Bros is LOADED with crazy, seemingly impossible stuff sitting beneath the surface if you dig a bit. We had literally nothing else to do, so as kids we dug.

Also, no internet + very localized data pool (just us) = conspiracy theories like woah.

Rumors abounded. There was supposedly a way to get “A hundred lives” by bouncing off a turtle shell in some stair blocks in level 1-3. This was heard through tertiary communications with a friend of a friend’s brother’s uncle who was super good at Mario, but it was all we had to go on and collectively we’d never made it past Word 5, except for one guy who was on a soda binge one night and made it all the way to “the snow level” none of us had ever seen before. We weren’t sure we believed him. He talked about it the way some of our family members talked about ‘Nam.

We burned an entire weekend trying that stupid 100-lives turtle trick. We reset that level so many times.

We never quite got it, and at about seven years old I got my first taste of a group effort collapsing under frustration and mismanagement.

It also collectively blew our minds out of our skulls when one of our group’s older brothers came home, saw four exhausted seven and eight year olds bickering about a turtle coughing up extra lives, immediately deduced what we were trying to do, and then effortlessly snatched the controller out of my hands and performed the 100-lives turtle trick like he could do it in his sleep.

Turns out we’d spent hours and hours and hours attempting it in the wrong spot, and none of us had thought to question our initial location to try the trick. If we’d moved it a couple screens to the right we’d probably have beaten the game atop our giant stack of extra Marios by now.

Again! Great lesson for project management that got dropped on my head before I was even remotely old enough to get what had happened.

Whatever; we’d instantly stopped paying attention to anything else, because the 100-lives trick had yielded something far more unexpected and bizarre. We’d resumed playing with our giant extra lives pool and immediately died to test it out. Normally, you get a black field with a graphic of Mario on it, then “x <Number of Lives>” to show you how many you had left.

We’d never gone past, like four. Turns out once you go past nine, weird stuff begins to happen.

Crowns, letters, what can charitably be described as “melting ice blocks”, and other random symbols began to appear on the lives screen.

Fascinated by this, we decided to try to see what else would show up, but were warned by the older brother to “not go over 100”.

“Why?”
“You die.”

Turns out he wasn’t kidding. With no way to tell where our lives counter was currently at, we tried to eyeball it while replicating the lives trick now that we knew how to do it correctly. We’d try to give Mario about 10 lives, then suicide him into the nearest pit and study the resulting symbols to try to glean their meaning. We took notes.

And, of course, we screwed it up completely. As I’d find out later, the game stores your available extra lives as a value of 1 to 128. If you roll that over, the game reads it as NULL and zeroes it out to avoid a crash, effectively giving you zero lives and thus triggering the Game Over script.

That’s the science. To us, it was mysticism. Here was some forbidden knowledge, a cheat code that may or may not have been intentionally placed there, but push it too far and you lose everything.

And that was just the lives counter. Eventually we discovered that it was, in fact, possible to Jump the Flagpole, but all that was on the other side was a barren wasteland you were trapped in until you died of the timer running out. We spent an entire summer trying to track down a “chocolate factory” that was supposedly hidden in the game, and instead stumbled across the far-weirder Minus World, which was so unexpected that it actually disturbed one of our players badly enough that she left the room, convinced we were “breaking it” and were doing some kind of irreparable damage playing where we shouldn’t be.

She was so disturbed by the unexpected behavior of the game that she put the controller down and straight left the room in tears.

Pretty heady stuff for someone who wasn’t even ten: http://www.mariowiki.com/Minus_World

The rest is history, pretty much. I went from staring wide-eyed at the Minus World for the first time to having stacks and stacks of beta builds of popular games because it’s part of what I do for my job now. It’s been great, and has given me the opportunity to see the intersection of technology and art develop from the front row.

And also from behind the stage. There’s a few weird little easter eggs I’ve left planted in some games I’ve worked on over the years hoping to pique some kid’s curiosity for how the systems actually work. No idea if anyone’s ever found any or if they’ve ever had the intended function but it’s a fun thought.