SEAMUS BLACKLEY OPENED HIS NOTEBOOK carefully, but not carefully enough. A floppy disk slid out and hit the floor with a soft slap. His eyes darted around the hall and landed on the gaze of one of the bigger kids, staring back at him with a smirk. The kid strode over and slapped Blackley on the back of the head. Blackley reached down, fetched the disk, and hurried to his next class.

This isn't good, he thought, heart pounding. His secret was out. He was a gamer.

"If you said that to somebody, you'd be mocked," he says. " That was the world. It wasn't yet the world of Mark Zuckerberg where the nerds won."

Blackley had carried his obsession with games since childhood. That obsession went beyond playing. The floppy disk he smuggled into school and through the corridors contained code for a game he'd been writing on a terminal connected to the PDP-11/34 mainframe to which his school had access. Playing games amounted to escaping to a safe place, but coding his own held even greater significance.

"I came from a catastrophically abusive home and was just looking to survive," he explains. "My mom broke my bones and cut me with knives. I got into making games because when I worked at a computer, it represented a world I could go into that didn't have the terrible things in my real world. Inside the microprocessor, I saw a place that could be molded into fantastical worlds with stories, gameplay, and adventures that were under my control."

Education was part of the key Blackley needed to unlock his means of escapism. He learned math to write more advanced games, only to discover that numbers made sense to him. Games were essential for his survival, but he never considered making them for a living. Math could take him places in the real world.

Blackley's aptitude for programming increased in parallel to his understanding of mathematics. In fifth grade, he and the other computer nerds who lurked in the New Mexico school's computer lab wrote Kojak, an irreverent little game where players had to trim hairs from a bald head while lice and dandruff mounted attacks. After the kids read about electronic mail in Scientific American, they developed their own email system. "That seemed so amazing to us. We wrote viruses and tried to infect other high schools. But there was no Internet, so it was all about modem hacking. It was an incredible, do-it-yourself world."

The only thing Blackley loved as much as writing code and video games was aviation. His eyes widened as he read about heroes like Patty Wagstaff, raised in Japan and employed as a shipwreck diver before she moved to Alaska and earned her private pilot's license in 1979. She continued her training and progressed to earning ratings on seaplanes and commercial aircraft. Then, to Blackley's amazement, she turned to stunts. In just two years, Wagstaff entered the Unlimited category, the most advanced level, and became a six-time member of the U.S. Aerobatic Team. In 1991, Wagstaff made history as the first woman to become U.S. National Aerobatic Champion. She defended her title in 1992 and 1993, then retired in 1996.

Naturally, Blackley knew the planes Wagstaff flew from top to bottom. Her bird of choice was the Extra 260: hand-built in 1986; praised for its perfect fusion of maneuverability, high performance, and beautiful design; able to roll 360 degrees per second and climb at a rate of 4,000 feet per minute; and made famous in 1991 as the aircraft Wagstaff flew to championship glory. Later, she moved on to the Extra 300L and continued her track record for flying tight and dazzling routines.

Blackley aspired to do more than read about the feats of daring pilots like Wagstaff. "I always wanted to fly airplanes. Always. I was that kid who, when we'd get near the airport and I'd smell jet fuel, I'd get hyperactive. There was something that drew me to the three-dimensionality of that."

While Patty Wagstaff worked her way toward national competitions, Blackley wandered an academic landscape that overwhelmed him with destinations. He entered Tufts University to study electrical engineering but was more interested in touring Boston with his jazz band. Far short of credits going into his junior year, he landed a summer job as an apprentice in a lab that specialized in nuclear magnetic resonance. Physics, he realized, dovetailed with his love of flying, games, and programming. He changed his major to physics and took nine classes a semester to rack up credit hours in record time.

In 1990, a year before Wagstaff became a U.S. champion, Blackley graduated Summa cum Honore en Tesis and worked at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory building physics accelerators. Located just outside Chicago, Fermilab operated as part of the U.S. Department of Energy. When Congress pulled funding for the Super Collider particle accelerator Blackley needed, he wandered yet again.

Blackley had no shortage of funds or free time. He was an experienced pilot and never ceased to feel amazed when he soared among the clouds. "The thing I really love is soaring," he explains. "You make some surfaces, put a seat in it, and now you can fly because of your brain."

Like programming games, flying had become an escape because it required all of his effort and focus. "All the concerns that seem so important about the world--all of these people and their problems, their need to get ahead of you, or take something from you, or get something from you; your need to take care of someone else--all of that stuff has to go away because you need to concentrate on the fact that you're doing something extraordinary. It's therapeutic, it's thought provoking, it's thrilling, and it's beautiful. How can you not love flying?"

In 1992, his shared passions led him to a job advertisement on a bullet board for a programmer at Blue Sky Productions, later renamed Looking Glass Studios. Blackley immediately felt at home among game designers such as Doug Church, who had dropped out of MIT to join Looking Glass on Ultima Underworld, a first-person RPG heralded for being the first roleplaying game to feature true 3D environments. (Ultima Underworld also claims to be the first FPS to map textures on environments, a feature in id Software's Wolfenstein 3D, the release of which followed Looking Glass's game by several months. Id Software co-founder John Romero says Church got the idea for texture mapping during a phone call with Romero. Either way, Ultima Underworld's earlier release carries considerable weight.)

Ultima Underworld and Thief, a medieval game where players use stealth to sneak around and eliminate targets, gave Looking Glass a well-earned reputation as a maker of deep simulations, or immersive sims. Blackley's own project aimed to carry that reputation to literal new heights. Bringing to bear his experience as a physicist and pilot, he captained development on Flight Unlimited, a flight sim in which players control real aircraft to perform aerial stunts and advanced maneuvers--a premise influenced by Blackley's awe for Patty Wagstaff.

Blackley got the idea for Flight Unlimited in 1992 after declaring that other flight sims failed to recreate the experience of flying. He wrote a game engine based on real-time computational fluid dynamics. Fellow programmers Tim Day and Eric Twietmeyer coded the game's terrain renderer, and the team received input from Michael Goulian, an aerobatics pilot who endorsed the game's realism.

Looking Glass self-published Flight Unlimited, a conscious decision made by the studio's managers to build up its status as a publisher/developer. The result, as described by Doug Church, was a critical and commercial hit that felt like several disparate programs tied loosely together. The game testified to Blackley's management style. Rather than hover over the shoulders of his developers, Blackley trusted them to complete their work and focused on his own tasks. He was known to make decisions while preparing gourmet meals for colleagues he invited to dinner and was always open to input from others. Whether he agreed or disagreed with their suggestions, he never made them feel foolish or embarrassed for approaching him.

Flight Unlimited premiered in twelfth place on the NPD Group's sales charts when the game released in June 1995. Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.1 claimed the number-one spot. Even so, Flight Unlimited sold over 780,000 copies by 2002, making it a commercial success for Looking Glass, and received recognition as a finalist in PC Magazine's Annual Awards for Technical Excellence.

Although outsold by Microsoft's juggernaut, Flight Unlimited was considered the superior simulation. The difference lay in Blackley's physics computations, which produced aircraft that handled so similarly to their real-world counterparts that any differences felt negligible. "Since Looking Glass incorporates true physics-based paradigms into its models, these planes behave more like real aircraft than any simulator we have seen," wrote PC Magazine's editors. "With its dynamic flight model and impressive graphics, this is the simulator by which all others will be judged."

Blackley, Church, and the rest of Looking Glass took pride in their accolades. There was something special, they knew, about being pioneers. Not in being first to use texture mapping in a game that beat a competitor to market, or the first to use real physics in a flight simulator--but in being the first to solve a complex problem.

"It's incredibly human," Blackley says, "and it's incredibly hard, facing that uncertainty. In retrospect, it's like, yeah, those were great times. But every time you're in that situation, it's super-terrifying. You're staring into a void. That's one of the most terrifying things human beings can do. In that way, it's like flying: Doing something so far outside of what you should be doing. It's a crucible for human character."

Blackley learned another life lesson in 1994, two years into the development of Flight Unlimited. Ace flier Patty Wagstaff, whom Blackley had met and asked to consult on the game, invited him to a black-tie event scheduled for that March. Her trusty Extra 360 would be put on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum next to Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Vega, and Wagstaff would love for him to attend. Blackley was stunned. "All these famous people from aviation were going to be there. All my heroes I'd read about obsessively in magazines. This was around the same time I was into flying aerobatics and crashing into trees."

Ahead of the event, Blackley rented a tuxedo and flew into Washington, D.C., with his girlfriend. Dressed to the nines, they entered the Smithsonian and gazed at a pantheon of flight heroes. Blackley gathered his courage and tried to introduce himself. All of them shunned him. "Nobody gave a shit who we were. I was almost in tears. It was horrible. I got invited to this thing not realizing that Patty was doing me a really big favor, but it was all these insiders who already knew each other. Now I understand what that is, but you don't at that age."

Heartbroken, Blackley walked back to their hotel with his girlfriend. Her grip on his hand tightened. He stopped and faced her. "Don't be sad," she said. "Just remember never to treat young people like this when you're in that position. Just remember that."

STILL IN HIS EARLY TWENTIES, BLACKLEY was self-aware enough to know he'd gone from calamity to calamity. From an abusive home, to a wayward college student, to a physicist whose funding had been pulled, to a game developer who led the team responsible for the most realistic flight simulator to date, to once again looking for work after Looking Glass's next two forays into self-publishing brought the company to financial ruin.

The thing was, he had snatched success from the jaws of each endeavor's calamitous finale. Flight Unlimited gave him enough clout to land at DreamWorks Interactive, where he would executive-produce a game based on Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park movie franchise. From the moment he entered the studio, he knew it would be chaotic in its own way.

"I show up on the first day, and someone said, 'Hey, this is Stephen Spielberg.' Hi. 'You're going to be in the office next to him.' Oh. Okay," Blackley recalls.

Blackley's charge was Jurassic Park: Trespasser, a first-person action game and a sequel to 1997's The Lost World film. Players control Anne, who finds herself the only survivor of a plane crash on an island where genetically engineered dinosaurs roam. Though Blackley didn't realize it at the time this venture had all the ingredients for another calamitous failure.

"First, I was an idiot. I'd come from Looking Glass where our shit smelled like roses. It was an environment where people beat on each other to the point where the quality stayed high. I went off to do my own thing, and I had to learn how to do that without checks and balances. I wasn't a great producer and manager at that point, but I thought I was."

Along with hubris he could not confront until later, Blackley led a team inexperienced in game development. That they would cut their teeth on a licensed game, especially one based on a globally successful film, amplified his concerns about leading such a green crew. "If you release a movie before it's done, it doesn't crash the theater. They didn't know that."

Blackley and the team started off strong. They resolved to build in Trespasser a gaming experience that, like Flight Unlimited, would elevate itself above anything that had come before it. Blackley led the effort to build a robust physics system that worked well in prototypes, and audio engineers produced chilling sounds like larger dinosaurs stomping around the island. The game's systems gelled well: Players could do things like roll barrels down hills, where they would collide with dinos at the bottom. If a dinosaur survived, it would let out a primal screech and charge up the hill toward players.

Then Blackley's fortunes changed. He went from getting to know Spielberg's kids and playing with them in the hall outside their adjacent offices, to new management coming in and realigning the company's mission. "On any day, there'd be new drama. Plus, it was Hollywood. These guys would play politics and throw tantrums for measured reasons. I didn't get that."

As development progressed, Blackley convinced management to let him sign a deal with AMD, Intel's biggest competitor in designing computer processors. Blackley and his team would get innovative hardware and a financial boost for releasing the game by a certain date. That date came and went. DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg made a habit of screaming at Blackley so strenuously that the veins on his forehead would stand out. "That terrified me," he admits. "That's what caused me to ship Trespasser before it was ready."

Blackley aspired to make Trespasser an interactive sim in the lineage of Ultima Underworld and Flight Unlimited that stood on a strong technical foundation. The team created lush jungle environments full of places to explore and things for players to do such as confronting dinosaurs and solving puzzles. One of the big items on their wish list was to dispense with on-screen menus and instead display pertinent information on the character's body. When players look down, they see a tattoo on Anne's left breast. At launch, critics and players talked more about being able to look down and admire Anne's cleavage than they did the game's, organic interface.

"We tried a lot of stuff," Blackley remembers. "We put a watch on her wrist that had ammo counters and health on it. We had a tattoo on her arm. We had her say it to herself. We tried different tattoos. That tattoo happened to be where our current experiment was when we were forced to ship. It was that simple. It wasn't like we had the idea to have booby tattoos."

By the time Jurassic Park: Trespasser released in 1998, it was half-finished at best. Hoping to crest the marker of selling over one million copies, the game sold approximately 50,000 and became an instant commercial flop. Critics favored some aspects, such as the impressive-looking dinosaur models, but bashed the buggy nature of the release and its gameplay, concluding that the physics may have been impressive but performing even the simplest action felt like a hit-or-miss chore.

Blackley was devastated. "I'd tried to force this new gameplay into the world. I shipped a game that was the culmination of everything I believed about game design, that I'd done all this press on, that I was forced to ship in a broken state, that destroyed this team of people I loved. I wanted to go die somewhere. Honestly."

Everywhere Blackley turned, players, critics, and peers lambasted his project. He had come to DreamWorks believing himself untouchable, the physics genius who had created Flight Simulator. When bigshot directors, celebrities, and game developers visited DreamWorks, they would make a point of asking to see Trespasser so they could marvel at what had been described to them as a revolutionary physics engine. So many people asked Blackley to show them Trespasser that he had found it annoying.

Bruised and bloodied by Trespasser's reception, he was forced to admit that he had brought most of the backlash on himself. "I was an impossible jerk back then in a lot of ways, but it was really hard. There are times in our lives when the universe comes to us and says, 'Those lessons you've been putting off? You're going to learn them now.' That was one of those times."

Worse, Blackley believed his failure had hurt the industry he loved. Because of Trespasser, he thought, anyone who heard the words "physics" and "video games" would dismiss any prospect of evolution in design by pointing to his failure. "It's terrible that we didn't finish that game because it could have been great. I still feel guilty about my part in impeding the process of game development in a way."

One afternoon, Blackley sat at his desk replaying his failures when his phone rang. He picked up and was amazed to hear the speaker on the other end introduce himself as Bill Gates. They had met once, Gates said. Blackley remembered. "He'd seen all the demos of the game. He was one of the financiers behind DreamWorks and I showed him these demos, and he tried to hire me when I was showing him these physics demos, and space-audio demos, and creatures walking around based on these physics."

Blackley had been unavailable the first time Gates tried to hire him. Now, he had few alternatives. "Maybe I'll ask him for a job and go hide out somewhere in Microsoft. That's what happened. I still had to interview with Mike Abrash and all these heavy hitter guys. I was put in charge of entertainment graphics for Windows, which was an amazing senior position for a brand-new guy. I was in the middle of the DirectX team."

THE CARAVAN MADE ITS WAY toward Semiahmoo, a resort just north of Seattle. Executives and managers piled out of vehicles and went inside, ready for a week of soaking in sights and debating the next wave of projects at Microsoft.

"I remember the retreat as being almost an excuse to talk about something a group of us were already talking about on the side," says Ed Fries, general manager of the games group.

Crowded in one room, approximately 40 executives listened as Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer proposed a new activity called Open Space. He gestured to a wall covered in slips of paper. Everyone was asked to take a piece of paper and write an industry, product, or technology they believed Microsoft should investigate. Then, executives put their paper back on the wall and stood next to it. One by one, they would announce their idea and provide background information. From there, executives formed groups by walking to individuals whose projects interested them.

Robbie Bach, then president of the consumer division, which encompassed everything from Ed Fries's games group to CD-ROM products like Encarta, was one of the higher-ups in attendance. "Pretty soon, it becomes clear that of all those topics, only six have critical mass. Everybody gathers around those topics and you walk off to talk about them. Rick Thompson proposed a topic: 'Should Microsoft do a video game console?'"

Thompson ran the company's hardware business, and had reason to believe Sony could be a threat to Microsoft's empire. A few weeks earlier, in a concert hall in Tokyo, over 1,500 journalists, game developers, and industry analysts had watched Sony President Norio Ohga, his soon-to-be-successor Nobuyuki Idei, Sony Computer Entertainment President Teruhisa Tokunaga, and Ken "Father of the PlayStation" Kutaragi summarize the company's achievements in gaming so far. At that stage, less than five years since the PlayStation launched in Japan, Sony had shipped 50 million consoles and sold over 430 million PlayStation games. It was time, Kutaragi said, to take the next step. Kutaragi announced Sony's next console, which would run on a technology called the Emotion Engine, and would be backwards-compatible with the first PlayStation's software.

Following the announcement, Newsweek ran a cover story on the PlayStation 2. Kutaragi gave an interview in which he proclaimed the PS2 would render visuals on par with movies boasting computer graphics. Further interviews by Sony executives increased Thompson's growing worry that Sony was poised to claim the fertile ground. "There are over a billion color TVs on the planet -- that's our market," said Phil Harrison, a vice president at Sony Computer Entertainment America. "That market will include other conventional forms of home-entertainment, and we see ourselves as a superset rather than a subset."

Bach and others joined Thompson's group. From there, the executives adjourned to rooms where beds had been pushed up against walls so everyone could stand around or sit on beds as they discussed the project at hand. Thompson floated the idea of creating a game console. It was uncharted territory for Microsoft, but a few internal developers were already at work.

Gates gave the go-ahead. "The idea that there would be a PC in the living room was a Microsoft dream, and one that didn't exist," Bach says. "When PlayStation 2 started pushing itself as a PC in the living room--which was really a marketing fabrication, but it's what Sony said--that got Microsoft's attention. The combination of this dream of expanding into a new market, and being in the living room instead of just the office, and the competitive threat of Sony came together at the same time."