Instead of avoiding the tough situations, he'd immediately create them, and immediately start learning how to handle the worst situation imaginable. Burrell was no longer attacking individual mutants, instead he was treating the whole swarm as one big target.īurrell may have lost that game and the next few, but it wasn't too long before he was really mastering the machine. He was doing really well, cutting through the swarm like the Grim Reaper's scythe. Then, while circling, he'd fire a burst pattern across the whole swarm, not needing to aim at individuals. He would circle around them again and again, and that would gather them into a densely clumped swarm. He'd already developed a technique for dealing with a whole mass of mutants. When Burrell's next turn came up I was surprised by how long his ship survived. Your ship is faster over the longer term, so you have to outrun them, establishing a gap, and only then do you have enough room to safely turn and fire at them. Mutants move so quickly over small distances that they seem to just jump on top of you. They move quicker, and with a different pace and pattern than the other aliens, so the normal evasive techniques don't work very well. Often a single mutant is enough to kill you. "He's not going to last long with a screen full of mutants!" "Burrell's not going to win this competition" I said to myself. He glanced in my direction with a grin on his face and said "Make a mess, clean it up!" and proceeded to dodge the swarm of angry mutants noisily chasing after him. He immediately shot all his humans! This was completely against the goal of the game! He didn't even go after the aliens, and when he shot the last human, they all turned to mutants and attacked him from all sides. We started up a new competition, and when Burrell's turn came up, he did something that stunned me. How could you gain some control in that environment? I'd seen Burrell and Andy innovate on all kinds of things, but I couldn't image how he could somehow step outside the box of a video game - the machine controlled the flow and dictated the goals. Andy came by my cube and said "You've got to come see what Burrell's doing with Defender." "How can you innovate with a video game?" I wondered. One day Burrell started doing something radical. "Gee, I can't even get through level 2! I guess it's time to get some sleep." Better to put in a bad performance on the defender game than mess up the current programming task, or start down the wrong path on some hardware design. The Defender machine was probably a pretty good objective measure of current mental capacity. You start the game with ten humans, and if the last one dies, all the aliens become mutants, and they swarm in on your ship from all sides.Īfter a while, surviving the first few game levels was pretty easy, unless you had been up all night programming or something. If an alien makes it to the top with a human, they consume him and become a vicious mutant, which attacks very aggressively. You control a ship and have to shoot the aliens, either before they grab a human, or during their rise up to the top of the screen. The evil green aliens drop down from the top of the screen and randomly pick up your humans, and try to bring them back up to the top of the screen. The goal of Defender is to defend your humans from abduction by aliens. This gave us opportunities to refine our skills, learn the other guy's technique, and show off our prowess. We were roughly equal in skill level, so as we'd take turns at the controls we could watch how the other player was doing, and have a gauge for who was ahead. We'd challenge each other, in two or three player competitions, taking turns at the video game machine, and compare techniques and high scores. While playing Defender one day I got some great insight into how Burrell accelerates his own learning process.Īndy, Burrell and I had a standing competition playing on the Defender machine. We also learned a lot about our coworkers and how they excel during competition. We found that competitive play gave us a jolt of adrenaline, and a refreshed mind-set when we resumed work. In the center of Macintosh work area in Bandley 3 we had a ping pong table, a nice stereo system, and a Defender video game machine. Working 90 hours a work week requires frequent, and highly effective, work breaks.
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