This is his second lucky break of the weekend. A friend recommended he go to this sci-fi convention; she said it would be good for networking. Mark wouldn’t mind having one of his illustrations on a trading card, or a rule book, or, who knows, one of those fantasy novels he used to read in high school.

So he shows up to the convention on Friday. Someone notices his work—his pencil landscapes that look hand-painted—, they invite him to join in the art show, he does, two days later he wins first place. That’s his first lucky break. The second is this guy, Gary, coming over to him, praising his work, asking him to ‘audition’ for a video game job.

“Could you come over to the Ranch for an interview?” Gary insists.

Mark reads the card again and stops for a second to think what to say next. He needs a job, after all. “I’d be happy to come over to do anything at all there but… I don’t know the first thing about video games. I never even touched a computer.”

“That’s alright,” Gary replies, “we’ve had better luck teaching artists how to program than the other way around. I’m not worried about that part.”

Driving back home, Mark tries to make sense of what just happened. On his first weekend—on his first serious attempt at becoming a professional illustrator—he’s offered to interview for a role that he didn’t even know existed, but that now sounds like a dream job—one that he’s terribly unqualified for. Later that night, he calls his parents and learns his father has just bought a personal computer. That’s his third lucky break.

“What are you doing with this thing, anyway?” Mark is sitting in front of the computer, skimming the manual. The cover reads Atari 520ST. “The school made a deal for us to get them at half price. They say we should get computer-literate if we want to have a job in five years.” The voice comes through the doorway, then his father, leaning on the frame. “I figured I could use it for writing, but they have a different brand at school, so I can’t print my files there. And I’m not buying a printer, so I don’t see the point. You can have it if you want.”

“Let’s see if I can get the job, first.” Mark keeps on reading. “It says there should be a drawing program for this. NeoChrome. Let’s try it out.” It takes them about 20 minutes to find the disk and open the program—their first project since his father taught him how to change his oil—then Mark switches to the NeoChrome manual. Another half hour later, he’s dropping little green dots over a blue background. His hand feels like a claw as he holds that little mouse. Whenever a connection sparks between the image on the screen and the image in his brain, he jerks to grab a pencil, a phantom limb of his. This machine won’t let him forget his body.

For a few evenings, Mark secludes himself in his old high school bedroom, getting familiar with the computer and its painting program. He puts together a little African hut picture and teaches himself to reproduce it, over and over, from a blank page. He repeats it one last time at Skywalker Ranch, a few days later, to survive his interview.

Mark walks out of the garage and meets Gary on the porch. Gary shows him around the Stable House, introducing everyone in the Games Group, and takes him to his desk. He’ll be sitting next to Gary and across the hall from Ron and David, the programmers. Mark notices there are not one but two different computers on his desk. And neither looks like the Atari he knows.

“That’s a Commodore 64,” points Gary, “and that’s a DOS PC. We’ve been transitioning from C64 to DOS. In fact, your first job will be porting the backgrounds of our new game. You’ll notice these are, uh, a bit… clunky, when it comes to graphics. Especially that one,” he points at the PC.

Mark feels like throwing up.

“I know, it’s a lot,” Gary laughs. “Look, the only thing you need to know about this one is how to run the game. As for this one… You’ll mostly just be using DPaint.” Nobody around here really knows what they are doing, Gary reassures him, not even the programmers. They are all just trying to figure out what it means to tell a story with a computer. What a video game worthy of LucasFilm would be. There are no experts at that. “An artist’s perspective is what we expect you to bring to the table. The tools, you’ll figure out. They change all the time, anyway.”

They spend the next hour fiddling with Deluxe Paint II, the drawing program for the PC. It’s like NeoChrome but better, or so Gary says. Mark notes the colors are fewer and uglier than the ones he saw on the Atari. “Oh, yeah. Those are the colors of your nightmares, starting tonight.”

After lunch, Ron sits with Mark to play Maniac Mansion, his B-horror adventure game. He shows Mark how to move around, how to talk with other characters, how to solve puzzles to make progress. Maniac Mansion is a blueprint of the kind of work they are trying to do. There’s a new game they’ve been working on, David’s game, Zak MacKracken, but Ron says Maniac Mansion is better for getting started. It’s best if Mark spends a couple of days getting familiar with it. His impostor syndrome kicks in again; he’s no gamer, not even an arcade player. “That’s perfect,” Ron says. “We want to build something that just about anyone can pick up and have fun with.”

Mark leaves the office with sore eyes from the computer screen and a headache from all the names and images shoved into his brain. He’s relieved that no one’s around to see him pull his Honda out of the underground garage. He slows down as he drives by the Main House, where they had lunch that day, a new building made to look old—period-specific old. Just like the one they put in the game. He circles by an artificial lake, a barn, a vineyard. This little valley is as otherworldly as any of his fantasy landscapes. As a shot from Star Wars.

His first assignment is to port Zak MacKracken's Commodore64 backgrounds to the EGA PC. David hands him a description of each location in the game. They call them rooms even though some are outdoors—outer space, even. Each one consists of a short description and a list of “hotspots”, the things the player can interact with: objects, doors, that kind of thing. He has to make sure those remain visible on the new backgrounds. Other than the list of rooms, the only design document is a huge chart posted on a wall, a sort of storyboard for programmers. Mark can’t make sense of it—or the game, for that matter. Zak MacKracken is bigger and more ambitious than Maniac Mansion; the work seems more interesting but the game is undecipherable to Mark.

At first, he tries working from the original C64 bit pictures, but that complicates things. Both are 16-color systems, but not the same 16 colors, so swapping palettes is pixel Whac-A-Mole. He needs to reproduce them from scratch. He sketches in his notebook, plots a grid in graph paper, and tapes acetate sheets to his monitor—anything to delay the moment when he has to move to the computer, where nothing flows, all so clumsy and rigid and LEGO-like.

Then there’s the palette: black, dark gray, light gray, white, dark blue, light blue, cyan, yellow, mustard brown, dark red, poppy red, peach, magenta, acid-hot pink, grass green, and acid-chartreuse. Always the same suffocating 16 colors for anything he needs to draw. He has to ponder carefully what colors to “spend”, an early decision that constraints the rest of his choices: the scene composition, the mood, what’s shown, what’s hinted. There’s no room for impulse or experimentation, everything has to follow a plan. Despite his Digital Artist title, his job doesn’t seem much concerned with art. The only creativity is in subverting the tools, working around them, against them, exploiting their limitations.

“Coppola,” says David. “Coppola, of course,” Gary concurs. “The Rolling Stones.” “Wait, all of them?” “Hmm. Mick Jagger. And the drummer, I guess.” “I missed them. I did see Huey Lewis.” “Yup. We played softball with the band.”

It’s Mark’s third week and, for the first time, he catches a glimpse of George Lucas. They usually only see him at the restaurant when he has visits. Gary and David are listing all the famous people they saw at lunch. Today it’s Spielberg.

“You’ll understand, of course,” David turns to Mark, “that, while it may seem as if they were right there across the room, we are not breathing the same air. We’re worlds apart.”

“Galaxies,” Gary suggests.

“Galaxies apart, thank you. They are holograms, like that Leia message on the first one. We can see them but they don’t see us.”

“Under no circumstances should we be noticed by Lucas.” “Or one of his guests.” “Or any film-related people.” “And especially not Lucas.”

The owner doesn’t care for video games. The existence of the games division is a sort of corporate accident, a spin-off of the Graphics Group prompted by a frustrated collaboration with Atari. And the fact that they got to stay while the Graphics Group—now called Pixar—was sold to Steve Jobs, is another corporate accident. They’re a rounding error, the last hackers standing, the only division totally unrelated to filmmaking—A kind of intruder. So the idea is to make themselves invisible, not to remind George Lucas that they exist, that he still owns this little video game studio, that they are spending his money and, much worse, taking up his precious space.

“Our man Steve, on the other hand, is our biggest fan,” David points his fork to Spielberg. “You’ll be seeing a lot of him.”

“This is like an amusement park to him. He’s more into it than Lucas, I think.” “He’d probably live here if he wasn’t busy, you know, churning out blockbusters.” “Did you know he used to call Ron for Maniac Mansion hints?” “So yeah, I bet he’ll get involved in one of the games sooner than later.” “An Indy game, most likely.” “When the tech is good enough.” “And when they get back the license.” “Right, when we get the license.”

That part Mark already knows, that he learned in his first week: LucasFilm Games doesn’t have the rights to make LucasFilm games. No Indiana Jones, no Star Wars. Some toy company holds the license. Instead, they are expected to come up with original ideas, something that is both a blessing and a curse: they have creative freedom but they must live up to the Lucas name: “Stay small, be the best, don’t lose any money,” Gary proclaims.

“And don’t embarrass George.”

The mouse, the pixels, the 16-color palette, the hotspots: those are the constraints he has to work with. One trick he discovered early on—a hack, programmers would say—is that, when he arranges the pixels in a checkerboard pattern, they will bleed and blend as he zooms them out on the screen. Much like the eyes finish the job as one steps back from an impressionist painting, the monitor melts the pixel mosaic into something richer than what that dull EGA palette could ever project. At first, this is just an accidental observation, he doesn’t make much of it. It’s only when he starts working on a new batch of Zak backgrounds that he finds himself thinking about those mixed pixels again.

This section of the game takes place on Mars, a location Mark finds very provocative. The acid EGA palette seems strangely fitting there. He owes no loyalty to the muddy C64 backgrounds and he need not abide by reality, either: he’s safely into sci-fi territory. He realizes he can weaponize the pixel-blending artifact and turn this into one of his fantasy landscapes.

Drawing from Red Rock and Grand Canyon photos, he easily settles on a composition: a fiery desert, a rocky horizon, and a slightly displaced pale sun. It’s the palette that gives him the most work, hours of trial-and-error. He needs the right color combinations and the right density of interleaved pixels for each figure, each boundary. He wants the image to jump out of the screen; he wants the sky and the sun and the ground to bleed into each other distinctly—the sun to set the sky on fire and the earth to bed the ashes.

It’s not the original C64 background, the EGA palette, or the hotspots list that dictates his work. It’s not what he pictured in his head. It’s the braid: each pixel born out of its predecessor, each one birthing the next. Little squares boiling with possibility, with no purpose but to carry his intent.

For once, he doesn’t feel constrained by his material. He’s so free that the work becomes free in turn. He tamed it into rebelling and becoming something other than what he set out to produce, something better than what he could have imagined. It’s then, when the work speaks for itself, that he knows. This may not be art, not yet, but it’s better than anything he did and anything he’s seen on a computer screen. There’s the spark. This is the direction, that’s where he needs to go.

Mark walks towards the door, then turns. “I can’t leave yet, I haven’t finished packing.” He looks at his desk. “I should put all this stuff in the box.”

He picks up a pile of sketchbooks. “They are labeled by month and year.” He puts the pile of sketchbooks in the box.

He picks up a worn-out DPaint 2 manual. “There’s a picture of an Egyptian mask on the cover.” He puts the worn-out DPaint 2 manual in the box.

He picks up a set of colored pencils. “I hand-picked these myself, one for each of the 16 EGA colors. I guess I won’t be needing them anymore.” He puts the set of colored pencils in the trash bin.

He picks up a Sam & Max issue. “My favorite.” He puts the Sam & Max issue in the box.

He picks up an Indiana Jones action figure. “Indy.” He puts the Indiana Jones action figure in the box.

He picks up a Chewbacca action figure. “Chewie.” He puts the Chewbacca action figure in the box.

He picks up a Sleeping Beauty reference book. “I never bothered returning this to the library.” He puts the Sleeping Beauty reference book in the box.

He picks up a signed Loom box. “It’s signed by The Professor. I signed another copy for him.” He puts the signed Loom box in the box.

He picks up the box. “This box is too full, I can’t carry it like this.” He puts the box back on the desk. He walks towards the door, then turns. “I can’t leave yet, I haven’t finished packing.” He looks at the desk. “Neat.” He looks at the desk drawer. “Neat.” He opens the desk drawer. He looks at the open desk drawer. “There’s a piece of rope here.” He picks up the piece of rope. “This might come in handy.” He looks at the open desk drawer. “It’s empty.” He uses the piece of rope on the box. “Much better.” He picks up the box. He walks out.

The Honda Civic drives out of the underground garage and turns around the Stable House. Lake Ewok glows like a dithered mirror. The car passes by the barn and the corral then drives away from the security kiosk and onto the main road. A tall tree goes by, followed by two short ones. Then two short trees go by, followed by a tall one. Then two short trees go by, followed by a tall one. Then there are no more trees, just hills and grass and road. The hills smooth down into a plain, Californian unlikely, and the flat darker blue sky grows naked in turn.

The Honda proceeds and the road proceeds but then ends abruptly, like an abandoned flooring job. The car rides on over generic green grass for a while, approaching an edge, moving out of the picture. But not all of it. Halfway out, it freezes. I can still make out the trunk and the glass, and the corner of a tire, sitting there, stationary.