As every person lucky enough to get old(er) realizes, it’s pretty remarkable how quickly time passes. It was pretty close to exactly 25 years ago that my friend Daniel said he’d just met the most interesting founder and was trying to decide if he was nuts or not. I was at Pacific Coast Power and Light, coming off of Road Rash 64 and simultaneously helping build out the foundations for what would become MX 2002 as well as an ultimately cancelled PS2 FPS title we were calling The Banishers.

My then wife and Dan went to college together and we were catching up after an apartment move. He had signed an NDA, so he suggested I try to interview so that we could discuss it.

That evening, I sent my first email to Philip Rosedale.

Come on up

Philip responded immediately with the kind of energy that would make him such a joy to partner with. He said anyone Dan recommended must be pretty good (truth) and suggested I come on up to San Francisco and see what they’re working on.

A few days later I did.

At the time, Linden Lab was in an alley — Linden Street — in San Francisco, between Dark Garden and a body shop. Three stories of light industrial space with advanced for its time camera pointing at you when you rang the bell.

As you entered, there was a big open garage space to your right — the eventual parking disasters that occurred in that space were many — with a conveyor belt running up to the second floor. Steep steps were right in front of you, lined with both whiteboards and posters that at first looked like lame motivational posters (my first thought was “how lame is that!”) until you realized they were from Despair and were absolutely brilliant.

It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.

At the top of the stairs was a wall hiding…something, Tessa at the reception desk (likely arguing with some supplier about not paying shipping), and a scattering of desks. Philip immediately walked over and it all began.

The rig

Meeting Philip for the first time is such a vivid memory. The intensity, the engagement as if you are the only person on Earth he wants to talk to, the obvious, palpable brilliance. But what struck me more than any of that was a moment when his wife called and he had to talk her through moving a motorcycle at their condo. I’ve watched many people be impatient in moments like this (ok, I mean me) — instead he brought calm, care, attention, and detail.

How interesting I thought.

After signing my life away, Philip and Andrew gave me the tour of the rig. Strain gauges for low latency. Fixed positions to reduce dissonance with proprioception. A projected view onto a wraparound screen.

It was awesome! I’ve spent a lot of the last 40 years rendering scenes on computers and until some specialty VR hardware at Stanford and Oculus, this was the most amazing interactive visualization I’d experienced. Philip went on to demo the partially working arm — nobody ever really got that working because the hidden challenge of the rig was always that lacking proprioception, you needed tight-loop visual feedback to control it — but I was already hooked.

Because my mind was racing with the possibilities of the world.

A tiled plane of possibilities

Linden Lab didn’t just have the rig, they had also connected four servers and were experimenting with drawing across them. It didn’t work yet, the graphics were barely there, but it was such a different approach to computing and world building than the FPS and MMO architectures I was familiar with.

What if you could use this to make games?

I’d pretty much lost the thread of my mission at this point — that night I would tell Daniel that while Philip might very well be nuts and I was in.

Guess there should be an interview

Then the interview began. And by interview, I mean the coin problem (oh, back when interviews were fun if wildly inaccurate — remind me to cover the boat problem I asked in return sometime) followed by talking about games, technology, the navy, nuclear power, boson fusion, compression, software development, and how we thought about problem solving.

Hours pass

At the end, Philip asked “so, when do you want to start?”

“When can I start?”

Notice, jpeg, and height fields

Walked out the door. We negotiated the next day and then I told Don I was leaving. He didn’t think that was an ideal choice, but he wished me well. During my two weeks, I bought a new PC (with a brand new GeForce 2, finally leaving 3Dfx behind after building a fun connection to them both on Armageddon and subleasing from them during PCP&L’s early days) and wrote a streaming, jpeg compressed renderer for height fields with interactive height deformation.

I walked in the door on my first real day, showed Philip how quickly and easily we could fly around a changing world.

We were off to the races

That code might still be lurking in the open source viewer. It was a quirky jpeg implementation, because experimentally height fields were so much lower frequency than most images that the quantization I chose was atypical.

It was a really important lesson. Go to jobs that you’re writing code on your time off to bring into work with you.