CHAPTER 6: New Game Studios
On Tuesday, March 24th, instead of going to the campus cafeteria during his free hour, George walked to the San Francisco Public Library on Larkin Street.
The San Francisco Public Library was an enormous Beaux-Arts building that smelled of old paper and institutional silence. George went up to the third floor, to the business and commercial law section, and sat at a wooden table with a stack of books that would have frightened any twenty-one-year-old with a social life.
How to Form an LLC in California. Guide to Trademark Registration. Intellectual Property for Small Businesses. Taxes for New Businesses. George flipped through them with the speed of someone who knows what they are looking for and only needs to confirm the details.
In his previous life, he had watched Ubisoft's lawyers handle all of this with the ease of someone filling out forms by trade. It had never fallen to him to do it on his own. He had never needed to. Now, sitting in a public library with a notebook and a pen, he understood for the first time what it meant to start something from scratch: it was not just about creating, it was about bureaucratizing. Filling out forms. Paying fees. Following processes that existed to protect people but that felt like obstacles when all you wanted was to sit down and program.
But the obstacles were necessary. Without a legal entity, he couldn't register trademarks. Without trademarks, anyone could take the name of his game and use it. Without legal protection, the first publisher who saw his product could copy it with impunity. George knew all of this because he had witnessed the legal horrors of the entertainment industry for two decades. He knew what happened when you didn't protect yourself.
He took meticulous notes.
* * *
Registering an LLC in California cost seventy dollars. The form was called Articles of Organization and was sent to the California Secretary of State in Sacramento. It could be done by mail. The process took between four and six weeks.
Registering a federal trademark cost two hundred and forty-five dollars per mark, through the United States Patent and Trademark Office. That could also be done by mail. George needed at least two marks: "New Game Studios" as the studio name and "Castlevania" as the franchise name. Possibly a third for "Symphony of the Night" as the game's subtitle. That was between five hundred and seven hundred and thirty-five dollars in trademarks alone.
George did the math in the margin of his notebook. Seventy for the LLC plus seven hundred and thirty-five for the trademarks: eight hundred and five dollars. On top of that, the envelopes, copies, and postage. Rounding up: about eight hundred and fifty dollars for New Game Studios and Castlevania to legally exist in the world.
Eight hundred and fifty dollars was a lot of money for a student with twelve hundred in the bank. It meant burning through more than two-thirds of his liquid savings before writing a single line of code. It meant depending on the student loan to survive the coming months.
George looked at the numbers. He looked at them for a long time.
In his previous life, this was the moment he would have backed down. Where he would have calculated the risks, weighed the options, and decided it was more prudent to wait. "Wait" was the favorite word of the George who had fallen asleep in Montreal: wait until he had more money, wait until he had more time, wait until conditions were perfect. And conditions were never perfect, so the wait never ended.
George closed the notebook, returned the books to the shelf, and went downstairs to the ground floor where there was a stationery shop.
He bought a large letter-size envelope, bond paper sheets, and postage stamps. He went back up to the third floor, borrowed one of the library's public computers, a beige PC running Windows 95 that made a noise like an industrial fan, and began filling out the Articles of Organization form.
* * *
The form was deceptively simple. One page. A few blank lines.
Name of the LLC: New Game Studios LLC.
Purpose of the company: Development and publication of interactive entertainment software.
Registered agent: George R. Hightower.
Address: The Fulton Street apartment. His thirty-five square meter studio with a futon, a beige PC, and a notebook full of dreams.
George looked at the printed form. One sheet of paper that would turn an idea into a legal entity. That would give New Game Studios a tax identification number, an existence before the government of the state of California, a place in the business registry among thousands of other LLCs created each year, most of which would disappear before their second anniversary.
He signed on the line at the bottom. The twenty-one-year-old George's signature: rounder, more open than the one he would develop over the years, as life slowly taught him to protect himself behind increasingly closed strokes.
He put the form in the envelope. He wrote the address of the California Secretary of State in Sacramento. He stuck on the stamps.
And there, standing in front of the mailbox at the San Francisco Public Library, envelope in hand and heart pounding as if he were about to jump out of a plane, George Hightower dropped the envelope into the slot.
The envelope fell inside with a soft, anticlimactic sound, completely unworthy of what it represented.
New Game Studios was on its way.
* * *
The trademarks were more complicated.
George spent Wednesday and Thursday researching the registration process at the USPTO. The form was longer, more detailed, and required a specific description of the goods or services associated with each mark. He had to choose the correct classes from the international classification system: Class 9 for entertainment software, Class 41 for entertainment services.
He filled out three applications by hand, in the most legible handwriting he could produce. One for "New Game Studios" as a service mark for video game development. Another for "Castlevania" as an entertainment software trademark. A third for "Symphony of the Night" as a subtitle mark. In the description of use, he wrote that the marks would be used in connection with video game software for personal computers.
He attached a check for seven hundred and thirty-five dollars. His hand trembled as he signed it. It was more money than he had spent in a single payment in his entire student life.
At lunch with Claire that Wednesday, he mentioned none of this. They ate at a Thai place she had found on Kearny Street, and George listened to Claire talk about a promotion she was considering applying for at the bank: an administrative assistant position that paid better but meant longer hours. George told her to go for it. Claire looked at him with an expression that said she was not used to her brother offering career advice, but that she liked it.
Back home, he put the three applications in an envelope, sealed it, and dropped it in the mailbox on his street. Another envelope. Another soft sound. Another seven hundred and thirty-five dollars disappearing into the American postal system with the hope of coming back as legal protection.
His bank account now had a hundred and sixty-two dollars. Four days until his parents sent the monthly five hundred.
George sat on the futon in his apartment and looked at the ceiling. A hundred and sixty-two dollars, a rented apartment, a beige PC, and a notebook with the blueprints of a video game. That was how empires began. Or how bankruptcies began. The difference was in the execution.
* * *
On Friday, March 27th, George solved the compiler problem.
He needed Visual C++ 6.0. The version he had, 5.0, worked, but 6.0 brought significant improvements: a more robust debugger, better support for the latest versions of DirectX, a code editor that didn't seize up every time you opened a large file. It was the difference between working with an old hammer and a new one: both drove nails, but one destroyed your wrist.
The official price was five hundred dollars. Money George didn't have and couldn't spend even if he did. But he was at a university, and universities in 1998 were the largest distribution centers for unauthorized software in the Western world.
He asked Kevin Park after class.
"Hey, Kevin. Do you know where I can get a copy of Visual C++ 6.0?"
Kevin looked at him with the knowing smile CS students reserved for questions whose answers involved legally questionable activities.
"Do you want to buy it or do you want to have it?"
"Have it."
"Talk to Dave Chen, the guy in the network lab. He has a CD with the whole Visual Studio suite. He'll copy it for you for a dollar, the cost of a blank CD."
George found Dave Chen that same afternoon. A short guy with thick-framed glasses and three pens in his shirt pocket, who operated from a cubicle in the computer lab like a miniature black market. For a dollar, George left the lab with a CD-R marked in black marker that said "VS 6.0" and a feeling of criminal complicity that was completely out of proportion to what he had just done.
That night he installed Visual C++ 6.0 on his PC. The installation took twenty minutes and occupied nearly two hundred megabytes of the hard drive, which was an obscene amount of space for 1998. But when he opened the IDE for the first time, when he saw the clean code editor with its white background and syntax highlighting, when he compiled a test "Hello World" and watched it run without errors, George felt what a carpenter feels when he picks up a well-made tool: the certainty that with this, he could build something.
* * *
Saturday, March 28th, 1998. Exactly two weeks since George had woken up in this world.
He got up at seven. Showered. Made coffee. Sat in front of the PC. Opened Visual C++ 6.0. And created a new project.
Project name: Castlevania.
His fingers trembled over the keyboard for a second. Just one second. Then they began to move.
The first thing was the structure. George created the project folders with the meticulousness of someone who has maintained codebases of millions of lines and knows that early organization is the difference between a manageable project and a disaster. A folder for the engine. One for graphics. One for audio. One for game data. One for auxiliary tools.
The second thing was the entry point: the main function. The place where everything begins. George wrote the first lines: initialize Windows, create a 640 by 480 pixel window, configure DirectX for rendering, start the game loop. It was code he had written hundreds of times in his career, in different languages, for different engines, at different companies. But he had never written it for something of his own.
His fingers flew. Not with the frantic speed of youth but with the precise speed of experience. Every line was thought through. Every function had a clear name. Every variable was where it needed to be. George wrote 1998 code with the discipline of 2025: descriptive names instead of cryptic abbreviations, short functions that did one thing, comments that explained the why and not the what.
A programmer from 1998 looking at this code would have noticed something unusual. They would have seen patterns that didn't yet have names: something resembling what would years later be called a "decoupled game loop", where the game logic ran at a fixed speed independent of the rendering speed. They would have seen an entity system that separated data from behavior in a way nobody did in 1998 but that would become standard a decade later. They would have seen clean, organized, professional code coming from the hands of a third-year student.
But nobody was going to see this code. Not yet. For now, it was just George and the screen.
* * *
At eleven in the morning, after four hours of uninterrupted programming, George compiled for the first time.
The compiler chewed through the code for thirty seconds. It spat out three warnings and zero errors. George fixed the warnings, an implicit cast, an unused variable, a semicolon in an ambiguous position, and compiled again. Zero warnings. Zero errors.
He ran the program.
In the center of the screen, a black window appeared, 640 by 480 pixels. Nothing else. No graphics, no sound, no interaction. Just a black rectangle with the title "Castlevania" in the Windows title bar.
George stared at it.
A black rectangle. The most insignificant thing in the world. A first-year student could do this in an afternoon following a tutorial. There was nothing special about it, nothing impressive, nothing that justified the trembling George felt in his hands.
But it was not what it was. It was what it was going to be.
That black window was the first pixel of a castle that would stretch across hundreds of rooms. It was the first silence before a soundtrack that would make strangers cry. It was the first empty frame of a game where Alucard would walk, fight, explore, and finally face his father in a battle that would mean something more than winning or losing. Everything started here. Everything started with a black rectangle and a name in the title bar.
Castlevania.
George closed the window. Saved the project. Got up from the chair, went to the kitchen, and poured himself more coffee. His hands were no longer trembling.
* * *
The rest of the weekend was a programming marathon.
George implemented the game loop: the heart of any video game, the infinite cycle that reads the player's input, updates the state of the world, and draws the result on screen, sixty times per second. On the surface it was simple: a while loop that never ended. In practice it was where the magic lived. The speed of the loop determined whether the game felt smooth or choppy. The precision of the timing determined whether the controls responded instantly or with a delay the player felt in their bones without knowing why.
George implemented a fixed-step loop: the game logic updated exactly sixty times per second, regardless of how fast or slow the computer was. If the machine was fast, the extra frames were used to render more smoothly. If it was slow, the game sacrificed visual frames but kept the logic intact. It was a technique very few developers used in 1998, but George knew it was the correct one because he had seen the consequences of not using it: games that ran at double speed on new computers, games that froze on old machines, games where the physics broke because someone had tied the simulation to the framerate.
Then came the input system. Reading the keyboard through DirectInput, mapping keys to game actions, implementing an input buffer that stored the last few inputs to allow what would years later be called "input buffering": if the player pressed the jump button a fraction of a second before hitting the ground, the jump would execute anyway. An invisible detail that separated games that felt good from games that felt frustrating.
By Sunday night, George had a program that opened a 640 by 480 window, ran a game loop at a fixed 60 fps, read the keyboard, and drew a white rectangle that moved across the screen with the arrow keys.
A white rectangle moving across a black screen. That was all. But that rectangle responded instantly. It moved with a smoothness that George recognized in his bones as correct. When you pressed the right arrow, the rectangle moved right without a millisecond of delay. When you released it, it stopped dead. No unwanted inertia, no sliding, no that soapy feeling that poorly programmed games had.
George moved the rectangle back and forth for five minutes, like a child with a new toy. Right. Left. Up. Down. Diagonal. The rectangle obeyed with a precision that was almost musical.
It was not a game. It was not even the skeleton of a game. It was the skeleton of the skeleton. But it was his, it worked, and it felt right.
* * *
On Sunday he went for lunch with his parents, as every Sunday.
Margaret made pasta with meatballs. Richard was watching a basketball game on television and grunted a greeting when George walked in. Claire didn't come this time; she had plans with a friend.
During lunch, Margaret asked how classes were going. George said fine. Richard asked if he needed money. George said no, which was a white lie: he needed money desperately, but he was not going to ask for it. The monthly five-hundred-dollar transfer would arrive in two days and that would keep him afloat until he could withdraw more from the student loan.
"You're quieter than usual," Margaret observed, serving him a second portion of pasta without asking if he wanted it.
"I'm working on a project. It's got my head full."
"A school project?"
"Something like that."
Margaret looked at him with the expression that meant she knew she wasn't being told the whole truth but was willing to let it go for now.
"Alright. Eat. You're thin."
George ate. The pasta was perfect. The meatballs tasted of home, of childhood, of something no restaurant in the world could replicate because it was not about the recipe but about the hands that made it.
After lunch, while Margaret washed the dishes and rejected every offer of help as a personal offense, George sat with Richard in the living room. The game had ended and Richard was channel-surfing with the remote, that meditative activity that nineties fathers had perfected.
"Dad."
"Mmm."
"Did you ever want to do something different? Something that wasn't mechanics?"
Richard stopped channel-surfing. He looked at George with an expression of genuine surprise, as if his younger son had asked him about the chemical composition of the moon.
"Different how?"
"I don't know. Something of your own. A business, a project. Something."
Richard went quiet for a moment. The kind of silence that in the Hightower men could mean anything from deep thought to having forgotten they were asked a question.
"When I was your age," he said finally, "I wanted to open my own shop. Your grandfather had one in Ohio, remember? No, you were too young. He had a small shop, did a bit of everything. I wanted to do the same thing here, in San Francisco. But I got married, we had Claire, then you, and... well. Life takes you where it takes you."
"Do you regret it?"
Richard looked at the television, which was showing a detergent commercial. But he wasn't watching it.
"I don't regret you. Or your mother. I regret not trying before life decided for me." A pause. "Why do you ask?"
"I'm thinking about starting something. A project of my own."
"Computers?"
"Video games."
Richard nodded slowly. George knew his father had no idea what making a video game involved, but that he understood what it meant to want to create something of your own. That was a language Richard Hightower, son of an Ohio mechanic who had dreamed of a shop he never opened, could speak.
"If you're going to do it," said Richard, with the voice of someone choosing their words with a care he rarely allowed himself, "do it right. And do it soon. Because life has a habit of filling up with excuses if you let it."
George nodded.
"I'm going to, Dad."
Richard went back to channel-surfing. The conversation was over. But something had shifted in the room, something subtle and invisible that only George could perceive: his father had given him permission. Not in those words, because Richard Hightower did not give permission with words, but with something deeper, quieter. With the confession of his own regret. With the wish, expressed without saying it, that his son not make the same mistake.
George left the house that afternoon with three containers of pasta and the most important conversation he had ever had with his father in two lifetimes.
* * *
That night, back in the apartment, George sat in front of the PC and opened the Castlevania project. The white rectangle waited for him, obedient, in its 640 by 480 window.
He had been in 1998 for two weeks. He had a forty-seven-page Game Design Document. He had an LLC in progress. He had three trademark applications in the mail. He had a new compiler, an embryonic game engine, and a white rectangle moving across the screen at sixty frames per second.
He had a father who had told him, in his own way, not to let the chance pass. A mother who packed containers of food as if food were a protective spell. A sister who was beginning to trust that this new George was the real George.
And he had, for the first time in two lifetimes, the feeling that every piece was falling into place.
Tomorrow April started. And in April, that white rectangle would become a character. That silence would fill with music. That black window would transform into a castle.
George moved the rectangle one more time across the screen. Right. Left. Up.
Soon, he thought. Soon you'll be Alucard.
He turned off the monitor. But not the computer. He left it on, with the project open, compiled, waiting. As if turning it off meant admitting the game could wait.
It couldn't.
End of Chapter 6