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Forever Young

Jason Johnson | Kill Screen | July 2012 | 23 minutes (5,679 words)

 

This week’s Longreads Member Exclusive is “Forever Young,” a story by Jason Johnson for the literary video game magazine Kill Screen. Johnson tells us how he first discovered a group of Hungarian developers who have spent more than 20 years developing a game for the Commodore 64:

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. As originally conceived, my account of Newcomer, a Commodore 64 game from Hungary, had no business in a publication that hangs its hat on lengthy works of journalism. My assignment was a paltry 1,500 words. The initial interview wasn’t fruitful. However, as is the case with many who’ve stumbled upon this fascinating lifework—now twenty-three years in the works, and counting—one thing led to another, and I was in it for the long haul.

“I was interested in profiling István Belánszky, Newcomer‘s torchbearer, but like so many merely adequate polyglots, István doesn’t speak English very well. He was hesitant to interview verbally. I wasn’t able to get to Budapest to meet him, so I interviewed extensively, both with and around István, relying on the convenience of email and instant messaging. The result was a scroll of text, some 27,918 words, the majority typed by István, with long intervals between our exchanges as he painstakingly hammered out, to the best of his ability, the ins and outs of writing software for a computer that, quite honestly, was outdated in 1992, when development on the game began. The longest of these sessions lasted for an insufferable seven hours. By the end, I was ready to cry. But every now and then, amidst the barrage of technical talk and ‘b0rked English,’ a morsel of information would appear in the text window so peculiar and surprising that it made everything worthwhile.

“In hindsight, I suppose I should’ve reckoned István would have plenty to say about a project he had spent his entire adulthood completing. On his word, we printed in issue six of Kill Screen that Newcomer would be done and out the door by summer, though I had my suspicions. Almost a year after we wrapped up the interviews, the game is still missing. But, he’s making progress. Occasionally, I’ll get a message from my friend István, and sometimes it’ll just be a link to a crude joke on some Hungarian forum, but in others, he’ll detail an overhaul to the game’s combat system, or give me the lowdown on the progress of his interminable debug.”

For more stories like this, you can subscribe to Kill Screen magazine.

* * *

Hungary in the late ’80s was one of the most volatile places on Earth. The Soviet Union was on the verge of crumbling, and with it, the Eastern Bloc. The Iron Curtain did not fall without a fight. There were scenes of revolt. In 1989, more than 75,000 protestors flooded the streets of Budapest. A year later, the Hungarian republic was formed. With it came democracy and, as they say, freedom.

What does someone do with newfound freedom? Perhaps, swept up in the spirit of change, they go into politics. Welled over with nationalistic pride, they enlist in the armed services. They see the world. The way to the West, which had been cut off by 150 miles of barbed-wire fence along the Hungarian-Austrian border, was opened. The last thing you would expect someone to do is lock themselves indoors and develop a videogame. Yet that is exactly what a group of young Hungarian men did. They started working on a computer game called Newcomer, an adventure about a man in search of—what else—freedom.

While their choice was not the obvious one, it might have been the greatest pursuit of liberty of all. It was the pursuit of free enterprise. Under goulash communism, Hungarians were required by civil law to work—usually in a field other than videogames. It was nearly impossible to form a game development studio. That would require the blessing of the state, which, for common people, was very hard to get. Their only option would be to go underground; but distributing samizdat—self-published, uncensored media—was a criminal offense.

The story of Newcomer could likewise be described as a tragedy. The amount of man-hours spent on it will surely dwarf what little recognition it will receive when it is released later this year. During my interviews with István Belánszky, the project’s current lead, he told me several times how he was going into “crunch time,” the prolonged periods when he’d spend upwards of 90 hours a week readying the final build. He usually seemed exhausted, having had only a few hours of sleep from working on the game. Since 2008, Newcomer has been his full-time job. Before that, he averaged around 20-30 hours a week. And that is just the work of one team member. A game tester I spoke with told me that he had been playing the game for 14 years. Since then, he said, “there was barely a day I did not spend at least one or two hours playing.”

Since the decline of communism, Hungary has made a full transition to commercial capitalism. Yet Newcomer remains a relic of bygone days. It still runs on bulky, khaki-colored, plastic computers reminiscent of the Space Age. It looks like it was made in the Soviet era. Though the original creators set out in search of prosperity on the free market, the game has looped back to a socialist ideal. After decades of hard work, the game will be given away for free on the internet. While the times have changed, Newcomer never did.

* * *

Newcomer was born in 1990, the same year as the Persian Gulf War. It goes without saying, but the development cycle didn’t go exactly as planned. As proof, here I am, playing a pre-release version in 2012. The game’s history has been a perpetual series of setbacks, reboots, and delays. Newcomer was first released in 1994 for the Commodore 64 to miserable sales. The team, unhappy with the end results, reopened the game. Instead of making a sequel, they continued development until 2001, when they quietly released an expanded edition called Enhanced Newcomer.

By now, the original team members are pushing 50 years of age. All but one has abandoned the game. Belánszky, the youngest member of the old guard—the newcomer, so to speak—has taken the reins in the past 10 years. Though he started out as a beta tester for the 1994 edition, he has since become Newcomer‘s driving force. Unsatisfied with the game they made, he forged ahead, muscling through the forthcoming final edition without help from the original creators. Belánszky assures me that Ultimate Newcomer will be completed soon, but the first question that comes to mind is: “Why would anyone remain devoted to this?”

Although 22 years have passed in the interim, Newcomer is still very much a late-’80s-era computer game. Set in a penal colony gone rogue, it is a role-playing game with an emphasis on player choice. You could think of it as an 8-bit version of Mass Effect. The graphics are utilitarian, and the game takes place in what looks like a giant maze. Here’s my stab at describing it: It’s like walking through an elaborate series of office cubicles after quitting time. Newcomer‘s world is one of gray walls, perfectly square rooms, and boxy architecture built of ragged shapes.

Besides that, you don’t see things. To be precise, you don’t see the objects you interact with onscreen because of hardware limitations. In order to look at a picture hanging on the wall, you face the empty wall where the picture should be, press the Return key, and a description appears in purple text: “Very nice landscape drawing.” The game’s cast of characters—made up of militants, sleaze-balls, and jail-yard priests—are invisible also. When you move onto a square where someone is standing, their black-and-white mugshot—drawn in large pixels—appears in a window below.

The places you explore are perfectly motionless. Moving around feels like clicking through slides on an overhead projector, as opposed to the fluid motion of film or watching television. There is no sound, except for the plod of my own footsteps as I move forward, one frame at a time, by pressing the “I” key. Turn left or right, with “J” or “L,” and the screen jumps 90 degrees. Turn left four times and you pivot in a complete circle. The “K” key, the Enter key, and the Spacebar, given the specific situation, can all mean “Yes.” Though the interface is outdated, the creators aren’t twiddling their thumbs. It’s just that instead of smoothing out the rough edges, they are piling on lore.

Cases such as Newcomer‘s are uncommon in the game industry, but not unheard of. Publishers generally have the business sense to cancel projects before they slip into obsolescence. Embarrassments are mostly avoided, but sometimes, shit happens. The most widely publicized train wreck was the long, strange evolution of Duke Nukem Forever. After Duke‘s development team squandered 15 years playing catch-up with the latest tech, the publisher was forced to take legal action to get the game out the door. When it finally arrived in 2011, Duke was deemed a massive flop by critics and players alike. One publication called it “barely playable, not funny, [and] rampantly offensive.”

Newcomer is a different beast altogether. The first distinction is size. Newcomer is a big game. How big? Even Belánszky admits that he doesn’t know the game’s full extent. According to his lead tester, it “is almost beyond computability.” The game’s website says it takes 60 to 280 hours to play the first time through. To put this in perspective, Duke Nukem Forever takes approximately 10 hours to complete. The longest solo games, like Persona 4 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, can take over 100 hours.

Second is scope. The difference between Newcomer and a game like Duke Nukem Forever is that Newcomer has expanded laterally, not vertically. Whereas Duke‘s tragic flaw was a severe case of technological penis envy, Newcomer‘s fault was that, for four console generations, it ignored the changing times and focused strictly on content. The team kept adding more stuff: 150 additional characters weren’t enough. They wanted 180. A word count that matched that of Crime and Punishment seemed inadequate. They threw in another novella’s worth of reading. A good portion of the development time was spent adding what is appropriately called the “Long and Complex” mode. Whereas a branching game like Mass Effect has multiple endings, each of Newcomer‘s three modes has multiple endings.

The problem is that the game industry doesn’t wait around for designers to pen a work equivalent in length to In Search of Lost Time. If videogames are art, then they are the most fickle kind of art. In other media, a lengthy delay isn’t necessarily detrimental. After 44 years, Brian Wilson was able to piece together the Beach Boys’ lost album Smile. Spend too long making a game and the hardware won’t be around to play it. Case in point: Newcomer is a Commodore 64 game. But since the actual Commodore 64 has been out of production since the mid-’90s, it must be played on a C64 emulator that runs on modern computers. (Belánszky’s Ultimate edition will be getting a very limited release on 5 1/4” floppy disk, however.)

This means you are playing an authentic Commodore 64 game, complete with all the hang-ups. Belánszky counts it as a blessing that the pixel-art style of retro games has made a comeback. The writing is a disaster, dealing with characters with names like Dogcatcher and Axel and Jackal, second-in-command of a gang called the Marauders. It avoids direct comparison to Tommy Wiseau’s The Room, the B-movie to end all B-movies, only because few games are regarded for their script. Worse, it is necessary to keep notes, jotting down hints that you are given during the game. This way, when you talk to someone like Ruth, a victim of sex trafficking you can sleep with for 500 bucks, you can choose “Tell me about…!” in the menu, then fill in the blank. Such aspects make playing Newcomer feel like running into a brick wall. In fact, I did run into the wall several times, fumbling with the controls, as the word “Ouch” scrolled repeatedly in the dialog box.

The game begins inside a compound that looks like a Syrian prison. I’m trapped in a maze of dilapidated sandstone patrolled by guards with uzis, punk rockers, and wild dogs. I get into a fight with the dogs, and it goes like this: I push “F” to fight, “A” to attack, and “Y” to confirm that I want to attack. Then, I shoot the dog for 1,200 damage points. I do this seven times in a row and the dog dies. As usual, there are no graphics to illustrate this violent conflict. It all occurs in a menu. I feel like a quality-control inspector on an assembly line, pressing the pass button each time a can of soup is slid in front of me.

Because of episodes like this, there is a disconnect between the game I see and the game described to me. Newcomer‘s original designer Zoltan Gonda told me that he is prouder of the game than anything he has ever done. Belánszky, his protégé, said what drives him is “the opportunity to take something that was promising, beyond what [he saw] in other games, and make it even better.” Once, he told me the inspirational story of a man who had played a previous edition of Newcomer in 2002. The man had lost his job and his wife, and was living alone in a flat. In his despondency, he started playing. After six months of not doing much else, he reached the end. The man then wrote the team a letter of gratitude. He said that Newcomer had helped him regain his self-confidence, and by playing it, he managed to pull his life together.

* * *

István Belánszky is tall and has a fairly slender physique. His head is shaved bald, and his features are pointy. He wears a bushy goatee, with no mustache. Shaven, his chin would be as prominent as Jay Leno’s. His goatee extends far in front of his face, as if you were viewing in profile the Man in the Moon. When I first contacted him over email, it took him a few days to respond. When he did, he explained that he had been checking me out—making sure that I was a writer, and not some Newcomer fan trying to glean unannounced information.

To put it bluntly, and it may be an understatement, Belánszky is obsessed with his game. When he sent me a copy to play, he encrypted the file and gave me the password over a secure chat client. This, he told me, would prevent the game from falling into the wrong hands, in case his network had been hacked. It felt like we were turning keys at the same time in order to arm a torpedo on a submarine.

Belánszky lives in old communist public housing in Budapest. His apartment is nestled in a wide, gray, boring building that was erected, along with many exactly like it, in the 1960s and ’70s to house the working class. He says its stairs are good for workouts. Belying his image as a programmer, Belánszky is also a bit of a health nut. Our conversations frequently began with small talk about hemp shakes, Omega fatty acids, cardiovascular training and stretching, and the benefits for lacto-vegetarians of building muscle mass with goat-milk whey protein.

He has not always been this health-conscious. However, as he spent the past decade primarily sitting in front of a computer, he developed a serious heart condition and Type 2 diabetes. To finance Newcomer, he began working for hire, doing odd jobs in the games industry: quality assurance, voiceovers, and localizations. He worked on Newcomer during his downtime. The result was a constant cycle of programming that eventually took a toll on his body. In 2008, he had to give up the side jobs because of his declining health. He weighed over 250 pounds. He was literally working himself to death.

Now Belánszky is healthy again. While Newcomer didn’t take his life, it did rob him of his youth. He turned 40 this May. Most of his adulthood has been spent living and breathing Newcomer. This fact is outlandish even before you consider that, strictly speaking, it isn’t his game. Belánszky joined up with the original team members in 1994, when the first edition of Newcomer had nearly been completed.

Taking over development on Newcomer may have been his destiny. Belánszky dropped out of high school in his senior year. He wanted to work in information technology, and the school he attended was ill-equipped to teach it. The best the Hungarian educational system had to offer were “horrible DOS PCs.” So he landed a job writing a monthly column on tabletop role-playing games for Guru Magazin, one of the first gaming magazines in Hungary. It was there that he discovered the game that would consume him.

In the spring of 1994, he had a long conversation in the editorial room with Zoltan Gonda, the creator and original designer of Newcomer, who occasionally wrote reviews for the magazine. Newcomer was in its final stage of development—or so they thought. Gonda was in need of another playtester who could give him feedback. According to Belánszky, “he pitched it to me as a computer role-playing game that was more like a tabletop role-playing game than anything else. Given my other main interest was computer geekery, I was sold on the idea.” He eagerly accepted the invitation, and with Belánszky’s assistance, the team wrapped up production on the first edition of Newcomer.

* * *

Gonda had assembled a team of three that included a coder, an artist, and himself as the game designer. Together, they envisioned a game in the same vein as Interplay’s popular titles, such as Wasteland, a post-apocalyptic fantasy that inspired Fallout; and Neuromancer, which was based on William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk novel. The plot, at least at the outset, is similar to the TV series Lost. A group of strangers with questionable pasts find themselves stranded on a mysterious island. Only these strangers are convicts, and the island is a prison. At the start of the game, your character wakes up on the island, confused from amnesia. His only memory is that he shot and killed his wife and the man she was sleeping with.

Like its main character, Newcomer‘s development started off on the wrong foot in 1990. Gonda had planned to complete the game in two years, but the team quickly ran into snags. No one had worked on a videogame before. Gonda likened the process to “walking in a 10-miles-long, pitch-dark tunnel with a tiny lighter in your hand.” The problem was that they didn’t have the hardware they needed to produce a game of the caliber of others on the market. They went from developing on MS-DOS, to two Commodore 64s linked together, to an Amiga 500, but Newcomer proved too much. It took too long for their underpowered computers to process information, so they purchased a compiling tool from the U.S. in order to speed things up. However, the code it produced didn’t work. They tried writing their own compiler, but it was too slow.

Eventually, they found a powerful-enough computer. By then, the initial two years had passed, and they were just getting started. Regardless, they were determined to make Newcomer a reality. They believed it could become a commercial success. In fact, some of them still do. As recently as a few years ago, Gonda shopped Newcomer around for a high-definition update. But, even in 1994, success was not to be. Half a year before Newcomer was finished, Commodore went bankrupt, the Commodore 64 went out of production, and the market for its games collapsed. The original Newcomer sold an underwhelming 1,500 copies. It was considered a local success in Hungary.

* * *

Belánszky tells me his Ultimate Newcomer is the far superior edition, though you wouldn’t know it by looking at it. When you ask him why he does it—why he continues to dedicate his life to a game that was dated the first time it was released 18 years ago—he will say something like, “For the hell of it!” or, “Ask those guys who first made it up to Mount Everest.” But the truth is, he does it because he has faith in its system. By the system, I mean the massive body of code that connects the game in the same way that twisting, disorienting streets connect Istanbul.

Newcomer is designed so that it can be explored for a lifetime. Most of the active testers have completed it more than 50 times apiece, and they still have not seen every encounter with rabid dogs, nor discovered every plot twist within its crumbling walls. Their job is partly an archeological excavation. Recently, the lead tester discovered unknown content that had existed for over 15 years, and was buried deep within the game. This is all the more impressive considering that Newcomer is story-driven. Unlike a sandbox game, where the designers create a host of variables and let them run wild within a system, every choice in Newcomer was handwritten.

The great paradox of Newcomer is that, despite its severe technical limitations, it allows you to do so many different things. If you can think of something to do, there is a decent chance you can do it. Sure, it has all the normal conventions of role-playing games. There are turn-based battles to fight and experience points to gain and spend. There are bartenders to drink with and merchants who sell shotgun shells. You may form a team of the unlikeliest of heroes. But you can also cheat at gambling, pickpocket, blow things up with dynamite, rip off jukeboxes, have sex, learn the gift of guile, wash dishes, specialize in cryptology, wear makeup, work in a field, and look at a porno magazine.

According to Belánszky, Newcomer‘s distinguishing trait is “the way the narrative is triggered by the actions the player chooses.” Newcomer was designed to give the player an extraordinary amount of freedom—something Belánszky has not always had. As a child, he watched the “commie regime” use the threat of physical violence to suppress differences of opinion. As an adult working in a Second World republic, he has felt the sting of being on the wrong side of outsourcing. He was overworked and underpaid. He complains of unfair labor practices in his country. “We had to play by the Soviet rules back then. Now we are expected to play by neoliberal rules,” he said, referring to the limited opportunities he sees within Hungary.

As if to compensate, Newcomer is full of choices. “This level of flexibility and nonlinearity is still very, very rare in computer games,” Belánszky told me. The player’s actions make ripples through the game. If you get into an argument with a merchant, you can freely take his life—that is, if your stats are high enough—but the consequences are greater than missing out on the double-barreled shotgun for sale. You will also lose the chance to make friends with a creep named Sancho. And should you kill the Snake Charmer, you won’t be able to convince Anna Verkaik to seduce Wilder, in order to infect him with an STD. Yet this could allow you to seduce him yourself.

What you see of the prison camps and wilderness and space stations and virtual reality caves is largely determined by an incredibly long chain of events. To keep up with the massive amount of choices the player makes, there are more than 2,050 script packages that run in the background. These scripts evaluate situations. They calculate who is alive and who is dead, which characters have joined your party, and what skills they have gained. The scripts know how much time has passed, and what game-changing events have occurred. There is even one that keeps tabs on when the walls are sprayed with graffiti. These systems come together to create a world that not only evolves, but revolves around your every whim.

In addition to an unprecedented amount of agency, Belánszky and his teammates dreamt up a ludicrous amount of backstory for the game’s 180 key characters. Because many of the characters are inmates, he saw fit to give them psychological profiles. For instance, the android Percival (serial number: 143) is a male spy built in the year 2058. His cybernetic body is made of Steel-Titanium-Molybdenum. He has a sense of duty, he acts thoughtfully, he’s non-autodidact, and he has a built-in AI link.

Belánszky spent a solid three months at the library in Budapest, cooking up a reasonable pseudoscience. “I wanted the tech journals and descriptions to be solid,” he told me. He researched subjects such as criminology, behaviorism, and psychiatry, and then merged them with cyberpunk tropes and conspiracy theories. The result was details—lots and lots of them. Sometimes, during our many long conversations, Belánszky would give me lists of seemingly random prison records he had written:

William Blake—Emotion retarder v0.736.
Paul Van Kryg—Loyalty v0.9 (failed).
Fabricio Cerioni—Loyalty v0.9 (failed).
Peter Waarden—Emotion retarder v1.0b.
Seamus O’Connor—Emotion retarder v1.0z.
Louis Arbey—GEAS v0.8.

The team also hid daunting secrets deep within the game. For instance, David Peabody, a young British thug, is a secret character that you probably won’t run into. But let’s say you do. Whether he lives or dies; joins your crew, or gets a rival gang to kick your ass; knocks you out and steals your money, or helps you rob a vending machine; commits murder, or deals in kidnapped hostages; all depends on the way you treat him. Other secret characters include a former porn star, an alien, and a guy who, according to Belánszky, “likes to kill himself.” However, the domino effect isn’t limited to new recruits. It goes all the way down to the smallest detail, such as how long a used condom will remain on the ground.

According to Ben Samuel, a software engineer at UC Santa Cruz, this type of design is called scripted narrative, where “the player interacts with the story at points that are specifically authored by the designers. You have a space of play that is cleanly and clearly denoted.” Newcomer may be the most ambitious scripted narrative ever designed. Belánszky told me it was “an experiment to see how far the complexity could go.”When I asked him how many of these scenarios were in the game, he didn’t know. “Hundreds? Thousands?” he said.

* * *

The lion’s share of these extravagant scripts were added between 1997 and 2001, during the second phase of development, when the game was known as Enhanced Newcomer. It was during this time that Newcomer went from being a fairly straightforward role-playing game to a godlike attempt at granting free will. In 1996—two years after the original edition of Newcomer was released—Belánszky, Gonda, and the rest of the original team had reunited. Their hopes of breaking into the game industry renewed, they formed a small software company. Before long, however, they had revived Newcomer.

The plan had been to create new software and sell it to publishers, but that never happened. The only thing they sold was a game that was an advertisement for Electrolux, a company that makes designer household appliances, and 400 boxed copies of Enhanced Newcomer. Most of the team was still living with their parents, so they didn’t have to worry when a project fell through. As Belánszky put it, “when you don’t have to pay the bills, you can cut being pragmatic some slack.”

Belánszky’s generation was the first in Hungary to step outside the order of Living Socialism, where employment for everyone was a strict policy. It seems like the Newcomer team were relishing in the fact that they didn’t have to go to work. They were developers without a cause. And they weren’t alone. Thousands of other young Hungarian über-geeks, a term Belánszky uses to refer to himself during this time, had grown up using Commodore 64s, and they took a keen interest in creating computer graphics, pixel art, MIDI music, and even games for the defunct computer. They were part of the demoscene, a grassroots movement among hobbyist developers that centralized throughout Europe.

According to Poison, a well-known graphic artist within the Hungarian scene, people were drawn in for two reasons: One, because it is art. “You don’t explain why you do it. Doing it is the explanation,” he said. And two, because it is competitive. The reason demosceners restrict themselves to using outdated hardware is because it levels the playing field. Another reason is the wow factor. “If someone breaks the known limits, it makes for a really nice surprise,” he added.

With these tenets in mind, Belánszky and company started kicking around new ideas for Newcomer. This was followed by a period of unbridled ambition, in which they threw in everything but the kitchen sink. They added a plethora of letters and diaries, a pair of loaded dice, walkie-talkies, a high-tech cigarette lighter, monk robes, a useful tube of super glue, gang memorabilia, neural implants, intelligence modules from outer space, a mysterious super-weapon, and items that are too confidential to be revealed here. (Belánszky is a stickler about spoilers.)

* * *

If making Enhanced Newcomer was the afterparty, then what came next was the hangover. In 2001, at the end of the expansion, the team made around 1,200 euros in royalties and donations from the Enhanced edition. Newcomer inspires a cultish following among a very few. An anonymous post made on the game’s website in 2001 read as follows: “To this day, Newcomer is one of my favorite games. I bought it in late 1994 or early 1995. I was forced to discard my old C64 a few years ago, but the game still rests inside my desk drawer, and has been waiting for some time to appear on my monitor.”

By that point, the team members weren’t in it for the money. Yet a small loyal fan base wasn’t enough to keep them together. Reality was beginning to sink in. After four years of reckless abandon, Newcomer was still in a shoddy state, and so was the team’s so-called software business. It had been a hell of a ride, but the party was over. They couldn’t go on making a passion project forever. One by one, the members went their separate ways. Gonda left to work on other projects in the game industry. The original coder quit making games altogether. The original artist now works on high-budget first-person shooters.

Belánszky was the only man left standing. He considered it his civic duty to finish Newcomer the right way. He felt betrayed that the original members had abandoned the game. He wasn’t ready to give up. In 2003, he assembled a new team to undertake the Ultimate edition to be released this year. At first, they didn’t plan on expanding the game. Newcomer was already mammoth. They were just going to make it friendlier to play. (Up until then, it had to be booted from floppy disks.) They thought they would knock it out in no time. They were very, very wrong.

When the newly formed team began to update the game, they were horrified by what they found. It was infested with bugs. Nothing worked right. Characters that were crucial to the plot would suddenly forget what they were supposed to do. Characters that were dead would return to life. Belánszky found himself in the peculiar situation where a work of fiction will sometimes parallel its author’s life in ways that cannot easily be accounted for. It is fitting that Newcomer is set in a penal colony. For Belánszky, repairing Newcomer‘s many problems has been a 10-year sentence of manual labor. As he put it, “Sartre said, ‘Hell is other people,’ but to me, ‘Hell is other people’s code.'”

Belánszky, who had been a game designer on the Enhanced edition, found himself playing a new role: exterminator. What followed was the debug session to end all debug sessions. The more bugs Belánszky fixed, the more he found. By 2008, he had fixed 350 bugs. By 2010, the number had risen to 550. At last count, it had surpassed 700. The project nearly collapsed several times: once because of Belánszky’s failing health, and another from exhaustion. But he persevered. Giving up is not something that Belánszky does easily.

* * *

For Newcomer‘s fans, Belánszky’s tenacity has been the cause of what seems like an eternity of waiting. Guzslován Gábor, who first played Newcomer in 1995, told me that Belánszky is “lost in the details,” and that he should “forget the hunting of the bugs.” When I asked him whether Belánszky was a perfectionist, crazy, or simply obsessed, he agreed to all three. Near the end of the robust clean-up, Ultimate Newcomer received one last gasp of new material, delaying it by another 15 months. At one point, the release date was set for February of this year. It’s now May, and Belánszky tells me the weapon upgrade system needs to be revamped. (As of publication the game is still unreleased.)

Those who question whether it will ever be finished have a legitimate concern. However, Belánszky is confident it will be released soon. (Once, he told me that there were only four bugs left.) The reason is that after 18 years, he is tired of working on it. Newcomer has changed him. He finds himself drifting away from his preconceptions about games, gradually losing the naïve outlook that they are intrinsically good. “I have lost both my faith and interest in games,” he told me.

After Newcomer is done, Belánszky says he will take a few months off to recuperate. His health has begun to decline again during the final surge to complete the game. Then, he says he won’t continue with Newcomer, or any other project. The colossal amount of effort it took to build the game of his dreams, together with his frustrating experiences working in the game industry, has left him weary and fatalistic. He thinks that the majority of games make players worse human beings. He believes that the industry has been ruined by commercialization. He is convinced that games have psychologically conditioned their audiences into not thinking—into mindlessly craving more of the same thing. He says, “Gamers may be beyond saving.”

The people who play Newcomer will doubtlessly be few. Belánszky takes pride in that. He has taken the road less traveled. He went in the opposite direction of the draconic industry. He finds sanctity in Newcomer‘s lack of commercial appeal. “It would tear my heart out to gut Newcomer by lowering it to the lowest common denominator—just to add eye candy and turn it into a cash vehicle,” he said.

In his mind, Newcomer has remained pure, while the rest of the industry has fallen. Although he still believes in the potential for the good in games, and in the spirit that swept him up in software development almost 20 years ago, he admits that it might require too much effort to achieve it. “Pure potential is nothing,” he told me. “There would have to be some huge cataclysm on the market—one that changes everything—for that potential to return.”

Belánszky might say the same of his country. In the 22 years since Hungary became a republic, his ideology has shifted. Cynicism has replaced his youthful optimism, and his doubt has spread to his view of freedom in general. He questions if Western society is really free, or if freedom is undermined by capitalism. “The consumerist culture and condition that is supposedly about personal freedom in fact just turns people into zombies,” he said.

He wonders whether Hungary was better off before democracy. “It implies something very bad when I sound as if I preferred then to now. I totally hated it back then—but also now,” he said. “What has befallen this region is just suppression of a different kind, and is more subtle and harmful.” Though he has spent his life in pursuit of freedom, he finds it a troubling proposition. It is easy to visualize, but elusive, and hard to enact.

* * *

Originally published in Kill Screen, July 2012.

Longreads Best of 2012: David Roth

David Roth is a co-founder of, writer for and editor at the sports website The Classical. He writes columns for Sports On Earth and Vice, co-writes The Daily Fix blog-column for the Wall Street Journal online, and writes for The Awl, GQ and other places when there’s time and when they’ll have him. He’s on Twitter, a lot, @david_j_roth.

I don’t keep track, although I probably should, but I’m fairly certain that I read more words in 2012 than I have in any of the previous years of my life. Some of this is because I think that’s the best thing to do when presented with words and most of it is because I’ve read so much stuff for The Classical, which I started with some other people a little over a year ago; a really healthy (or unhealthy, depending) percentage of the words I’ve read have been for that site, and I’ve read a lot of them as an editor. I suppose I should recuse myself from mentioning any of these pieces, and I’ll do so after acknowledging that the majority of my favorite new writers of 2012 were people I worked with on essays written for The Classical. That’s all the plugging-of-site I can do without getting embarrassed.

Best Crime Story

The New Yorker is The New Yorker, and generally seems to operating at a level a tick or two above virtually any other magazine. I am always amazed at the way it turns itself into an ultra-fatuous luxury publication, all drollery about shopping and famous people’s kids and whatever, for a couple of issues a year, but the depth of the talent on that invisible masthead, and the quality of the work that all those people do, is astonishing. The stories that have stuck with me the most from the magazine over the past year, and which are thus pretty much the best thing I read in a magazine over that period, both have to do with crime. One is Sarah Stillman’s piece on the unconscionably irresponsible misuse and exploitation of wildly unprepared (and very much in danger) informants by law enforcement. The other is Nadya Labi’s story on the bleak, wild life of Detroit hit-man Vincent Smothers. (The latter is, sadly, only available to subscribers in the magazine’s online archive.)

There are several larger critiques embedded within each piece—the drug war and its warping effect on a wide array of priorities, in both cases—all of which emerge organically and forcefully through the simple forward movement of the stories. There isn’t necessarily a dazzling sentence or an image or anything similarly flashy that still sizzles in the memory months or even days after reading, but the stories stick all the same. So, yeah: two great New Yorker stories, in a year that had a great many.

Best Political/Media/Political Media Story

There was, certainly, a great deal of good political writing done during the endless election season. I don’t remember any of it, and what I remember I don’t remember particularly fondly, but given the number of words written—all those anonymous strategists and undermine-y underlings speaking tartly off-the-record; the reverent profiles and irreverent takedowns; the trends and themes and memes and so on—it would be surprising if some long piece or two in there wasn’t especially good. Much better and more illuminating, at least to me, was Alex Pareene’s essay for The Baffler on the pervasive and mostly pernicious influence of the repellent and vexingly influential Politico seemed to distill all the things that were infuriating, facile and otherwise wrong about the way we read the election, day by day. It was also a lot of fun to read. Which, about that:

Best Stylistic Trend

There’s no fixed way to write anything, of course. There’s a way that some types of pieces generally sound—a profile reads like this, a review reads like that—and many magazines have a house intonation and perspective, if not necessarily a house style. What I’ve enjoyed most about the essays I’ve most enjoyed over the last year, though, is the way in which they reflect an emerging style of colloquial, unpretentious, deceptively erudite writing that’s flourishing on the web. This is there in Pareene’s essay on Politico or John Lanchester’s consideration (it’s adapted from a speech) of Karl Marx at 193 years of age in the London Review of Books. It’s also in Adrian Chen’s dazzling piece for Gawker on Reddit, its troll culture and the man who was its foremost embodiment, or in the writing of Maria Bustillos at The Awl—start with her thumbnail history of James Thurber’s Walter Mitty and its weird afterlife, or on the deathless and wearying discursive concern with irony.

Of those, only the latter two live entirely on the web. They’re not about similar things, or written for similar publications or audiences, or really even written in ways that outwardly have much in common. But there’s an energy and vitality to all of them, a sense that the people writing respect their obligation to tell the stories they’ve chosen, but also that they’re intensely into those stories. There are some good jokes and striking sentences and a great deal of elegant (or infuriating) and illusion-free (or opinionated) thought in all of them, but there is not show-offery or grandiosity or stuffiness. They’re stories told and arguments made by people who seem impassioned and informed, and told in the voices—different-sounding, as they should be—of people alive in and engaged with the world and the ideas loose in it, and conversant with both in the fast, open way of the web. I don’t know, maybe it’s just good writing.

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012.

Let’s Eliminate Sports Welfare

Longreads Pick

Cities are slashing school budgets to pay for professional sports stadiums, and the NFL is still a nonprofit. An argument for cutting off all public funding for professional sports across the U.S., which could save taxpayers billions:

“Consider stadium subsidies. When Kubla Khan built his stately pleasure dome above a sunless sea, he did not strong-arm the Xanadu County Board of Directors into funding the project by threatening to move to Los Angeles. His mistake. He wouldn’t last five minutes as an American sports owner. According to Harvard professor Judith Grant Long and economist Andrew Zimbalist, the average public contribution to the total capital and operating cost per sports stadium from 2000 to 2006 was between $249 and $280 million. A fantastic interactive map at Deadspin estimates that the total cost to the public of the 78 pro stadiums built or renovated between 1991 and 2004 was nearly $16 billion. That’s enough to build three Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Or fund, in today’s dollars, 15 Saturn V moon rocket launches — three more than the number of launches in the entire Apollo/Skylab program. It’s also more than what Chrysler received in the Great Recession-triggered auto industry bailout ($10.5 billion), and bigger than the 2010 GDP of 84 different nations. How does this happen? Simple. Team owners ask for public handouts and threaten to move elsewhere unless they get them, pitting cities against in each other in corporate welfare bidding wars — wars rooted in the various publicly granted antitrust exemptions that effectively allow sports leagues to control and maintain a limited supply of teams to be leveraged against widespread demand.”

Source: Sports on Earth
Published: Dec 14, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,530 words)

Longreads Best of 2012: Paige Williams

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Paige Williams is a National Magazine Award-winning writer whose stories have been anthologized in five Best American volumes. She teaches at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and edits Nieman Storyboard.

For elegance + acute observation in the service of theme

Belle Boggs’ “The Art of Waiting,” on fertility (Orion)

“The family as a socially isolating unit is an idea not limited to humans. In the wild, infants represent competition for resources, and it is not uncommon for a mother’s job to be primarily about hiding and protecting their infants from members of their own species. Jane Goodall observed chimpanzee mothers completely protecting their infants from contact with other nonsibling chimpanzees for the first five months of life, pulling their infants’ hands away when they reached for nearby chimps.”

And:

“Because we spend much of our young lives dramatizing and imagining ourselves as parents, it isn’t surprising that even the strongest of us let the body’s failure become how we define ourselves. But nature, which gives us other things to do, tells us otherwise. The feeling of grief subsides; we think through our options and make choices. We work, travel, find other ways to be successful. After completing The Waves, at forty-eight, Woolf writes of a feeling of intoxication that comes from writing well: 

Children are nothing to this.”

For unpretentious power + authorial restraint

Mark Warren’s “My Father’s Last Words,” on his father (Esquire)

“Of course, my father numbered his boys among the reprobates and never missed an opportunity to let us know it. He resented that we just assumed that we’d have stuff, like food and clothes. In the great ledger of material things, my family didn’t merit a mention. We had little to speak of, and as the youngest I got everything we did have last. It was just life and nobody complained. But compared with some of the boys I went to school with, we were absolutely prosperous. In my town, you showed yourself to be truly poor by showing up at school barefoot. And there were so many kids without shoes that we really didn’t think much of it. I remember one kid from my street vividly. Aiken was a fully muscled man at ten. Aiken was weathered at ten — steel-calloused hands, deep-set, weary eyes — looked like he punched a clock as a longshoreman just in time to make it to Mrs. Norris’s fifth-grade class every morning. Aiken had no shoes, and he wore the same clothes every day of the week. You’d see his mama out in the yard doing the wash on Sunday, and they’d start out clean on Monday, and by Friday they’d have fresh holes and be pretty ripe. But Aiken walked through the world unfazed by this, and even though we didn’t have a pot to piss in, either, I felt sorry for him all the same. In Aiken’s grim acceptance of the world and its privations, my father saw a lesson for me. When my brothers and I asked for extravagances, like shoes, Daddy would say, ‘You girls better marry rich wives, you’ve got expensive tastes.’ Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, surely this was meant affectionately! A little ribbing, to make men of us. But just to make sure that we knew he wasn’t joking in the slightest, he’d quickly add: ‘You’ll never amount to anything.’”

For vibrant wordplay and sentence structure

Karen Russell’s “The Blind Faith of the One-Eyed Matador,” on the comeback of a torero after a near-fatal goring (GQ)

“Marques scoops his head toward Padilla’s face on the sandy floor, a move that resembles canine tenderness, as if he’s leaning down to lick him, but instead the bull drives his sharp left horn through the bullfighter’s jaw. When Marques tusks up, the horn crunches through Padilla’s skin and bone, exiting through his left eye socket. Cameras clock the instant that a glistening orb pops loose onto the matador’s cheek. A frightening silence descends on the crowd. Nobody knows the depth of the wound.

“Marques gallops on, and Padilla gets towed for a few feet, pulled by his cheek. He loses a shoe. Skin stretches away from his jawbone with the fragile elasticity of taffy. Then Padilla’s prone body is left in the bull’s dust. He springs up like a jack-in-the-box and hops around. His face is completely red. As the blood gushes down his cheek, he holds his dislodged eye in place with his pinkie. He thinks he must be dying. I can’t breathe. I can’t see.”

For exquisite reporting and detail

David Grann’s “The Yankee Comandante,” on the American expatriate William Morgan in revolutionary Cuba (The New Yorker)

“Her name was Olga Rodríguez. She came from a peasant family, in the central province of Santa Clara, that often went without food. ‘We were so poor,’ Rodríguez recalls. She studied diligently, and was elected class president. Her goal was to become a teacher. She was bright, stubborn, and questioning—as Rodríguez puts it, ‘always a little different.’ Increasingly angered by the Batista regime’s repressiveness, she joined the underground resistance, organizing protests and assembling bombs until, one day, agents from Batista’s secret police appeared in her neighborhood, showing people her photograph. ‘They were coming to kill me,’ Rodríguez recalls.

“When the secret police could not find her, they beat up her brother, heaving him on her parents’ doorstep ‘like a sack of potatoes,’ she says. Her friends begged her to leave Cuba, but she told them, ‘I will not abandon my country.’ In April, 1958, with her appearance disguised and with a tiny .32 pistol tucked in her underwear, she became the first woman to join the rebels in the Escambray. She tended to the wounded and taught rebels to read and write. ‘I have the spirit of a revolutionary,’ she liked to say.

“When Morgan met her, he gently teased her about her haircut, pulling down her cap and saying, ‘Hey, muchacho.’ Morgan had arrived at the camp literally riding a white horse, and she had felt her heart go ‘boom, boom, boom.’”

For humor + descriptiveness + a masterful sense of the absurd

Devin Friedman’s “The Best Night $500,000 Can Buy,” about the Vegas superclub Marquee (GQ)

“Going to a nightclub, like going on vacation, sometimes gives rise to this really stressful internal-feedback loop that initiates when some dark part of your brain transmits a pretty obvious question: ‘Am I having fun?’ Then: ‘Is this fun? What about that?’ Or, ‘Those people look like they’re having fun—are they pretending like I am?’ Or, ‘I should be having fun, but am I really? How about now? Or…now?’ And then this other part of your brain says, ‘Shut up, this is your dedicated night for fun, you paid all this money for it, and if you’re not having fun now, maybe you’re not capable of fun, so please for the love of God just shut up.’ ‘Okay. Okay… But how about now?’”

And:

“You can kind of see how the chemistry between Jason and Noah works. Jason is handsome and prone to fixing his hair while he speaks to you. He is just tan enough so that you wonder whether he is naturally that color. He’s superserious about electronic dance music and keeps the satellite radio in his Denali tuned to ‘Electric Area’ and presents as the kind of guy you want to be with on the night when occasion lands you at a fancy nightclub. It’s wrong to say that Noah is a lovable schlub, because he’s not that schlubby. I’m not implying that he isn’t handsome, though I am implying that he is bald and sweats more than Jason, and I don’t think he’s ever had a tan in his life. When he opens his mouth, accentwise, the Manhattan of the 1990s, of the Beastie Boys and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, comes out. Jason is pals with millionaire DJs from Amsterdam; Noah is friends with, like, Jay-Z and Paris Hilton. And also everyone. It’s just very, very easy to like him.”

Read more guest picks from Longreads Best of 2012

A Father’s Long Battle For His Daughters

Longreads Pick

A deported father fights for custody of his daughters:

“The girls ended up with their maternal grandmother, who was destitute and suffered from memory lapses, so social workers took them away. They joined the thousands of children nationwide who are under custody of child protection agencies after their parents have been placed in deportation proceedings or deported. An estimated 5,000 such children are in foster care, about 1,000 of them in Los Angeles County, according to juvenile court attorneys and the Applied Research Center, a nonprofit racial justice think tank.

“Many follow their deported mothers and fathers, if the parents can convince U.S. agencies that they can provide a stable life in their home countries. In such cases, social workers from Los Angeles escort the children to parents at joyous airport reunions, usually in Mexico and El Salvador.

“But sometimes parents fail. Their children either languish in foster care or they’re adopted by American couples. Some never see their biological parents again.”

Published: Dec 2, 2012
Length: 8 minutes (2,043 words)

The Top 10 Longreads of 2012

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About This List

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the Longreads community this year, and to all of our guests who shared their favorite stories of 2012. The below list represents our editors’ favorite stories of the year, for both nonfiction and fiction.

Longreads is edited by Mark Armstrong and Mike Dang, with Kjell Reigstad, Joyce King Thomas, Hakan Bakkalbasi, Jodi Ettenberg and Erika Kussmann.

Thanks to all the writers and publishers who create outstanding work.


2012 Nonfiction Picks

1. Grace in Broken Arrow

Kiera Feldman | This Land Press | May 24, 2012 | 56 minutes (14,008 words)

The story of a sex abuse scandal inside a Tulsa Christian school, where church leaders were in denial and where the crimes shattered the lives of victims and their families:

“No more sleepovers. No more babysitting, or car rides home. No more being alone with children or ‘lingering hugs given to students (especially using your hands to stroke or fondle).’ Aaron Thompson—Coach Thompson to his PE students—sat in the principal’s office at Grace Fellowship Christian School as his bosses went through the four-page Corrective Action Plan point by point. It was October of 2001, the same month Aaron added ‘Teacher of the Week’ to his resume.

“Grace’s leader, Bob Yandian—’Pastor Bob’ as everyone calls him—wasn’t there: no need, he had people for this kind of thing. Pastor Bob’s time was better spent sequestered in his study, writing books and radio broadcasts. His lieutenant, Associate Pastor Chip Olin, was a hardnosed guy, ‘ornery as heck,’ people said. Olin brought a USA Today article on the characteristics of child molesters to the meeting. At age 24, Olin explained, Aaron was acting immature and unprofessional, and someone might get the wrong idea.”

More stories from This Land Press


2. State of the Species

Charles C. Mann | Orion | October 25, 2012 | 32 minutes (8,232 words)

A brief history of Homo sapiens—and a prognosis for our survival:

“Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.

“Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all?

See also: “The Art of Waiting” (Belle Boggs, April 2012)

Books by Charles C. Mann on Amazon


3. The Yankee Comandante

David Grann | The New Yorker | May 21, 2012 | 88 minutes (22,146 words)

A story of love and revolution in Cuba. William Morgan was a free-spirited American drawn to Cuba to help Castro fight, only to grow disenchanted with his embrace of communism:

“One day in the spring of 1958, while Morgan was visiting a guerrilla camp for a meeting of the Second Front’s chiefs of staff, he encountered a rebel he had never seen before: small and slender, with a face shielded by a cap. Only up close was it evident that the rebel was a woman. She was in her early twenties, with dark eyes and tawny skin, and, to conceal her identity, she had cut her curly light-brown hair short and dyed it black. Though she had a delicate beauty, she locked and loaded a gun with the ease of a bank robber. Morgan later said of a pistol that she carried, ‘She knows how to use it.'”

See also: “The Caging of America” (Adam Gopnik, January 2012)

Books by David Grann on Amazon


4. Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

John Branch | The New York Times | December 20, 2012 | 70 minutes (17,639 words)

The story of 16 world-class skiers and snowboarders who decided to go skiing together in Washington’s Cascades in February 2012, and what happened to them when an avalanche hit:

“‘Just as I had the thought about what I’m going to do, wondering if it was going to bury me, that’s right when I could feel it,’ Castillo said. ‘It was like a wave. Like when you’re in the ocean and the tide moves away from you. You’re getting thrashed and you feel it pull out and you’re like, O.K., I can stand up now.’

“Castillo saw daylight again. His camera captured snow sliding past his legs for another 13 seconds. The forest sounded as if it were full of sickly frogs. It was the trees, scrubbed of their fresh snow, still swaying and creaking around him.

“Castillo turned to look back up the hill.

“‘Where there were three people, there was nobody,’ Castillo said.”

See also: “In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad” (Charles Duhigg, David Barboza, January 2012)


5. The Innocent Man

Pamela Colloff | Texas Monthly | October 11, 2012 | 113 minutes (28,149 words)

A two-part series deconstructing the case against Michael Morton, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife but has maintained his innocence:

“Michael was breathing hard. ‘Is my son okay?’ he asked.

“‘He’s fine,’ Boutwell said. ‘He’s at the neighbors’.’

“‘How about my wife?’

“The sheriff was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s dead,’ he replied.

“Boutwell led Michael into the kitchen and introduced him to Sergeant Don Wood, the case’s lead investigator. ‘We have to ask you a few questions before we can get your son,’ Boutwell told him. Dazed, Michael took a seat at the kitchen table. He had shown no reaction to the news of Christine’s death, and as he sat across from the two lawmen, he tried to make sense of what was happening around him. Sheriff’s deputies brushed past him, opening drawers and rifling through cabinets. He could see the light of a camera flash exploding again and again in the master bedroom as a police photographer documented what Michael realized must have been the place where Christine was killed. He could hear officers entering and exiting his house, exchanging small talk. Someone dumped a bag of ice into the kitchen sink and stuck Cokes in it. Cigarette smoke hung in the air.”

Read part two of “The Innocent Man”

See also: “Portrait of the Artist as a Postman” (Jason Sheeler, September 2012)


6. ‘I Just Want to Feel Everything’: Hiding Out with Fiona Apple, Musical Hermit

Dan P. Lee | New York magazine | June 17, 2012 | 29 minutes (7,287 words)

A lost weekend, or several weeks, with Fiona Apple:

“A week later, my phone beeped. It was a heavily pixelated video. She was wearing glasses, looking straight at me:

“‘Hi, Dan. It’s Fiona. [She moves the camera to her dog.] This is Janet. [She moves it back.] Um, are you coming out here tomorrow? Um, I, I, I don’t know—I’m baffled at this thing that I just got, this e-mail shit, I don’t know what these people—are they trying to antagonize me so that I do shit like this, so that I start fights with them? I don’t understand why there are pictures of models on a page about me. Who the fuck are they? What? What?’

“The text attached read: ‘And are you western-bound? And hi there! F’

“I had no idea what she was talking about. Two days later, I landed at LAX.”

See also: “A Life Worth Ending” (Michael Wolff, May 2012)


7. The Queens of Montague Street

Nancy Rommelmann | January 1, 2012 | 41 minutes (10,299 words)

[Ebook, 99 cents] Memories of life as a truant teen in 1970s Brooklyn:

“Most of the time we just hung out, in front of the newly opened Baskin-Robbins, on the corner of Montague and Henry Streets. This corner was the epicenter of Brooklyn Heights, a community unaccustomed to seeing its daughters straddling mailboxes and flicking cigarette butts into the street. Nor were we used to fielding the looks we began to get: wary, unhappy, every father coming home from Wall Street and every mother on her way to Key Food shooting us stern, silent reprimands. It made me squirm, but it also pissed me off: What was I doing that was so horrible? And if they had something to say, why didn’t they say it? While our little petri dish of a neighborhood evidently considered hanging out anathema, I was on the fence; my dad had grown up in Greenwich Village, an Italian kid playing stickball and rolling tires in the Hudson River. Isn’t this what teenagers did?”

See also: “The GOP and Me” (Rany Jazayerli, November 2012)


8. How A Career Ends: Nancy Hogshead-Makar, Olympic Swimming Gold Medalist

Rob Trucks | Deadspin | July 31, 2012 | 21 minutes (5,369 words)

A first-person account of an Olympic career, a violent attack, and what happened next:

“My coach calls me up and says, ‘Listen, If you want to keep your scholarship’—by the way, he’s totally devious here—he said, ‘If you want your scholarship, all you have to do is show up for the meets. Don’t do anything else. Just show up. You don’t have to come to a single practice. You don’t have to warm up. Just show up at the meet.’

“Well, I was unhappy with how the first warmup went. I didn’t think I was in good enough shape for the first warmup, but I won all my events, OK? And so before the second time I thought, I’ll just go to a few workouts, you know. And then slowly, but surely…

“He was just so spot on. So then, sure enough, I’m now going to two workouts a day. I’m lifting weights and I totally get the hunger in a big, big way and my time was the third-fastest in the country. It wasn’t like the end-of-the-year time, which would be much faster, but I was really psyched that I could go that fast and do that well with just the amount of training that I had had.”

See also: “What Happens When A 35-Year-Old Man Retakes The SAT?” (Drew Magary, March 2012)

Books by Rob Trucks on Amazon


9. The Most Amazing Bowling Story Ever

Michael J. Mooney | D Magazine | June 20, 2012 | 18 minutes (4,622 words)

It’s still remembered as “That Night”—when bowler Bill Fong stunned the crowd at the Plano Super Bowl:

“Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a ‘perfect series.’ More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track.

“Bill Fong’s run at perfection started as most of his nights do, with practice at around 5:30 pm. He bowls in four active leagues and he rolls at least 20 games a week, every week. That night, January 18, 2010, he wanted to focus on his timing.”

See also: “The Honor System” (Chris Jones, Esquire)


10. Come On, Feel the Buzz

Alex Pareene | The Baffler | November 5, 2012 | 26 minutes (6,530 words)

A critical look at the political newspaper and website Politico:

“One classic method of unleashing irresistible Drudge bait on the Internet is to boil another outlet’s story down to a couple salacious-sounding excerpts, or (failing an effective condensing strategy) to simply reinterpret the material to fit a Drudge-friendly narrative. This past May, for example, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Maraniss’s biography of Barack Obama. (The liberal media vetting blackout continued apace, in other words.) Politico’s Dylan Byers took the excerpt and turned it into a little micro-news story: Obama admitted to Maraniss that certain figures in his first memoir were ‘compressions’—i.e., composite characters. Byers completely missed that Obama explicitly said at the outset of his own book that some characters were composites, but Drudge didn’t care. ‘Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in Memoir,’ went his headline, with a link to Politico instead of Vanity Fair—and another false right-wing meme got its wings.”

See also: “Dead End on Shakin’ Street” (Thomas Frank, July 2012)


2012 Fiction Picks

1. Cold Pastoral

Marina Keegan | The New Yorker | October 5, 2012 | 28 minutes (7,023 words)

A college student grapples with the death of her on-and-off boyfriend:

“We were in the stage where we couldn’t make serious eye contact for fear of implying we were too invested. We used euphemisms like ‘I miss you’ and ‘I like you’ and smiled every time our noses got too close. I was staying over at his place two or three nights a week and met his parents at an awkward brunch in Burlington. A lot of time was spent being consciously romantic: making sushi, walking places, waiting too long before responding to texts. I fluctuated between adding songs to his playlist and wondering if I should stop hooking up with people I was eighty per cent into and finally spend some time alone. (Read the books I was embarrassed I hadn’t read.) (Call my mother.) The thing is, I like being liked, and a lot of my friends had graduated and moved to cities. I’d thought about ending things but my roommate Charlotte advised me against it. Brian was handsome and smoked the same amount as me, and sometimes in the morning, I’d wake up and smile first thing because he made me feel safe.

“In March, he died. I was microwaving instant Thai soup when I got a call from his best friend, asking if I knew which hospital he was at.

“‘Who?’ I said. ‘Brian,’ he said. ‘You haven’t heard?'”


2. Break All the Way Down

Roxane Gay | Joyland | May 26, 2012 | 24 minutes (6,184 words)

A baby’s arrival stirs up difficult memories:

“I sat with the baby in the living room, setting her on a clean blanket. When I tired of watching her, I stretched out, resting my hand on her stomach. I fell asleep with the baby staring at me, her eyes wide open.

“In the morning, my boyfriend kicked my foot with his heavy work boot. ‘What the fuck is this?’

“I sat up quickly, holding a finger to my lips. I stood and pulled him into the bedroom. ‘Anna Lisa brought the baby last night. She can’t take care of her anymore.'”

Books by Roxane Gay on Amazon


3. Miss Lora

Junot Díaz | The New Yorker | April 23, 2012 | 21 minutes (5,357 words)

A teenager’s grief and its aftermath:

“Years later, you would wonder if it hadn’t been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn’t care. I’d fuck her.

“You’d fuck anything, someone jeered.

“And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it’s a bad thing.”

Books by Junot Díaz on Amazon


4. Hello Everybody

A.M. Homes | Electric Literature | September 12, 2012 | 27 minutes (6,868 words)

A grieving family’s privileged, plastic life:

“She hears his car grinding up the hill. At the edge of the driveway, the engine shudders, continuing on for a few seconds before falling silent. Walter buzzes the front gate; Esmeralda, the housekeeper, lets him in. The gate closes with a thick metallic click.

“‘Where are you?’ he calls out.

“‘I’m hiding,’ Cheryl yells from the backyard.

“He enters the through the pool gate.

“‘Shouldn’t that be locked?’ she asks.

“‘I remembered the code,’ he says.

“‘The pool boy’s code, 1234?’

“He nods. ‘Some things never change.'”

Books by A.M. Homes on Amazon


5. Ice Man

Elmore Leonard | The Atlantic | June 22, 2012 | 9 minutes (2,351 words)

A run-in with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer after a rodeo:

“Victor saw Nachee and Billy Cosa looking toward the entrance and turned his head to see a Riverside County deputy talking to the manager. Some more law was outside. They’d go around to the kitchen and check on Mexicans without any papers. Victor saw the Riverside deputy look his way. No, he was looking at the white guy at the next table, the guy wearing a straw Stetson he’d fool with, raising the curled brim and setting it close on his eyes again. Never changed his expression. He had size, but looked ten years past herding cows. It was the man’s U.S. Government jacket told Victor he was none of their business.”

Books by Elmore Leonard on Amazon


6. Casino

Alix Ohlin | Guernica | May 1, 2012 | 16 minutes (4,225 words)

A sisters’ weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories:

“When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates how much she does for them. All she does is give, give, give, without getting anything back, et cetera. I don’t really mind—I enjoy a good martini, and while Trisha rants I don’t have to worry about getting sloppy, given that she’s always sloppier—except that even her complaints are part boast. She has to mention her busy husband and the two hundred thousand he rakes in a year. Her children’s after-school activities for the gifted are just so freaking expensive and time-consuming. There’s a needle in every one of these remarks, pricking at my skin, saying See, Sherri? See?”

Books by Alix Ohlin on Amazon


7. Onward

Emma Donoghue | The Atlantic | August 24, 2012 | 17 minutes (4,385 words)

A close-knit family’s struggles in Dickens-era England:

“Caroline always prepares Fred’s breakfast herself. Her young brother’s looking sallow around the eyes. ‘We saved you the last of the kippers,’ she says, in a tone airy enough to give the impression that she and Pet had their fill of kippers before he came down this morning.

“Mouth full, Fred sings to his niece in his surprising bass.

“His brow is wet with honest sweat,

He earns whate’er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face,

For he owes not any man.

“Pet giggles at the face he’s pulling. Caroline slides her last triangle of toast the child’s way. Pet’s worn that striped frock since spring. Is she undersized, for two years old? But then, girls are generally smaller. Are the children Caroline sees thronging the parks so twig-like, under their elaborate coats? ‘Where did you pick that one up?’ she asks Fred.

“‘A fellow at the office.’

“‘Again, again,’ insists Pet: her new word this week.

“Caroline catches herself watching the clock.”

Books by Emma Donoghue on Amazon


8. West of the Known

Chanelle Benz | The American Reader | October 1, 2012 | 20 minutes (5,136 words)

Loyalty, betrayal and a final judgment for a brother-sister duo in the Old West:

“My brother was the first man to come for me. The first man I saw in the raw, profuse with liquor, outside a brothel in New Mexico Territory. He was the first I know to make a promise then follow on through. There is nothing to forgive. For in the high violence of joy, is there not often a desire to swear devotion? But what then? When is it ever brung off to the letter? When they come for our blood, we will not end, but go on in an unworldly fever.

“I come here to collect, my brother said from the porch. If there was more I did not hear it for Uncle Bill and Aunt Josie stepped out and closed the door. I was in the kitchen canning tomatoes, standing over a row of mason jars, hands dripping a wat’ry red when in stepped a man inside a long buckskin coat.

“I’m your brother, Jackson, the man smiled, holding out his hand.”


9. The Semplica-Girl Diaries

George Saunders | The New Yorker | October 8, 2012 | 35 minutes (8,979 words)

A father uses his lottery winnings for an extravagant birthday party for his teenage daughter:

“September 3rd: Having just turned forty, have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black book just got at OfficeMax. Exciting to think how in one year, at rate of one page/day, will have written three hundred and sixty-five pages, and what a picture of life and times then available for kids & grandkids, even greatgrandkids, whoever, all are welcome (!) to see how life really was/is now. Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes by that time passé? Will future people know sometimes cats fought in night? Because by that time some chemical invented to make cats not fight? Last night dreamed of two demons having sex and found it was only two cats fighting outside window. Will future people be aware of concept of ‘demons’? Will they find our belief in ‘demons’ quaint? Will ‘windows’ even exist? Interesting to future generations that even sophisticated college grad like me sometimes woke in cold sweat, thinking of demons, believing one possibly under bed? Anyway, what the heck, am not planning on writing encyclopedia, if any future person is reading this, if you want to know what a ‘demon’ was, go look it up, in something called an encyclopedia, if you even still have those!

“Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting cats.”

Books by George Saunders on Amazon


10. Frogs
Mo Yan | Granta | October 11, 2012 | 14 minutes (3,591 words)

An aunt recalls how she met her husband:

“‘If you want to know why I married Hao Dashou, I have to start with the frogs. Some old friends got together for dinner on the night I announced my retirement, and I wound up drunk – I hadn’t drunk much, less than a bowlful, but it was cheap liquor. Xie Xiaoque, the son of the restaurant owner, Xie Baizhua, one of those sweet-potato kids of the ’63 famine, took out a bottle of ultra-strong Wuliangye – to honour me, he said – but it was counterfeit, and my head was reeling. Everyone at the table was wobbly, barely able to stand, and Xie Xiaoque himself foamed at the mouth till his eyes rolled up into his head.'”

Books by Mo Yan on Amazon

Our Top 10 Longreads of 2012

Longreads Member Exclusive: The End of a War, the End of an Army

Longreads Pick

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This week, we're excited to share a Longreads Member Exclusive from Thomas E. Ricks, whose new book is The Generals, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 21, "The End of a War, the End of an Army," details how the U.S. military and its leadership faltered in the final years of the Vietnam War:

“Often in warfare, it is the first year of fighting that seasons forces, which become more effective as those who survive gain skill, good leaders rise to the top, and units become more cohesive over time. Counterintuitively, as the Vietnam War progressed, the American frontline force weakened. In 1966, remembered Paul Gorman, the battalion he commanded had fourteen senior sergeants who had been in the unit for more than ten years, all of them trained by a legendary sergeant major who had landed at Normandy with the Big Red One. By contrast, he said, five years later, when he was commanding a brigade in the 101st Airborne, good sergeants who could provide the backbone of units, especially by maintaining standards and enforcing discipline, were hard to find. "I didn't have the NCOs [non-commissioned officers]. The NCOs were gone." By 1969, draftees made up 88 percent of the infantry riflemen in Vietnam. Another 10 percent was made up of first term volunteers, meaning that the fighting force was almost entirely inexperienced and often led by novice first term NCOs and officers. In one company in 1970, of two hundred men, only three—the captain, one platoon sergeant, and one squad leader—had been in the Army for more than two years. In addition, because of the rotation policy, units not only arrived green but stayed that way. "After only two months in Vietnam, I had more experience than half the men in Vietnam," recalled one sergeant. There were plenty of career soldiers in Vietnam, but they disproportionately served at higher headquarters, not in line units doing the fighting.”

Published: Nov 28, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,533 words)

You Owe Me

Longreads Pick

On teaching writing to children at a Houston cancer center. Featured in The Best American Essays 2012:

“The children I write with die, no matter how much I love them, no matter how creative they are, no matter how many poems they have written, or how much they want to live. They die of diseases with unpronounceable names, of rhabdomyosarcoma or pilocytic astrocytoma, of cancers rarely heard of in the world at large, of cancers that are often cured once, but then turn up again somewhere else: in their lungs, their stomachs, their sinuses, their bones, their brains. While undergoing their own treatments, my students watch one friend after another lose legs, cough up blood, and enter a hospital room they never come out of again.

“The M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, where I have taught poetry and prose for nearly ten years, is a world-renowned research institution. I have met the sickest children in the world there—children who have been treated already, somewhere else, and who have come for one last experimental treatment, who have one last chance at survival. In this capacity, my students often take part in studies. The treatments they receive are often groundbreaking, innovative ones that, with time, are perfected and standardized. This means their experiences, whether their disease is successfully eradicated or not, serve to build treatment protocols that eventually cure children throughout the world. But only a small percentage of the students I work with in the center’s classrooms live. Less than half, maybe less than a third, and I think less than that: I am just one of the writers in residence there. The numbers aren’t available to me.”

Published: Nov 25, 2012
Length: 22 minutes (5,637 words)

Boss Rail

Longreads Pick

A high-speed train crash in China unravels years of corruption in the building of the world’s most expensive public-works project:

“Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had no choice but to visit the crash site and vow to investigate. ‘If corruption was found behind this, we must handle it according to law, and we will not be lenient,’ he said. ‘Only in this way can we be fair to those who have died.’ People didn’t forget Wen’s pledge as the first deadline for the investigation came and went, and they continued to demand a fuller accounting. At last, in December, authorities released an unprecedented, detailed report. It acknowledged ‘serious design flaws,’ a ‘neglect of safety management,’ and problems in bidding and testing. It also blamed fifty-four people in government and industry, beginning with Great Leap Liu. The Minister’s name became a byword for ‘a broken system,’ as the muckraking magazine Caixin called the Railway Ministry, a testament to the political reality that, as Caixin put it, ‘since absolute power corrupts absolutely, the key to curbing graft is limiting power.’ When I spoke to an engineer who worked on the railway’s construction, he told me, ‘I can’t pinpoint which step was neglected or what didn’t get enough time, because the whole process was compressed, from beginning to end.’ He added, ‘There is an expression in Chinese: when you take too great a leap, you can tear your balls.'”

Author: Evan Osnos
Source: The New Yorker
Published: Oct 15, 2012
Length: 32 minutes (8,124 words)

Solvency has haunted Antioch College, a liberal arts school in Yellow Springs Ohio with a storied history, which shuttered its doors in 2008. The college reopened last year with 35 students, and is looking for new ways to draw students and maintain financial stability:

When the first students arrived on campus last fall, they found themselves with an unprecedented amount of influence over what Antioch would be. Administrators had set up a schedule that included intensive study of one subject over a few weeks; what that meant in reality was that students had mid-term exams about two weeks after starting a course. They complained, and in a major change that affected class sequences and faculty, the school dropped the schedule in favor of a more traditional one. Another adjustment: The school had planned to offer Portuguese to help with co-op positions in Brazil, but students persuaded administrators to replace it with Japanese. Students also sit in on faculty interviews and help write visitors’ policies, which is not a common practice at most colleges.

That kind of influence is possible because Antioch, despite its rich history, is essentially a start-up, with all the opportunities and challenges that go along with a new venture. Money is a constant concern; the school’s endowment, which helps pay for current students’ tuition, is $44.5 million, far smaller than most liberal arts institutions, which means it can’t afford to spend the $75,000 or more per student that high-end liberal-arts colleges do. That’s led Antioch officials to focus on a narrow mission and do it well, acknowledging what they are not and what they cannot do.

“Old College Try? Meet New College Try.” — Julie Irwin Zimmerman, Cincinnati Magazine