Met with Gene, Lauren, and Ed Badasov and showed them my Baghdad ideas. (Ed B. made up the working title Prince of Persia.) The storyline didn’t impress them much, but I think they saw promise in it.

It doesn’t really matter a whole lot what they think – I’m the one that has to do it – but it sure as hell wouldn’t hurt to have them enthusiastic. In a few months I should have something to thrill them.

I’m starting to get psyched to write this game. Slowly.

Apartment hunting with Steve Patrick. We checked out one place with a pink carpet, dusty chandeliers, and an old-lady landlord who said she doesn’t like renting to kids. “They make a lot of noise,” she said. “They invite their friends over.”

“Not me,” I said. “I just got off the plane from New York. I don’t have any friends.”

“Oh, you will,” she said, ominously, sounding like Yoda in Empire. “You will.”

Steve and Tomi told me I can stay with them until they kick me out.

“You should live in the Marina district,” Doug advised. “You’d meet a lot of… (pause)… yuppies.”

Looked at a house in Mill Valley, on a shady road winding through the redwoods. When I rang the doorbell the lady peered around me and said, “Is your mother down there?”

She spent fifteen minutes showing me the house, but I don’t think I ever quite convinced her I was serious.

Spent much of today working on the logistical problem of how to get the footage from a VHS tape into the computer. I finally (tentatively) settled on photographing the frames one by one with a regular 35mm camera, getting prints made, then (after retouching as needed) digitizing the prints with a regular Sony video camera.  It sounds like a pain but I think it’s the best way. 

Another solid workday. Today I stayed till around 7 and got DRAY pretty much finished. I tested it out by digitizing a page out of Muybridge. It’ll do what I need it to do. It could use another day of work. Actually, I could keep working on it for a month, if I didn’t have so much else to do.

Ed Bernstein called his last P.D. meeting this afternoon. He’s leaving to head up Broderbund’s fledgling board games division. DOUG HIMSELF will be taking over as acting head of P.D. He’ll be taking my desk, the better to stay in touch with the people. So I’ll be moving into Ed’s office. Life is strange.

P.D. is throwing Ed a goodbye party. “Better the devil we know than the deep blue sea,” Steve said.

At lunch, Doug said: “You seem to have a very strong entrepreneurial bent.” I was surprised, and said something about how I’d probably inherited it from my father.

Coming out here was definitely the right thing to do. In Chappaqua, I was in a rut. Now, I’m in the thick of it. It’s great.

I have a car.

I have an apartment.

Today I moved into Ed’s office. Obviously, this is a temporary arrangement; eventually some new guy will be hired to run P.D. and I’ll get booted to some other part of the building. But while it lasts, it’s great.

Besides vast amounts of space, a couple of armchairs for visitors, my own phone, and a door that I can close, the office has the most important thing of all – equipment. A printer. An amber screen. An Apple IIc.  It didn’t occur to me until I was actually confronted with two Apple II’s on my desk and I had to figure out what to do with the extra one – but it’s perfect. Now I can run programs without destroying the source code in memory. It’s…(gulp)… a development system.

David Stenn read my screenplay. He said it has promise but would need at least one more rewrite to be saleable. Perhaps sensing my disappointment, he said: “Look, it’s great for a first script – it really is. I wouldn’t show you my first screenplay. You obviously have talent, you should stick with it.”

He was more impressed with the reviews of Karateka I’d sent him. “You’re in the right business,” he said. “What do you want to get into this one for?”