Sweaty palms, pounding heart, and a mind that won't stop racing. The sooner it's over, the better, you tell yourself, but wouldn't it be be nice if someone pulled a fire alarm and ensured this didn't have to happen at all?
That probably describes public speaking for most of us, even if it's the best man speech you've rehearsed for weeks. Now, imagine being asked to present your ideas to some of the world's most powerful people in a small room at the Pentagon.
"I don't remember the last time I was nervous presenting," said Christopher Hazard, founder of Hazardous Software, Computer Science PhD holder from North Carolina State University, and one of the two main developers on Achron, a real-time-strategy game with time travel mechanics as impressive as they are perplexing.
Yes, the same Achron that collectively melted the brains of a room of Whiskey Media employees during a recent Quick Look. The same RTS that allows players to play with time and space to create the ideal outcome for a matchup by allowing the player to jump back and forth through time. If Achron were real, we could practice our public appearances over and over again.
Knowing that, it shouldn't be much of a surprise Hazard knows how to keep his cool.
The Pentagon wasn't Hazard's first conversation with the military. After showing Achron publicly for the first time at the Game Developers Conference in 2009, where a room of hundreds scratched their heads at the concept of organically manipulating time, the military quickly approached Hazard. By quickly, of course, I mean the military tracked them down at GDC.
"We knew there was an appeal for it pretty much from the very beginning," said Hazard, recalling the meeting where he pitched now lead developer Michael Resnick. "We spent an hour and a half that first night talking about the different applications out there for using it beyond just a consumer game. We always had it in the back of our minds that would happen."
What surprised Hazard and Resnick was how quickly outsiders came on board--and not just the defense industry. Achron's seen resonation of all sorts. After some initial conversations with the military, Hazard was eventually asked to speak at "a couple of big wig defense things," which included a meeting with the Pentagon he couldn't elaborate on very much.
I mulled asking Hazard if this means the government has discovered time travel and merely desires more tools to harness its power, but realized the government's interest in Achron means they may already be able to go back and stop me from even asking about it. There's no way to be sure.
Shit.
Government work is just one piece of Hazard's new side business. The studio both licenses out its time travel mechanic to companies and works with others on developing software to enhance other industries. This is part of a larger sub-section of video games called "serious games."
"What serious gaming is [to me] is using principles from the gaming industry that the games industry has learned over many, many years and applying it to techniques within your organization, both for training and for modeling and simulation," he explained.
There's a whole serious games track at the Game Developers Conference. Shock: it doesn't generate many headlines.
It's not very difficult to imagine how a game that allows someone to simulate an outcome and easily change the results of that one possible outcome in real-time would have practical applications outside of destroying a fictional race of aliens.
Hazard was speaking to me last week over Skype from a computer in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was taking meetings not unlike the one at the Pentagon.
"[Say] there's the earthquake in Haiti or some world disaster," he proposed. "How do you respond to it? People are thinking 'Well, we've never seen this before, it's something new' so they have to figure out the new processes for that. They want to save and transfer that knowledge for the next people who are going to be running that organization. Game technology is a good way of doing that. You think about a level editor or things like that--you play out the game, you play out your strategy and you say 'Here's what we did' and other people can game on that and see 'What could we have done better?'"
The ability to learn from simulation grows when past, present and future are interchangeable, and suddenly it's less science fiction and more about practically understanding consequences of choice.
Having such interest in his concept must be especially satisfying for Hazard, as he's been thinking about creating Achron for nearly as long as 3D Realms was claiming to be making Duke Nukem Forever.
"When I came up with the idea in 1999, I estimated that it wouldn't be until 2006 or 2007 until computers would be fast enough," he said. "So I developed it as a professional hobby in that time, and just sort of had my sights set on the future."
The reason Achron took so long is also responsible for Achron taking a hit in some of its initial reviews. So much of the CPU and RAM have to be dedicated to making the time travel mechanic work as designed.
Take pathfinding, for example. Hazard figures Achron's dedicating 1/20th of the CPU and 1/1,000,000th of the RAM towards pathfinding than any modern RTS on the market.
Consequently, Hazard sometimes finds it more enjoyable to work with big corporations, as he's able to work on computers far, far more powerful than anything consumers could buy. Still, he's hopeful he could produce a game more on par with others in the genre, if the studio ever moves forward with a sequel.
It's an "if" because the next move hasn't been determined. Sequel? Expansion pack? Up in the air.
Or maybe he just went back in time to make me think that.