Of course, the road to selling twenty-three million cards wasn’t completely straight. For example, the first production batch of cards from the printer were not what we wanted. Evidently, the printer thought we were just kidding when we’d talked about having a mathematical formula, even a simple one, for controlling the distribution of the common, uncommon, and rare cards. And then once the retail stores heard that we were actually going to be able to deliver on what they ordered, they not only weren’t worried about having ordered too much of the game, they simply raised their orders further. We weren’t able to adjust the print run at that point, though we felt good about penciling in a reprint sooner than later.

The area of damp dog smell radiating out of the carpet from the fireplace was still growing. The night before Thanksgiving, some of my archaeologist housemates decided to take serious measures against the dog spirit who it seemed was haunting our home. I came in from a night out with friends around one in the morning to find that I could not see anything at all in front of me. Usually, I could see down the short front hall and through the long living room out through the glass door to the backyard starlight beyond.

Flipping on the hall light showed me why: visibility was only about 3 feet or so, after which a solid volume of smoke filled the house floor to ceiling. I called hesitantly to my housemates, but got no response. After confirming that no one was in the living room I made my way to the fireplace, where embers still glowed. Coughing, I opened the flue and cracked the back door, then I retreated to my room. One open window and a damp towel along the door’s bottom edge later and I felt safe going to sleep that cold November night.

To be fair, though, they’d exercised whatever had been haunting us. It’d be a month before people stopped asking me why I smelled like a campfire, though we never felt dampness on the carpet or smelled wet dog in the living room again.

The weeks leading up to the game’s release were some of the sweetest in years, and one of the few bright spots through my year of tedious depression. People were talking about a new movie that had just come out called Pulp Fiction, and after all the time we’d spent together over the past three months it felt great to get out with Steve to do something fun — I thought Doug Barnes had come with us as well, though he doesn’t remember it that way now; someone did, certainly. It felt even more right to be seeing for the first time a movie that seemed destined to be a classic.

“It’s a great game,” I said in the parking lot on the way out from the film.

“Well, I hope so,” Steve said. “I think it will sell.”

“It will,” I said.

Back at the office, Jim McCoy, lead admin for Illuminati Online, was opening one of the first sets of finished, packaged, store-ready cards and sorting them out. I thought seeing that many cards so soon would be nausea-inducing. I was wrong. For whatever reason, it was comforting. To see Jim so delighted by the cards was a real gift for me, too. I told him about Pulp Fiction, strongly recommending he see it.

He nodded quietly, adding nothing further. That was when it hit me: I always knew Jim was a cool guy, though I hadn’t realized how shy he was. I hoped he’d open up some day.

I told him how the Newton coupled with the software he’d given me had saved the day for us in Michigan, at the press check, marveling at how much technology had to be bent to make up for being short a single quarter. We had a good laugh. I liked Jim.

We played our first in-house game with real, finished cards — six of us battling it out for world domination. I won.

Soon, the fan mail began pouring in — mostly electronic, at first, though this was in the day when physical fan mail still arrived every day, with questions or ideas or strange randomness. Overall, I think the game had a mixed reception. It took much longer to play than Magic, for example, and it was a specific kind of dorky that was different from Dungeons & Dragons dorky or Star Trek dorky. It had its serious fans, though, and in those first few weeks, most people were pretty excited about it. There’d only been four collectible card games of note, by that point, not counting two tiny disasters from two tiny companies.

We were excited, certainly. The best part, of course, was finally having something worth talking about with people who didn’t give a crap about games. At a small concert in downtown Austin, I ran into one of Cookie’s old roommates and her boyfriend, the young designer who’d been running down my Internet predictions.

“It hasn’t even been a week,” I said, “and we’ve nearly sold through twenty-three million cards.” They stared, mouths opened. “I think it’s pretty cool,” I filled in. They wished me a merry Christmas, turned, and walked away. I never saw them again. That’s fine.

The following week, I met up with Cookie. She called because she was in town for Christmas to see her parents. I picked her up in town and we drove over to just north of the university campus. That’s where in Austin you always used to find the most spectacular holiday light displays, strands of brilliance stretching from pole to pole along and across the street and back. Maybe it’s still that way today.

Standing on a corner, looking up at the pin points of color, I hugged her from behind as she reached up to squeeze my forearms gently.

“Some part of you will be inside of me for eternity,” I said, not sure it was a good thing even though it was true. We did not kiss. That would be more than six months out, still.

As uneven as some of our moments had been during production, Steve was gracious and generous once the money began rolling in. He gave me a bonus that was almost half my annual salary at that point, as well as a 20% raise. This was still not a lot of money, even in Austin terms, but I was finally making more than a starting teacher’s salary, so it began to feel more real. I began to wonder if I might actually have taken a much larger step towards adulthood than I’d thought.

I was having fun, and I was learning something. What’s not to love?

My mom called. “You won, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“The nerds. The nerds won.”

“They did?”

“You did. You always said that computers were the future, and that tying them together was important, and in the past year it’s finally happened.”

“Are you saying you think it’s cool to be a nerd?”

“No,” she said. “I think the nerds aren’t nerds anymore. I don’t know; they just are. But they’re in charge now. You’re in charge now.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” I said, quickly adding, “but thanks. Thank you.”

Our house was full for New Year’s Eve. Jeff and Andy and their larger circle were there, plus Suzanne and some of her other friends; Patch and Felicity showed up, though Doug was busy — and of course there were the archeologists and all their friends. Even Mentor came through, for a time. Rick couldn’t make it. He was back in Houston, having girlfriend trouble. Something would have to change there soon.

As the night breezed on, I found myself sitting in one of those big round rattan papasan chairs, half curled up and watching everyone moving in and around the party, basking in the magic of the evening. Down on the floor by the chair, Felicity asked something of Patch, pointing up at me. He grinned and shrugged, and like a careful cat she crawled up to nestle with me in that eternal moment. She held my hand, pressing it against her thin waist.

“I can see it,” I told her. I tilted my head toward Patch, who sat watching us from the thick shag carpet. “I see it.”

“See what?” he asked, still grinning.

“All the connections,” I said, my gaze drifting. “I can see the three of us on the day we met. I can see every time Felicity served me eggs over-easy at Red River Cafe. Doug was so important to all of this, and I can see the raw deal he got, in the end — I wonder what’s going to happen to him? It’ll be so marvelous to see.”

I went on. “I can see all the ways that I know all the people here, and how we’ve touched each other’s lives — the important ways, the trivial ways. All the connections. It makes a pattern.”

“Cool,” he said.

“Someday,” I told them both, “I’m going to write it all down.”

“If anyone can,” Felicity said, “it’s you.”

“Well,” I began to say —

— then a short fuse ignited in my brain, and for a moment, only for a moment, I thought I heard my mother saying something, and I remembered the thing I hadn’t even known I’d forgotten, never known I had lost.

It came to me, only for a second: my true name. I reached to grasp it with both hands and like that, it was gone. Worse, I couldn’t even remember what it had been, what it had meant to me, or the mysterious web of connections it had so briefly unlocked.

“Are you alright?” Felicity asked.

“I think so,” I said, though I did not think so.

Someday, I told myself, I should at least try to write it down. But being realistic, until I finished the book that Steve had pulled — and he was right to pull it, I could see it by then; the most infuriating thing about Steve was that he was right, he especially was usually right about things being wrong — I couldn’t even begin to think about writing anything else.

One year to the day, I would again remember my true name. But it would be a long year.

Here’s the story.

It was a simple idea, as these things go. After having spent years wondering what the Internet would first look like — only to be disappointed to discover that no, it wasn’t going to be the virtual-reality interface promised by science fiction but a series of crappy-looking flat pages of text no more sophisticated than a daily newspaper — I was the right person at the right time to ask why it couldn’t be just a little bit more.

Since quarterly newsletters and bi-monthly magazines were too infrequent, especially in promoting a project we’d started only ten weeks earlier, the answer was something online. Because our Web site was one of the first couple of hundred destinations on the Internet, if not one of the first hundred, and a good chunk of people who were online at that time were, well, geeks, our little game company got a fair bit of traffic. So you’d want it to be a Web page.

But it would be great if it wasn’t any old Web page, not least because I didn’t like Web pages at the time. For example, here’s what The Telegraph looked like in 1994’s November.

Not good. What about yesterday’s stories? What about related stories? Because traditional media was crapping themselves about how they were going to make money online, they had no plan to make older content available. A number of media outlets seemed to presume they’d end up adopting a business model like Lexis-Nexus, which had been successfully selling subscriptions to case-law records and news archives for many years by that point. Still, I don’t remember anyone being interested in organizing what little content they were putting online towards the end of 1994.

What if you didn’t care whether or not anyone was paying for your content? We sold issues of Pyramid Magazine, because it cost a lot to print. We gave away our quarterly newsletter in stacks because it was a compact bit of self-promotion. But what if you did care about letting people look back, to see the full scope of content you’d posted in the past, and you wanted to make it as easy as possible?

Begin with a Web page, basic HTML, with a header across the top naming your publication and a short column of text saying whatever you wanted to say. Then every day, you could add another column on top of yesterday’s story, growing the page out in reverse-chronological order. Add something like a little calendar in the upper-right corner of the page, which would show readers which days had seen updates, and let them jump to specific days, and you’re golden.

You could put all sorts of things in these columns. You can give people your email address, you could link to other pages on your site — you could link to other sites.

It could be a better promotional tool than a magazine or a newspaper. It didn’t need to be a daily editorial, it could reach out to people in a very personal way. I was afraid that it would become more personal journal than advertising copy, though I figured there were worse things in the world.

I didn’t have a name for it, though 19 years later most people would call it a weblog, blog for short.

I had a serious problem, though. I called it postpartum depression over having gotten the card game out the door, but it turned out to be normal depression, in a serious way. While I expect I probably looked fine, it would control my life for almost exactly a year.

We didn’t have a year to kick this thing off, though. The printer was mowing through the card stock, and the retailers were hungry for the game, so we had four weeks to get our fans fired up enough to send them into the stores.

Every day, Steve asked me, “How’s it going with that news thing?” I don’t know what I said. I should have said, “Listen, I’m pretty depressed and I can’t even see how to start making something that isn’t crap.” Because while Steve was not always a mentoring type, he was a problem solver, and one of his special geniuses was improving things that sucked.

Instead, I did almost nothing for ten days after Andy and I got back from the press check. That’s not totally true: I took the time to assess what it would take to get my book project back on track. With the confidence and the credibility I’d earned from my work on the card game, I still thought it would be possible to get it out in two months.

It wouldn’t come out for two years, though I’ll get to that.

My work on the HTML page quickly got hung up on how to make the little calendar, and though I spent nearly all my free time brooding about it I made no progress. After waiting nearly two weeks for me to get off my ass and do something — anything — Steve caught me in the hall upstairs one Thursday morning.

“I went ahead and started a page for the newsletter idea you were talking about,” he said. “I don’t know what to call it, but we can figure it out.”

I was mad, though I knew I could only be mad at myself. I’d wanted to make something great, while Steve saw how to make something good enough.

“I gave you permission to update the file,” he said with a shrug. “If you want to be the one to update it, go ahead.”

I was too mad and depressed to do anything about it that night. The next day, Steve told me that a fan had recommended calling it The Daily Illuminator, and that’s what it’s called to this day.

Click here to read the first two weeks of the Web’s oldest blog. The first entry was November 16, two days before the page from The Telegraph shown above.

By Sunday, I’d crawled far enough away from my depression and didn’t feel overwhelmed by the pressure to return to my derailed book project, so I took the time to add my first of many updates to the Illuminator. After a short line reporting that we’d signed off on the most recent issue of Pyramid, I said this:

“The rest of our weekend has been surprisingly calm. After much cold and rain this morning, the clouds parted and we had a lovely autumn afternoon.”

I’ll call it my first blog post, and that’s why to my closest friends and I take credit for co-founding the world’s oldest blog. Though it made me grit my teeth at the time, Steve Jackson deserves credit for being its first blogger, with me being the second.

Was it the first actual blog? I don’t know. In 2008, I heard about a guy who’d posted a reverse-chronological diary of his summer intern a few months before our column started, but I don’t know anyone who heard about it at the time and he didn’t keep any archives. The basic idea had appeared before as a “plan” file, which some older-school Internet people used to make available for public browsing, which was kind of a personal “what I’m planning to do” text file. What we did took the concept to its logical Web-based conclusion. If it wasn’t the first blog, it was the first one we ever saw, and it remains the oldest, longest-running, regularly updated blog, though the credit for that goes to the great number of people who’ve stepped up over the years to keep it updated.

Call it a final bit of magic to show up in my life that year.

We updated it every day, letting fans in on the blow-by-blow of getting Illuminati: New World Order, and soon other projects, wrapped up and available in stores. It was 10 days before we included our first link, though the ability to link to other pages across our site was cooler than any worry about people getting sick of reading text littered with links. It was the Web: people hoped your text would be littered with links, because that felt like a more useful thing to do. Other news sites were repulsed by the idea of putting up columns linking to source material or definitions on other sites, because it was taking readers away from their content and their site. It sounded to us that by doing the right thing for readers, they’d be more inspired to come back to us again.

The Daily Illuminator is still going strong, nearly 20 years later.

Exactly one month after the Illuminator’s first post, on December 16, Illuminati: New World Order hit retail stores. I hit a couple of comic shops on launch day, and it was an eerie feeling to see our neatly packaged decks of cards there by everyone’s cash registers. I was swollen with regret over so many aspects of the design, but seven or so people had put it together from scratch in two months — and that included bringing the team of seven or so people together. So it wasn’t great, but I had to admit it was good enough.

It was an even eerier feeling a few days later, when all the decks were gone. They were gone because they had sold out.

People liked it. In seven days, we sold 23 million cards.