Bill King had been as good as his word and better. He and Mike Baker only needed ten minutes alone with Nick Morelli's Pong game to figure out how it worked and to document the components. King knew in an instant the principle behind the machine and how he could build a better game in no time.
"If people are willing to pay money to play this simple thing," King mused to himself, "What would they say to a game that offered a real challenge?"
King already had the perfect program in mind and it wouldn't take much to turn it into a game.
"Mike, what do you think we could do with our standard joystick test program?" King asked.
"Well, we already use it to move a cursor through a maze," Baker replied. "But we designed it to test the hand/eye coordination of professional fighter pilots. We'll have to dumb it down a little for the Average Joe."
"Dumb it down, pal. Lobotomize it if you have to. If people will pay cash for Pong they'll go nuts for what we can offer!" King was beside himself with anticipation. It wasn't the kind of work he had in mind when he opened Alpha Control for business, but it certainly might bring in some much-needed revenue. He could always sell it under a subsidiary name.
Within a week, King and Baker had designed a program that did nothing but amuse. Using an Alpha Control joystick, anyone with a quarter could move a dot of light through a series of increasingly intricate mazes. As long as the players didn't touch the walls they could move on to the next level. Mike Baker suggested adding some sort of bonus points or prizes to be hidden along the way. Harkening back to his classical Greek mythology studies, Bill King named the game Manny the Minotaur in a nod to the half-man/half-bull creature who inhabited King Minos' fabled labyrinth on the Isle of Crete. The moving dot was recast as the closest thing to a minotaur as the primitive graphics of the day would allow.
King contacted a national arcade game company and offered to lease them Manny in exchange for a flat cut of the profits. For every quarter the new video game swallowed, Katyco, the subsidiary named for the woman who first brought video games to King's attention, would receive fifteen cents. Of that, a nickel would go directly to Mike Baker and his new bride, Katy.
While a nickel never bought much as a rule, the ten million nickels Manny generated that first year brought the newlyweds half a million dollars, which was real money in the early 70s. The following year, King would name Katy Baker as the CEO of the subsidiary she had inspired. As several more games followed Manny in quick succession, Katy found herself helming one of the most profitable companies in the country, and one of only a handful of women CEOs in the world. Katy was the first of many women Bill King would name to senior positions over the years, a policy he would never regret.
With half a dozen successful game titles behind it, Katyco soon became a major source of revenue for Alpha Control. The infusion of cash allowed King to turn his attention to projects he thought were worthwhile, rather than scrambling to meet artificial deadlines imposed by government contracts. He was wise enough to recognize that the game division's rapid success had more to do with good timing than high innovation. Soon, the millions of dollars generated by the video game craze would flood the field with competitors and King would probably sell out and roll the profits back into Alpha Control, where his heart and mind really was.
It was another warm May evening, a full year after the Great Pong Raid, when Bill King was finally able to get back to Morelli's pizzeria.
"Holy cats!," growled Nick Morelli, affecting an exaggerated theatrical squint. "The face looks familiar but I just can't place the name."
"I know. I know. I've been gone a long time, and I'm sorry," said King, meaning it.
"I was startin' to think I'd never collect on my marker," Morelli chided, pointing to a framed napkin on the wall behind the register, signed by King and stating "I owe Nick Morelli a hundred." "I ain't a young man no more," he joked.
"Shoot! I should live so long!" countered the younger man. "I've come back to clear my good name and pay my debt to society."
"Screw society, gimme my C-note," laughed Morelli.
King reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a check, which he handed over to Morelli with a flourish. He watched the other man's face as he read the document. At first Morelli playfully pointed to the handwritten sign taped to the register that read "No Checks!" but within a few seconds, for the first time in many, many years, Nick Morelli found himself speechless. The amount on the check read $100,000 dollars. The note on the "Memo" line read: "Consulting Fees."
"Sweet sufferin' Marie!" was the best Morelli could come up with, as he half-collapsed onto a nearby stool. "Billy, I thought you meant a hundred bucks. I can't take this!"
"Yeah you can, Mr. Morelli. You've given me a lot of great advice over the past few years and you deserve to be rewarded for it. I wouldn't be where I am today without you. I want to make you one of my chief consultants."
"Hell, I don't know nuthin' about no computers!"
"You don't have to. All I need is an honest man who will give me his honest opinion whenever I need it."
"You sure this check is any good?" said Morelli with a smile.
"I'd cash it as soon as you can," laughed King. "We're in a fickle business, you and I."
"Geez!"
The pizza business had been very good to Nick Morelli and over the decades he and his wife had squirreled away a sizable nest-egg for retirement, but this boon had completely changed the game. Every May 7th, for the next fifteen years, Bill King would stop whatever he was doing, wherever he was in the world, and make a pilgrimage to Morelli's to consult his favorite consultant.
"Who's going to win the World Series this year, Mr. M.?" was the traditional question.
"The Boston Bruins, of course!" was the traditional answer.
"That's a rather dubious prediction for a baseball tournament."
"Listen, Jack, who's the famous consultant here? You or me?" And the ceremony was complete.
Their business completed, King would order a pizza and a beer and hand his friend a six-digit check for his consulting advice. Morelli always tithed a tenth of the money to his church and split the rest between the Morelli Scholarship Foundation, a local orphanage and a city-wide soup kitchen. When Nick Morelli passed away years later, Bill King saw to it that his consulting fees continued to be distributed accordingly, in memory of his first mentor.
Over the course of his long life, people would call King many things. The one epithet friend and foe alike could agree upon, whether glowingly or grudgingly, was generous.