Chapter 2
Mike and Joe had begun to design their new game of solitaire with sound effects, a new interface, and dual-player, online capabilities. They snickered their heads off as they typed in the notice that said Bill Gates would pay them $500 for winning a game. That would really bring in a lot of players. But Mike realized something important that he had to bring up before the two released their new game into the public.
"Dude…aren't we violating the copyright? Solitaire belongs to Microsoft, and we're butchering the program and are going to market it as our own without any permission whatsoever," Mike said with concern.
"That's what trolls do," said Joe. "Don't worry, that computer geek will never find out…as long as we're careful."
"But people will eventually find out if we have the game available for a long time," said Mike.
"Let's just give this a test run to see what happens," said Joe.
Mike reluctantly agreed, and when they finished programming the game, they decided to title the game Solitaire 3000. It was a much more refurbished version of the classic made by Microsoft. The game play was similar to that of the old version of solitaire, only there were two playing fields, one for each user. The object of the game was for one of the users to win solitaire before the other user.
In addition to the dual-player capability, the game's sound effects were also interesting. Whenever a player laid down a card, a ricochet sound emitted. If a player tried to move a card to an illegal place, a "boing" sound would spring out, and the card would fly back to its original place. And at the end of the game, the winner of the game would receive the sound of applause and fireworks on his or her computer, while the loser of the game would hear the sound of a "wrong-answer" buzzer.
Mike and Joe created a website especially for Solitaire 3000 and uploaded the game to the internet. They also set up many ads for the game on message boards. When they spammed boards, they spammed with a notice to play the Solitaire 3000 game.
Not long after putting up the ads, the number of players soared to 10,000 within 15 minutes. Needless to say, both Mike and Joe were shocked. They decided to play the game themselves and challenge others. Mike and Joe always won because they knew how their program's AI functioned. It was also vital that they won because if the others won, they would soon realize that the claim that Bill Gates would pay them $500 was a fraud. Unfortunately, Mike and Joe were about to face such a problem.