The Only Thing That Matters

"No!" Smith fires back. "We want them to be able to switch points of view. If their character is killed off, they need to inhabit another one rather than having to start the game over."

Long immediately assents. Later, talking about Smith, he says, "I like a producer who'll say 'No' to me. It tells me she wants to own her project." He hired Smith as a producer, he continues, "because she has an athlete's mind-set. Athletes train for what they're doing, they 'get' the game, and they constantly strive for improvement."

Long figured Smith would be a quick study. But he's been dismayed by what he views as her sometimes disdainful treatment by BMG, the game's publisher. "They keep giving her a hard time," Long says. "They say it's because she's green, but I know it's just because she's a woman."

Smith doesn't let that -- or much else -- bother her. "I can pretty much hold my own against people like that," she says. The evidence suggests she's right. One day, doing research for Special Operations, she took her team to a "live fire" at the Army's Ft. Lewis training grounds where she found herself wearing a huge Kevlar vest and a helmet, and standing in the middle of a field lined with trenches. All around her soldiers were frantically running, diving, squirming, and crawling.

"They put us in a HMMV and took us out into this field," she recalls, "and I'm thinking, 'This is pretty cool.' We were actually right next to the soldiers. This guy runs by me with his rifle, I'm right next to him taking a picture. They're in the trenches, we're right above them taking pictures." When they started using live ammunition, however, Smith was relieved to be sent to safer, higher ground.

"Then it starts raining," she says, "and we get soaked to the skin. Then it gets dark, and a guy brings all the soldiers in, gathers us all together, and says, 'OK, now we're going to do it again.' We were freezing, sopping wet, and I'm thinking, 'Uh, we wanna go home!'"

For Smith, the work at Zombie comes naturally; the company provides an environment where she can help define new art forms, discover new ways of looking at the world, develop new mixes of media. "I guess we're trying to take reality and kind of bend it a little, almost with a cinematic effect," she says. "We're always asking, 'What can we do with game play? How will it integrate with what we can do technically?' We want a mixture of reality, cinematics, and definitely a sense of immersion. We want people to sit in front of the screen playing the game, and not even realize that hours have gone by. And then, when they walk outside, they feel like they've been on a drug."

The Grown-up

And then there comes the time when what's needed is adult supervision -- or at least the techno-preneurial version of it.

Where there are startups there are venture capitalists -- the money side that pairs with ideas -- and so the software-startup boom has triggered its own VC-startup boom. "Since we began," say Richard Novotny, who joined the EnCompass Group in 1995, "I can name 10 other new VC firms started in Washington. It's all part of the startup climate. Silicon Valley is pretty well saturated with VC firms. Seattle is one of the few areas that has lots of software companies and relatively few VCs." Focusing almost exclusively on hardware and software for the Internet, EnCompass averages $1 million per investment.

It's not a small operation -- but when you first meet Richard Novotny, you take him for used-car salesman. He's wearing a paisley shirt open at the neck, with the sleeves rolled up. He doesn't even come close to fitting the suit-and-power-tie mold that cranks out stereotypical venture capitalists. His way of talking makes him sound like a character on the old TV-sitcom "Taxi" -- a Danny DeVito on downers -- and he never quite manages to disguise the vaguely sardonic look on his face, even when negotiations take a serious turn.

Yet here he is leading two visitors from Japan into the conference room at F5 Labs, quietly orchestrating this meeting between F5 and Trans Cosmos, which may be interested in localizing BIG/ip and marketing it in Japan. Novotny skillfully guides F5 cofounders Mike Almquist and Jeff Hussey through their presentations with occasional prompts. The questions the Japanese businessmen are throwing at Almquist and Hussey grow increasingly technical; Novotny listens carefully to the answers in English and offers his own elaborations in a soft-spoken Japanese.

The shift from Novotny's garage-mechanic's English to smoothly syncopated Japanese is a jarring reminder of his unlikely package of skills. Another of Novotny's anomalous traits is a sympathetic manner that runs counter to the bottom-line bearing of the typical VC. "People who come to me are very sincere," he says. "I don't like to say just 'No' to them."