SURF LIKE SLATER

Back at the rented Keiki Road crash pad on the North Shore, the ESPN videographers swarm Kelly, Rob, Kalani, Tom and Donavon. Eric Koch, who is on the North Shore to oversee the use of the game in the television show, is talking to me about his week on the North Shore. After watching him interact with the game's cast for four days, I'm impressed by the way he jibes with the surfers. They don't seem to have much in common. But despite outward dissimilarities, he and Kalani get along like best friends. (Kalani gave him one of his old motocross suits.)

Eric lights his next cigarette with the one he's smoking. "Kalani's been really helpful with the game," he says, brushing stringy bleached hair from his forehead, expelling smoke into the North Shore air. "He's really into video games, so he knows his stuff." Amiable and highly video-game savvy, Eric has become the prime liaison between the tech and the tube.

Eric tells me about his start in the gaming world. In 1997, after hearing that people actually got paid to play video games "somewhere in L.A.," Eric sold everything he owned save what he could fit in a black trunk, and came out from Florida to the promised land: Santa Monica, the North Shore of video games.

He begged and pleaded for a job at Activision for three months until he finally got placed in "QA," or Quality Assurance, known by Activision employees as "The Dungeon." It's a scary, Red Bull-fueled, highly unhealthy game-testing lair, where pasty-faced gamers come from all over the world to tear at joysticks and push buttons for 10 hours a day in the basement below Activision's headquarters. It resembles a windowless newsroom, except for the pierced and dyed laborers who get paid between $8 and $12 an hour for their input; just enough to buy more Red Bull, fast food and bandages for the blisters on their thumbs.

For fanatical gamers, it's a dream world of buttons, levels and point totals. For Activision, it's their Manhattan Project basement full of dedicated scientists.

Eric is explaining how he has risen, literally and figuratively, from the QA basement through the Activision ranks to where he is now, a fully-fledged, big-project producer when Kalani runs by us with a bodyboard and a surfboard in his hands. He looks at Eric.

"Well?"

"Well, okay," says Eric, dubiously.

Eric takes the bodyboard and heads toward the Ehukai channel next to Pipe, with Kalani leading. They sneak out through the channel and Eric goes to check out what Pipe's tube really looks like.