If you’d told me back when I was crunching thermodynamics equations at Embry-Riddle that I’d be coding the bejeezus out of a VR game featuring Bolshevik bloodsuckers T-Rexes, I would’ve laughed you out of the room. But here I am, sitting in a repurposed warehouse in Vancouver with my childhood amigos, living the dream in 2031. Well, our dream, which is as odd and wonderful as a plot twist in a Rick and Morty episode.
You see, back in '23, I had my life mapped out like a GPS route to "Stable Career Land". Aerospace engineering was my jam, and the Air Force was going to be my ticket to the stars—literally and figuratively. Then, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it twist of fate, our jeep decided to tango with gravity, leaving me with a chest that got more intimately acquainted with the road than I’d ever hoped.
My dreams of soaring took a hard landing, and the ROTC and I had to part ways. My body was grounded, but my mind was free to wander. So, like a protagonist in a quest novel finding a new path, I rerouted to computer programming. As for my bros—Dingus, Eli, and Owen—life had taken them on their own side quests in arts, marine biology, and architecture, respectively.
Fast forward through some years of healing, grinding, and many, many cups of coffee, we all found ourselves at a proverbial crossroads. I could almost hear the universe’s narrator whispering, "What happens when an artist, a scientist, a builder, and a coder walk into a bar?" Instead, we walked into a Vancouver apartment together.
The idea was simple yet as insane as believing the Game of Thrones finale would ever satisfy anyone: a VR gaming studio. We pooled our skills like the Avengers assembling, and "Commie Vampire Dinos" was birthed from a joke that escalated way too quickly during a marathon of old Halt and Catch Fire episodes.
Dingus, with his MFA in Mush (a futuristic 3D design software, for the uninitiated), shaped our polygonal undead dinos into something Pixar would have nightmares about. Eli, channeling his inner marine biologist, created an ecosystem so complex, our vampires had a preferred blood type based on the virtual humans' diet—type O negative with a hint of garlic for the win.
Owen’s architectural wizardry constructed a dystopian cityscape with a communist flair that made you feel like you were skateboarding through a KGB agent’s fever dream. And then there was me, coding like a man possessed by the spirit of a caffeine-overdosed Linus Torvalds, bringing our madcap vision to life.
Vancouver in the late 2020s to early 2030s was like a cyberpunk novel come to life, only with more rain and less neon. The city had grown up and out, its skyscrapers reaching for the clouds with the eagerness of a toddler, while its cultural roots sprawled like an old, wise tree whose branches knew no bounds. Our apartment, a repurposed loft above what once was a fish cannery in Gastown, sat snug between the old brick facades that whispered tales of the Steam Clock's younger days.
Mornings in Vancouver had a palette: the grey of the lingering mist, the silver sheen of rain on cobblestone, and the rich green of the pines that refused to be upstaged by urban sprawl. The air was a mix of ocean brine, pine, and the unmistakable electric scent of ozone from the ever-present drones zipping overhead. Seagulls cawed like cantankerous old men, arguing with the buzz of hover cars that glided past, their sounds muffled by the latest noise-cancellation tech.
Our days were underscored by the percussive patter of rain on the loft’s wide windows, a natural metronome for our work. We were cocooned in warmth, the soft glow of monitors bathing us in a more hospitable light than the gray outside. This was our incubator, the petri dish where the game mutated from a ludicrous idea into a living, breathing digital world.
The loft was a collage of our lives and work: Owen's miniature models of in-game buildings scattered on surfaces, Eli's marine tanks humming in the background, nurturing corals that glowed like alien flora. Dingus' digital canvases, ablaze with dino-concept art, wallpapered our reality. And then there was my corner, where dual screens flickered with strings of code, a digital loom weaving the fabric of our game.
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Nights fell like a curtain, the city lights winking on to form constellations that mirrored the stars obscured by the urban canopy. Food carts emerged like mushrooms after rain, wafting scents of sizzling noodles and maple-smoked salmon through the streets. We’d often venture out, our laughter mingling with the symphony of city life, our debates continuing over pints of craft beer that tasted of hops and hints of the forest that still ruled beyond the city limits.
We lived in a place suspended between the wilds of nature and the pulse of silicon dreams, a liminal space that seemed to be the physical embodiment of our own lives—half-rooted in reality, half-soaring in digital fantasies. Vancouver was not just our home; it was a crucible for our ambition, a character in our story as vital as any of us. And within its embrace, our madcap vision was given room to unfurl, like a fern greeting the dawn.
The road to "Commie Vampire Dinos" was less of a highway and more of a winding trail littered with the coding equivalent of banana peels and Mario Kart shells. Picture four lifelong friends—each a genius in his own right, but when combined, as chaotic as a blender without a lid.
Dingus had an artistic vision that sometimes felt like he was painting on a canvas the size of a football field, with a brush made for Warhammer figurines. His designs were as intricate as the plot of "Inception" on a loop. The problem? Our processing power had more in common with a 2010s smartphone than the quantum behemoths of our time. So, we improvised, and by improvised, I mean we spent countless nights fueled by energy drinks, re-coding the same dino scales until our dreams were in pixels.
Eli, who we started calling “Dad,” was in charge of the game’s lore and the creatures’ behavior. His dedication was unmatched, but his attention to detail meant we had a Compsognathus AI that once decided to go on a hunger strike for virtual ethical reasons. We dubbed it the “Gandhi glitch”.
Owen, the architect, built worlds that defied gravity. His blueprints were a tribute to Escher, had Escher been into Soviet brutalism and VR. His ambition was the eighth wonder of our little world, but it also crashed our systems more often than we'd like to admit—usually when showing off to potential investors.
And me? I was the glue, the coder—turning caffeine and takeout pizza into interactive experiences, patching up the leaks sprung by my overambitious crew. I was also the crazy one, the push-boundaries guy, the "start-a-fire-with-your-flaming-juggling-act" guy.
For three years, our apartment was a microcosm of creative anarchy. We argued over everything, from the political structure of our dino dystopia (do vampire dinos vote?) to whether we should allow players to romance the T-Rex. (For the record, we went with 'yes', and it became an unexpectedly popular feature.)
Our salad bowl of ideas often looked like a Jackson Pollock painting—everything thrown together in hopes it would somehow form a masterpiece. And it did, sort of like how tossing enough random ingredients into a pot can sometimes make a decent soup.
We had our breakdowns, like the time the game physics glitched, and vampires started ascending to the heavens like a bizarre, toothy rapture. Or when Owen’s latest “revolutionary” building design turned out to be an unintentional homage to a Jenga tower mid-collapse.
But we also had breakthroughs, like implementing a dialogue system so sophisticated that players could debate Marxist theory with the dino bourgeoisie. And when Dingus' art finally synced with my code, it was like watching a child take its first step—if the child was a giant, pixelated Triceratops.
Through all the sleepless nights, the heated debates over whether Justin Bieber's 2020 album deserved a Grammy, and the precarious dance of living on the edge of financial ruin, we built more than a game. We built a life, a brotherhood, a legend of sorts. When PewDiePie laughed so hard at our T-Rex in a ushanka hat that he fell out of his gaming chair, we knew all the chaos was worth it.
We were four friends who had dared to dream in a world that had forgotten how to fantasize. And as the world laughed and played with us, we realized that maybe, just maybe, we had created the new dream for an entire generation.
From the crushed chest of an aspiring aerospace engineer emerged a dreamer who learned to fly in virtual skies. And as we watched our player count climb like the high score on a 2010s Flappy Bird app, we all agreed on one thing: Sage Waters might’ve lost altitude, but man, did he know how to soar in code.