It didn’t take long for virtual reality games to corner the market. Not just the game market. Not just the entertainment market. The Market. All of it. The entire kit and caboodle. Within a year after the release of Primerea Online, the entire world, from mountain peak to sandy beach, was spending all their free time immersed, living at 5 times the normal speed of the real world. Living in a world where dragons and trolls walked the virtual landscape. Fighting and leveling and collecting loot and whatnot. Primerea Online, rough as it was, had opened peoples’ eyes to the possibilities.
Small game companies all over the world were swarmed with people wanting to invest. Out of depth phone app programmers were being hired to design entire virtual biospheres as companies and venture capitalists all over the world tried to expand into the new virtual reality market. Hackers were being scouted out as early as middle school, and there were rumors of labor camps with kidnapped graphic designers working with their hands cuffed to their keyboards.
Eight months after the first game was released, hundreds of copycats began to flood the net. Most were poorly modded versions of Primerea. Others were more original but so buggy that several early adopters ended up on their knees outside their VR Pod (hereafter called a Pod) wondering why their sick smelled like spinach. Only a few gained any widespread following.
At first glance “Hel”, the first game released by a small garage based gaming company consisting of an autistic garbage man, a substitute biology teacher and a 7 year old girl who had wandered in one day like she owned the place, was just another cookie cutter copy of the Primerea. It was described in the online game directory as a fantasy world where you and your friends could have adventures, slay monsters, collect loot and gain power. It was released with little or no acclaim, and for two months was almost completely ignored by the world at large.
Enter webcaster Bud Lightyear, who had attracted a small yet significant viewership by finding obscure yet functional games and playing them while giving a running commentary on how bad they were. He specialized in “Breaking” games, figuring out an exploit which allowed him to level up his character to obscenely overpowered heights. Extremely intelligent and utterly ruthless, he was already gaining a reputation in the industry someone who could make or break (usually break) a game company.
When Ms. Cornwall, the substitute biology teacher, found out Bud had purchased a copy of their game, she began chewing on her fingernails and pacing about nervously. She immediately signed into Hel, popping into the world she had helped make. She appeared as Terra, Goddess of the Hunt and Harvest. Why a short, overweight, extremely jewish substitute teacher in her late twenties would choose to play as a seven foot tall fur covered death machine with the head of a lion is a mystery, but may or may not have something to do with the state of our public school system.
Terra strode through the halls of the pantheon, seeking out her fellow gods.
Mephisto, Lord of Death and Rebirth (AKA Frank the autistic garbage man) was easy enough to find. As always, he was in his workshop, tweaking the programming that ran their world. He had long ago moved past conventional coding, and had out of necessity created his own interface using the game’s mechanics. Mephisto/Frank had always been a little strange, but Terra worried that he had grown worse as time went on. He had never been good at talking to people, and as he got better at talking to machines he seemed to stop even pretending to try. These days it was hard to engage his interest long enough to have a conversation with him, even for Terra, who had known him since childhood.
“We’re in trouble!” She exclaimed as she burst into his room, which pulsed with arcane energy and seemed to somehow be growing and shrinking at the same time. Her feline form was tensed to spring, the ears on top of her head twitching and her claws extending and retracting spastically.
Mephisto looked over and gave her a sarcastic leer, which was quite a trick for someone whose online appearance could only be described as a heap of rubbish and compost. “Is it full blown AIDS?”
“Bud Lightyear just joined our game!”
“How dare he!” exclaimed Mephisto, who enjoyed prodding Terra along despite not really understanding or caring what she was talking about. “I hate that guy! We should sue!”
“What? What are you talking about? We can’t sue him! We can’t…” She hesitated, grasping at straws and worrying about their precious game. “…No, right, we can’t sue. That would be ridiculous. If you’re not going to take this seriously, Frank, stop interrupting.”
“My name is Mephisto, Eunice, and I’ll thank you for remember that,” said Mephisto, who didn’t really mind being called Frank but wasn’t about to pass up an excuse to use Terra’s real name, which he knew she hated. Frankly Frank thought Terra sounded like a stripper’s name, but he was a live and let live sort of fellow.
“Don’t call me THAT NAME!” Roared Terra, and when a seven foot tall lion like goddess of the hunt roars, the walls shake.
“Indoor voices please, children,” said a quiet voice behind Terra.
Agnes stood within the doorway, having been drawn towards the noise. Online or offline, Agnes was Agnes, a 7 year old girl with oversized glasses, red hair up in a bun, and Kermit the Frog overalls atop a pink shirt. Agnes had refused all offers to design a more godlike body for herself, stating “There’s nothing people find more terrifying that a child that’s obviously smarter than them.”
“What seems to be the problem?” asked Agnes with wide eyes.
“…um,” squeaked Terra, who had faced down rage-filled roided-out teenagers in her classroom without batting an eye, but was for some reason terrified of this little girl, who was also her best friend, and the smartest person she had ever encountered. She didn’t want to break the bad news. Didn’t want to tell this sweet, sociopathic little prodigy that their reputation as a game company was about to be destroyed.
Agnes continued to look expectantly at Terra, who stood making a teakettle like sound, before finally turning toward Mephisto.
The heap shrugged. “From what I understood of her rant, a small plastic astronaut has purchased a copy of our game, and may or may not attempt to give all our players AIDS. But since we don’t actually have any players in this game yet, I say we let the little bugger go out and bugger anything her can catch.”
Agnes, who was used to dealing with Mephisto, took a moment to decipher this before turning back to Terra.
“Bud Lightyear bought a copy of our game?” She asked.
Terra nodded wordlessly.
You can imagine her surprise when Agnes’ face split into a wide, feral grin.
“Finally!” She crowed.
***
Bud took a moment before entering Hel for one last check that his live feed programs were running. He was set up to record video both from his own eyes and from several angles around him, in order to get all the action from every angle. This would be the 43rd game he demolished, and he experienced an almost sensual joy from thinking about the dreams he was about to crush.
Then the clock struck noon, signaling the start of his webcast. He stepped into the virtual sunlight of Hel for the first time.
And, as always, he began his show and his experience with a new game with his catchphrase “One small step for man, one giant leap for game design! Welcome to my show folks! I’m Bud Lightyear, and today we’re reviewing “Hel”, an almost unknown Primerea ripoff which I suspect will take me less than a full real world day (That’s five virtual days for you Amish listeners) to break. Let’s see how things go!”
He continued to give a running commentary as he went along. Trying desperately to be witty. He prided himself on his sense of humor, which didn’t in fact exist.
“Alright, looking around I appear to be in a pretty basic medieval town. There’s a road made out of dirt. Some buildings made out of dirt. A town wall made out of, you guessed it, dirt. Oh, and here’s a peasant, who while not made out of dirt appears to have carried on a long, torrid love affair with it spanning several years.”
“Now this peasant, who is looking at me expectantly and beckoning me over, pretty much screams ‘starting Quest’, so let’s go see what he has to say.”
“Hello good sir!” said Bud, walking up.
“No one will ever love you,” stated the peasant in a matter of fact tone
“…What?” said Bud.
This strange, dour statement threw him for a loop, and he didn’t really know how to respond.
“No one will ever love you,” repeated the peasant, whose eyes appeared to be moving independently of each other. The right one remained locked with Bud’s own gaze, while the left one wandered to look at his outfit and equipment. “You’re going to die alone, in a field, with your blood soaking into the mud, and no one will care. You’re going to die because you’re a pansy. You’re going to die because you have no dick, and they can smell that you have no dick, and they know how good dickless cowards taste. And when your corpse is cooling in the rain, the people who you thought loved you will laugh and divvy up your stuff. Then they’ll sing songs about how they’re glad you’re dead.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Bud took a moment to absorb this. Then he took another moment.
“Damn…I mean…damn. What? What?”
The peasant laughed, then went back to his gardening.
Bud was at a loss. This wasn’t in tune with his normal experience. When you walk up to a peasant at the start of game, they’re supposed to ask you to kill ten badgers or something. Then you give them ten badger livers or whatever and they give you a sword. That’s how this works. That’s how this is supposed to work.
But not here apparently.
“OK,” he said with a false cheer for his viewers’ sake “OK, let’s review what we’ve learned so far. Firstly, the writers for this game are seriously messed up. Secondly….,” he drew a blank.
“Secondly we need to look at the equipment they started us with. Which we really should have done first. Now remember viewers, unlike Primerea, this game doesn’t allow you to adjust your race/class during character creation. So everyone starts off with the same equipment. Let’s see what we have here.”
“OK, looks like we have a sword, five health potions, and five loaves of bread. Pretty standard stuff.”
Bud took out the sword and practiced swinging it around. Having experience with a wide variety of fantasy games, he considered himself pretty good with a sword, though his broken characters usually depended on skill and attribute bonuses to reach true deadlyness. Unfortunately, he was unable to find any sort of help menu that listed skills or how to acquire them. Unwilling to ask the creepy peasant for help, Bud experimented by swinging at a nearby tree from different angles. After a minute or two he got his first notification of the game.
Bud did his signature dance of celebration, which was frankly pretty awful. “Alright guys, I just learned my first skill. For those of you who can’t read, it says BLADE MASTERY. It seems pretty cool. So I’m going to level it a few times then go find something to kill. A lot of people would probably just run out the gate now and attack the nearest monster, but this game hasn’t given me any information about death penalties, and that peasant freaked me out more than a little and I don’t want to risk it yet, so I’m gonna grind a little. Feel free to check up on me later, I’ll be hitting this tree for a while”
In truth, Bud was a little worried. In a normal game, he’d have a pretty good understanding of what he needed to do by now, but this game seemed to delight in giving no advice, direction or hints. There was no menu. There was no tutorial. As near as he could tell there were no quests. He didn’t want to start his video off by dying.
Once he got his blade mastery up to level 10, increasing the sharpness and mass of his blade by 5%, he decided he had delayed long enough (several hours had passed) and headed toward the gate. The peasant saw his intention and began laughing like a madman. Bud, his back ramrod straight and his virtual face red with embarrassment, did his best to ignore it and continued on to the other side of the wall, trying not to dread what he was going to see outside the village.
What he saw, as it turned out, was rabbits. A field full of rabbits. Hopping around peacefully, chewing on grass, twitching their noses.
Bud couldn’t help but laugh. He tipped his hat (beginners cap, +1 against cold) to the programmers of this game. What a great gag. Get the noobs nice and terrified for nothing.
Of course, the joke was over now that he had broadcast the secret to the world, but he was fair enough to admit they had had him going for a while. Even though this was a game, he had felt genuine fear for a moment. So he tipped his hat laughed his relief as he walked forward.
Then the rabbits attacked. Bud, reactions honed by years of gameplay across a multitude of virtual world, was able to dodge the first attack, dodging its leaping form as it aimed for his throat, cutting it in half as it passed. It was a very cool move. Very stylish. Very Bruce Lee.
Less cool was the sound he made as the second rabbit attached itself to his Achilles tendon. Suddenly finding himself on the ground, he was swarmed in moments.
…
And that was the world first exposure to the raging beast of a game known as “Hel”. A few thousand people saw the live feed of Bud falling under the rabbits teeth. They showed a few million of their friends. Those millions continued to watch as Bud tried again and again to make headway at the game, eventually bringing in other professional gamers to help out. Eventually those professional gamers were joined by thousands of viewers. Together, slowly, working in teams, learning about the game as players (usually accidentally) learned new skills, they got stronger. Guilds formed, with hellish training schedules that insisted on a level of teamwork and precision rarely seen outside of professional sports. Eventually, after months, the valley of rabbits was conquered, not by Bud Lightyear, but by a coalition of teams from other two newbie villages. Then the badgers showed up and began raising hell. Skills and levels weren’t enough to master this game. You needed the reflexes of a professional athlete, and it only took one mistake to die and have to start over.
But regardless of the bloodshed, the gaming community was hooked. Not all of them. Not even most of them. Most people hated playing the game. It was too hard. The death penalties were too strict. The monsters too deadly. The designers hadn’t even provided a guide. But the hardcore gamers had finally found their Everest. After years of being treated with kid gloves by game developers who were afraid to hurt their players feelings, they had finally found a game designer who sincerely wanted to kill them. The designers, who came to be known as N.O.W.E.L.Y Games because of the first sentence spoken in their game (No One Will Ever Love You), seemed to want players to fail.
And they loved it.
It was five years later (25 game years) that a guild of 200 players managed to defeat the most powerful dungeon in the game. The players had amassed godlike power during those 25 years, through sweat and tears and bloodshed. More than half of them had learned to speak Hel’s 7 dead languages fluently, giving them access to arcane magic that had wrecked the continent centuries ago. Others had acquired heavily enchanted artifacts that pulsed with power and bent space around them. One of them had in fact spent 7 game years training under an NPC martial arts master atop a little known mountain in order to have the soul of a dragon bound to his body. Many of them were closer to their guildmates than they were to their own children, and each one had seen more combat than any warrior in human history. They cleared the dungeon, barely, and only because 12 other guilds had made the attempt before them, sacrificing themselves to get the details behind the boss’ minions and tactics.
The survivors were few. The demon king had obliterated all but 40 players, most of whom were on their last legs.
Then a light descended on the battlefield, and the gods appeared.
…The bastards.
“Hi guys” said Agnes. “Good job and whatever. I guess it’s pretty impressive that you killed the demon boss guy. Especially since no player has managed to discover the holy knight hidden class yet. So, you know, go you.”
SirNastyNight, who was staring at Agnes but didn’t seem to really be seeing her, replied with a befuddled “What?”
“Exactly! That’s the spirit!” boomed Mephisto. “We wanted to congratulate you. Because of you, we finally get to release our next game. Frankly we didn’t think you guys would ever finish. I mean, 5 years?”
“Shush Frank!” snapped Terra. Then she turned back to the shellshocked players. “Don’t listen to him. 5 years isn’t that bad. And it totally gave us time to make sure everything in our second game was perfect. So now that you’re done with our old game, please come play our new game when it’s released.”
Herratic, who was a little faster on the uptake than his companions, dragged his wounded body toward the gods, “You….you made a sequel to Hel?”
This was big news. The gaming community was dying to know when NOWELY Games would release their second title.
Mephisto seemed confused, “What? No, no that would be stupid. We already made Hel. Why would we want to make another Hel? Don’t be stupid. No, no this game is called Midgaurd. Completely different.”
“Completely different,” agreed Terra.
“It’s gonna be a lot more fun,” cackled Agnes.
Then they disappeared.
The bastards.