Game Over

Chapter 1: The Launch Party Nobody Wanted

The banner read REALM OF RECKONING: A NEW ERA IN GAMING, but someone had hung it crooked, and the R in RECKONING had peeled away to dangle like a man considering whether to jump. Greg Donaldson stared at it from across the Pixelgrind Studios break room and thought it was the most honest piece of marketing the company had ever produced.

"Greg, could you maybe not stand there looking like you're at a funeral?" Fiona Walker said, speed-walking past him with a tray of grocery-store cupcakes. She set them on the folding table next to a bowl of punch that Big Phil from the cafeteria had made using a recipe he described as "tropical but aggressive." The punch was the color of a traffic cone.

"I'm not at a funeral," Greg said. "Funerals have better attendance."

This was technically true. The Pixelgrind Studios launch party for Realm of Reckoning—two years in development, eighteen months behind schedule, and approximately four hundred thousand bug reports deep—was being attended by exactly four people. Greg, who was thirty-eight and had tested the game so many times he sometimes muttered NPC dialogue in his sleep. Fiona, who was his boss and who had the permanently startled expression of someone who'd just been told the building was on fire but was too polite to run. Big Phil, who ran the cafeteria and had been lured here with the promise of free cupcakes, having no idea what a video game actually was. And Samira Kassem, the twenty-two-year-old intern who'd been at Pixelgrind for three months and who was, at this very moment, sitting in the corner on her phone, looking like she'd rather be literally anywhere else on earth.

Greg couldn't blame her. He'd rather be anywhere else too. The problem was that Realm of Reckoning was his life's work in the same way that a very detailed autopsy report was a surgeon's life's work. He hadn't built the thing. He'd just spent two years documenting exactly how broken it was, in meticulous detail, across four thousand three hundred and twelve individual bug reports that absolutely no one had read.

"The stream starts in ten minutes," Fiona said, adjusting her blazer for the fourteenth time. She'd insisted on a live demo streamed to the internet, which Greg thought was roughly equivalent to performing open-heart surgery on live television when you'd never actually gone to medical school. "We're going to show the opening dungeon, the character creator, and the first boss fight. Twenty minutes, tops. Clean, professional, exciting."

"The character creator crashes if you try to give your avatar a beard," Greg said.

"Then we won't give it a beard."

"It also crashes if you don't give it a beard. There's a brief window where it works if you select the goatee and then immediately deselect it, but you have to be fast."

Fiona's left eye twitched. This was her tell. Greg had seen it approximately nine hundred times over the past two years, usually when he brought her a new batch of bug reports. "Greg. Please. Just—can we have one night where we pretend everything is fine?"

"I've been pretending everything is fine for two years. I'm very good at it."

Big Phil wandered over, holding a cupcake in each hand. Phil was six-foot-four, two hundred and sixty pounds, and had the gentle demeanor of a man whose greatest passion was making sure everyone in the building had access to a hot lunch. He'd worked at Pixelgrind for eleven years and had never once, in all that time, understood what the company actually did.

"So this is the thing you all make?" Phil said, looking at the monitor where the game's title screen was displayed. A dragon flew across a moonlit sky. The dragon's left wing was clipping through its own body, which gave it the appearance of a bird that had been partially fed through a paper shredder. "That's a sick bird."

"It's a dragon, Phil."

"Huh." Phil bit into a cupcake. "Doesn't look healthy."

Samira looked up from her phone. "Is anyone actually watching the stream?"

Fiona checked the laptop. "We have... seven viewers. No, six. No, four. Okay, one of those might be me. And one is definitely the bot that keeps posting links to discount pharmaceuticals in the chat."

"So two real people," Samira said.

"Two real people who are about to witness gaming history," Fiona said, with the desperate conviction of someone selling timeshares in a flood zone.

Greg walked over to the demo station. The game was running on Pixelgrind's best hardware, which was roughly equivalent to everyone else's mediocre hardware. The title screen glowed. REALM OF RECKONING. He'd seen this screen so many times it was burned into his retinas. He could close his eyes and see it, the dragon, the moon, the words, the faint rendering error in the lower left corner that made it look like someone had smudged the sky with a greasy thumb.

He knew this game better than he knew his own apartment. He knew that the shopkeeper in Millhaven Village said "Welcome, traveler! May your blade stay sharp and your coin purse stay full!" in a voice that sounded like it had been recorded in a bathroom. He knew that the bridge in the Darkwood Forest had a collision detection error that let you fall through it every third crossing. He knew that the final boss—a dragon named Valdremoth the Eternal—had a thirty percent chance of T-posing during its death animation, arms spread wide like a lizard on a cross.

He knew all of this because he'd reported all of it. Every single bug, every broken animation, every line of dialogue that sounded like it had been written by someone who'd learned English from a poorly translated instruction manual. Four thousand three hundred and twelve reports, each one detailed, each one timestamped, each one ignored.

"Alright," Fiona said, clapping her hands together. "Let's do this. Greg, you're on controls. Just play through the opening. Keep it simple. Samira, you're monitoring chat. Phil, you're... moral support."

"I'm also in charge of punch," Phil said.

"Yes. And punch."

Greg sat down and picked up the controller. The title screen pulsed. Outside, a late October wind rattled the windows of the Pixelgrind offices, which were located on the third floor of a building that also housed a dentist's office and a business that sold wholesale restaurant supplies. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The cupcakes sat on their tray, their frosting already developing a thin, sad crust.

This was it. Two years of work, culminating in a launch party in a break room with four people and a bowl of orange punch.

Greg pressed Start.

The screen went white.

And then the power went out.

Not gradually, not with a flicker. The lights died, the monitors died, everything died, all at once, like someone had pulled the plug on reality itself. For one second, the break room was in perfect darkness.

Then the demo monitor blazed back to life—brighter than it should have been, brighter than any monitor had a right to be. The white light filled the room like a physical thing, thick and warm and wrong. Greg felt it on his skin, felt it in his teeth.

"What the—" Fiona started.

The light swallowed her voice. It swallowed everything. Greg felt the controller vibrate in his hands, felt the floor tilt, felt gravity go sideways, and then he was falling, not down but forward, into the screen, into the light, into the game.

The last thing he heard before the break room disappeared entirely was Big Phil saying, "Is this normal?"