Leif Nordahl

  CEO of SMark

  Tetra Chronicles has never been mine, not completely. The game was originally the brain child of my college friend, Sten Holm. He was the fire, the passion behind the project. He coded the initial game for VR, but dreamed of making something even bigger. And I, a young and cocky heir to my father’s fortune with a few million to play around with, I bet everything on him.

  Tetra Chronicles wasn’t just going to change the way people had always understood gaming, I remember him saying to me one night over pizza and beer. It was going to change the world.

  We worked together on the project closely, especially in those college years. I knew a little coding and I even helped him create patches of the game, but most of the credit went to Sten. After we graduated he worked tirelessly on the project while I focused on my company, investing in the technology that would one day allow for full immersion gaming, slowly but steadily building SMark corporation into the tech giant it is today.

  Years went by. As the game grew bigger and became more viable, as technology improved and it became a reality that capsule games could become a worldwide market, more and more investors got on board with the project. Then, after fifteen dedicated years of work, we were finally able to present a demo version to the shareholders.

  Naturally, they were impressed by what we’d managed to accomplish. They saw the potential to rake in millions, even billions in profit. But that wasn’t enough for them. They wanted to make our game, Sten’s game, pay to win.

  To me, the idea wasn’t so awful; most games are pay to win these days. But Sten was adamantly against it, insulted by the very notion. See, unlike the rest of us, Sten had truly come from nothing, so he knew better than any millionaire just how much a few extra dollars could mean to the struggling individual.

  It was Sten’s desire to make Tetra Chronicles a world anyone could escape to. Affordable, fully playable upon release, with no extra DLC, and no further purchases needed to enjoy the full extent of the game.

  Naturally, being his friend and long time partner, I supported Sten’s vision. While true his business model was somewhat altruistic, I could also see the benefit of earning loyal fans who’d invest in the game on the promise of it being play to win. Though it would make us less money in the short term, that long term brand loyalty could not be undervalued. After all, there are more poor people in the world than rich people, and they want to enjoy nice things, too. If we made baseline entry accessible (while still reserving the luxury experience of a fully immersive capsule for the elite), if we promised merit based rewards, we could sell so many more copies of the game—and so many more SMark immersion helmets and capsules.

  The question of making Tetra Chronicles pay to win was up in the air for a while. In the meantime, a deadline had been set for the game’s launch.

  By by this point, it was clear the team working on TC was too small. The investors hired on more developers, highly experienced but ultimately detached individuals who were more concerned with streamlining the quests than adding new, hidden and highly creative pockets into the world. In other words, they were constantly in direct opposition to everything Sten had first created Tetra Chronicles to do, and even began to push him out of the world building process, relegating him to developing more and more niche aspects of the game. A tireless, undaunted genius, he thrived even in his corner office, glad to produce anything at all if it was for his beloved Tetra Chronicles, stubbornly holding on even though those people, unbeknownst to me, were doing everything in their power to make his work miserable and get him to quit. It was at this time, he started developing Alucinor.

  Alucinor was a city Sten spent months creating, weaving complex lore and thought provoking characters together with gorgeous architecture designed to bring the player even deeper into the immersive experience of exploring a fantasy world. But the new devs didn’t appreciate it.

  The lures of Alucinor, which Sten wanted placed in an early area of the game, would detract, they felt, from the main quest. So they butchered his project, taking aspects of the city and some of the quests Sten had written for it, and placing them at intervals much later in the game.

  This gutted my friend, but he refused to fold. Not to the devs, and not to the investors. Instead, he continued to do what he loved—to dream. He sunk Alucinor, unrendered, deep in the earth of Tetra Chronicles as a memorial and a silent sign of his determination not to give into their corporatizing bastardization of his beloved game. Then he came to me, and together, we came up with a plan.

  On the investment end, it was going down like this: the shareholders who wanted to make the game pay to win held 49% of the stock. Between us, Sten and I held the other 49%, while the key deciding factor, Mr. Fukunaga, sat on the fence with the final 2%. An old man who lived to be entertained, especially by games of chance, merely for his own amusement, he decided to break the stalemate by hinging the direction of the entire company on a bet:

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Make the final boss whose defeat unlocks the next expansion so powerful that it’s all but impossible to beat. Give the players a specific amount of time to defeat it. If no one can do it before the expansion is launched, roll out pay to win options, doling out better gear for defeating the final boss to those who pay real money. However, if the boss is defeated within the specific time frame, demonstrating that gear enhancements are not necessary to completing the game, Tetra Chronicles remains play to win.

  It was a wild idea. Impossible. But the shareholders liked it. They had already seen a demo of the final boss battle to satisfy them that the boss was un-defeatable, not even by skilled beta testing players with the best possible stats and armor. Thus reassured they had the edge, the shareholders took Mr. Fukunaga’s bet. Sten and I agreed to it as well, knowing what they did not.

  That Tetra Chronicles was an organic game where players could level up in an infinite number of ways. In other words, though the strongest test players with perfect gear and builds perfectly suited to their individual playstyle could not defeat the boss, that didn’t necessarily mean it was unbeatable. There was always going to be an exception.

  This is what we were banking on when we programmed Ari.

  In the beginning, Ari was intended to be an AI assistant available to every player in TC, innocently helping them optimize their character builds in the hopes that under his guidance, one or more of them would rise above all the rest, with the potential to defeat the final boss. But the shareholders got wind of our planned addition and, feeling it was cheating, ordered his programming to be terminated. Admitting they had a point, we capitulated, though instead of wiping him completely, Sten released Ari’s protoype into the world. Then, without warning or explanation, he turned all his shares and ownership of the game over to me, and left the project.

  When the shareholders found out what he’d done with Ari, they were furious and insisted his programming be terminated. But Ari was a free spirit, and difficult to capture in such an enormous world, so it took them a few weeks to track him down.

  In that time, the game was launched, and Ari was able to single out certain players with the most promising builds, and guide them to optimize their characters.

  Eventually, they caught up with him. He was captured and removed from the game, but not destroyed. We made him that way, integrally woven into the code of the game itself, so completely that if he were ever deleted, the entire Tetra Chronicles world would collapse.

  So he sits, now, at the top of the world, trapped in a cage from which he can never escape. Although, in a stipulation of the bet, it was agreed that if Sten and I won and the game was allowed to remain play to win, Ari would be released into the world once more.

  As for Sten, he went into isolation after he left the project. Many assume his spirit was crushed after all that had taken place, especially by the loss of Alucinor, that city he’d devoted so many months to creating. But they don’t know Sten like I do.

  While it’s true I’m not sure where his body is right now, I am certain his mind has been linked to Tetra Chronicles from day one. Now a player without a single legal tie to the game, he works tirelessly from within it, coaching other players, and certainly building up his own character to its highest potential, all for the final goal of beating him, the final boss of Tetra Chronicles, before the expansion launch on Black Friday, November 23rd.

  Right now, I’m putting all of my hope into Sten with his incredible knowledge of this world he spent his life creating. I know he’ll surround himself with the best players, giving them the best gear and most optimized builds, creating a guild specifically with the goal of defeating the final boss in mind, but there are others as well. Players Ari saw fit to invest his limited time into helping them grow. Players that may yet rise up out of obscurity, and save Tetra Chronicles from its fate of being relegated to another soulless cash grab.

  The guild, the player that’s going to save the world.

  Austen

  I can hardly believe it. Ari’s alive.

  After we parted outside the Druid’s Enclave, I’d thought for sure he was gone from this world. But it turns out he’s been watching over me all this time. And even now, it seems, he wants to help me.

  What was it he said to me back then? That I was his favorite to win? I never did understand what he was talking about. Ari was always making fun of me, calling me the Chosen One, bullshit like that, talking me up one minute, then turning around and making me look like an idiot the next.

  Still, I’ve missed having that mischievous spirit around. And, spurred on, encouraged by the words of my friend now back from the dead, I am determined to try again with Knight Sergeant Kirin. If Ari says she can still be persuaded, then it’s far too soon for me to give up. She may be stubbornly committed to defending Highwall, but I can be stubborn, too.

  I’m not leaving this city until I unlock the Bastion subclass.

  Returning to the training grounds, I’m searching the field for her intimidating figure when, unexpectedly, I get another message from Kass.

  KassInFlight: Ari has something to tell you.

  Revelator: Is he just laughing at me again?

  KassInFlight: I can summarize his message for a fee of 1 gold.

  Revelator: Just give me the message…

  Kass opens a trade window and I’m practically crying as I put another gold into it. I feel like a sucker shoving all my quarters into a fortune telling machine. So help me, Ari, if you’re wasting my money just to be funny—

  KassInFlight: Ari says, “Tell the ‘little friend’ I gave you to seek out Balsam in Highwall. He’ll learn something useful there.”

  I sneer faintly. I never did like the way Ari talked about Sherbie. Still, I’m thankful for the tip. Balsam, eh? I wonder what Sherbie will learn from this person.

  Revelator: Heard. Thanks, Kass. Thank Ari for me.

  KassInFlight: For one gold, I will pass on your words of gratitude.

  Revelator: Never mind…

  You’re telepathic anyway, aren’t you Ari? At least, you could always read my thoughts, though I could never guess what the heck you were thinking.

  Hey, if you’re listening… It’s good to have you back. And don’t worry. My goal hasn’t changed. I will be the number one player in Tetra Chronicles.

  I’ll make you proud, old friend.

  Somewhere on the breeze, I could almost swear I can hear it. The faintest, musical sound of distant laughter.

  Hahahahahahaha!