“We need more dread,” he said, coming forward in his chair. “We have these fucking early meetings, fine, I don’t complain, but do I have to sit here listening to dweebs talking about fucking smoke? Smoke is not the issue. What we really need is dread.”
“I agree,” said Reed or Reese.
“Absolutely,” said his brother. “We already have the best, most textured smoke in the business, and don’t say Napalm Sunday because their smoke blows.”
BigIf had two major rivals in the world of Web-based, multiplayer shoot-’emups. One was Napalm Sunday, set in the distant future. The other was Elfin, set in the magic past, an age of dragons, gorgons, castle keeps, warlocks, and bad spells. BigIf was poised nervously between them, set in the near future, a tricky time to work with — not exactly now, but also not the never-never of Arthurian romance or of interstellar war. The three games had been launched at more or less the same time, during the last game craze when every venture cap worth his or her corporate salt had at least one multiplayer shoot-’em-up.com in the incubator. Many games were started in the fad, all of them pursuing the same vision strategy: take the VC money, build a game, do the marketing, get the player loads up to a stable-profit, self-sustaining waterline, then take the baby public and everyone gets rich, a can’t-miss plan — so can’t-miss, in fact, that many game designers saw it, and thirty games were launched, more than the hard-core gamer base could possibly support, and so the can’t-miss plan was the ruin of many interactivists, and a kick in the wallets of their VC backers. Remember Scoregasm, which let you, the gamer, blast your way out of a terrorist-held junior high school? Or Red Motorcade, which let you relive the murder of John Kennedy in the role of Oswald, the Cubans, the CIA, the Soviets, the Cosa Nostra, or the Secret Servicemen playing in thwart mode? Jens worshiped Red Motorcade as a design. It had one beginning, eight middles, and sixty-four endings, the nice effect of squaring possibilities, but the teens, the target audience, were only dimly aware of the real events in Dallas and the Dealey Plaza graphics were always going down. Of the surviving games, only BigIf, Elfin, and Nap Sunday were thought to have a chance of reaching steady profit, stable loads, and the sunburst of successful IPOage.
Head said, “Nap Sunday’s in the shitter, but not because their smoke blows, though it does. They’re in the shitter, Jens, because they are dread-challenged. What can you kill in outer space? Robots? Cyborgs? Those annoying machine poodles? I am forced to yawn my ass off. Distant future, pah. Who gives a fuck about the distant anything?”
Meredith said, “Clarify.”
Head said, “We need new monsters. Hamsterman was dynamite, don’t get me wrong. Skitz the Cat, Farty Pup, Seeing Eye, the piss and toxic flatulence, all the bathroom slapstick — it worked, we’re here, and we owe it all to them. I’m duly grateful, but I sense a played-out trend. We’ve got to up the ante, folks. We’ve got to crank the dread. Our monsters are cartoons. Their life and death — cartoonish. We need human monsters. People want to shoot a face.”
“Hmm,” said Meredith. She turned to Jens. “How’s the Postal Worker coming?”
Jens said, “Naubek has the Postal Worker.”
“Naubek is a burnout,” said Jaffe the attorney, doodling furiously, straining from the effort.
“I’ll reassign it,” said Meredith.
“Nap Sunday’s got a droid that doesn’t even kill you,” said one of the twins. “If you fight it and lose, it overrides your mouse port and drags you around for an hour and you can’t logoff or close the window.”
“Virtual enslavement,” said Head. “You know, that’s not half bad.”
“The problem is time,” said Meredith. “Elfin has the past, Nap Sunday has the future. We’re stuck in the middle.”
“And Elfin’s expanding,” Digby said. “They’re launching a new time-travel feature. Click an icon and their warlocks will send you ahead in time to the day of the Kennedy assassination. They bought a lot of code at Red Motorcade’s going-out-of-business sale.”
Head said, “Time travel is so corny.”
“Maybe so,” said Meredith, “but soon the wizards will be able to send you ahead to a post-apocalyptic near future, and where will that leave us?”
“Can they do that?” Digby asked. “Didn’t we license the near future?”
Jaffe the attorney cleared his throat. He said, “We have a trademark on any game-related use of the word apocalypse and twenty-four synonyms and likely modifiers in all of the GATT languages. We own Armageddon, chaos, plague, famine, mushroom, cloud, mushroom cloud, and thermonuclear exchange. We bought toxic, ooze, and mutant from Scoregasm when they went belly up. We own belly up, bite the dust, bought the farm. We traded flog the dolphin to Sea Spawn in return for put to sleep—it seemed a better mammal-fit — and got it back when Sea Spawn choked the chicken. I’d say it would be difficult for Elfin to market a near-futuristic feature in any GATT vocabulary without running afoul.”
“Thank you,” said Meredith.
Head said, “Let them have the past, the future, the near future. That still leaves one time realm unexploited: the present.” He looked around the table. “Nothing crawls the flesh like the near-at-hand. Let’s draw our monsters from the nightly news. Think about it, people. What if famous serial killers made special guest appearances? I’m talking big names here, Bundy, Gacy, Gein, Manson live from Quentin. The Oklahoma City bomber, John Doe Number Two, the stocky ball-capped male they never caught. Salvadoran death squads, the Tonton Macoutes, brand-name ethnic cleansers.”
“Bundy’s dead,” said Meredith. “Gein too, I think.”
Head said, “I don’t mean the actual guys, living or dead, although if Manson would play ball — wow. I mean characters like them, recognizable products of our own time. What could be more dreadful?”
“Wouldn’t it get dated fast?” Digby asked. “That’s the beauty of the distant future.”
Head said, “We’ll be gone in eighteen months, IPO’d or RIP’d. Fast is not the problem.”
They covered other topics, the underbrush upgrades, the new audio fx. As the meeting ended, Meredith asked Jens to stay behind. They went into her office with the head creative.
Meredith installed herself behind her desk, a mass of spotless butcher block, a terrifying desk. “So,” she said. “What the fuck is up with Monster Todd?”
Jens said, “Any day now. I just have a few kinks to—”
“Six weeks overdue,” said the head creative.
“Don’t blame me,” said Jens. “The problem is your specs, Head. What’s the concept? Who is Todd? He’s just a kid. He stands there and he walks around. How am I supposed to write his logic if I don’t get the concept?”
Head yawned. “Want a concept? Here’s a concept, Jens. In every high school in this country, there is a quiet, troubled boy who is always thinking about murder. Maybe he is ugly, fat, or unpopular. Maybe he’s a half-assed Satanist or a pimpled white supremacist angered by the failures of his skin. He’s certainly a loser without normal friends or healthy extracurriculars. His parents don’t understand him, neither do his teachers — who can understand a bloody-minded child? So, yes, he’s misunderstood, that quaint teen complaint. He’s lonely, angry, hateful. He speaks his thoughts and they are dark and other kids make fun, so he goes to Pizza Hut and buys himself a gun. He brings the gun to school one day, planning to mow down. I say let’s put that kid, a trademark of our time, up on screen. The other kids will pay big bucks to hunt him through the corridors. That’s the concept, Jens. Stop bucking for the Nobel Prize and write some fucking code.”