Chapter Text
I’m your man from December
I only wish I could remember
All the lights of the cars in the streets
As they blind me to the spot and then knock me off my feet
And I’m feeling this stagnation but it’s just a fabrication
Born out of complications from my primary vocation
—The Phoenix Foundation, ‘40 Years’
* * *
Even having lost a major lawsuit, been slapped with a bunch of fines, and with shares in his company plummeting, Antwan only allowed himself an hour to wallow in self-pity.
After the last of those court hearings and expensive settlements was over and done with, he fired his corporate lawyer, told the Comms Department to take the whole week off (because most of them were too timid to tell journalists ‘reaching out for statements’ to piss off, and it was better for them to just stay away from the fallout of Antwan screwing up), then spent the evening speeding around the interstate for a good few hours to burn off his anger at the world trying to bring him down.
(All those mistakes were, logically, his own doing, but pointing the finger at a vague concept like ‘the world’ felt easier.)
He crashed on the bed in his Windermere bungalow that night, with a bone-deep exhaustion, dreaming of nothing.
The next morning, Antwan cobbled together some truffle bruschetta for breakfast, then tried to productively vent his frustrations by striking the punching bag in his home gym, kicking and punching until his muscles hurt more than his wounded pride.
Deep down, a small part of him was relieved that all that covering up and sneaking around was over. For almost five years, not a single other person had known about Rusk and McKey’s machine learning algorithm being embedded in Free City’s code. Now, its discovery and the subsequent accusations were shaping up to be the video game industry’s scandal of the year.
It meant Soonami had lost a good deal of profitability overnight, which in turn meant the launch of Free City 2: Carnage had gone from lacklustre to di-sas-ter. But it also meant he no longer had to look over his shoulder every time he entered HQ’s server room to check that no one had accessed the precise server that held his stolen ‘island paradise’.
Now that his dirty secret was out, Antwan had nothing left to lose. Ridiculously, it almost felt freeing.
Antwan spent the rest of his day flitting between rearranging his gym equipment, clearing out expired stuff from his fridge, and looking over Soonami’s ‘forgotten catalogue’ of games that never made it beyond pre-production. From this library, he was determined to find a financial successor to Free City as Soonami’s flagship title and cash cow.
The catalogue in question was contained on a nondescript 15 TB external SSD, usually kept under lock and key in Antwan’s office. Not even a quarter of all the people who’d served on the Board of Directors had seen the drive’s contents, and all staff who had worked on any of those projects were still, to this day, bound by data protection policies to not share any of the unpublished work.
If Antwan was privy to his Board members’ gossip, he’d guess they’d chalked his protectiveness over the data up to him not wanting others to discover all the impulsive acquisitions—aka poor business decisions—he’d made. That was true, though only for a small section of the catalogue. What he truly didn’t want others to discover was that most of those shelved projects were, in fact, his original ideas.
They were novel, frivolous things that seemed like the brightest stroke of genius at the time; he’d compile folders upon folders of hand-doodled sketches and digital concept art alike, before the realisation that investors would never be as passionate about it as him made his motivation drop faster than a lead balloon, leading to all these half-assed projects sitting in development limbo.
Antwan didn’t particularly feel like revisiting any of them, in any case. The recent lawsuit was already reminder enough of his failures.
The other few games in this forgotten catalogue really were acquired titles, bought over from smaller developers. After early market research showed they had little to no future franchise potential, unable to guarantee a steady stream of revenue, they’d been set aside for the proverbial rainy day, hopefully never to be thought about again.
Antwan normally wouldn’t bother trying to gamify anything that didn’t already have a dedicated fanbase. With the sole exception of Free City, Soonami had never pushed original projects to the forefront of their marketing—why waste the effort generating hype for something when a major film or TV studio could do that for them? But with the declining popularity of the Free City franchise, it seemed like the only reasonable option left.
Sprawled out on his living room couch, Antwan went through each and every subfolder in the catalogue, clicking and scrolling on his laptop. He skimmed through the executive summaries and concept art of various proposals and subsequently moved them to either a Maybe folder for further consideration, or a Nope folder to be forgotten about again.
(Those unrealistically ambitious creations of his, upon recognition, were all immediately closed and dropped into the Nope folder.)
* * *
There was an obscure forum page with a small but active user base that shared and discussed various ‘treasure bugs’ in Free City that, unlike the typical bug, actually improved the gaming experience. Most of them had to do with initiating unconventional interactions with the NPCs, which in turn resulted in some pretty unconventional responses.
A player choosing a non-flirtatious line of dialogue with Ms Bombshell would lead to her talking about the books she’s read lately (+50 INT) instead of inanely flirting back. Them asking Ms Barista to brew them a coffee, instead of robbing her cash register, would lead to a medium roast with cream and two sugars (+75 HP) being added to their inventory. Them talking to Mr Ice-Cream Vendor about his specialty bubblegum flavour, instead of beating him up, would lead to him revealing a cheat code to unlock unlimited ice-cream (+100 EXP).
Antwan had lurked on that forum since the beginning, hoping against hope that none of his employees from Customer Service would also find this online community and bring it to Keys’ attention. All the while, review after review had praised Free City for its immersive authenticity that set it apart from other shooters, earning itself an enormous global following and generating buzz for a sequel.
In the end, though—as her lawyer had eloquently described—Millie Rusk had to do little more than sing a Mariah Carey song while in-character to finally topple the dominos to awaken Blue Shirt Guy’s artificial intelligence, and with him, that of so many other NPCs in Free City, which led to the uncovering of the Life Itself code that was behind all that groundbreaking magic.
* * *
Antwan pressed snooze on his lunchtime reminders all the way until dinnertime, then pressed snooze on his dinnertime reminders too. The need to find a replacement for Free City was overwhelming, taking his entire mind hostage; his hungry stomach could wait.
A single-sentence pitch stood out from the rest, making Antwan pause his restless browsing. Teamwork-based action-adventure set in fictional jungle inhabited by dangerous beasts; quests and puzzle-solving depend heavily on team/partner cooperation, it read. The report’s title identified the game as Jumanji.
The other documents in this Jumanji subfolder included eye-catching designs and illustrations of characters and locations and hybrid-animals and more; they weren’t concept art, but actual screenshots from the game. It had already been fully developed and published by a New Hampshire-based indie developer before they’d been bought over by Soonami some years back, when the latter company itself was just beginning to expand. Under Soonami’s possession, it was simply being adapted from its original DVD console form into an online multiplayer format, before efforts were abandoned at the alpha stage.
Antwan’s laptop didn’t have the graphic drivers that supported the actual game, but he didn’t even need a gameplay demo to feel inexplicably drawn to it. The slightly pixelated yet charmingly nostalgic visuals really spoke to him, the open world concept would probably remain popular in the market for the foreseeable future, and the game’s challenges that seemingly rewarded critical thinking was different enough from Free City’s laissez faire chaos to not feel anything like a rehash.
Suddenly motivated to eat, Antwan ordered delivery from his favourite Michelin-starred restaurant, then opened a bottle of Kahlúa while waiting for his food. Just as a treat for his sweet tooth and to celebrate his lucky discovery.
He’d already made up his mind about returning Jumanji from the back burner to active development, but still wanted to look through the rest of its folder, since knowledge was power, and he might need a teeny bit more of that to win back the Board at their next meeting. After being publicly exposed as a liar and a thief, Antwan knew he’d have to work extra hard to charm his colleagues and investors back to his side.
Over dinner, he read through past reports from Quality Assurance where they tested the game as it was being adapted-slash-modernised. It seemed to have been riddled with bugs, a large proportion pertaining to player-player interactions and player-NPC interactions.
Antwan wasn’t surprised that he’d probably skimmed through all those bug reports and decided, at the time, that investing further in debugging wouldn’t be worth it when there could be other more lucrative projects for QA to work on.
Things were different now, though. Soonami being in desperate need of a comeback would be the elephant in the room at the next monthly Board meeting, not to mention the upcoming annual Shareholders’ Gala in two months’ time.
Already, the outline of his sales pitch was forming in his mind, how he would advocate for the resumption of beta testing on the promising, overlooked, underestimated-no-longer open world adventure that was Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. It’d be a welcome to a new era of Soonami, too; at least, that was what Antwan wanted to sell.
The brand recognition for Jumanji was barely-existent right now, but Antwan was confident he could change that. He’d always been great at analysing and anticipating trends in an ever-fickle consumer world, sussing out what was well-liked, marketing exactly what people wanted, and riding that wave of popularity all the way to the bank.
(He tried not to think too hard about how that might be the only thing he was good at.)