Chapter 0: The 100,000-Hour Rule
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 0: The 100,000-Hour Rule
[Not Recommended]
[Recorded: 100,042 hours]
– Don't play this. There's nothing to do.
Just once.
This was the first review I had ever written since starting the game.
I wasn't being sarcastic, I wasn't trying to bash the game, and I wasn't using reverse psychology because I actually liked it.
It was just an honest review.
– The game is fun, but... it’s a zombie apocalypse game with no multiplayer and no sex. If I’m just going to hunt zombies and farm, why play this? I might as well play a cozy farming sim.
I intended to keep it to a single, simple sentence, but once I started writing, the words kept coming.
A review based on 100,000 hours of experience.
Only after writing it did I realize just how much time 100,000 hours actually was.
In terms of pure time, it was eleven years.
And that was assuming I played twenty-four hours a day.
I often heard people ask what kind of crazy bastard plays one game for that long, but the game had been out for ages. What was even more surprising was that it still hadn't officially launched.
That was why my review was getting a decent amount of traction.
– LOL 100k hours? Holy shit, there really was someone playing this for 100,000 hours.
– Goo-goo ga-ga... an 8,000-hour newbie offers his greetings.
– At 100,000 hours, aren't you basically a zombie yourself?
– Is there even enough content to last 100,000 hours?
– You can do it if you really want to... if you use mods.
Gripes aside, the "Zombie Apocalypse" game was undeniably fun.
It had a vast world.
Numerous types of zombies.
A map based on the real world.
Diverse skills and a brutal survival difficulty.
The difficulty was so high that less than 3% of players ever saw the ending. The game was notoriously unfriendly, acting as a massive barrier to entry for newbies.
Still, the occasional updates and the mods developed by the community managed to reignite the spark of fun every time I felt like quitting.
But that was over now.
I’d played it long enough; I was at an age where I had to think about reality.
"How much longer am I going to live like this... just killing fucking zombies?"
My life was no better than the protagonist's in a zombie apocalypse.
I was a bottom-feeder.
I was thirty years old, still leeching off my parents, spending all day picking up scrap in a virtual zombie world and thinking about how to kill zombies in slightly more entertaining ways.
Now that they were gone, there was no one left to leech off of. I had managed to survive for two more years on the small inheritance they left behind.
Living in a tiny semi-basement room, stuffing my face with ramen.
The time had finally come when I actually had to work.
But could a guy who had spent his whole life playing and eating just suddenly decide to work?
The best I could do was a part-time job at a convenience store, but the thought of starting now made my stomach churn.
That bitter feeling had bled into my review.
Fuck.
If only it had been a little more fun.
If it were a game popular enough to succeed on stream, I could have made a living doing what I loved.
It wasn't that I hadn't tried streaming.
Even if it was a dead game that didn't even crack the rankings anymore, it was still considered a pioneer of the zombie apocalypse genre and had a solid cult following.
The problem was that I was just boring as hell, so no one watched.
Donations? As if.
– What is this guy doing? Why has he been foreplaying with that zombie all day?
– Ugh, fuck, that’s gross.
– Say something, at least...
It felt a bit unfair.
I was confident I could create content that people would find entertaining in a zombie apocalypse.
I could clear out zombies in satisfying ways or build my own kingdom.
I had 100,000 hours under my belt; there was no way I couldn't do that.
The timing had just been off.
It just so happened that I was in the middle of some intense zombie research back then.
I knew it was just an excuse, a justification.
Anyway...
As I kept writing, the review that started as a single line ended up being quite long.
[.......So, if there’s no update, I’m quitting. (Total: 8,421 characters)]
It felt refreshing.
In truth, I wasn't quitting because of a lack of content, but because I had no choice if I wanted to survive in the real world.
I had rationalized it to myself, and seeing the comments acknowledging my dedication made me feel like I had actually achieved something.
I lay down on my bed, feeling a sense of pride.
I was used to the hunger.
Just as I closed my eyes to sleep, a notification sound rang out.
"Huh?"
The official Zombie Apocalypse account had replied to my review.
[Thank you for your valuable feedback. We would like to provide a special mode for our only customer who truly cherishes and loves our game. We have sent the mode to your email. We hope you have an enjoyable zombie apocalypse.]
It was a reply only the author could see.
My heart began to race.
Holy shit.
This godforsaken, trash-tier game company, which had never once officially replied to a user inquiry, had sent me a response.
There were many reasons why this game had flopped, but one of the biggest complaints was its unfriendliness.
The internal unfriendliness of the game was nothing compared to the external unfriendliness of the developers.
You’d send an inquiry, and there’d be no reply. You’d point out a problem, and there’d be no reply.
Only announcements.
They updated and patched the game entirely according to their own whims.
What player would like that?
And yet, that very company had called me their "only customer."
"Is the cutoff 100,000 hours?"
I had my suspicions, but it didn't matter.
Who cared?
I immediately opened the mode the developers had sent.
The long list of grievances I had written out was already washed away.
The email contained a similar message along with an attachment.
And the description of the mode.
..
There was more below, but I postponed reading the rest.
I wasn't the type to read the manual before playing a game.
I’d figure it out as I went.
There was a difference between checking the contents of a gift box before opening it and the joy of discovering them one by one.
[Multiplayer Mode installation in progress.]
[Estimated time remaining: 11 hours]
"What? Are you fucking kidding me?"
Even if my Virtual Reality Access Device was an older model, I had upgraded the parts here and there.
Installing the base Zombie Apocalypse game only took ten minutes.
"Sigh."
Of course.
They couldn't do a single thing perfectly.
"I guess it'll be done when I wake up?"
I was about to curse them out, but then I remembered this was a mode made just for me and took off the goggles.
I was going to quit anyway.
Eleven hours meant I could just sleep, do something else, and it would be finished.
"I'll push it back a few days..."
Finding a job could wait. It would be disrespectful to the developers not to play the new mode they sent me.
I lay down on the bed with a fluttering heart.
There was no way I could sleep, so I spent the night wide awake.
Then, at some point, I lost consciousness without even realizing it.
[Installation complete.]
When I opened my eyes, the world had changed.