Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Afterward, while wandering around the surrounding seas, he encountered a pirate.
He tried to avoid them, but since he still was not used to the controls, he ended up getting attacked.
There are too many of them!
He had never intended to fight in the first place since he knew his combat power was lacking in the early game, but the moment the battle screen appeared and he saw six ships, his heart nearly stopped.
Worse still, since they were pirates, every single one of them was a massive warship.
Run! Run! Run!
Garazt frantically hammered the keyboard and desperately fled. Fortunately, the starting ship was small but fairly fast, so by carefully avoiding encirclement, he managed to reach the edge of the battle screen before they could catch him.
After continuing to suffer from pirate attacks, he decided he needed to expand his fleet. However, he was far too weak for piracy, and his starting capital was too small to properly engage in trade, so he first began taking quests and events from government offices and taverns.
The tasks ranged from simple delivery jobs to searching for people or procuring goods. There were more lucrative assignments as well, but those were too difficult at his current level.
Like that, he gradually earned money through quests and slowly grew stronger through commerce and piracy.
Afterward, he traveled to many places and enjoyed adventures. Beyond simple character progression, the unique characters and unexpected events immersed him even deeper into the game world.
This is incredible...
It was a game that delivered an experience he could never have imagined before.
Ras, the company president, had seemed lacking in confidence because it was unfinished, but from Garazt’s perspective, it was difficult to even find flaws worth criticizing.
Still, if he absolutely had to point something out, it would be the AI of the NPC fleets.
“Up until the midgame, I could still outmaneuver and defeat them because they were stupid, but in the late game, battles started feeling too easy.”
“I figured as much.”
Since Ras already knew it was a problem, all he could do was answer with a bitter smile. He had tried implementing all sorts of patterns, but it was not something he could completely solve. It was still beyond the limits of Ras’s current coding abilities.
Or rather, to be precise, it felt like he could eventually solve it if he tackled things one by one, but it would take far too long. His goal was to make fun games, not develop artificial intelligence.
Garazt had pointed it out, but even before reporting it, he had already tried thinking of solutions himself and failed to find any realistic answers. Seeing Ras’s reaction, he quietly closed his mouth.
At the same time, he imagined how fun it would be if all those NPCs were actually players like himself, almost like playing chess.
It was an easy idea for him to picture because the battle screen used a chessboard-like grid, and the virtual worlds he had always imagined were not solitary spaces, but places where many people lived together.
After that, Garazt kept that fantasy tucked away in a corner of his mind and began wondering whether there might someday be a way to realize it.
In any case, Meta Soft continued testing the game, fixing problems, and filling in shortcomings, and one month later, they finally completed it.
Well, not entirely. The title had still not been finalized, so perhaps it could not truly be called complete yet.
“Bring out the titles you’ve thought of.”
Sitting at the end of the newly purchased oval conference table, Ras looked around at the employees as he spoke. Including Diska, there were now four people seated around it, and the company looked surprisingly legitimate.
Diska had not participated in development, but since Ras had assigned him a work computer and let him play the game, he too had been given the homework of thinking up possible titles alongside the other employees.
The poor boy had never even seen a computer before and did not know what games were, but because he was still young, he quickly learned how to play and enthusiastically enjoyed himself. He had even started thinking that someday, after saving enough money, he wanted to buy a computer and play games himself—despite being shocked by how expensive they were.
“Take turns picking one title you think is good.”
After looking through the answer sheets from all four people, including his own, Ras handed them around to the others. He would not necessarily choose the title with the most votes, but he intended to use them as reference.
Voyage, Pirate, False Peace, Water World, Sea King, Sailing Ship, Sea and Humanity...
Everyone had taken the assignment seriously, so there was a wide variety of titles, and several of them seemed usable. Interestingly enough, some of them resembled game titles that had existed on Earth. Humans really did think alike.
The titles that received the most votes were Age of False Peace, Sea King, and Trade and Naval Warfare.
“I think Sea King sounds the best. The other two are too long, and they don’t really feel like game titles.”
As expected, the final decision came from Ras, the supreme authority of the company.
In truth, Sea King also sounded a little childish and certainly was not flawless, but he liked how it could summarize the entire game in a single phrase while still leaving plenty to the imagination.
And even if the title was mediocre, Meta Soft already had name value thanks to Land of Adventure, and Ras had confidence in the game itself, so he did not care much.
In any case, the game was officially given the title Sea King, and they immediately began work on the opening screen. Since Pana had already completed the rest of the work in advance except for the title itself, it was finished extremely quickly.
“Oh. This looks great.”
Ras admired the opening page.
Garazt also wanted to praise it, but since Pana was his senior, he felt it might come across as presumptuous if he spoke carelessly. However, judging by how he stared at the monitor with wide eyes, he clearly felt the same way.
The waves and white surf rendered across the blue background resembled the ocean within the game itself, though they were portrayed far more vividly. And the slowly passing sailing ship above them felt like a perfect condensation of the entire game.
But how did she make this animation? Miss Pana is completely hopeless at coding.
Of course, aside from Ras, the only possible explanation was Garazt. Their relationship had seemed awkward before, but seeing this result reassured Ras somewhat. At least when it came to work, they seemed capable of cooperating without issue.
Having finally completed the game in a state truly ready for release, Ras’s gaze suddenly drifted toward the calendar.
It had already been nearly half a year since the release of Land of Adventure. Excluding the one-month break, that meant they had spent five months developing the game.
The thought was deeply moving, but Ras could not help worrying about the increased development time compared to the previous game. It was not because he regretted laziness or anything like that. He had worked extremely hard, and their development capability had improved enormously compared to before. Nothing had gone wrong.
This game had simply been far more complicated than the previous one, with vastly more things to consider.
A sudden chill ran down Ras’s spine.
This was only manageable because they were still limited to the same 8-bit environment. Once computer performance improved further, it was obvious that development difficulty would rise dramatically as well.
Still, there was nothing he could do about it. The only answer would be to earn money, expand the company, and solve the problem with manpower.
And in fact, they had already earned a considerable amount.
While developing Sea King, package sales had reached 200,000 copies for Tetris, 100,000 for Pac-Man, and 250,000 for Land of Adventure, bringing total profits to over 13 million Del. In Korean terms, that was more than 13 billion won.
Back when Ras first saw the amount recorded in his bank account, he had genuinely been shocked.
Then he saw how much tax was being taken and became shocked a second time.
Still, he decided not to bring up unpleasant topics like taxes.
Back when he first sold Tetris, one hundred thousand copies had been the all-time record. It seemed that, thanks to incredible luck, he had happened to strike at the exact moment the market was rapidly expanding, which allowed him to make such enormous profits.
At electronics stores and in magazines he had visited before, people were even saying that Land of Adventure had driven that market growth.
However, since Ras already knew the history of the computer market’s expansion on Earth through both knowledge and experience, he did not accept that idea at face value.
The market had already been prepared to grow. His game had merely served as a small catalyst. If another game of comparable quality had appeared at the right time, it probably would have produced similar effects.
Of course, even with luck, skill was still required to ride the wave, so it would not be accurate to say he had no influence at all.
Wondering how many copies Sea King would sell, Ras contacted Barbal Soft.
“So the new game is finally finished.”
A thin, sharp-looking woman with blue hair, around thirty years old, spoke excitedly as she listened to Paul Roxy and Kandel talking nearby.
She was Jennifer, the head of the Production Department, and had come to the president’s office for work-related matters. Since she was one of the company’s founding members and a core figure, there were practically no secrets between them anyway.
“Yeah. I kept wondering what they were doing when they should’ve been riding the momentum while the games were still selling. Thankfully, it seems they were working on something after all.”
Roxy loved Ras’s games, but from the perspective of a company president, he had also been desperately waiting for a sequel to boost the company’s sales.
“The gap was a little long, but considering how much money he earned, I guess this is still a pretty good outcome.”
Jennifer had seen several people suddenly become rich and drown themselves in the pleasure wealth brought them. Because of that, she was sincerely grateful that Ras had even released another game at all.
Like many people at Barbal Soft, she too was a fan of Land of Adventure.
“So what kind of game is it? Maybe a sequel to Land of Adventure?”
“No. Unfortunately not. Still, it seems to involve adventure. Apparently you sail around the seas on ships. We’ll know once we try it.”
“Really?”
Three days later, Barbal Soft received a twelve-disk sample copy of Sea King.
Everyone was shocked by the size.
After the success of Land of Adventure, games had generally begun growing larger in scale than before, but this was truly unprecedented.
“It feels strange saying this based only on the storage size, but it seems he really wasn’t just absent for half a year doing nothing.”
Jennifer counted the floppy disks one by one after receiving them from Kandel and let out a hollow laugh.
Surely there would not be pointless dummy data stuffed into samples sent to a distributor, which meant the contents were genuinely packed full.
“It doesn’t seem like he was slacking off. Whenever I visited, they were always working on something, and it looked like they’d even hired more employees.”
“Really?”
Having eagerly waited to test the game first, Jennifer half-listened to Kandel before carrying the disks to her computer.
However, she could not play immediately.
The other employees all clamored for copies as well, and with so much data, the copying process took quite a while. Still, thanks to the power of being the department head, she managed to secure the first copy.
The moment she launched the game, she immediately became completely absorbed.
“Wow... Seriously, how does someone even come up with something like this?”
Jennifer had only just barely earned enough capital to begin trading after narrowly running errands between pirates, and she was so moved by her first profit that she instinctively turned to brag to her subordinates—only to realize she had become completely immersed.
Then, by chance, her eyes met those of the massive bearded man, Amans, and she muttered the words aloud. Judging by the way Amans nodded, he seemed to feel the same way.
After conducting internal evaluations and testing, the employees of Barbal Soft became convinced that this game, too, would be a success.
Once Sea King launched, fans of Land of Adventure rushed to buy it as if they had been waiting impatiently all along.
Some of the hardcore fans of Land of Adventure had already cleared not only the main story but every side story as well, yet still continued grinding to max level, collecting every obtainable item, and researching unusual skill combinations. They had squeezed every last drop out of the game to the point of chewing on the bones afterward, so Meta Soft’s new release was truly joyous news for them.