The Genre That Didn't Exist
The next day, my brother and I left for Japan alone. The suitcase held not a single change of clothes—only five college notebooks and two floppy disks.
Whatever we need, we can buy it there.
My brother looked wound to the breaking point. We were on our way to show Daisho his work, and his feelings were a knot. Mine, by contrast, were very simple.
From Kansai Airport all the way to Kyoto by train, I turned over a single question.
How do I make this project succeed?
That was the only goal I could bring myself to dwell on. We would be there a week at the outside. What would it cost? My whole future hung on this, so it seemed absurd to worry about money now—and still.
If this turns into overinvestment... Grandfather will put his finger right on that. He always does.
Hmm.
Talk it through with Hideo, and I'll have a rough answer...
Thought was still chasing thought when the train began to slow.
"Jihun. Time to get off." My brother said it while guarding the suitcase like a household shrine.
"Isn't that heavy?"
"My treasure's in here. What do you expect?"
Kyoto Station was quiet.
"How do we get there from here?"
"We take a taxi."
"Sure is convenient, having a rich business partner."
He was forcing the joke, trying to shake the nerves loose, when a voice cut across the middle of Japan—in English.
"President!"
I turned toward the sound.
"Over here!"
A man was waving from a distance.
Huh?
A red shirt, denim overalls... that was Super Orlando's outfit, worn without a shred of shame.
He came striding toward us.
"It's been a while, President."
Hideo and I had barely finished greeting each other when I turned.
"This is my older brother."
"I—it's an honor to meet you. I had such a good time with Super Orlando. Gorillong, too... ah, look at me. I'm Park Yugeon."
"Miyamoto Hideo."
The two of them shook hands, plainly glad of it.
"Is this your only bag?" Hideo asked me, smiling.
"We came running, more or less."
"Please, let me take it. I'll put it in the trunk."
"You're busy, and you still came all the way to meet us..."
"It's been a long time since I've seen you, President. Of course I came."
"Then I won't stand on ceremony."
With the schedule this tight, shamelessness was triggering like a passive.
Nothing else for it.
Hideo took the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat, my brother in the back. Super Orlando must have made him a fortune, and yet he didn't seem to want much of anything—he was driving a plain compact Toyota.
"You're studying the car."
"It's a model I've never been in."
Hideo's driving was extremely careful. Even so, the particular lightness of a manual transmission traveled through my whole body.
"You haven't eaten, have you? Shall we start with a meal?"
"No. I'd rather we finish the business first." I said it, then turned to look at the back seat. "You okay with that, hyung?"
"Yeah. Right now I think even water would sit wrong."
Fortunately, Daisho headquarters wasn't far. Twenty minutes, maybe. Through that short stretch of talk, my brother and Hideo seemed to have grown fairly close, and a good deal of the tension had drained out of my brother's face. Hideo must have felt it. While we parked and walked toward the building, he kept speaking to him.
"An RPG—that's impressive. It's a genre I've always wanted to try myself."
"No, no. It's just something I scribbled on my own... by your standard, Hideo-san, it won't come close."
"May I ask what the story is?"
"You go to slay a dragon. That's all of it."
"Simple, isn't it?"
He said it with a smile, and then the smile shifted, just slightly. Was the feedback starting already? As if to prove the thought, he went on with a somewhat serious face.
"I'd like a fuller explanation. Who these people are who go to slay the dragon, what each of them hopes to gain through it, and why the dragon is hoarding treasure in the first place."
"Ah, that's..."
"...?"
"There isn't anything special enough to tell."
"The story is thin... hmm. That's a problem. In an RPG, narrative matters most."
Here Hideo turned toward me. His face asked what I meant to do about it. My answer was simple.
"Japan does have plenty of good writers."
Hideo gave a light laugh and went on. If we could only bring one of them in, the story would solve itself easily enough. We kept up an easy conversation as we made for the building ahead.
Hideo's department was on the first floor, and it seemed to sit right by the entrance.
"I don't have a room of my own. I have to talk with the team, so we work in the same space as much as we can."
The inside was ordinary: a wide room, desks lined up in rows. Partitions divided them, but coming and going you could see exactly what your colleagues were doing. The staff didn't seem to be watching their surroundings for it.
"We haven't entered a project yet. Once the next title is decided, everyone will tense up and get to work."
"Until then, you take it easy?"
"It's the off-season, after all."
Even with their boss talking to guests, they hardly seemed to notice. Hmm. Not bad.
Hideo's seat was in the farthest corner.
"Ah—yes. One moment."
My brother opened the suitcase at once and took out the disks. Two of them in all, the backup included, in case one failed. Hideo, instead, typed in the commands and checked the files inside with care. Then he spoke.
"This is remarkably clean."
"What do you mean?"
At my question he hurried into an explanation.
"It's a professional's hand. There isn't a single wasted line in the code. Maybe that's why the file is so light. Something like this isn't going to throw bugs."
I know nothing about coding. So when I heard that Martin had coded the script my brother wrote, I had honestly thought it was nothing special. And yet here was Hideo, impressed.
So it really was Martin.
A familiar logo rose with the screen.
"Th-that's it."
My brother watched with anxious eyes. Hideo's fingers were already flying—tat-tat, tat-tat-tat. The class he chose was mage. The strategy was pure grind: learn the higher spells by brute labor first, then herd mobs and pile the levels on. At level 15 he received the quest for his second advancement. By the time that advancement was finished, he was level 20. Only after he had learned a truly vicious spell and beaten down even the second boss did he turn back to us.
I expected feedback. What he said instead caught me off guard.
"Could I see the setting notes?"
"Ah, those... they're all written in Korean..."
"Even so, I'd like to look them over."
"Sorry? Ah—yes."
My brother took the thick college notebooks out of the suitcase one after another. The sheer volume must have looked vast even to a professional; Hideo was clearly startled. He flipped quickly through a notebook and pointed to a page where an illustration appeared.
"If you've gone so far as to include illustrations, this must be a fairly important setting..."
"Ah, that's about the laws of physics. Like a hot-air balloon... if you light a fire, you can fly through the air... something like that..."
"No. It's less that, and more... it was just fun to imagine..."
"You wrote down everything that came to mind? For the fun of it?"
"Yes."
Hideo kept digging through the notes after that.
"Could you translate this part as well?"
"One moment."
Questions and answers like that went on for more than an hour. Only after he had gone through all five notebooks did Hideo lean back in his chair. Was he sorting, one by one, the thoughts bristling out in every direction? For several minutes his eyebrows worked furiously. What on earth was he about to say?
And then—
"What if you changed the genre?"
Hideo offered an opinion I had not seen coming.
"...!"
"The problem is that none of those outstanding settings can be applied inside the RPG genre as it exists."
If a planner is a designer, a developer is an engineer. No matter how brilliant the design you bring, if the technology of the day cannot realize it, the thing is useless. Hideo's conclusion seemed to be the latter.
"...?"
"You build a kind of deck... and resolve combat through arbitrary combinations of cards..."
Were his thoughts still unsorted? Scratch, scratch. Hideo rapidly wrote one idea after another down on paper. He was imagining, on the spot, a genre the world did not have. Of course it would overload him.
"Are you following?"
"Not quite yet..."
Card Collector.
In other words, to keep my brother's outstanding settings alive, Hideo had just invented the TCG genre on the spot.
Ha. Did that even make sense?
Worth the long trip.
Hideo kept adding explanations, sorting out his own thinking as he went. As if to prove it—
"Ah. What about this?"
Even while he talked, new systems kept being introduced, if that was the word.
"Wouldn't it be fun if combat, settings, items, and characters each had their own cards? The judgment would change depending on how you combine them."
As the explanation went on, my brother's understanding began to catch up.
"If there's a separate setting card... then there isn't a system we can't implement, is there?"
"That's right. That's the goal this genre was designed around."
At that point my brother looked at me. Where the business was concerned, he had agreed to hear my opinion. It would not be easy. Whatever anyone said, this was a niche genre.
But if it's me—and I know the future...
Contrary to that thought, I looked at my brother as if I knew nothing at all.
"What do you think, hyung?"
"I want to try it. It's a genre where I can pack in every element I love, as tight as it'll go..."
"The target is two million copies. Wanting to try it isn't enough."
At my words, my brother nodded.
"I'll do it. I have to."
One sentence, spoken like a vow. I grinned. Yes. This was the answer I had wanted to hear. I turned to Hideo at once.
"He says he's thoroughly satisfied."
"Tempted?"
"Then shall we draw up a contract?"
"...Pardon?"
"My dear Hideo-san is the one who's tempted. How could I possibly look the other way?"