Chapter 18
Chapter 18
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Translator: Silver Dragon
Chapter: 18
Chapter Title: Genius
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"Shall we release this officially?"
I'd always thought of myself as pretty forward-thinking.
After all, having lived through the 21st century, I figured I'd naturally be way more open-minded than the conservative folks of the '90s.
'Am I the rigid one here? Or are these two just crazy?'
But right now, I was seriously questioning whether my assumptions had been too arrogant.
It all started with Scarlett's visit.
I was deep in work as usual when she barged into the office unannounced.
I wondered what was up since she hadn't called ahead, but the moment I saw the "Dead Hills adult version" in her hand, my heart sank.
'Jason, you mad bastard!'
I wanted to throttle Jason, who was napping in the corner with his chair kicked back, but dealing with Scarlett right in front of me took priority.
'That's... something one of our staff made as a joke—it's got nothing to do with me! We'll scrap it right now...'
I was about to spit out my frantic excuse when Scarlett cut me off and dropped her bombshell: she wanted to release it officially.
"You're serious?"
"Of course. Why didn't you tell me you'd made something this awesome?"
Scarlett waved the Dead Hills adult version around excitedly, her face lit up with enthusiasm.
"The original Dead Hills was cool, but this? This is totally my thing."
"...Your thing?"
"Yeah. I love it. What could be better than busty babes slicing up zombies?"
My mind started to go blank.
Was this really Scarlett standing in front of me?
Or was it Jason in disguise?
Maybe Jackson, pissed about my order to design at least 30 female characters, had slipped hallucinogens into my coffee?
"You get it!"
"Who are you...?"
"Heh heh... the guy who made that 'real Dead Hills' you just mentioned."
Jason had snuck up between Scarlett and me without me noticing—he must've woken up.
Wearing a smug grin, he announced to Scarlett that he was the creator of the Dead Hills adult version and started gushing that she was the first to appreciate its true genius.
"Huck's way too conservative. He made this great game called Dead Hills but only threw in like ten female characters—what a sin."
"Exactly... Weren't like 70%, no, 80% of the characters in Dead Hills guys?"
"In my book, Huck's either gay or a misogynist."
In the blink of an eye, I'd been dragged into a hellish binary choice: gay or woman-hater.
As those violent words muddled my brain, I tried to recall where I'd stashed my self-defense pistol—I might need to shoot Jason's head off.
"Sorry for the late intro. I'm Jason, feminist and lover of women."
"Nice to meet you. I'm Scarlett, marketing team leader at Seton. I had no idea Savior had someone this progressive."
Scarlett and Jason shook hands, beaming at each other.
For some reason, I had a near-certain gut feeling that letting these two meet would come back to bite us in a massive way someday.
'We absolutely cannot release Jason's so-called "real Dead Hills" as-is!'
Scarlett had persuaded Huck, who was dead set against releasing the adult Dead Hills even over his grave, and they'd eventually reached a dramatic compromise.
Huck did acknowledge the appeal and potential of the female characters Jason had created, so he allowed a few of them to appear in Seton's Dead Hills console version.
The PC version of Dead Hills couldn't add more characters due to storage limits, but Seton's Hyper Drive used ROM cartridges as its storage medium, leaving plenty of room.
'This company's more fun than I thought.'
Scarlett hadn't rated Savior's potential very highly at first.
Sure, they were developing an intriguing game, but it was such a small outfit—a one-man show with President Huck handling basically everything.
In her experience, companies like this usually went one of two ways.
First, they'd sink together after one mistake by the one-man leader.
Or...
'That one-man leader drags the company all the way to the top.'
Of course, the first outcome was overwhelmingly more common.
But a tiny fraction of geniuses really did elevate their companies to world-class status single-handedly.
Like Waffle founder Steve Polson or the living legend of IT, Bill Heights of Minisoft.
"Let's rewrite this code section."
"It's too granular right now, causing delays, right?"
"Yeah. Might work when computers get faster, but for now, it's just bogging the program down."
Scarlett watched Huck intently as he oversaw Savior's new project.
Once he'd finished issuing instructions, he immediately approached Fisher—Seton's dispatched technician and her subordinate—to chat.
"Adding the characters shouldn't require any major changes, so we can proceed as-is."
"But considering the Hyper Drive CPU, we should rewrite this code. I'll handle it right now."
"Got it."
Huck took over the code window Fisher had been working on and started typing away.
In less than 30 minutes, the screen filled with dense lines of numbers and letters.
Fisher gawked at it, unleashing a torrent of praise in terms Scarlett couldn't follow.
"Perfect loop consolidation in a single branch! Memory mapping calculated by page? And flawless VGA direct access!"
"It's not that complicated. Just the basics."
Fisher called that an insult to developers worldwide and spent the next ten minutes singing Huck's praises.
After wrapping up with Fisher, Huck returned to his desk and dove right back into hammering at his keyboard, staring at his monitor.
'...Is that even possible?'
Scarlett wasn't a programmer.
As someone in marketing and management, not development, she couldn't precisely gauge how exceptional Huck was.
But even she could tell that what he was doing was far from ordinary.
'This part needs some system tweaks, right?'
'You think that's easy? Changing one thing means ripping apart the whole structure! Then you'll complain about bugs and delays!'
The developers she usually worked with would snap irritably even at minor change requests, acting like the world was ending.
But Huck was juggling multiple tasks seamlessly, controlling everything like flowing water.
To an outsider like Scarlett, his casual coordination looked anything but average—like he was just solving simple arithmetic.
'Those two are Huck's alumni from Caltech, right...?'
Rogers and Jason, slumped and working with hollow eyes in the corner.
She recalled her shock when she learned these guys being run ragged like part-timers by Huck were Caltech grads.
Seton, one of the giants splitting the console market, didn't even have any Caltech alumni.
Caltech grads almost always ended up in labs or key R&D at top U.S. corporations.
Yet here were three—admittedly still students—at a tiny dev shop like Savior. It was downright unusual.
Might even be a waste of talent, but having three geniuses together made her curious about what they'd create next.
"What do you think of their level?"
"All three?"
"Yeah."
On her way back after finishing up at Savior, Scarlett couldn't resist asking Fisher, who was still dispatched there as the tech expert.
She was curious about his sharper technical insight.
"Rogers and Jason alone are honestly way beyond me."
"That good?"
"Caltech's rep isn't hype. No real-world experience, but their code looks like pros with over ten years in the industry."
Scarlett was pretty surprised by Fisher's words.
Fisher's skills were above average even at Seton.
For him to admit so readily that they outclassed him meant the gap was bigger than she'd thought.
"And Huck... I can't even evaluate him."
"What?"
"Scarlett, you got a religion?"
"Why bring up religion out of nowhere?"
"It's like asking a Christian to rate God."
"... "
Scarlett was more baffled than anything.
She'd just asked for an assessment of Huck's skills—why were Christians and God suddenly involved?
"I felt it from the first time I saw the Dead Hills source code... but that's not human work."
"Aren't you overdoing it?"
"If you'd ever studied even a bit of programming, you'd know I'm not exaggerating. I'm out here on dispatch with nothing to do. Huck glances at the code and fixes it in one go—I just clap on the sidelines."
His face filled with hollow self-deprecation as he spoke.
"And above all... that new game they're making? It's on another level. Insane."
"That new game? They wouldn't even tell me, said it was top secret."
"Jason came bragging to me about it."
Fisher casually spilled what would give Huck a seizure if he knew—leaking new game info.
"What's the game?"
"Can't say, but when it drops? The industry's getting flipped upside down."
Fisher's face brimmed with conviction as he declared that Savior's new game would rock the game world.