Block Valley (1)
Han Sena met up with her friends for the first time since coming back from her trip.
Several days had passed, but none of them had managed to shake off the enchantment of where they’d been.
“I want to go traveling again.”
“I keep looking at the photos every day. I miss Barbados.”
“Disneyland for me.”
“Even now, it still feels like a dream.”
Han Sena had barely taken a bite of her meal before she glanced around for no particular reason.
“What’s wrong?”
“No, it’s just that lately I keep getting this feeling like someone’s watching me.”
She flinched.
At those words, Jung Sojin panicked inwardly.
Because she had been watching Sena on Han Miru’s request. She had already filed two reports.
“Hmm. Maybe it’s just your imagination?”
“I-it must be.”
“See? I figured. I mean, who’d be watching me?”
Jung Sojin let out a quiet sigh of relief inside.
Thank goodness Sena’s so oblivious.
As the group went on chatting, the conversation eventually turned to Mukids.
“They held a K-pop festival in LA this time, right? I heard the Mukids guys absolutely stole the show.”
“I saw it too. I had no idea they had that many American fans.”
“Even if you added up every other K-pop idol’s popularity, it still wouldn’t come close to Mukids.”
Han Sena muttered to herself, “Ah! I really want to go to a Mukids concert.”
Jo Yoogyeong shook her head.
“Getting tickets is basically impossible. I heard three million people tried to get into the K-pop festival this time.”
In the end, the only answer was to buy scalped tickets, and even then the price was far beyond what a college student could afford from saved allowance.
Could I maybe use the big-brother card for this too? I feel like my brother might be able to get them somehow. Should I try begging him?
Just then, her phone rang.
“Oh! My brother called.”
“What is it?”
“No idea. He sent me some video.”
Han Sena hit play without thinking much of it.
On the screen appeared a man in his twenties, of mixed heritage.
Depending on how you looked at him, he seemed East Asian; depending on how you looked, Western. In one angle he looked like a boy, in another like an adult. He had a strikingly handsome face.
With a smile, he said:
[Hello, Sena. This is Xenon from Mukids.]
“Uh….”
The friends watching the video all gasped.
“Wait! Is this real?”
“What? That’s Xenon?”
“No, no way! Our Xenon….”
Whether they were shocked or not, Xenon in the video kept talking.
[I heard you haven’t been listening to your parents lately and you haven’t been studying either. That won’t do. From now on, promise me you’ll listen to your parents and study hard, and become a good Han Sena. All right?]
“…….”
Watching the video, Han Sena couldn’t say a word.
Xenon oppa sent me a video message!
She couldn’t believe this was real.
It felt less real than riding a private jet.
Well, putting that aside….
A moment later, Han Sena finally snapped back to her senses and shouted in outrage, “What the hell did this guy say to Xenon oppa!?”
* * *
We drove from LA to Santa Monica.
Dongho-sunbae was behind the wheel.
“Ah, I got a call from Representative Yoo Hyunmu. Looks like he’s willing to go along with your proposal.”
“Tell them to write up the detailed contract terms however they want and send them over. We’ll review them at headquarters.”
“And if the terms aren’t any good?”
“Then we send it back and tell them to bring something back that we like. But if they have a brain in their heads, they won’t hand over a shoddy contract to Continue Capital.”
“Oh? So that’s how negotiations work.”
Still, listening only to girl-group songs was getting old.
“Why does your smartphone playlist only have girl-group songs?”
“What are you talking about? There’s Jiyu’s songs in there too—she’s a solo female singer.”
“……Let’s just turn on the radio.”
After idly flipping through the channels, country music came on.
[Take me home, country roads~]
“Why country music? You like this stuff?”
“Don’t you feel like you should listen to music like this when you’re driving on American roads?”
We hummed along together.
“California really does have nice weather. Compared to Seoul covered in fine dust, this place is paradise. Should I live here when I retire?”
“Didn’t you say you wanted to live in New York?”
“I’m still deciding. Should I live a flashy life in New York, or a leisurely one in California?”
“Why not just live in both?”
Wouldn’t it just be a matter of buying two houses and shuttling back and forth by private jet?
By the time I retired, I’d have made enough to buy a penthouse or a mansion anyway.
Santa Monica wasn’t far.
It was a coastal city on the Pacific, famous even in the United States for being one of the best places to live. It was also home to a number of well-known game companies.
We headed into one of them.
“Welcome.”
“Thank you for making the trip.”
The people who greeted us were Charles Griffin and Ken Utley.
They were none other than the co-CEOs of Purple Games.
I introduced Dongho-sunbae.
“This is Lee Dong-ho. He’s the head of Continue Capital’s Korea branch.”
“Nice to meet you.”
The three of them exchanged greetings.
“Is Rufus here?”
“He’s inside.”
One of the co-founders, Rufus Bailey, had said he wasn’t interested in management and left that to his friends, while he himself took the title of CTO, or Chief Technical Officer.
Inside the office, about 150 people were hard at work on development.
That was ten times more than when I’d visited before. As the staff had grown, the office itself had moved here too.
With launch just around the corner, everyone wore the exhausted faces of the dead as they clung to their computers.
I walked over to Rufus. He was working while eating potato chips.
“Hello. Have you been well?”
When I approached, he greeted me with an awkward expression.
“Y-yes. It’s been a while.”
He looked like someone who thought he’d done something wrong, avoiding my eyes all the while. He was still clearly the shy type.
His desk was a mess, littered with half-empty chip bags and crumbs.
Still, it did look like he’d put on some weight compared to before.
I briefly wondered whether he ought to work out more, but since I’d never heard of him collapsing before the regression, his health must be fine.
Even so, I ought to get him a medical checkup just in case.
It would be awkward to make him go alone, so maybe we should run a full-company health screening or something.
“Uh….”
“Yes?”
“Thank you. CEO Lucas helped me a lot.”
I had no idea why he was thanking me for that, but….
“Yes. I’ll pass that along.”
We left Rufus to keep working and took our seats in the meeting room.
The reason I’d come here was simple: the official launch of Block Valley was only three days away.
Charles Griffin spoke first.
“When we first started developing it, I never imagined it would grow to this scale.”
Ken Utley looked worried.
“After putting this much into it, I’m nervous about what happens if it doesn’t take off.”
Continue Capital had already invested more than $100 million, and Legend Games had poured an enormous amount of money into publishing as well.
Just maintaining the current development staff cost tens of millions of dollars a year, so if the game failed, it would mean bankruptcy.
“There’s nothing to worry about. In fact, you’ll probably need to hire even more people than you have now.”
Normally, once a game launched, the development team would disband or move on to another title.
But Block Valley was different.
Because this wasn’t just a game. It was a game platform, and an early form of the metaverse.
* * *
At the beginning of the year, a flood of new games always hit the market.
The reason was that many game companies ended their fiscal years at the end of March, so they tried to launch as many titles as possible before then, boosting revenue and profit.
Among the long line of launches from major game companies, one game in particular was drawing all the attention.
That game was Block Valley.
It had been created by Purple Games, an indie studio that had once made a game called Hammer Warrior.
It had been a pretty decent game, with sales that were respectable enough.
Some fans even hoped for a sequel.
But Block Valley was getting attention for a different reason.
Namely, because Continue Capital had invested in it. On top of that, Legend Games was handling worldwide publishing.
Those two facts were more than enough to heighten public expectations.
Game Spark, the biggest game webzine in the United States.
Jim Schneider, one of its reporters, was known among gamers as the most famous journalist around.
Originally, his dream had been to become a game developer.
Since childhood, he had wanted to make a game of his own.
But he had no talent for coding. He wasn’t particularly good at drawing either, and he had no real gift for design.
In the end, he became a journalist instead.
Most game journalists played whatever had been released and wrote reviews, or cranked out promotional pieces based on whatever information the game companies fed them.
Jim Schneider was different.
He went out and met the people working at game companies in person, digging into the internal workings and development process like an investigative reporter.
He wrote his articles with just the right mix of internet memes, game memes, and trending slang, and he never held back from savage criticism no matter how famous or massive the company in question might be. Thanks to that, he earned a strong reputation among gamers.
He was utterly convinced that games were the greatest art form of all.
Music, dramas, films, animation—those were all just things creators made for consumers to passively enjoy.
But games were different.
Unlike other cultural products, games were completed through the player’s participation.
Even the same game could become, depending on how you played it, what people called a piece of trash—or a masterpiece.
That was the unique appeal only games possessed.
And the role of a game journalist was to bring that appeal to the audience.
As a reporter for Game Spark, Jim Schneider had the chance to try Block Valley before launch.
A game invested in by Continue Capital?
Just that alone had drawn a lot of people’s attention to Block Valley. But money alone did not guarantee a good game.
How many small studios had made something great, only to be bought by a big corporation and then ruined?
Those damn AE bastards!
So what about Block Valley?
According to the information released so far, its genre was listed as an open-world sandbox role-playing game.
Something like Minecraft?
There had been a time when this kind of sandbox game was all the rage, and they’d popped up everywhere. But aside from Minecraft, none of them had found much success.
He started the game.
As expected, the graphics aren’t anything impressive.
Compared to the triple-A titles coming out these days, they were crude. But that was probably unavoidable for a sandbox game.
The single-player mode wasn’t all that remarkable.
It contained a bunch of short games across various genres, almost like minigames.
FPS, TPS, tycoon, everyday communication, RPG, battle royale, racing, puzzles, deduction, and more.
There’s not much depth here.
Up to that point, it was hard to give the game a high rating.
But….
Originally, sandbox games weren’t really about single-player at all. Their focus was on creation and construction after that point. The fun of the genre lay in making something new through it.
And Block Valley had one major difference from other sandbox games.
That was the fact that you could use the development tools provided in the in-game studio to make entirely new games!
So you can make a game even if you don’t know how to code?
How far could that really go?
The development tools were much easier to use than he had expected.
Even a child could learn them and build something after a few hours.
He thought back to the game he’d wanted to make as a child.
A game where dozens of people gathered in one space and carried out missions according to a set of rules in order to escape.
Not a battle royale where the last person alive won, but one where the goal was to have as many people survive as possible.
At first, Jim Schneider had started making it with a light heart.
Before he knew it, he had forgotten to eat, forgotten to sleep, and was completely absorbed in making the game.
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