Eventually, as time kept dissolving, in addition to taking care of his mother and cleaning two of the houses she used to clean, he began to teach himself everything he could about computer repair and game design. Cory was a fast learner, and Valley Tek in Northampton had hired him and trained him, and he soon became adept, a natural, learning the weaknesses of the different machines. He was content there with his fellow employees in the safe, minimalist box of the store. At night he went home and cleaned his house and cooked dinner, and then played video games sitting cross-legged on Alby’s bed with Slowy nearby. A few months in, Cory began socializing with the gamers at the store. Logan in particular kept an eye out for him and seemed to feel protective of him. He often encouraged him to come up with an idea for a game, which Logan could design. Cory had been trying.
At the end of the evening at Logan and Jen’s place, Logan walked him out and said to him on the front porch, “You got something yet?”
“Sort of.”
“Okay. I’ll take that as a positive response. I’m working on a game myself,” Logan said. “I really enjoy constructing systems and game mechanics. But you wouldn’t have to worry about that; I’d think it through. Thing is, I found a potential angel investor through some friends. He lives in Newton and he’s driving over Wednesday night to discuss it.”
“What does he do?”
“Rich oral surgeon. He’s a gamer, but he says he has no imagination at all and he wants to get in on this. He likes the idea of indie games as art pieces. He thinks that if he makes his money back, it’s a success. I’m meeting him at Hops, the craft beer place on Masonic. You can come pitch him too if you want.”
“Oh. Well, I’m not ready for that,” said Cory.
“You have until Wednesday. I have a feeling you can get it together by then.”
So Cory came home from work and sat down at the table in the living room, with his mother sitting peacefully across from him. In one of Alby’s many notebooks he began to write down some readable notes for the game he’d recently been formulating, but which, really, he’d been formulating for much longer. Then on Wednesday night he entered the lacquered wooden hive of Hops in downtown Northampton. It always made him nervous to go to these trendy establishments, because they reminded him of what he’d once had, even for a little while—the wealth that had enclosed him at Princeton, and then again in Manila, before he had given it all up.
William Cronish, DDS, was a thirty-five-year-old, tilted-chinned oral and maxillofacial surgeon who wanted very much to look like a nobleman. “I was kind of a Goth when I was a kid, and I was also obsessed with playing offbeat games. But my dad and my granddad were dentists, and when it came time to figure out my life, I allowed myself to get pushed in that direction, because nothing I was interested in could earn me a living. So now I have a great practice, but I still think about that other side of myself. I’d love to be in on the ground floor of some cool game. I’m not going to make my fortune this way; I already do very well. But I’m really eager to hear what you’ve come up with.”
Logan pitched him first. “Witch Hunt,” he said slowly, letting each word settle. “It’s an RPG. Your avatar is a girl in Salem, 1692. She’s just a regular girl. A teenager in a bonnet.”
“Does she have to be a girl?” Cronish asked. “Couldn’t she be a villager?”
“A villager might also be a girl,” Cory pointed out.
“True,” said Logan. “Okay, let me describe how I would generate environments.”
Cronish held up a hand. “You know,” he said, “let’s stop here. It seems a little conventional to me. And in fact there have already been a few Salem-related games. And as I told you, I’m looking for art as much as anything else.” The oral surgeon’s gaze shifted to Cory, and he warily asked, “Does your idea seem to fit the bill a little more?”
Cory didn’t want to upstage Logan, who had shown him such kindness, even if it was of the pitying variety. (“Can’t you help that nice Cory Pinto?” he could imagine Jen asking Logan plaintively in their kitchen, over a locavore dinner.) “Logan and I are in this together,” he began. “The idea was mine and I’ll write it, but he’s the designer and programmer. I know nothing about any of that.”
Logan said, “I can tell you my plans for it. When you listen to what Cory has to say, you might think, whoa, how can that be done given the number of environments we would need to create, but—”
“Wait,” said Cronish. “We’ll get to that. Maybe.” To Cory he said, “But first, just tell me how you see it.”
And so Cory began, speaking about his “idea,” not in the way that he imagined game designers spoke about their own ideas, but just the way he saw it. “What if you were on a quest to find the person you love, who’s died?” Cory said to the two men, his voice low. “And even though you know that the person you love is dead, and that therefore your quest is pointless, you still have to make the quest, because you can’t believe that person no longer exists. I mean, you believe it intellectually, but you don’t really believe it in your heart of hearts. Without even knowing it, you search and search, trying to find the person through dreams, through other people, through an endless cycle of yearning, maybe through drugs, maybe through briefly interesting sex with people you would never have thought to have sex with before. Through whatever means you can find.
“But it doesn’t work. It never works. How can it? The person you love is dead. Their body has stopped functioning, their heart has stopped beating, their brain has no more blood flow. There is no way they can still exist. But in the game version, in our version, which for the moment I’m calling SoulFinder, you might actually stand a chance of finding them.”
He paused here, but again neither man stopped him or asked questions or nodded or expressed any reaction at all, and it was impossible to tell whether he was bombing or succeeding. Cory just kept talking, because there was nothing else to do. “It will be really, really hard, though,” he said. “I mean, almost no player can ever achieve it. That will be a part of the appeal. Most people who buy the game won’t actually ever experience what they’re hoping to experience. But every once in a while a few of them will.
“People will want to know, ‘How did you do that? How did you find your person?’ But there isn’t going to be an easy answer. It’s got to be a very . . . emotionally and intuitively minded game. But counterintuitive as well. The people who are able to find their dead will become famous in the gaming world, because everyone will know that it can somehow be done. It’s just that you have to try hard enough and long enough to find the person you lost, and eventually you just might be able to transform that longing into skill. Of course, most of the individual games won’t even possess the software capability to locate the dead. But some of them will, and if you get one it’ll be like holding one of Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets. You won’t know it until you test it over months and months of gameplay. But even if you’ve got one, you still need to do everything right in order to find the dead person.”
“What made you come up with this?” asked Cronish, his voice noncommittal.
Cory hadn’t planned to get into this, but now he said stiffly, “My little brother died. He was run over by a car and it was the worst thing that ever happened in my family. One thing I’ve never forgotten since then,” Cory said, speaking quickly and not allowing for the moment in which the other person usually said, I’m sorry for your loss, “is that anything can happen at any time. And this isn’t a bad philosophy to live by if you’re trying to design video games. The whole point of a lot of games, at least the ones that Logan and I have been playing, is surprise, right? The falling boulder. The lightning strike. The ambush. They prepare you for all the real falling boulders and lightning strikes and ambushes that are . . . the decorative flourishes of being alive.”
Where were these words coming from? Right away he knew. They were coming from slick Armitage & Rist, and his short stint there. But then there had been a bend in the road. A deep, serious turn, and he had finally emerged in a different form. No consultant now. No partner in a microfinance startup ever.