I closed the Terra Firma client and opened a web browser; then I pulled up Chaos Terrain’s website. I clicked through to their website’s “About Us” page and scanned it. As a longtime CT super fan, I already knew quite a lot about the company’s history. It had been founded back in 2010 by a Bay Area videogame developer named Finn Arbogast, who quit a lucrative job working on the Battlefield series for Electronic Arts to venture out on his own. He founded Chaos Terrain with the lofty goal of “creating the next generation of multiplayer VR games.”
Arbogast had then assembled a dream team of creative consultants and contractors to help make his bold claim a reality, luring some of the videogame industry’s brightest stars away from their own companies and projects, with the sole promise of collaborating on his groundbreaking new MMOs. That was how gaming legends like Richard Garriott, Yu Suzuki, Gabe Newell, Warren Spector, Tim Schafer, and Shigeru Miyamoto had all wound up as consultants on both Terra Firma and Armada—along with several big Hollywood filmmakers, including James Cameron, who had contributed to the EDA’s realistic ship and mech designs, and Peter Jackson, whose Weta Workshop had rendered all of the in-game cinematics.
Chaos Terrain had also licensed the most advanced game engines; then they set about modifying and improving them for their specific needs. Terra Firma utilized code and design features from several different combat-simulation game series like Battlefield, Call of Duty, and Modern Warfare. Armada, on the other hand, had been created using a heavily modified version of the game engine for Star Citizen, which Chaos Terrain had licensed from Roberts Space Industries for an undisclosed sum.
This plagiaristic, Frankenstein-like development strategy proved wildly successful. Terra Firma and Armada were two of the bestselling multiplayer videogames in the world, and with good reason. Their stripped-down arcade-style gameplay made both titles easy to learn and fun for casual players, but they were also scalable and dynamic enough to be challenging for everyday players like myself. Both games also had killer production values, and they could be played on any modern gaming platform, including smartphones and tablets. Best of all, the games weren’t overpriced, like most MMOs. Sure, Chaos Terrain charged a low monthly subscription fee to play both Terra Firma and Armada, but once you got good enough to achieve the rank of officer in either game, CT waived your monthly fee and you played for free from then on. And they didn’t use in-game microtransactions to milk players for extra revenue, either.
I closed the window and stared at the icons on the desktop, trying to sort out my thoughts. Until today, it had never occurred to me to make a connection between the alien invasion plotline of Chaos Terrain’s games and the conspiracy theory outlined in my father’s notebook. There were hundreds of alien-invasion-themed movies, shows, books, and videogames released every year, and Armada was just one of them. Besides, the game had only been out for a few years, so how could it possibly be connected to the stuff my father had written in his notebook decades ago?
On the other hand, if the government really did want to train average citizens to operate drones in combat, then multiplayer combat games like Armada and Terra Firma would be exactly the sort of the games you’d create to do it. …
When the Star Trek door chime sounded a few minutes later and a gaggle of semi-regulars from the nearby junior high filed into the store, I shoved my new helmet, throttle, and flight-stick controllers back into their box and stowed it under the counter before any of the prepubescent hooligans could lay their covetous eyes upon it.
“Welcome to Starbase Ace, where the game is never over,” I said, reciting the store’s canned greeting with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “How may I help you young gentlemen this evening?”
When I got back home, my mother’s car was parked in the driveway. This was a pleasant surprise, because she’d had to work a lot of overtime at the hospital this past year, and a lot of nights she didn’t get home until after I’d already crashed for the night.
But knowing she was home also put me on edge, because she’d always been able to tell when something was bothering me. When I was younger, I was convinced she possessed some sort of mutant maternal telepathy that allowed her to read my mind, especially when there was crazy shit going on inside it.
I found my mother stretched out on the living-room sofa, with Muffit curled up at her feet, watching the latest episode of Doctor Who, one of her many televised addictions. Neither of them heard me come in, so I just stood there for a moment, watching my mother watch her show.