“Fucking ridiculous,” Marc Bangor mutters over frenzied keystrokes. “This absolute goddamn nutcase.” On his monitor is a live feed of an individual player currently enjoying Bangor’s new game. The rest of the office around him is black and empty—it’s almost 3am. “Keep running asshole. So help me God.”
The game, an open-world RPG called Lukaria: Corrupted World, was once Bangor’s muse. A muse he now regrets. “It’s a big open world, right. Like, really big. Not procedurally generated, either. It’s gigantic, and every square on the grid, I poured my heart into. My team poured their hearts into,” Bangor explains while he continues to code. “We did this little press release, pointed at these mountains and said, ‘You see those mountains? You can go to those mountains. And the mountains beyond those ones.’ But we never dreamed of this fucking guy. This asshole never stopped. He just never stopped.”
The player, GarrockX12, can be seen running at a steady pace towards yet another range of mountains in the distance.
“See those mountains? They’re exactly like the ones he just passed. Trees in different places, yeah, but the exact same. I keep trying to get ahead of the guy and put some crazy ice troll in there that’ll kill him and just end my suffering, but he’s always one step ahead of me. I have a fucking kid, man. What’s this guy’s problem? He’s been at this for 7 hours.”
The contents of a whiteboard in Bangor’s office have clearly been recently erased and drawn over with crude depictions of mountains and an angry ice troll with burning red eyes. “I swear to God if this guy just has a stack of quarters on the W key I’m going to lose my fucking mind.”
At press time, Bangor was still in his office. His development team advised us not to enter.
