“You know what? Screw it. Let’s get the bad ending,” says local gamer Greg Harrison, fishing around a crumpled bag for the final modicum of Dorito dust. “I bet you get a Steam achievement or something.”
Upon uttering this prophetic statement, he then emptied the clip of his gun into a shopkeeper, who had a wife and three children, audibly sighing with disappointment when the option to cannibalize the corpse was not made available to him. Rather than continue on the game’s primary quest, which the narrative team had spent countless hours expertly crafting, he then proceeded to voluntarily spend two real-life hours hunting down and killing in cold blood every single digital inhabitant of the game before stacking them into a “meat tower” composed entirely of dripping flesh and mutilated faces. The only comment Greg had was that the physics engine of the game made body-stacking “janky.”
Having run out of virtual lives to end in torturous agony, Greg then used the funds he had pillaged from ruined corpses to purchase a train ticket to the game’s Capitol. Once inside the train itself, his true goal was revealed to be the systematic slaughter of the train staff—paying particular attention to the Wood Elves, who he had always considered “real fuckers.”
After extensive research, it seems that this impulse, which ultimately resulted in the total extinction of the Wood Elf species, was birthed during Greg’s first playthrough, when a Wood Elf prisoner called Greg’s character, then a fellow prisoner, “knave.” This very same prisoner was nailed to the wall, burned, healed, burned, healed, burned to death, revived, and beheaded, never knowing why he must suffer through such unimaginable anguish at the hands of a man he never recalled meeting. Afterwards, his head was placed atop the ever-growing meat tower, a process which took the overencumbered player almost three real-life hours to complete. The only comment Greg had before, during, or after this experience was: “nice.”
This task complete, Greg advanced upon the terrified Capitol, who had barricaded their doors and desperately armed themselves in a futile attempt to stop this soulless instrument of death; unfortunately, Greg’s armor, which he had bought from the in-game DLC shop, was totally impervious to such low-level forms of attack. Rather than end their lives with sword or spell, Greg punched every citizen, guard, and scripted NPC to death. When asked to comment why, for the love of all Gods why, by the fleeing townsfolk, Greg muttered under his breath, “because I payed sixty freaking dollars for it, jeez.”
After killing every NPC on the continent by herding them into prepared “death camps” that he had filled with poisonous gas, Greg, now a far more terrifying and loathsome monster than any enemy he had ever faced in any game, seized the throne of Hell itself, allowing him to continue torturing the helpless, screaming souls of those he had slain for all eternity. After the credits sequence finished, Greg nodded to himself, satisfied, before starting a new game: his final comment was, “this time, I’m gonna make them love me.”
