The Restoration Game Read Free

in Krasnod's Museum of the Peoples and in the two Orthodox monasteries that hadn't been turned into Houses of Atheism; and in the one surviving copy of Life and Legends of the Krasnar , compiled in the 1920s by Krassnia's leading Bolshevik ethnologist (shot in 1937)—all that and more she'd cobbled together and “freely translated” into English as ancient lays , into even what you might call a national epic , which was instantly banned in Krassnia (even in English, even under democracy) and enjoyed a brief vogue with the Mind, Body, Spirit crowd for its ancient wisdom and shamanic spirituality and among Hell's Angels and gaming geek-boys for the sword fights and the sex bits.
    “You mean that hasn't been done already?” I asked.
    (Not the most cogent of questions, but the one at the top of the stack.)
    “No, it hasn't,” said Amanda, sounding exasperated. “The book's out of print in the US, and it's still banned in Krassnia, not that that makes much difference these days…. Anyway, nobody outside of Krassnia is interested in writing a game for it—the market's too small—and nobody inside of Krassnia is interested in anything but Western and Japanese games. So whoever developed it would have that market all to themselves.”
    The cat ambled in, stretched himself onto the coffee table, and nosed at the foil containers. I swatted him away. He glared at me from under the stereo.
    “A market you've just said isn't big enough. The game wouldn't break even.”
    “I happen to know it would,” Amanda said.
    I recognised that tone. It wasn't one that expected to be questioned.
    “If you say so,” I said. “But who would actually develop it?”
    “That company you work for,” she said. “Digital…Fist, yeah?”
    “Digital Damage Productions,” I corrected, abstractedly. “The fist is the logo.”
    Then I caught up with myself. “But we're just starting! Why not—?”
    “Go to one of the big-name companies? You know why not.”
    I did, too. “OK,” I said. “I can see that. But—”
    “Look, Lucy, give me a minute to explain how this is gonna work. You told me ages ago that Digital…whatever was working on some kind of dark fantasy fighting game, yeah? Heroes with swords, craggy landscape, gloomy ruins, spectres and slime, right?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Dark Britannia.”
    “Right!” she said. “All you'd have to do is change the landscape map, tweak the costumes, plug in Krassnian dialogue and prompts, rename and rejig your demons and dwarfs and so forth, and there you have it, tah-dah!—Dark Krassnia!”
    Now this was actually not a bad idea, and one very much along the lines that Sean Garrett, the PTB (Pony-Tailed Boss), founder and genius and hard taskmaster of DDP, had been thinking aloud about for months. Aloud is more or less how he does all his thinking, and you can occasionally interrupt this stream or rather torrent of consciousness and break it up into something that could from a distance be mistaken for a conversation (another word for which—here's a clue, Sean—is dialogue) and one component of such sequences that you could have drag-and-dropped into more or less any of his recent rants and rambles was: You know, when this thing takes off we can franchise it out for local adaptation in every fucking country in the world that has a Dark Age heroic mythology and you know what countries that leaves out? Only the ones that are still in the fucking Dark Ages! Ha ha ha!
    “That's by no means all,” I said. “And I don't see us doing it while we still don't have Dark Britannia done and dusted. When do you need it?”
    “Middle of June,” she said.
    “Four months? No way!”
    “It can be as quick and dirty as you like,” Amanda said. “We're not talking a flagship release here. Digital could even claim it had been pirated. Come to think of it, that's probably…hmm…”
    “The money would have to be good,” I said. “If I'm going to pitch it to the lads.”
    “Fifty thousand