Vaporware Read Free Page A

thinking about
it like it’s a commercial. We need to use this to really get BlackStone fired
up about the game, and that means showing them all the sexy stuff first to get
them hooked.”
    She
turned her notepad around, and on it was a rough storyboard for a new
presentation, starting inside the machine and then exploding into the rough
combat sequence that Leon had demoed to me the day before. “Something like
this?”
    Eric
leaned down and grabbed the notepad. “Something, yeah.” He looked over at me,
then around the room. “Ryan, Michelle, why don’t you sit down with this and try
to rejigger what we’ve got. All the Powerpoint stuff is good, but if we can
move this up front…will end of day tomorrow be all right?”
    “Fine,”
I said, a little bitterly, and shut the projector down. The whirr of the fan
filled the room, along with the scent of scorched dust. “When are we presenting
this to the suits?”
    “We’re
not,” Eric said softly, accenting the first word just enough to let me know
that all was not well. “We’re just sending them the presentation, and their
third-party group will be looking it over by themselves.” There was a moment of
quiet while that sunk in and he scanned Michelle’s sketches. “That’s why this
thing needs to be kick ass all by its lonesome.”
    I
could feel my eyes getting really big and my guts trying to drop into my shoes.
If they didn't want to spring for plane tickets for us to present, that
meant—No. I caught the thought, cut it off, and stuffed it away. No sense
panicking the rest of the room, no sense freaking myself out, either. The game
rocked. It was going to be fine.
    So
I just nodded and hoped like hell that I was keeping the panic out of my face.
“I see. Michelle?”
    She
looked up at me, an unspoken question in her eyes. It translated roughly as
“How screwed are we?” and I wasn’t in a position to answer it here.
    “My
office, fifteen minutes?”
    “Sure,
if I can get my notepad back.” Embarrassed, Eric handed it to her. “I’ll see
you then.” She stood and, without looking at anyone else, left the room. The
rest of the attendees followed, chattering amongst themselves, their low voices
suggesting varying degrees of worry.
    And
then there were two of us, me shutting things down and detaching my laptop from
the projector, and Eric standing there watching me. He waited until everyone
else was out of the room, then crossed to the open door and shut it.
    “You
could have warned me,” I said as I unscrewed the video cable from the port on
the back of the projector. “Instead of hanging me out to dry like that.”
    “I
didn’t know what you had planned,” Eric said, no apology in his voice. “If
you'd nailed it like you usually do, I wouldn't have said anything.”
    “You
could have asked for a preview.” The cool-down light on the projector flashed
green, and I shut it down. The fan whimpered into silence, leaving only the
occasional thunks and groans of the building’s HVAC system to fill the void.
“If I’d known that wasn’t what you wanted, I wouldn’t have been here until
midnight every night last week trying to finish the presentation.”
    Eric
frowned. “It doesn’t matter. Just work with Michelle and put the chrome up
front, OK?”
    I
turned, and this time I didn't try to hide the fact that I was pissed off.
“It’s not chrome. It’s the core gameplay loop, and it’s what makes this game
different. You know that.” I'd said it, let him deny it if he had the balls to
do so. He didn't, though. He knew it was good, too, that we had a chance for a
real winner here.
    “I
know, I know. And I know how proud you are of it, and how hard you’ve worked on
it. I know this is your baby, Ryan. But it’s everyone in the building’s baby,
and I need to make sure that it’s positioned best for the company.” I looked up
from wrapping the video cable into something vaguely knot-like and saw that
he’d positioned himself in