On the midnight of March 24, 2257, Valin's gigantic cold fusion servers were powered on for the first time.
In about ten hours, they will become the databanks of the most widely anticipated game in history,
Truly, this was another achievement of mankind. The Intergalactic Police has already recorded an all-time low crime rate in all of the human settlements across the galaxy.
Every teenager who owns a VEX GEAR are already cooped up in their homes, eagerly waiting for the game's galaxy-wide release even though it was still school day. Even most of the teachers are on standby, leading to schools becoming so sparsely populated like ghost towns. This led to governments declaring the rest of the day a no-class day.
Nobody didn't expect the repercussions of the game's release to the public. The game has been plastered on the headlines of every channel, website, newspaper, and blog available, and easily accessible from the rural places of Africa to the farthest outpost of humans located on the Kepler-452 System thousands of light-years away from Earth. Every human colony is made aware of the game and its unparalleled capabilities.
Millions of people who didn't have an interest in the game was attracted to the attention it has amassed, so they decided to join the bandwagon and bought a VEX GEAR and a copy of the game at the last minute. As a result, productivity rate for the day was diminished quickly from a high rate of 84% to 23%.
The average citizen would ask: How did a game get so ridiculously popular that almost 30% of the human population is eager to play it? After all, the idea of virtual reality is not the revolutionary thing it once was two hundred years ago.
To find the answer, we must first know how it all started.
The third decade of the 21st Century was when the gaming industry started to take the idea of virtual reality seriously. It was the first generation of full-dive VR games, and they worked just as expected: bad, terribly uncomfortable to the senses, and primitively pixelated graphics. The brain-computer interface was very buggy too, causing a number of beta testers to go into a coma and die. They were met with mixed reviews, some praising the risk and effort the developers made and some berating the disastrous results.
One review even said that going into full-dive VR was like "experiencing the worst nightmare of your life, only that you're fully awake."
The second generation of VR games perfected the brain-computer interface. Using miniaturized quantum computers and fitting them into a VR headset, artificial stimulus was simulated to 99% accuracy. They called this new invention the Virtual-Expansion Gear, or VEX GEAR. Unlike the previous VR headsets, the VEX GEAR does not read brain waves. Instead, it makes micro-incisions at the spinal cord and the back of the neck, linking directly to the nervous system of the user. Thus, information exchange is instant.
This was when VR games started to gather widespread attention and acclaim among the masses.
This was also the time when single-player VR games became the norm. But as time passed by, there have also been demands to create a multiplayer VR experience, but unfortunately there still wasn't enough computing power to link two VEX GEARS with perfect synchronicity. After all, the smallest lag is enough to wreak havoc to the user's nervous system, causing irreversible insanity and brain damage to the user.
The third generation started in the year 2200, after the initial colonization of Jupiter's moon Europa. In its underground oceans, they discovered a new element in liquid form that could be utilized as a very powerful sedative. It was then integrated to the VEX GEAR so as to completely stabilize the brain functions of the player when going into full-dive, making the fatality rate of VR games to an all-time low of 0.009%.
Meanwhile, in its mantle, a mysterious out-of-place metal was discovered. Its properties look very similar to that of silicon used in CPU's, but its molecular structure would mean it had better and faster computing power than the latest quantum processors. Thus, integrating it into the VEX GEAR just seemed like the natural thing to do.
This became the last piece of the puzzle to make the idea of a VRMMORPG a reality.
After that, VR sales skyrocketed to the highest degree, as well as the number of psychiatric patients who have failed to seek a grip on reality. Virtual reality has become so barely distinguishable from actual reality, to the point where game developers had to put in totems, in-game markers, to remind the player that they were still inside the game.
Fourth-Generation VR was a great leap in technological advancement. Aside from its applications on recreation, prisoner rehabilitation and military combat simulation, this kind of virtual reality is the most suitable match for a VRMMORPG game. Thus, work has commenced immediately on a new game.
It was in the year 2253 when the first-ever VRMMORPG game was released to the public.
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During this time, there were rumors circulating that the Valin Megacorporation has been secretly building titanic servers in its headquarters on Mars.
Theories quickly spread out on the internet, "It's probably a giant military hardware." or "Maybe they're making spaceship factories or something."
But it wasn't until the press conference held in New California when the current CEO of Valin Megacorporation, Dr. Carrol Adkins, addressed the public for the first time:
"The Valin Megacorporation is fully committed in creating a game that will kickstart the fifth generation, a VRMMORPG of epic proportions, with a whole planet and its moon as its map, and an unprecedented emergent gameplay where anything is possible. If you can think it, you can do it.
Some major tweaks made in the VEX GEAR will also enable persons with disabilities to have their imperfections fully restored, at least inside the game. A man who has lost his legs can now re-experience the sensation of running, or a girl who was blind since birth can now experience the gift of eyesight for the first time. A comatose patient can now play with his relatives inside the game, as if he was 100% healthy.
But the most game-changing feature of all, the one that would distinguish the game as a one-of-a-kind, is its cutting-edge artificial intelligence system called FATE (Fully Artificialized Transhuman Emergence). For the first time in gaming history, players will cross the true uncanny valley as non-playable characters (NPC's) will have the same intelligence and neural process as a living person. Thus, every NPC will feel very alive and sentient. There will be no scripted conversations or events with them, for everything that happens is purely emergent out of how you treat them. Make no mistake, they are but lines of code programmed to perfectly simulate human consciousness. No matter how you get attached to them, they do not and will never exist in the real world. Just a heads-up.
It is truly a game where you can be anyone, do anything. Well, after the scripted introduction, that is. Whether you crave human interaction or the love of combat, it is where you can make your wildest fantasies come true."
"Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:
Dr. Adkins' speech triggered a mass movement that would continue on for a few years. Like a typhoon hovering over an expanse of ocean, it gradually gathered enough power to be considered as an anticipated intergalactic historical event.
In the present, after so many preparations and a mountain-load of temporary setbacks, everything was finally ready to go. The servers are hot, the billions of users on their VEX GEAR waiting for the first streak of virtual light among the darkness. With one gesture from Carrol Adkins, the servers will be greenlit, and the game will start.