About one week earlier…

The black-haired man sat before his computer with a bored expression.

Disposable, one-use bowls lay all over the ground, clearly not disposed of.

A massive heap of clean and dirty clothes lay against one of the walls.

The room was only lit by the retina-annihilating laser-beam that was the man’s computer screen.

A rainbow-coloured keyboard and mouse elevated his status amongst the other shut-ins.

“Looks boring…” the man remarked seeing the unoriginal game on the screen.

In the search bar of his go-to knock-off search engine ‘Foogle’ was “Fun MMO to play”, above a long list of uninspired, knock-off games.

“The graphics look boring…” he remarked scrolling past another game.

He read the title of the next game out-loud.

“Sword Aunt Online”

He scrolled down.

“Dragon Bowl Quest! Based on the world-famous show-…” he didn’t even finish reading the full title as he scrolled down.

“Jesus, are any of these games made by non-weeaboos?!” he asked scrolling even further down.

“Super Mary-Oh Online!”

“Breaking Crab: Together! Crab-dealing and gang fights!”

“World of Dorncarft!”

“World off Torncarft!”

“World & Morncarft!”

“World with Gorncarft!”

“World no Stormcarft!”

“World on Wormcraft!”

JohnWillStab felt a chill run up his spine.

“I’ve reached some scary parts of the internet…” he remarked with a look somewhere between discomfort and fear.

He scrolled to the very bottom of the page where he saw the message reading “Results Page 3 out of 11287!”

The man took a long, deep breath as he reached for the multi-pack of energy drinks located at the side of his desk.

He pulled out the first can, it was purple with a bumpy texture on the can.

The brightly-coloured logo read: “Chemergy”.

John cracked the can open and downed the whole thing in under fifteen seconds before throwing it behind him into a pile of similar cans.

“This is going to be a long night…” he thought before cracking his wrists with a look of pure determination.

Later that night…

The dried-out husk of a man lay in the computer chair, the occasional flicker of life in his eyes, a mere illusion formed by the rainbow lights reflecting in his teary eyes.

“They’re all… unoriginal…” he mumbled.

JohnWillStab breathed a sigh, he reached out towards the computer.

He aimed for the power button on his screen, it’s not like he ever turned the actual computer off.

It was like unplugging your grandma except you don’t typically use your grandma to watch porn.

That was when he set his eyes on the picture before him, at some point during the mind-numbing scrolling, all the pictures started looking the same, not this one though.

The picture showed what looked like a frogman with a shotgun fighting against a skeleton with a wand while a human with daggers crept up on them from behind.

The game was called “Binary Progression”

JohnWillStab raised his eyebrows.

“Gee, I wonder if this is the game I’ll end up playing…” he thought.

For the first time since the start of the game-searching experience he clicked into the link to do some more research on the game itself.

The page loaded incredibly slowly; the entire process was painful.

“Where exactly do these people host this website from? Mars? Agartha?!” John thought seeing the website’s loading-bar slowly reach fifty-percent after thirty seconds.

He felt his interest in the game ebb and flow as the page slowly came into view, it was loading in like one big image from the top down.

After almost a minute of waiting the game loaded and JohnWillStab was greeted with what can only be described as an early two-thousands nightmare of a site.

Low quality cat gifs danced around the screen, some wore hats, some had allegedly funny captions.

“Holy shit this looks bad…” the man said seeing the dated design, his throat felt dry as he grabbed another energy drink.

“When was this last updated?!” he asked scrolling down to the bottom of the page where an up-to-date copyright message was written plain as day.

All over the site were ads from around the world.

Most of them included some sort of unsavoury business, JohnWillStab couldn’t be sure because it was written in a wonky language, but he could swear he saw ads for actual hitmen.

When he eventually made it back to the top again, he saw the list of images and videos from the game.

“It looks good at least…” he thought clicking into one of the images.

The graphics were quite dated but like any other true gamer not to mention a connoisseur of old strategy games, JohnWillStab knew a good, stylised look was more important that pure detail and the resolution of the textures.

He looked down to the publishing-date of the image and saw that it was published almost twenty years ago.

“…”

“It looks interesting… but what’s the point of playing an MMO if it’s not going to have any people?”

“If I wanted to play games alone, I’d just play Heroes of Might and Wizardry…”

He clicked into the forums tab and was once again met with a test of patience.

“I hope the game isn’t like this…” JohnWillStab said just before the website loaded.

The forums appeared and much to John’s relief plenty of new posts were up already.

“FIX THE F#&KING DAGGER CLASS!” was the title of the first post, it was posted earlier that day.

“GUYS, DO NOT GIVE KEVIN MOSSBACK KIDNEYS!” read the next.

“Looking for mossback kidneys, pm me.” Read another.

JohnWillStab wasn’t certain what kind of game this was, but it was a good looking MMO with an active community.

Plus, with how sketchy the website looked, he wasn’t leaving without at least a few viruses, so he might as well download the game.

He turned back to the previous website, this time it loaded a lot quicker confirming John’s suspicion it downloaded something onto his PC.

He clicked the “register” button and was quickly redirected to the registration page for the game.

A long list of questions appeared.

He began filling out his details, getting progressively more concerned as they went on.

“Username: JohnWillStab”

“First Name: JohnWillStab”

“Last Name: I’ve always used this one,”

“Middle Name: Will”

“Do You Have A Pet: Nope”

“Pet Name: John?”

“Age: 27”

“Blood Type: Red”

“Body Type: Human”

“Bank Details: It stores money and charges you for it,”

“Favourite Dish: Cheap Noodles”

“Are you a divine being in disguise: No?“

“Are you sure?: Yeah”

“Ok… If you say so…: WHY ARE YOU SO DISTRUSTFUL?!”

JohnWillStab finally complete all the questions.

He clicked “Next” only to be brough to more questions.

“Password: ********”

“Password Again: ********”

“Email: [email protected]”

Again, he clicked “Next”.

The big, red, animated button appeared in the centre of the screen, the download was small, disturbingly so.

“214 MB” was the size of the compressed file.

As soon as it downloaded, JohnWillStab dragged the folder inside onto his cluttered desktop.

“Why is it so small?” he wondered seeing that inside the folder were only two files.

The two files were “BinaryProgression.exe” and “Data.hsiw”.

Uncertainly JohnWillStab opened the exe file and after a few seconds a few folders appeared called “data”.

Quickly its insides became packed with hundreds of “.hsiw” files before the size rocketed to eighty-five gigabytes.

“What the hell?” he asked out loud, he double-clicked into the newly created folder seeing many file names, most were just single-letter titles like “A.hsiw” and “H.hsiw”.

“How is this possible? How advanced is this game?” he wondered seeing the log-in screen appear, it was a simple, black box with a bright blue outline and two fields to fill in, “Username” and “Password”.

JohnWillStab filled both and clicked the “Enter” key on his keyboard.

He was brought to another screen, it had “graphics”, “controls” and “lawsuits” sections.

That was when the dreaded message appeared.

“Please wait, the game is updating :D” read the message, while “Play” button became greyed-out.

“…”

“So much for this piece of crap being advanced…” he sighed seeing the download bar slowly filling up.

It was no less than a full hour later that JohnWillStab finally passed out in his chair.

His mind was too exhausted to dream; the eight-hour nap felt like it began and ended instantaneously to John.

When John opened his eyes, he saw that the game was “successfully updated!”.

“Finally! I can get to the game!” he said with a relieved smile.

His screen went black as into view came a grassy field, in the centre of his screen was a simple wall of text.

“You have no characters, they might have been deleted due to a bug or removed by an admin, please create a new character.”

Below the message was a blue button reading: “Create New Character”.

“On second thought… I… have a bad feeling about this game…” he said hovering his mouse over the character creation screen.

A few quiet seconds passed in John’s room, the only sound within it was that of the computer fan, sounding like it was about to take off.

Click.