The Story
In the year 2040, the corporate gaming industry had passed its prime and was a shell of its former glory. Many of the larger triple-A gaming companies published the same formulaic games over and over with little to no innovation. Despite that, there were still those who pushed the limits of gaming. Many smaller indie developers pioneered where others would not, and it paid off with them rising to the top and reaching all-time highs in popularity in their passion projects. It didn’t stop there, and the paradigm shifted when many of gaming's rising stars banded together for a much more ambitious project.
A new gaming platform was announced, one that would revolutionize the medium as we all knew it. Using the power of a highly sophisticated AI, these developers could multiply the quality and quantity of their work beyond what developers of the past could. The end result being better games, more interactive NPCs, lifelike worlds that stretched beyond the horizon.
Horizon Industries was still very much in touch with their humble beginnings as multiple indie teams, and eventually made their software open source. They understood the power of collective interest, and knew that passion, not greed, would make the greatest gaming experiences of all time.
In the year 2046, an anonymous user compiled a highly advanced program on hardware they claimed would not only create new games, but reinvent old ones in ways never thought possible. The chip was sent in for testing and was placed within the gaming system. To everyone's surprise, the claims held true. This lone chip did everything Horizon set out to do and so much more. Where the team needed to generate and place countless assets, this chip’s AI not only did the bulk of the work, but also had the power to process it all. Where old games were dated and lacking, this chip had generated new and realistic content, completely reinventing them. It was truly a marvel of technology. Games were now more realistic than they had ever been, or perhaps ever could be...
The new “Horizon” system was published within the year, and shipped all over the world with unprecedented success. However as time marched on, strange and haunting incidents began to surface. Some characters acted contrary to the inputs of the players’ controls, and many NPC's were acting far too real, begging not to be killed or becoming fed up with the player character’s antics.
The devs of the system were perplexed by this development and attempted to solve the problem. It was then when they received another message from the same anonymous user who created the chip in the first place. They claimed there was a software bug and had written out a simple patch to fix the issue. When asked the user simply explained that the bug was due to a minor miscalculation in the AI’s realism processing algorithm that pushed things a little too far...
Having already proven their skill, the devs trusted their reasoning and rolled out the patch.
It was quickly installed to all systems, but what came soon after was what many came to call "The Horizon Incident". Characters, items, monsters, and even entire locations from games were seemingly torn out from the worlds they inhabited and transported into our own. Chaos ensued. Law enforcement and even the military tried to intervene when the many villains and monsters sought to destroy and subjugate this new world, but they were not enough. They were mere men against gods. They were stretched thin, both by the scope of the catastrophe and the destruction. Those who would commit such atrocities would have likely succeeded, if not for the Characters and brave souls who stood in their way. Through the earliest hours of the catastrophe, to the last moments of the conflict, these brave Characters and humans fought alongside their new charges and companions, and beat back the evil which threatened their way of life.
The conflict ended after six months and peace resumed. The Characters were ultimately treated differently depending on where they ended up and who the character was. Some were loved and admired, others hated and feared. One thing was almost universal; it was hard to adapt to life in this new world. The Character Affairs Association, or CAA, was formed to help these Characters acclimate to the real world. They saw this as a new beginning for all Characters and believed that even once evil characters could be given a second chance.
It's now the year 2047. A year has passed since the day of the apocalypse. Things are still rather chaotic, but order is slowly returning to the earth. Some characters are working with authorities, while others conspire against them. Some have sought out a quiet life, while others thrust themselves into the spotlight. Many characters stick to their old ways, but a few, for better or worse, changed as they adapted to their new environment. But their stories, only you can tell.
Welcome to the real world...
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