I Became the Tyrant of a Defense Game [EN]: Chapter 387

My childhood doesn’t hold many good memories. I was born to a poet father and a singer mother. They met at a jazz bar and fell in love at first sight, or so the story goes. It sounds like a romantic tale, but reality is usually quite messy. My father was a poet. Or rather, an aspiring poet. He spent his entire life writing poems and sending bundles of manuscripts to newspapers and magazines every spring, but none of them ever gave him a positive response. Strictly speaking, my father had no talent. My mother was a singer. Not a famous one, just someone who sang old pop songs at a jazz bar. She would receive an envelope with a few tens of thousands of won [Korean currency] after each performance and spend it all that day. She had no concept of saving money. Or rather, it would be more accurate to say she had no sense of financial responsibility. Their meeting might have been romantic, but the two of them were always poor after they got married. I, who was born in the first year of their marriage, also lived in that poverty. My father wanted me to write poetry. So, he made me read all sorts of old poems. In my father’s old, musty-smelling room filled with poetry books, I memorized and copied old poems. My mother wanted me to make a lot of money. So, she made me study. I don’t know where she got the money from, but from a young age, she sent me to academies and had me tutored. It seems both of them wanted me to fulfill their unfulfilled dreams in areas where they lacked talent. Unfortunately, I had no talent for either poetry or studying. I was just an ordinary kid who loved games. I secretly picked up an old game console that the neighbors had thrown away, connected it to a low-quality CRT television, and played games all night with my eyes glued to the screen. I still remember the opening of that game. On the dull dot-graphic screen, the sun rose… and the hero, bathed in the sunlight, raised his holy sword above his head. And then, the words appeared. – PRESS START – Insert A Coin To Continue Press the start key. Insert a coin to continue. Games were thousands of times more fun than writing boring poems or studying things that wouldn’t stick in my dull head. That old game console was the only escape from my frustrating childhood. That escape ended when my parents broke the console and threw it away. *** As I grew up, and it became clear that I had no talent for either poetry or studying, my parents’ obsession grew stronger. Their belief was that anything could be overcome with effort. After school, I couldn’t even catch my breath before having to immerse myself in writing and memorizing poems, and studying. I didn’t have any real friends. My life was just going back and forth between home and school, with no time to socialize. When I became a high school student, my parents started fighting. It usually followed this pattern: – Our child must be raised to be a poet. They need to win awards in their teens. Let’s focus on making them write poetry now. – What are you talking about? Our child needs to go to a prestigious university in Seoul. Forget about poetry and focus on studying. My parents fought like that every night. Isn’t it ridiculous? It’s like they were counting their chickens before they hatched. That’s exactly what it was. The poems I wrote never won any significant awards, and my grades were barely enough to keep me in the top ranks at school. I spent half my day on poetry and the other half on studying, and that was the result. ……. Three years passed. My high school life was over. My poems still hadn’t won any awards. And I messed up the college entrance exam. *** My parents divorced around the time I was retaking the exam for the third time. Unable to overcome their financial difficulties, they separated. And only then did they give up on their expectations for me. Or perhaps ‘gave up’ is the right word. I worked part-time while preparing for the exam in a goshiwon [a small, cheap room], and I was able to enter a decent national university with a three-year scholarship. It was a department that had nothing to do with poetry, one that had good job prospects. My father declared that he was cutting ties with me at this point. It seems he wanted me to go to a department related to poetry. My mother was happy. After serving in the military, I studied like crazy until I graduated from university. And I was really lucky to get a job at a major company that everyone would recognize by name. My mother hugged me and cried her eyes out. She said she knew I could do it, that I was the kind of kid who could do anything if I set my mind to it… My father didn’t answer the phone. I didn’t tell my father that I had not given up and had been writing poems every year, secretly submitting them, and still not winning any awards. Because I was no longer going to write poetry. I joined the company. And from my first day at work, hell began. *** One year. The exact amount of time I lasted at that company was one year. The harsh working conditions, the daily overtime, the weekend work, the harassment from my seniors… I could actually endure all of that. Humans are adaptable, after all. I persevered through being called an idiot and a moron, and my evaluation improved from a complete failure to just average. My mind could handle it. The problem was my body. One night, after dozens of consecutive days of overtime, I couldn’t even remember when I had returned to my studio apartment. I collapsed with a nosebleed and woke up in the emergency room. They said there was something wrong with a blood vessel in my heart. They said it was caused by overwork. They told me that if I continued to live like this, I wouldn’t last long and would die. After leaving the emergency room, I took a taxi back to the company to finish the remaining work I was handling. The sun was rising in the east. I stared blankly in that direction. Was it my imagination? Under the blazing sunlight, I seemed to see letters made of dots. – PRESS START I stopped the taxi. I changed direction to my studio apartment and called my boss. Like a dot-graphic hero drawing his holy sword, I bravely took out my phone and said: “I’m quitting the company.” I pressed the start key. And only then did my real life begin. *** When I quit the company, my mother also cut ties with me. She couldn’t understand why I had quit such a good company, a place I had worked so hard to get into, just because it was a little difficult. She said she was disappointed in me, that I was someone who didn’t know the meaning of perseverance or effort. I lost contact with my parents. I didn’t have any friends to begin with. My former colleagues didn’t bother with me anymore after I quit the company. I also stopped writing poetry. There was no need to study anymore. Faced with an abundance of time, I pondered for a moment what I should do. I was a boring person with no real hobbies. “…That’s right.” I recalled a memory from my childhood and muttered. “I used to love games.” That day, I went to Yongsan [a district in Seoul known for electronics]. I was a complete newbie who knew nothing about computers, so I was ripped off by the vendors and bought a top-of-the-line computer. The vendor smiled and asked: “You’re getting such a good computer, are you planning to do game broadcasts?” I didn’t understand what he meant, so I just chuckled. The vendor gave me a mouse and keyboard as a service. I later found out that it was just a way to get rid of old stock, but at the time, I was just grateful. I brought the computer home, struggled to install it, and when I saw the computer successfully booting up, I burst into tears. It was because I realized that it was the first time in my life that I had bought something I wanted, for myself. *** While I had been living without games, they had developed tremendously. Spectacular graphics, deep and expansive genres and systems, and complex controls… For me, who was more like a newbie than a returning user, the new games were unfamiliar and bewildering. I was a much more outdated person than I thought. So, I started playing classic games. I started playing old games from decades ago that were comforting just to look at. Fortunately for me, nostalgia was always a popular content, so I could easily find old games. Moreover, they were re-releasing old titles as remasters and remakes. Every time I ran a game, there was something that kept appearing in the upper right corner of the screen. [Start Game Broadcast] It seemed to be a built-in feature of the computer’s graphics driver. It supported broadcasting on its own. At first, I tried to ignore it, but the words kept appearing every time I turned on a game, so I gradually started to pay attention to it. – Are you planning to do game broadcasts? The vendor’s words also came to mind. So, one day, impulsively… I started a broadcast. [Please set a broadcast nickname.] Nickname. What should I use…? After much deliberation, I clumsily typed on the keyboard. A nickname that suited my old self, who memorized old poems, listened to old pop songs, and played old games. [ClassicOtaku] That’s how my first broadcast began. *** But the broadcast was terribly unpopular. From the start, I had just started it as a side thing while playing games, but it was so unpopular that it was pathetic. Well, in this day and age, who would come to watch a broadcast of old games from decades ago, especially one without a camera or microphone? But at that time, I didn’t know anything about the internet broadcasting ecosystem, so I didn’t know how to improve it. So, I just turned on the broadcast every time I played a game. A month passed. My broadcast was still a ghost town, and the few viewers who occasionally came in would leave after just looking at the screen. ‘Should I quit?’ I thought that as I turned on the game. I was almost at the end of a classic side-scrolling RPG. I thought that after finishing this, I would quit broadcasting. The final hidden boss appeared on the screen. I skillfully manipulated the controller, taunting the boss, and defeated it without taking a single hit. Game clear. The ending credits rolled. In the screen that followed, the hero who had saved the kingdom was being praised by the people. In reality, I was just playing games alone in this one-room apartment, as if I were dead, with no one to acknowledge me. “Haa…” I said with a long sigh. “Cleared it.” I was startled after speaking. It was because I belatedly realized that I had turned on the microphone for what I thought was my last broadcast. I was surprised, but then I chuckled. What did it matter if my voice was being broadcast? It was a broadcast that no one was watching anyway… That’s when it happened. – Bro! In the empty chat window, A single message appeared. – Bro, you’re amazing! How did you beat that? “……” I was so surprised that my eyes widened as I looked at the message. I read it again and again. Only then did I see it. Number of viewers. 1. Since when? Since when had they been watching? I was speechless. I didn’t know how to react to the first message I had ever received from a viewer since I started broadcasting. As I stood there, flustered and frozen, another message from the guy appeared. – I’ll add you to my favorites. You’ll broadcast again next time, right? “Uh, uh… Y-yes.” As I stammered, the guy left a waving emoticon and then… – It was fun! See you again! He left the broadcast. “……” Again, the number of viewers was 0. Was it a mistake? Did I see something that wasn’t there? But the chat log was clearly there. I read the chat left by the unidentified viewer again and again. “…Haha.” I laughed. For some reason, my nose tingled. I quickly pressed my hot eyes with the back of my hand. I had been trapped in a shell. I was dying alone in an isolated place where no one thought to look. I thought that this was how I wanted to live. But it wasn’t. In fact, I had been hoping that someone would reach out to me. Not the me who writes poetry. Not the me who studies. Not the me who makes money. Not the me who is useful. But just the me who likes what I like… I wanted someone to like that me. That was what I had wanted my whole life. So, this one chat message left by a complete stranger, even if the person didn’t mean much by it. The feeling of being connected to someone. The kindness that someone had extended to me, who had become useless. It made me so happy that I could cry. “Maybe I should broadcast a little longer…” I gave up on the idea of quitting the broadcast and decided to continue for a few more days. And this choice changed my life forever.