Read Online Press Start to Play by Daniel H. Wilson, John Joseph Adams - Free Book Online

and picked up the envelope in which the game had come. He looked inside the envelope and noticed a small square of paper. He retrieved it and saw the sender had sent him a handwritten note. It read:
Enjoy the game, but not too much. Don’t forget to eat!
    —
    When Jamie finally came in with the tea, Sam had the game back up and running, the power restored. “Mate,” Sam said. “New house rule. When I’m playing this game, we can’t use the kettle.”
    “Get out,” Jamie said. “I need my caffeine.”
    “Look, you can’t save this game, you can’t even pause it. If I’m fifteen hours in and you start an explosive brew, I’m making you homeless.”
    “We could buy a new kettle.”
    “Or
you
could.”
    Jamie flapped his hand dismissively. “Sod off, you know I can’t afford that.” Sam did know this: Jamie had been staying with him rent-free for six months while he tried to get back on his feet following his “redundivorce.” The simultaneous blows in quick succession had made his childhood best friend a figure of maddening pity, but Sam’s patience was on the wane of late.
    “No job, no tea,” Sam said. Jamie looked crestfallen, and Sam felt a twinge of regret. Had he been too harsh? He was about to apologize when Jamie gave him the finger.
    “Lovely,” Sam said. “You done? Good. Now shut up and watch me play the best computer game ever made.”
    Ten minutes of walking later, Sam having made no visible ground on the mountains, Jamie said: “Is this literally it? The whole game.”
    Sam shrugged, his gaze fixed on the television. “That’s the point,” Sam said. “No one really knows—that’s what’s so exciting about it.”
    “Yeah, I can barely contain myself,” Jamie said, and Sam sighed. “You said this was the game that you’d been waiting your whole life to play.”
    After a moment of reflection, Sam spoke softly: “You need to understand what you’re looking at. This is possibly in the top five of the all-time rare games—”
    “I know that, I’m just saying it’s probably rare for a reas—”
    “Listen first, and then learn. The game’s rare because it was only ever released as part of this
Games World
sampler. The other games on the sampler were all demos that later got a proper release, but due to a manufacturing balls-up, the full game of
Desert Walk
was featured instead of the demo version. So the magazine had to recall the issue, which means loads of the samplers got destroyed. However,
Desert Walk
never got its official release in the end because Sega pulled it for no reason that anyone’s been able to properly ascertain, meaning those few who bought the sampler before it was recalled were the only people to ever play
Desert Walk
.”
    “Well, it’s obvious why it never got an official release, isn’t it? It’s rubbish.”
    “That’s not the reason. No one knows exactly why it was pulled, but there’s all sorts of cool rumors about it doing the rounds. Go look it up. The game causes epilepsy, it causes blindness, it causes madness. I’d never have put much stock in all that, but on one of the forums someone posted a link to a BBC article from two years ago about some bloke who apparently got a copy off eBay and died of dehydration after playing the game for a week straight.”
    “I’m the only one that’s going to die of dehydration if you’re serious about that kettle,” Jamie said. Sam ignored him. Up on the screen, the passing desert looked the same as it had at the start of the game.
    chshh, chshh, chshh
    “And it isn’t rubbish,” Sam continued. “It was ahead of its time. It might look simple at first, but those stones on the floor aren’t being regenerated from previous screens. The arrangements don’t repeat. They’re all completely unique. That means the designer made every square inch of this huge, endless desert.”
    “Why did he bother?”
    “She. The designer’s a woman, you pig. That’s the question, isn’t it? And that’s