Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 38: Chapter #38: The First Glimpse

Irina Jelavic clicked the digital attachment, bringing the image to full screen.

A bright, piercing full moon loomed heavily behind a canopy of shifting clouds, casting a pale and sickly light over a mysterious, deeply gloomy gothic city.

There was no one else in Irina’s apartment.

The suffocating, oppressive atmosphere radiating from the concept art seemed to bleed directly through the monitor, filling the dark room with a chilling stillness.

She stared blankly at the high-resolution image, feeling as though her very soul was being pulled into the digital streets, sliced apart by the cold moonlight.

After a long, heavy moment, she finally took a deep breath. She completely believed him now.

The lead developer of Sprout Studio wasn’t just boasting for the cameras, and he wasn’t making empty, arrogant wagers just because he had been provoked during a live interview.

He actually had a concrete blueprint for his next massive project, and production was already fully underway.

This wasn’t just a PR stunt.

The highly anticipated AAA game wasn’t just a hollow ’New Folder’ sitting empty on his desktop.

At that exact moment, she felt an overwhelming, desperate urge to show this artwork to the global player base.

She wanted them to see the masterpiece he had promised to deliver within a single year.

Sprout Studio hadn’t even existed for half a year, yet they were boldly promising a sprawling AAA title within twelve months?

To the average industry veteran, it sounded like an absolute joke—a naive, arrogant fantasy.

But Irina’s fingers were already flying across her mechanical keyboard, frantically drafting a video script.

It wasn’t until midnight that she finally pushed her keyboard away with a deep sigh of satisfaction.

She read through the heavily revised, meticulously crafted copy one last time, nodding to herself in the dark room.

She immediately hit publish, uploading the script, the high-resolution artwork, and a fully edited video package that she had spent the last few hours rendering.

Late evening and midnight were the absolute peak hours for video engagement algorithms.

Even long after the clock struck twelve, millions of gamers were still lying sideways in bed, mindlessly scrolling through their phone feeds.

There was a running joke in the internet community: during the day, the algorithm fed you cooking tutorials and attractive influencers, but the second midnight hit, your feed morphed into an endless stream of horror shorts and supernatural deep-dives.

At twelve o’clock in the morning, the internet was a digital ghost town.

After scrolling through one terrifying paranormal video after another, countless viewers pulled their blankets up to their chins, thoroughly spooked but entirely unable to stop watching.

"Why does the algorithm literally only feed me jumpscares at night?!" one user muttered helplessly into the dark glow of their screen.

They squinted nervously, fully prepared to get terrified by whatever loaded next, before swiping up to the next video on their feed.

That was the universal curse of late-night scrolling. Every time a creepy thumbnail appeared, your eyes desperately wanted to look away, but your brain stubbornly forced you to watch until the very end.

Phew!

As the screen transitioned, the viewer let out a massive sigh of relief.

The next video wasn’t a screaming ghost or a found-footage horror clip.

It was just a static image, accompanied by an incredibly soft, melancholic, and gentle background track.

"Hi everyone. This is First Game News, and I’m Irina Jelavic," a calm, professional voice echoed through the phone speakers.

Just as the exhausted gamers were bracing themselves for a sudden jumpscare, that deeply familiar, authoritative voice washed over them, instantly putting them at ease.

Taking a closer look at the uploader profile, they confirmed it was indeed the verified, official account for First Game News.

"Jesus, that scared me. But why the hell is the lead anchor posting a video at midnight?" netizens wondered, glancing at the timestamp.

The metric clearly showed the video had literally just been uploaded.

"Today, I’m going to give you a definitive update on Sprout Studio. But first, I want to formally apologize to their entire development team once again for the trouble our recent interview caused them," Irina’s voice sighed softly over the audio track.

"The explosive growth of Sprout Studio is something the entire industry has witnessed. We’ve all seen their past, and we’ve all experienced their previous masterpieces."

"Today, I want to tell you that we are also about to witness their future."

"This afternoon, during a private conversation with Nova, the founder of Sprout Studio, I was given access to a single piece of concept art," Irina explained, having chosen to deliver the news in a deeply personal, narrative format.

The visual track of the video remained locked entirely onto that single, haunting image.

Paired with the gentle, atmospheric soundtrack, her soft midnight narration felt incredibly intimate and beautiful.

"With his explicit, official authorization, I have embedded that artwork into this video to share with all of you."

The moment the words left her mouth, every single viewer narrowed their eyes, studying the grim, hyper-detailed background image with intense focus.

"Just as many of you might be guessing, this is an official concept poster. It is the very first glimpse of the AAA masterpiece that our favorite sadist promised to deliver."

The short-form video platforms were driven entirely by smart recommendation algorithms.

The vast majority of the people being fed this video were hardcore gamers, or dedicated fans who actively followed First Game News.

Not too long ago, this exact journalist had cornered the developer during a live broadcast, inadvertently forcing the studio to rush out a chaotic cooking simulator just to prove a point.

Almost everyone in the community knew the backstory.

And the entire catalyst for that drama was the community violently questioning his ability to actually develop a AAA game.

Seeing the artwork slowly pan across their screens, the viewers couldn’t help but grip their phones tightly.

Countless gamers physically sat up in their beds.

In the pitch-black darkness of their bedrooms, millions of fingers dragged their phone brightness sliders to the absolute maximum.

As the harsh backlight illuminated their screens, the bright, piercing moon in the concept art became overwhelmingly conspicuous.

The art direction leaned heavily into a rotting, decaying Victorian aesthetic, massively amplifying the mysterious, suffocatingly gloomy atmosphere.

The surrounding environmental details featured towering, elegant iron pillars and sprawling, shadowed verandahs.

The composition was hauntingly beautiful. A thick, white mist rolled in from the distance under the moonlight, while a lone man stood dead-center in the middle of the creepy, cobblestone town.

He was wearing a long, ragged trench coat, but the pale fabric was already heavily stained with thick, blackened blood.

He gripped two distinct weapons. In his left hand, he held a heavy, primitive thermal firearm. In his right hand, he clutched a brutal, jagged saw cleaver.

Thick, dark blood dripped steadily from the serrated blade, pooling onto the cobblestones and leaving a gruesome, crimson trail in his wake.

The city around him was completely devoid of human life, yet the sheer emptiness of the streets still managed to instill a deep, primal sense of dread in the viewer.

It was the exact kind of psychological terror you would feel staring down a midnight butcher.

The massive, jagged saw cleaver in his right hand was genuinely frightening.

It looked like a piece of brutal, mechanized factory equipment, the kind of crude tool typically utilized in the slaughterhouse or the hunting trade.

The blade featured a devastating set of bloodletting serrations, perfectly engineered to rip flesh and tear bone—a horrific, undeniable symbol of the hunt.

Just by analyzing the visual cues in the poster, veteran gamers instantly knew that this map was going to be incredibly harsh, deeply sinister, and packed with lethal challenges.

The jarring, violent contrast between the hot gunpowder of the firearm and the cold, jagged steel of the machete created a massive visual impact.

It injected a fierce, spicy, and unprecedented flavor into an otherwise dull and stagnant gaming market.

It single-handedly resurrected the taste buds of a global player base that had long grown numb to tasting all the generic, corporate-slop releases in the world.

"The sadistic developer Nova only gave me this one picture, and the title: Bloodborne," Irina narrated softly.

"I don’t know what the mechanical gameplay loop will look like. I don’t even know how he truly defines the title. But I do know one thing for absolute certain. The AAA game he promised us is absolutely real. It is not just an empty ’New Folder’ on his desktop."

"We can always, always look forward to the games produced by the sadist."

"Today, I truly believe."

The video came to an abrupt, impactful end right there, and Irina’s narration faded into the silence.

She had deliberately chosen not to mention Ethan’s massive financial expenditures, nor did she disclose the staggering number of top-tier developers he had just hired to scale the studio.

Those were corporate metrics. They weren’t things the players actually worried about, and honestly, the community wasn’t interested in boardroom logistics.

In the dark of her own apartment, Irina kept the image open on her monitor, staring at it repeatedly. The longer she looked at the gothic streets, the more she liked it, entirely unable to tear her eyes away.

And in that exact moment, shattering the silence of the midnight hours...

The gaming community absolutely exploded.

Countless sleeping players were violently woken up by frantic Discord pings and phone calls from their friends, screaming at them to wake up and look at the terrifying, gorgeous new poster for Bloodborne.

[ShadowStrike_99: HOLY FUCKING SHIT HE’S ACTUALLY DOING IT!]

[RetroGamer_Dad: The sadist is built fucking different! I don’t care if it takes a year, the second this drops I am slamming the pre-order button!]

[Pixel_Prophet: AHHHH THE HYPE IS UNREAL! This is literally my favorite developer on the planet right now! Sprout Studio never misses!]

[NightOwl_Gaming: well there goes my sleep schedule. I’m way too hyped, I need to go play something right now!]

Thousands of miles away, Carter was violently jolted awake by a frantic, late-night phone call from his executive secretary.

After rubbing the sleep from his eyes and carefully watching the viral video, he took a massive, shuddering breath.

He made a phone call directly to his friend overseas.

"What the hell are you doing calling me this early?!" Ivan grumbled, glancing at the clock. It was currently his most treasured nap time.

"Ivan, listen to me," Carter practically yelled into the receiver, his voice echoing with absolute certainty. "You were completely fucking wrong about him this time!"

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