At 1:40 the next afternoon, February 4, a Thursday, techno music pulsed and blared through the Atlantic City Convention Center. The raucous crowd was not at all what Mahoney and I expected. Yes, there were lots of eager tweens and doughy adolescent males who looked like they tended toward the stoner-slacker end of the spectrum. But there were also young women and grown men and women, many dressed as their favorite avatars in a Victorious game. We saw six or seven Conkers in the kind of squirrel outfits you might see at a rave concert, several women dressed as glam avatar Celes Chere, and two couples sporting the sort of futuristic cowboy garb the Marstons supposedly favored in their game.
Vendors sold fast food. Hawkers offered tournament programs and other Victorious-branded souvenirs.
Mahoney said, “Feels like we’re going into a combination of a prize fight, a rock concert, and a Star Wars convention.”
“With three million in Bitcoin to the winner,” said Philip Stapleton, Victorious Gaming’s security director.
“Why Bitcoin?” I asked.
Stapleton shrugged. “My bosses think it’s edgy.”
Stapleton was in his early forties, a former navy NCIS investigator who’d been shot in the hip in the line of duty, left the military, and joined Victorious two years ago.
We’d given him the gist of what had brought us to the event and a copy of Kristina Varjan’s photograph to distribute via text to his team. He’d been concerned that a wanted bomber might be in the complex, but we told him it was unlikely she was there.
He took us through open double doors into a sprawling exposition space. There were five raised stages, four of them set up to look like boxing rings but without the highest rope around their perimeters.
There were seats surrounding the rings and the main stage, fifty rows deep and filling with fans. Above each ring were four large screens facing the growing crowds. The pulsing techno grew louder.
Stapleton explained that during the preliminary rounds, each of the four rings would serve as a battleground for one of the four big Victorious games.
The first ring would feature contestants in Conker’s Bad Fur Day, the game Ali described the night before. The Ruins would play in ring number two, starring the Marstons, a couple in a dystopian world searching for their lost children.
Competitors in ring three would vie in Avenging Angel, which featured the avatar Gabriel in a fantasy scenario. Ring four’s contestants were looking to advance in Blade Girl, starring Celes Chere, a badass with mad martial arts skills facing danger in an unnamed urban setting.
I wanted to head straight to the Blade Girl ring but was stopped by a booming voice over the PA system: “Let’s get ready to rumble! Let’s get ready to be Victorious!”
The fans jumped up, raised their fists overhead, screamed, whistled, and stomped their feet. The music took on a frenetic, infectious pace and beat.
Stapleton led us to the central stage where Austin Crowley and Sydney Bronson, the young co-founders of Victorious, were dancing and imploring the crowd to join them. They were dressed like hipsters, Crowley in thick black glasses and a nerd cut and Bronson in a black-and-white-checkered jacket and a red porkpie hat.
I’d read up on them on the way over. Crowley and Bronson had met by chance at a party in Boston. Crowley was a sophomore and standout student at MIT who spent his free time gaming. Bronson was a bored freshman at Harvard who also spent most of his free time playing games.
In their first conversation, both said they thought they could come up with better games than any on the market. They decided to try, and they had enough success with their first effort that they both quit school. The rest was history. According to Forbes, six years after they left academia, they were worth a quarter of a billion dollars.
The music died. Bronson went to the mike, said, “That’s the energy we want in this room! Am I right, right, right?”
The crowd hooted and howled back its approval.
“We hear you,” Bronson said. “We see ya, and we feel ya too!”
The fans erupted again.
Over their clapping, Bronson said, “I am Sydney Bronson, chief visionary officer at Victorious! And I’d like to introduce my partner and our chief geek, the man who takes my ideas and makes them come alive, Austin Crowley!”
Crowley came somewhat reluctantly to the mike. His eyes swept the crowd, hesitated, then pushed on. He looked like he was suffering from stage fright as he said, “Well, do they make you happy? Our games?”
The crowd cheered. He gained confidence, threw his fist overhead, and roared, “Will Victorious rule the gaming world?”
The fans went wild.
“All right!” Bronson said, coming back to the mike and throwing his arm around his partner. “Austin and I welcome you to the Victorious world championships, the richest e-sports event on the planet, an event that is only going to get bigger and richer in the years to come!”
The men gave each other high-fives and then shouted in unison, “We declare these games open!”
Crowley threw both hands over his head, and Bronson pumped his fist and crowed, “First bouts start in five minutes!”
They waved and walked offstage.
Fans started to push toward the various rings.
I was about to suggest to Ned that we take a walk around when, across the sea of people moving in all directions away from the stage, I saw a woman dressed as Celes Chere gazing back at me. She had a green lanyard around her neck and a green badge that identified her as a contestant.
Pretty face, short, spiky blond hair, shiny white coat, and pale skin. She looked away, put on cat’s-eye sunglasses, and merged with the fans heading toward rings one and two. I stared after her, seeing the structure of her cheekbones, jaw, and nose in profile before the crowd blocked my view.
“Alex,” Mahoney said. “Let’s—”
I started pushing into the crowd, calling over my shoulder, “I think I just saw Varjan!”