Outside the game, I was Isobel Bailie, and I mostly hung out in my apartment a lot.
Sparkle Dungeon was a VR game, which you played with a headset to give you an immersive 360-degree interface to the game world and a base station to track your movements as your basic setup. I mean, you could get as fancy as you wanted—get a whole platform that you strapped yourself into, or chain a bunch of dance mats together, or plop your lazy self down in a racing chair if you didn’t want to stand up while you play; you could use grip controllers or gloves or get weighted weapons that matched your character’s specific gear; you could set up wind machines in your living room, hire the neighbor kids to clap when you did something cool, whatever it took to make it feel immersive—but all you truly needed was a headset, a base station, and a console. And some room to dance, because this game frequently required you to “bust a move.”
And if you’re like me, you needed a place where you could be loud, because the best interface to the spellcasting system was vocal. This, of course, used to drive my girlfriend, Wendy, up the walls. We had a routine where once a week or so, we’d argue according to a specific template.
“Can’t you just use joysticks or something?” she’d say, after a particularly loud and brutal battle. “You sound like you’re being mauled by a mountain lion.”
“Sure,” I’d say, “if I wanted to lose. I mean, I could play this game with a keyboard and fire off spells with the arrows and the number keys—”
“Yes!” she’d say. “Then I wouldn’t be forced to wear noise-canceling headphones on top of noise-canceling headphones to get any peace in this apartment!”
And I’d say, “Look, I do more damage and I’m more accurate when I’m firing off spells with my voice.”
To which she’d reply, “Yes, and your relationship suffers multiple negative Yelp reviews every time you play.”
But the fact was, the game system rewarded you for starting with vocal spellcasting in the original Sparkle Dungeon, and continuing to learn new techniques all the way through Sparkle Dungeon 4. You could eventually deliver complex sequences of spells by compressing the number of syllables required for each one, which saved you valuable time in combat, amplified spell effects, and freed up cognitive capacity to execute critical dance moves.
The game cheekily referred to voice spellcasting as “diva-casting,” named after the emotional vocal divas on many a house cut. But it did not sound like a track that a true diva would lay down in a studio.
It sounded a little like you were being mauled by a mountain lion.
So you could play the Sparkle Dungeon series in a stand-alone mode, where you just dropped into a single game and played the heck out of it and then you were done; or you could play in “campaign” mode, which networked all four Sparkle Dungeon games together into one long quest and made everything harder. When campaign mode was first launched, you could briefly acquire new epic level artifacts by being the first person to complete each individual game on your epic adventure. I launched myself at this task. I was already known as a jerk about acquiring unique loot, but I still had a few challengers come at me, and I took it very seriously, and I lost a job I rather liked, and uh, Wendy broke up with me and then left town, but I absolutely destroyed campaign mode, and was duly rewarded with a total of four epic level artifacts: the Electronic Dance Mace, the Psybient Crystal, the Remix Ring, and Blades Per Minute.
As I predicted, people were pretty freaking irritated when I pulled off collecting the whole set. I admit I was already a little insufferable just being on top of the leaderboard as Queen since—oh, let me check my notes here, ah that’s right—DAY ONE. But look, someday, some young, incredibly skilled tyro would come along, and would be in the right place at the right time and would suddenly be the hot shit and—just kidding, that wouldn’t happen, I would always be triumphant and would defeat all who dare oppose me for I was endless and may my reign never dim!
Anyway, I suspected the development team for the game never expected these artifacts to operate in tandem as a set. I just wasn’t confident this was one of their test cases. But obviously that’s the very first thing I tried once I had them all. Because, and this question is important: why wouldn’t you?
I was with my usual posse, who were accustomed to providing acerbic commentary for my live streams: the respawned Sir Trancelot, and the mysterious Keeper of the Moonlight Prism. We were goofing off in the wake of completing the final boss battle of SD4, literally dancing upon the bones of our glittering enemies. I had Blades Per Minute whirring in my right hand, with the Psybient Crystal grafted onto its pommel, glowing an eerie green and generating weird arpeggiation; meanwhile, the Remix Ring was perched brightly on my left hand, allowing me to remix the game soundtrack in real time, while I also thumped the Electronic Dance Mace on the ground repeatedly to generate a serious bass hit. It was a silly stunt, I admit; if I’d been attacked right at that exact moment—who am I kidding, there would be dead attackers at that exact moment—but my point is, it would not have been super graceful.
Instead, the entire game environment flickered several times, like it was glitching or live updating or something. My display went completely black for a couple seconds, and the next thing I knew, we were staring at an enormous, steadily expanding rift from sky to ground off on the horizon.
“Did I do that?” I asked.
“Turn your shit off!” Sir Trancelot shouted. I deactivated my artifacts, and the rift stopped expanding.
There was nothing to see through the rift, no “outside the Realm” that anyone had designed and made available for us to discover. It was just indistinct digital noise, like a lightly billowing fabric of gray and white pixelated threads.
“Did I break the Sparkle Realm?” I asked.
“Relax,” said the Keeper of the Moonlight Prism. “Whatever happened, they’ll patch it.”
Players were not able to reach it; the topology of the Realm always bent to keep players on the active parts of the map before they ever reached the horizon. Non-player characters (NPCs) were occasionally seen to wander that direction and wink out of existence as they blindly wandered through it. People discussed it on the forums; the dev team never commented on it. It seemed harmless; people soon forgot about it. Life in the Realm continued at its typical steady pace of 125 beats per minute.
But they did not patch the rift.