Michael was so close. All he had to do was get past this last level of Spacewalker and he could finally get back to his life. He’d gotten the game on sale a few weeks ago and it was a little cheesy but he hadn’t been able to stop playing it since.
He’d already finished it a few times and saved the human race from the attack of the Gorjd but he was kind of obsessing about getting the high score. The first time he’d finished the game he’d only been about 5000 points off hitting the leaderboard, and after the second time he was in the top five. Since then he’d been sitting in second place but he couldn’t quite crack the top spot and it was starting to get to him.
After hitting the buttons on the controller a few more times he managed to shoot down the last of the enemy ships and the credits started playing on the screen. He waited impatiently for the final score to come up and when it finally did he let out a loud groan and threw his controller down onto the table with more force than was absolutely necessary.
He was still in second place and ‘Player 45’ still had him beat by about 600 points.
Michael scowled, annoyed that someone with a completely unoriginal identifier like ‘Player 45’ was beating him. It all seemed like some cosmic joke, like someone was doing this just to torment him. After moping for a few more minutes he looked over at the clock before sighing; he had a lecture in a few hours and he was is no way prepared for it.
It took him a while but he eventually got his limbs to work properly again. He grumpily got up and switched off the console before he flopped down onto his bed and within a few seconds of his head hitting the pillow he was out cold.
***
About a week later Michael was scrolling through his emails on his computer while he was sat on the train, heading home from college. He skipped past most of them, majority being spam or newsletters he wished he’d never signed up for in the first place, before one caught his eye.
He almost deleted it instinctively, not recognising the name or email address of the sender, but luckily the tag line caught his attention.
‘Game Testers Wanted: Spacewalker 2’
He hadn’t heard anything about there being a follow up game, in fact as far as he knew the company that made Spacewalker had only ever released the one game and hadn’t ever really been heard of again. He opened the email anyway, a strange sense of excitement bubbling in his chest
‘Dear Mr. Clifford (cliffoconda_95),
AnisotropyGames is excited to announce that a sequel to the Spacewalker game is currently in it’s final stages of development and it will be ready to hit shelves after some user testing.
That’s where you come in; as one of the top ten high scorers in the original Spacewalker game we would like to invite you to be a tester for the new game. It will mean that you get to have a look at the new game before anyone else and you’ll be able to offer insight as to what we can do to improve the experience for players.
Unfortunately we’re unable to offer the option of in-home testing, but if you are able to make it to our main office on the date and time specified below we would love to have you on board.’
Michael kept reading, the rest of it pretty much being house keeping stuff; date, time, address, RSVP details and such. When he was done he read over it one more time to make sure he wasn’t just imagining it all, and when he was positive he emailed back letting them know that he would be more than happy to attend.
***
When the day came Michael was mostly excited, although he was also a little nervous and very slightly hung over.
