Far From Vanilla: Modded Game Reincarnation

Have you ever played a game so much, you were one of the best to ever grace the controls? I was.

Have you ever seen the completion count of the game exceed a thousand? How about ten-thousand? I have.

Did you ever wish that you would somehow forget about everything about the game, just to experience the magic of playing it for the first time? I did.

I played a game so much that I knew the code that ran it. I played the game so much that I could accurately predict what would happen next, just from the prerequisites that have been imputed so far.

I was called crazy, Psychopathic even, but I didn’t do it for glory. 

I just enjoyed playing the game. 

But it still is funny…

To think that I’d die because of it.

Ironic really, and it’s not something I can complain about. It could be called a pitiful end in the eyes of most but to me it was perfect, not that I would know how my family or internet following would say anyway. 

I don't really have many regrets, because the moment ‘[Source&Create]’ –Source for short– launched globally, I died. Seong Hyun did at least. I was reborn into my character, Hyun.

Admittedly, I wasn’t very creative with my name and just placed my name, but as the years trickled by I couldn’t let it go. It simply grew with me, almost as if one of my feet were already in the world of [Source&Create] and so I stuck by that name.

My name was so fundamental to what made me who I was in Source that I couldn’t change it, no matter how hard I racked my brain. It was the anchor, the pillar, the cornerstone of what made ‘me’ the only constant in a sandbox game that kept changing. 

  Even now.

I opened my eyes to breathe in the cleanest air I’ve ever had the honor to breathe. The scent of the morning dew was palpable, the chirping of a nearby nest of sparrows was just lovely, and the sun I’ve always loaded under was shining overhead. 

Like the start of every playthrough, it was six in the morning, or so my trained body clock said anyway. Though the sky was almost like that of a clear day in Seoul, I could feel in my bones that this was not earth. 

I was in Source!

If heaven did exist, this was certainly the perfect heaven for me because if it was the same vanilla game, it would’ve been hell. I would certainly be bored to death if it were just that easy. I knew the game like the back of my hand.

But this?

This world is exactly how Source would’ve looked like if I played the mods I installed before I died– if the display pictures did it justice of course.

In other words, all my experience was rendered fundamentally useless, or at least incredibly unreliable to the point of near redundancy. 

I looked at the generated world of Source with a grin. This is how it felt when I played it for the first time. This was the exhilaration of witnessing the unknown for the first time. A wall that I will slowly climb over.

 Many were intimidated by the curve, but some like myself were eager to climb that mountain and to take in what it truly felt like to be at the top. But I was no longer at the top of that mountain was I? I was at the foot of it…

No…

I was in the ravine of the deepest valley, at the foot of the tallest mountain. Below my feet was the bottom of the world, and above me in the distance was the peak. If you couldn’t guess where my first step was headed towards, you certainly didn’t know the very essence of Source. 

Progress. 

Progress headed towards greater heights as you viewed the world further and further up. You subdued the world and shaped it into your own creation– that is… If you were willing to dedicate the time and effort. 

It is a game that provides the tools for success, but it is the player who has to use them to progress. 

A game of self-expression…

A blank canvas.

Your playthrough will be what you make of it.

“The pains of the early game, huh?” I sighed with a somewhat annoyed smile. “I couldn’t be happier.”

I turned to the young birch tree right next to me and twisted my body counter-clockwise, punching it with my right hand.

 Bam!

 The birch tree rattled but the outer bark was not even scratched. Instead of damaging the bark, the mark left on the wood was blood from my first. The first thing that broke in this life was not the wood or my fist…

  It was my pride as an ‘expert’ of Source.

I fell on the ground, kneeling and silently sobbing as I clenched my fist. My ego hurt more than my hand, but my hand hurt too. 

This was how I sustained my first injury, a simple Boxer’s fracture.

 “Fuck…” I sobbed, my ego in tatters.