As the desktop finished loading, Kairos quickly opened a browser. The cursor blinked in the search bar, and without a moment's hesitation, he typed: "Pokémon."
Since this was a parallel world, whether this IP existed and what state it was in had to be the first question he answered.
He hit Enter, and a flood of search results instantly filled the screen.
Kairos scrolled through the pages, carefully reading through the information.
After skimming more than a dozen pages, a look of genuine surprise slowly crept across his face.
This world did have the Pokémon IP, and it had once been glorious.
But that was all ten years ago.
According to a deep-dive article written by a veteran player, ten years prior, a fierce power struggle had broken out within the rights holder's company.
The upper management had fought so viciously for control that the company descended into chaos, eventually causing its funding to completely collapse. To make things worse, the core development team had taken the key technology and disappeared, bringing all development on the IP to a grinding halt.
The long-awaited sequel became a distant dream, and fans went from anticipation, to disappointment, to outright despair. A once-glorious franchise had simply been left to rot.
When Kairos clicked into a few still-active nostalgia forums, he could see plenty of old-school players still venting their grief.
Some called it the ultimate "will-they-won't-they" series. Others raged at the rights holders as shameless crooks. And some wrote bitter posts declaring it "a cursed IP," since over those ten years, several major companies had attempted to acquire it, only for each attempt to mysteriously fall apart during the planning stage, whether due to funding issues or sudden cancellations.
After enough of that, no one bothered anymore.
As for the Pokémon-branded games currently on the market, they were all cheap reskins masquerading as mobile games.
A few clicks through the top-ranked titles showed clunky visuals, blatantly plagiarized mechanics, and nothing beneath the Pokémon skin except pay-to-win traps. The reviews were brutal.
Kairos closed those pages and sat back in thought.
So in this world, Pokémon was already flat on the ground, not moving.
In that case, what was the state of the gaming industry as a whole?
He cleared the search bar and began looking up news on gaming and entertainment.
This time, what came up actually caught his attention.
This world's entertainment industry was thriving across the board. Film, music, and media were all flourishing.
Gaming, however, was noticeably lagging behind, with high-quality titles being rare exceptions rather than the rule.
But just last month, the world's first consumer-grade VR headset, the "Horizon One," had launched. Reviews noted that the technology was still rough around the edges: mediocre resolution, visible grain in the visuals, and an absurd price tag running into the tens of thousands.
Even so, the device's pitch of full virtual reality had drawn wealthy early adopters and hardcore enthusiasts in droves.
While Kairos was reading through VR-related news, a brightly colored pop-up appeared in the lower-right corner of the screen.
It read, in bold letters: "The First Annual 'Apex Cup' Game Development Competition is Now Open!"
Kairos's eyes sharpened slightly. He clicked the banner.
The page laid out the competition rules in detail. The theme was intriguing: "A New Perspective."
The grand prize included top-tier promotional placement across all major platforms, a sponsored giveaway of one hundred thousand copies of the winning game to players, and a cash prize of fifty million.
Kairos's eyebrow went up.
Fifty million was nothing to sneeze at, though at this point in his life, the money itself held almost no appeal.
The hundred-thousand-copy giveaway, on the other hand, was the real draw. That kind of distribution would supercharge a game's exposure, essentially functioning as a massive injection of organic traffic.
Come to think of it, the system had issued a new mission just yesterday: create a game built around the perspective of a villain.
"Villain perspective." That fit perfectly with what this world needed.
Kairos's thoughts began to race.
If the villain in question was from Pokémon, there was really only one answer: Team Rocket. They were the childhood menace of an entire generation, the most iconic villainous organization in the franchise's history.
In a traditional Pokémon game, the player took the role of a righteous trainer, collecting gym badges, challenging leaders, and eventually dismantling some evil organization along the way to save the world.
But what if it were flipped?
What if the player took the role of a low-ranking grunt in Team Rocket, starting from the very bottom, stealing other trainers' Pokémon, evading the League's officers, and gradually carving out dominance over an entire region?
That kind of gameplay would feel genuinely fresh to any player.
Kairos himself wasn't particularly fond of the idea of stealing Pokémon in real life, but in a game, the meaning was entirely different.
The whole point of a game was to let players experience lives they couldn't otherwise live, even the life of a villain.
And besides, even as a Team Rocket grunt, the player wouldn't necessarily have to steal. They could still choose to experience the world's cruelty and excitement from a villain's vantage point, on their own terms.
With that, Kairos took a slow breath and closed all the cluttered browser tabs.
He had a direction. Time to get started.
He focused inward, pulling up the system's interface in his mind and selecting the "Virtual Reality Development Module."
The current state of VR technology was still primitive, but games built through the module should be able to adapt perfectly to any hardware. He selected the Kanto region as the starting map and activated the map module.
The moment he confirmed the selection, the system immediately pulled up the scan data he had collected in the first world.
Torrents of data streamed across the screen as Kanto reconstructed itself in extraordinary detail: every tree in Viridian Forest, every stone in Pewter City, every inch of Mt. Moon, all rendered at a perfect one-to-one scale.
Next came the character models.
Kairos pulled up a Team Rocket grunt uniform from the asset library, that sleek black bodysuit with the bold red "R" on the chest, and felt a wave of nostalgia hit him.
Beyond the main character, he populated the world with classic Pokémon used by Rocket grunts, along with the bewildered civilian trainers who would serve as the targets, each one carefully crafted.
For the core mechanics, he wrote code for systems like stealing and capturing.
In the private room, the rhythm of keystrokes grew faster and more insistent. Lines of code streamed down the screen like a waterfall.
Two hours passed.
Across the city, the top floor of a high-end apartment building blazed with light.
This was the home of a well-known streamer who went by "Big Wave," real name Dave. With three million followers, he had a reputation as a no-nonsense, brutally honest gaming commentator.
It was two in the morning.
Big Wave sat in front of his premium streaming setup, stifling a long yawn that squeezed tears from the corners of his eyes. He had been live for five straight hours riding the wave of the Apex Cup buzz, and in that time he had test-played no fewer than twenty entries.
Honestly, the quality was hard to watch.
Everything was either visually stuck in the last century or so baffling in its design choices that it made you question reality.
There was no genuine playability to be found anywhere. The chat had shifted from excited anticipation at the start of the stream to wall-to-wall mockery.
[Big Wave, is this competition just all garbage?]
[Bro, stop torturing yourself. Log off and eat something.]
[What is any of this? My grandma could make a better game with her feet.]
[I'm out. Can't watch this.]
Big Wave sighed at the screen.
"I want to log off too, guys, but I gotta ride this trend all the way. What if something great shows up later?"
He said it, but he didn't really believe it anymore. He rubbed his throbbing temples and scrolled lazily through the game list.
Then something stopped his cursor.
It was a plain icon: pure black background, a single white "R" drawn in clean, simple lines.
Title: "Pokémon: Grunt's Gambit"
Big Wave stared at it for a moment, then nearly burst out laughing.
"Wait, what? Pokémon? Who the hell is still making Pokémon games?"
That one outburst jolted the half-asleep viewers in his chat back to life.
The messages came flooding in.
[???]
[Am I reading that right? Pokémon?]
[Hahaha, are you messing with me? That dead IP?]
[This has to be some clout-chasing stunt. Can fan games even enter this competition?]
[Don't bother, streamer. This is definitely one of those pay-to-win reskins, or some die-hard fan's template project.]
[Exactly. Anyone making an indie Pokémon game in this day and age, the grass on that grave is two meters tall.]
Big Wave laughed along with the chat. At this point, the word Pokémon was practically synonymous with terrible games.
Still, staring at that oddly charming little icon, he figured, why not? He had nothing better to do. It would give the audience something to roast, and roasting always drove up engagement.
"Alright, since you all want to see it, let's find out what kind of creature this actually is."
He moved the cursor and clicked the purchase link, fully expecting to be greeted by some "Spend six dollars, get a legendary Pokémon" screen.
Instead, when the payment window appeared, he froze completely.
The price field showed a number that made him question everything he knew.
Price: $15.00.
Big Wave rubbed his eyes and looked again.
Fifteen dollars. That was not a typo.
"What? Did I read that wrong? Fifteen bucks?"
He genuinely couldn't help himself.
"A random indie game costs sixty or seventy dollars minimum these days. Is this developer running a charity, or did they just lose their mind?"
The chat erupted.
[Fifteen dollars???]
[No way, that's insane.]
[Bought. Bought immediately. Worth it just for the laugh.]
[Streamer, don't think, just buy it.]
[At fifteen dollars you literally cannot lose. Let's go.]
With the chat egging him on, Big Wave stopped hesitating and clicked the buy button. Fifteen dollars was one fewer cup of bubble tea. If he got scammed, so be it.
He took a breath, held it for a moment with his finger hovering over the confirmation button, then pressed it.
A cheerful chime signaled the successful payment.
Almost simultaneously, the download bar shot from zero to one hundred percent as if it had been rocket-propelled.
"That fast?"
Big Wave blinked, then instinctively right-clicked to check the file properties.
When he saw the number, his suspicions were fully confirmed: this had to be a cheap, slapped-together mess.
The installer was 485 MB.
"Four hundred and eighty-five megabytes? Modern indie games are dozens of gigabytes these days. What could you possibly fit in four hundred megs? A loading screen?"
He leaned into the mic, voice dripping with contempt.
"Guys, that's not even enough for a high-res texture pack. Did this developer just zip up some old browser game assets and call it a day?"
The chat was right there with him.
[485MB? I'm dying. My phone's meme folder is bigger than that.]
[Just refund it, streamer. Don't waste your time. This is one of those ad-infested trash heaps.]
[Fifteen dollars, and a lesson learned. Worst scam of the stream, Big Wave.]
Even while roasting it, Big Wave decided to see it through. Money was already spent. Besides, being a hardcore gaming commentator meant doing his due diligence, even with garbage, so the audience could see exactly what kind of garbage it was.
"Alright, four hundred and eighty-five megs. Show me what you've got."
He reached over to a shelf beside him and lifted down a dramatically styled headset.
This was the Horizon One, the VR device that had just launched a while back.
He had dropped most of his savings on it, and it had been sitting in his apartment collecting dust ever since, because the VR game library was in a genuinely sorry state.
The so-called "flagship titles" were a handful of basic shooters with visuals so blocky they looked like pixel art, and two minutes in, you were reaching for painkillers.
"You've got the nerve to charge fifteen dollars. Let's see how you hold up against a 50,000 dollar headset."
He pulled the Horizon One over his head, adjusted the straps, and pressed the power button.
A faint electrical hum, and then the real world faded away, replaced by a perfectly black void.
"Where's the loading screen? Not even a logo?"
He was muttering to himself in the darkness, hand already moving to take the headset off in case it had crashed.
Then the thunderous roar of engines reached him — low, dense, and deeply oppressive, seeming to roll in from somewhere impossibly far away before detonating right inside his skull.
The next instant, a blinding wall of white light tore the darkness apart.
Big Wave flinched and squeezed his eyes shut, but when he finally forced them open and took in the scene before him, he went completely rigid in his gaming chair, mouth hanging open wide enough to fit a fist.
This couldn't be real.
Are you sure this is a game and not a movie?
Against a sky choked with roiling stormclouds, an enormous airship tore through the heavens — black as midnight, a floating fortress of steel and ambition, cutting through the churning cloud cover with absolute, terrifying authority.