Rewritten Past

So, after wracking my brain for gift ideas, I'd settled on the following gifts for everyone.

For Mama Yue, a handwritten card telling her just how much I loved her, appreciated her, and how amazing she was for letting me be part of her life.

For Mom, a one-take recorded cassette tape of nursery rhymes to play for her and Ai when I was at school.

For Dad, a set of intricately folded origami that I'd glued in a clear acrylic box that he could put on his desk.

For Serena, like I said, I already had a gift prepped for her.

Ever since she and April had started living with us, I'd taken note of all the good things that April said about her mom and recorded them.

I figured that she would still have some doubts about if she was a good mom to April or not, so I made sure to nip that flag in the bud by stockpiling ammunition for exactly this moment in the form of a bound book of quotes by April along with the time, day, and place she said everything.

Waterworks. Waterworks everywhere...

Ah, and for April...

Well, I'd been sketching her since I'd met her, so I was planning on just giving her my sketchbook of her.

...I just had to be careful not to mix up the sketchbook I had of my drawings of her future self I did from memory.

Note to self: remember to actively remove that so I don't accidentally wrap it up with the other one.

Anyway, gifts were settled, wrapped, and prepared for Christmas Day.

But that was tomorrow.

Today was still Christmas Eve. And only just noon on Christmas Eve.

Dad had come home already, looking a bit haggard. But he was taking the time to unwind by watching Die Hard in the living room.

Mom was relaxing beside him, knitting a blanket for my still unborn baby sister.

Serena was busying herself in the kitchen, unwinding in her own way by baking almost nonstop.

Mama Yue was napping in the guest room, probably tired out from running around all week finishing up filming sessions before the holidays.

April was in my room, locking me out for 'secret present time' and making 'something' for me.

Which left me free for once in a long while.

'Huh. What should I do?'

Everyone was relaxing upstairs and I didn't want to bother them. But I also was getting a bit restless not doing anything.

So after a bit of thinking, I headed downstairs to the basement where my dad's home office was and booted up his computer.

'Might as well be a bit productive.'

Unlike my laptop, Dad's PC was a bit slow.

Well, compared to 2020 standards it was ABSOLUTELY glacial...

But what could you do, right?

Anyway.

Since I was free, I decided to make the most of my time.

Making myself comfortable in Dad's office chair, I opened up Internet Explorer and then logged into my private FTP server via SSH.

"Let's see..."

I used the server to host my website too, so I made sure to check the uptime.

Seemed like it was working well.

I'd invested in some scrapped PCs and cobbled them together for a Linux server rig with the money I got from Hero Creator. Said server rig was the one hosting the FTP server in the private small office that Mama Yue had rented to serve as the physical address for Lexali Productions down in Los Angeles.

Honestly, I was SERIOUSLY loving the fact that tech literacy was VERY MUCH not mainstream yet.

The amount of computer parts I got for cheap through garage sales and thrifting...

But anyway...

"Huh. Looks like it's getting a lot of traction in Asia."

My site was getting a lot of pings from South Korea, Japan, and China. Mostly on Hero Creator, but a lot on my various NovelFires too.

Of course, my adsense revenue was increasing accordingly. But I'd also gotten a few donations through the donation box I'd coded in, along with messages about how grateful people were for having such a great game available for free.

"Hm... should I give them all a Christmas gift?"

I clicked through my server directories and did some deliberating.

It was still a bit early, but I DID have a prototype of Infinite Archives prepped.

And my website had a complete copyright disclaimers as well as the usual legal stuff too, so it wasn't like anyone could claim it without being completely screwed over later.

Not to mention there was clear watermarking...

And if I dropped it now, it wasn't like anyone could patent it since it would be prior art-

Wait.

I slowly blinked. Then I let out a fierce grin. "Oh. Ooohhh. I can fuck them all up."

I clearly remembered how game companies had patented game mechanics in the future to try and monopolize the features. Like how Nintendo tried to patent summoning creatures from capsules.

But they could only do that because they were 'technically' the first to do so.

Unfortunately for them...

"I can make a game mechanic bible."

I was VERY MUCH an avid gamer.

And I remembered ALL of the popular mainstream game mechanics in the future, as well as a lot of indie game mechanics.

Now, it would be a problem if I directly copypasted the exact details... Like, if I described Ride Pokemon using actual pokemon.

But if it was just the general mechanics...

Not only would it be a literal bible to game developers and probably jumpstart a whole rennaisance of games, but it would definitely shred the AAA game studios' gameplans of monopolizing the market via legal shenanigans.

Sure, I couldn't do anything about copyright really.

But patents? That I could tank by generating prior art.

Hell, I could even describe anti-cheats, shaders, anti-piracy mechanics...

Everything that the AAA game studios forced onto gamers in the future, I could strip out right now by practically making it open source.

Corporations operated based on monetary gain. And a lot of that monetary gain came from licensing intellectual property. And a good chunk of that intellectual property came from patent licenses. At least, at the corporate level.

I knew for a fact that there were a lot of start up game studios that were blacklisted and shutdown by AAA studios wielding their patents like a sword.

So if I stripped their weapons ahead of time right now...

"...Won't video games become amazing in the future?"

A world where corporations couldn't use patent lawsuits to try and shutdown startup game companies. Where game studios couldn't monopolize good ideas and had to focus on the execution of the ideas themselves...

I laughed and then clicked open Microsoft Word '98. "Well... we're already a proper LLC. Might as well put out our first main project, right? Let's see... 'Game Mechanics and Nothing New Under the Sun.' Mm... we'll workshop that later. But it works for now."

Fueled with the vindictive spite of a gamer who had the opportunity of a lifetime to cut out legal shenanigans that big AAA studios tried in the future, as well as the pure adrenaline of getting to lay down legal precedent for the entire video game industry, I immediately started typing.

Multiplayer lobbies, MOBAs, client-server interactions for online games, gacha mechanics...

"Let's start both Christmas and the new year with a bang, shall we?"

I let out a dark chuckle and continued writing the equivalent of a nuke on the video game industry, eagerly sketching out requirements, flowcharts, hardware requirements, and more.