The Birth of the World's First Video Game

After the preview screening ended, Joshua sped up the filming process under Bone Duke's urging.

Thus, Joshua was now sitting in a carriage in the role of the hunter, Gaston.

Around Joshua sat a group of indignant Villagers. Incited by "Gaston," they raised torches and took up bows and pitchforks, preparing to crusade against the beast—the beast that had imprisoned Belle, the beautiful girl from their village.

Most Villagers who lived in the mountains and forests made their living by hunting. Perhaps they would have been afraid if told that the enemy they were about to face was a "demon," but Joshua very cleverly painted Zennas as a "humanoid beast."

To these hunters, any beast was merely prey. As long as it was a creature that could be killed with bows and arrows, there was nothing to fear.

And so, with that mindset, the Villagers followed Joshua into the most dangerous place they would ever visit in their lives... Bone Duke's Shadow Dusk Forest.

If these Villagers knew that the forest was home to countless evil spirits capable of tearing their souls into shreds at any moment, would they still be able to march forward with their heads held high?

The undead dwelling in the forest were also seeing so many "living things" enter their field of vision for the first time. These evil spirits, who had not tasted fresh souls for centuries, grew somewhat restless.

But Bone Duke's majesty permeated the entire forest. Under that absolute pressure, the evil spirits could only watch those delicious lumps of flesh pass before their eyes, not daring to approach at all—apart from the few Banshee camerawomen specifically assigned by Joshua.

'Is the final ending really going to be a tragedy?'

Just as Joshua was concentrating on directing the Banshees to capture this scene as well as possible, a window suddenly popped up before him.

It looked like he needed to add several lines of notification code in front of the "Chat Window"... Fortunately, Joshua was not riding a horse. Otherwise, that message suddenly popping into his vision would have been enough to make his horse crash into the people ahead.

Joshua looked toward the culprit behind all this. Ciri was sitting in another carriage, and her gaze happened to meet his.

'That's right.'

Joshua immediately sent Ciri a reply.

Ciri herself was a White Magician. Although she was still only a young apprentice, after Joshua sent her the Chat Window program, she quickly mastered how to use it and happily began playing around with it.

That included sending Joshua a harassing message at the drop of a hat.

'There's really no room to change it?'

'It's only a movie.'

Joshua clenched the mark in his left palm and issued a string of commands to the Banshees, while his other hand rapidly tapped through the air.

Joshua had only recently discovered this ability to multitask. Since his soul had received the memories of this Demon Prince, he had found his thoughts far clearer than they had been on Earth. Even typing out strings of code in a single second during programming was no problem.

'But if the ending is a tragedy, then the prince and Belle will also...'

As Ciri typed this far, her hand stopped moving. She suddenly realized something terrifying.

That was... she was sympathizing with a demon. Though he was only a character in a movie, she was feeling indignant over the unfair treatment the Demon Prince had received.

After watching Joshua's preview screening, Ciri had only one wish: that Belle and the prince would be able to live happily ever after in the end!

Ciri herself did not know where this urgent feeling came from.

When she heard Joshua say that the prince would ultimately be killed by the Villagers, apart from being filled with grief and unwillingness over the prince's fate, she even felt like forcing Joshua to change the script—or going up there herself to stop those Villagers.

And this reaction from Ciri was exactly what Joshua had hoped to see. It also proved that the movie Beauty and the Demon had succeeded.

Joshua believed that after watching a good romance movie, the audience should not merely be stuffed full of lovey-dovey sweetness. Rather, they should sincerely hope that the Male Lead and Female Mage would be together, and wholeheartedly bless them to live happily ever after.

That was a movie's successful portrayal of love, and Beauty and the Demon had undoubtedly achieved it.

'There aren't that many happy endings in this world. Don't take it too seriously. Also, I made another interesting Mini Program yesterday.'

'What is it?'

The instant this message appeared in the dialogue box, Ciri's attention was diverted. She truly had never heard of anything like a Chat Window. Even though Joshua had explained to her that it was a kind of "magic" created with runes, Ciri still could not understand the principles behind it.

Ciri knew that spells such as the Eagle Eye Technique and Insight Technique could alter one's field of vision, but she had never heard of a window that could directly appear within one's vision and allow people to communicate through text.

And when Ciri asked Joshua, "How do you chant the runes for this window?" Joshua had merely replied, "Uh... it's very simple. You only need to chant around two or three thousand bytes—no, if converted into primitive runes, around seventy thousand or so."

At the time, Ciri could only assume Joshua was joking. After all, even strategic-level magic capable of causing widespread destruction only required around ten thousand runes. Joshua's window supposedly required seventy thousand; Ciri absolutely did not believe it.

'Catch.'

A rotating phantom cube appeared in Joshua's hand. With a wave, he tossed it toward Ciri in the carriage beside him, and the cube successfully entered her body.

This was the real-world version of Local Network transmission. The medium of transmission was Joshua's mental power, and its range was the area his mental power could cover—roughly one or two hundred meters.

Ciri received the Rune Program Joshua had given her, and before long, something new appeared in her vision alongside the Chat Window.

'What is this?'

Ciri looked at the new window in her field of vision. There was a rectangular block on each side, with a tiny cube positioned in front of the blocks.

'Tennis for Two.'

Joshua replied with a name destined to be recorded in the history of video games.

Because this game was the ancestor of all video games on Earth, the origin of video games. It had been invented by the American physicist Willie Higinbotham, and the moment this machine came into being marked the birth of an entertainment medium that would overturn an era.

Tennis for Two was an extremely simple game—so simple that it had only two rectangular blocks as "paddles," and a small bouncing cube on the screen as the "ball."

But in that era, when people did not even know what video games were, Tennis for Two was eagerly sought after the instant it appeared.

Joshua remembered that Willie Higinbotham had once placed the machine in a bar and let people play once by inserting a coin—the arcade machine known to later generations. In just a few days, the machine had been filled to bursting with coins.

And after Joshua explained the rules to her, Ciri's attention was instantly captured by the game. This was the first time Miss Mage had encountered a video game in her life, and also the first time she had become addicted to one.