Creepy Short Stories

Razor Games

Razor Games

My name is Tom. I am a sound designer for video games. I love my work and I have been doing it for quite some time. I used to work for a small indie game developer called Razor Games LLC.

My friend Jason, who hired me after I quit my last job for personal reasons, owned Razor Games. The company did very well and we had our share of small game development success but mostly did outsourced work for larger clients.

Jason's brother Max was a producer at one of the largest game developers in the world. He often would outsource smaller projects to our company as a favor to his brother. That is where the bulk of our work came from.

We only had a dozen or so staff members at the company. I was close with several people at the company and considered them my second family. Jason was my friend of several years and was a rugged middle-aged man who had been playing games since he was five. Melissa was this quiet little blonde girl who loved fantasy books, game level design, and had been my best friend of several years. Tanner was this bearded teddy bear of a guy who worked as a game tester and had won my best friend's heart. Melissa and Tanner had recently gotten engaged and I was elated for the both of them. The last person I was really close to at work was a guy named Nick. He was a character designer and A.I. programmer. He was a dark haired young guy and a prankster. The rest of the team was made up of various programmers, designers, and business-oriented people of whom I knew, but didn't have as close of a relationship as I did with these four.

These people made my job the best job anyone could ask for. Things were great until two years ago when Max's company laid off a bunch of employees due to a corporate restructure. Almost all of their development was kept internal, meaning we wouldn't get any outsourced projects anymore.
I watched Jason stress out about possibly cutting into the company's emergency fund to keep it afloat while he tried to find more work. Razor Games had received so much work from Max's company that we were too busy to pick up but a few other clients. In the end, that hurt the company more than it helped.

For almost a year Razor Games survived on the emergency fund that it had built up. We had work here and there but no big projects. Out of the blue late last spring, Jason landed a massive job for us.

I remember being in the conference room when he announced the job. Melissa, Tanner, Nick and I were seated together around the small conference table at our office along with the rest of the employees, eagerly waiting to hear what Jason had to say about this new job.

Jason had hooked up his laptop to the projector on the table and was about to take us through a slide presentation.
"Over this past weekend I accepted a large job from a game developer in Korea," Jason started. His body energy was higher than it had been in months and the excitement in his voice could not be hidden. "The developer's name is Violet Edge Digital. The president of development for that company is a woman named Mia Nasta."

Jason flipped to a slide that showed a screen capture of their website. It looked very professional and sleek. I had never heard of this developer before but with so many different companies around the world, I didn't give it a second thought.

"She emailed me last week with a proposition and the possibility of a massive payout," Jason continued as he paced excitedly back and forth at the front of the conference room. "Her company has in the past made VR simulators for military and aviation training purposes and is now developing a VR headset system for commercial use to compete with Oculus, Sony, Samsung, and others. We all know there are rumors of a Star Wars VR game and others floating around the community."

A series of several slides showed pictures of what was supposed to be their past work. They included everything from pictures of a flight simulator and a VR set hooked up to a military training simulator.
Jason stopped his pacing and put his palms flat on the conference table and leaned in as if he was going to tell us the world's biggest secret.