AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Seven
Dustin
Three days of beta. Three days of seeing the world play the game we’d built. Three days of epicness.
I grinned like an idiot the entire time we were loading loaner computers back into my SUV. Phillip and Adrienne were cleaning up the conference room, while Brandon and Jeremy helped me fit everything in my vehicle.
The early reviews were fantastic—of course—but Brandon and Jeremy had opted not to read them. Brandon already knew people were going to love the music, and Jeremy said he didn’t read reviews. Any of them. Apparently he’d managed to avoid them most of his career.
It was a writer thing, he told me.
“That’s the last of it.” Brandon tossed a bundle of cables into a crate in the front seat. “Tonight?”
“Looking forward to it.” Watching Danny and Reese on stage was always fun, and it would be the perfect end to a perfect week.
“Dustin, a minute?” Judith joined us behind the building.
Never tell the boss no, especially when I was working to convince her I wanted that Director job. “Sure.”
“We’ll catch you later.” Brandon waved, and he and Jeremy headed back inside.
She waited until they were gone, before speaking again. “I sent the information to Legal that you gave me. It looks good, thanks.”
“Any time.” I knew where the balance lay between a casual tone and a professional one and I summoned it now. “I’m sorry this came down on us.”
“Not your fault. As long as the asshole backs off, it doesn’t matter. I’m hearing a lot of good things about the beta this week, both internally and from fans and streamers.”
I couldn’t help my grin. “Because this game is going to blow them out of the water. Everyone I’ve talked to loved the company-sanctioned gaming we did in the conference room. Thank you for permission to set that up.” I wasn’t above reminding her of the awesome things I’d done. Every conversation was a chance to push how good I’d be if she promoted me.
“Keep it up,” Judith said. “I want to see more of this kind of teamwork.”
“You don’t even have to ask.”
“Go. Return this crap. Tell them I send my thanks.” She patted the back of my SUV, where the computer equipment sat.
I gave her a salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
She rolled her eyes and walked back into the building.
I did one last mental check, making sure everything I’d borrowed was going back, and I headed to Rinslet.
Was this part of my job? The hype? The build-up both internally and externally?
No.
Was I going to keep doing it anyway?
Damn right.
I’d flitted through a lot of jobs in my life, thanks to a knack for picking up new things and running with them. The art had been at my core for as long as I could remember, but it wasn’t my job until Rinslet. Like Adrienne, like so many of the people at Rinslet, I was hired for my talent rather than experience, and given a chance to step into a highly sought after job.
Unlike Phillip, Brandon, and most of the others at Aces, I was older when I was hired. I’d been doing the video game art for less than a decade, and some of my colleagues were going on twenty years. No one worked for the same company for twenty years in tech. Especially in the cutting-edge jobs. While it was true, Aces was a new company, they were really Rinslet 2.0. Aside from Adrienne and Luna, I was the new guy.
At Rinslet I’d found a group of people I wanted to work with, but it was still just a job.
When we all started talking about this game, when Judith said she could fund it, I was all in. This was a project I was fully behind, not specifically because of the extra options for characters to fuck, but it was new. It was groundbreaking. The game itself was brilliant. I wanted the world to love it as much as I did.
Maybe the world was asking for a bit much, but I was willing to push every limit to get our name out there. Aces didn’t have a marketing or client-facing group specifically—it wasn’t in our budget. Since everyone at Rinslet had media training, we’d decided we could handle spreading the word in other ways.
