Chapter 29：The Birth of the World's First Video Game

After the end of the preview, Joshua accelerated the filming process with the Duke of Bones' urging.

So now, Joshua was sitting in a carriage as "Gaston, the Hunter", and along with Joshua was a group of indignant villagers.

Under "Gaston's" incitement, they held up torches, bows and arrows, and pitchforks as they set out to kill the beast who had imprisoned Belle, the beautiful girl in their village.

Most of the villagers who lived in the mountains were dependent on hunting for their livelihood. Perhaps telling them that they would be facing a "demon" was terrifying, but Joshua had cleverly described Zenarth as a "human-shaped beast".

For the hunters, any beast was nothing more than prey. As long as the beast was something that could be killed with bows and arrows, it was nothing to be feared.

So, the villagers traveled to the most dangerous place they had ever known with that idea in mind: the Duke of Bones' Forest of Twilight's Shadow.

No one knew if the villagers would still be willing to march onward with such bravado if they knew countless of evil spirits that could rip their souls into shreds lurked around in the forest.

Plus, this was the first time the undead lurking in the forest saw so many "living things" entering their vision. The evil spirits that had never tasted fresh souls for centuries were now a little restless.

However, the majesty of the Duke of Bones permeated across the entire forest, and under that absolute pressure, the spirits could only look on as the walking sacks of fresh meat passed them. Not a single one of them dared to approach the humans aside from a few banshee camera operators.

"Is the final ending really a tragedy?" 

Joshua was focused on mobilizing the banshees to get the best possible footage out of the scene. All of a sudden, a window popped up before him.

It seemed like he needed to set a few notification reminder codes in front of the chat window... Thankfully, Joshua was not riding a horse, or else the sudden appearance of the window was enough to get Joshua's horse to knock into the person in front of him.

Joshua looked at the culprit, Ciri who was sitting in another carriage. She was looking at him too.

"Yes."

Joshua immediately sent a reply back to Ciri.

Ciri herself was a white mage. Even though she was still an adept, when Joshua gave her the chat window program, she quickly mastered it and even started to have fun playing with it.

Her notion of fun was to send Joshua harassment messages at random.

"Is there no room for any changes?" 

"It's just a movie."

Joshua clenched the mark on his left hand as he gave the banshees a series of orders, while he tapped his hand rapidly against the air.

The ability to use his mind for two things at the same time was something Joshua had only recently discovered. Ever since Joshua received the demon prince's memories, he found his thoughts to be much clearer than before, and even writing a series of codes under a second was possible now.

"But if it is a tragic ending, that means the prince and Belle..."

As Ciri typed that out, her hands suddenly stopped as she realized a horrifying thing.

She was... sympathizing with the demon. Although he was only a character in the movie, Ciri found herself furious at the unfair treatment of the prince.

After she watched Joshua's preview screening, Ciri's only wish was for Belle and the prince to live happily ever after!

Ciri had no idea where this surge of emotions came from, though.

The moment she heard from Joshua that the ending would see the demon prince killed by the villagers, aside from grief and indignation, Ciri also had the idea of forcing Joshua to change the script or even stopping the villagers herself.

Ciri's reaction was what Joshua had hoped to see. That meant the "Beauty and the Demon" movie was a success.

Joshua believed that a good romance movie should not only slam the audience in the face with love, but it should also make the audience hope for the happiness of the hero and heroine from the bottom of their hearts. The audience should sincerely wish them to live happily ever after.

Only then would it be a successful portrayal of love in a movie, and "Beauty and the Demon" undoubtedly achieved just that.

"There aren't all that many happy endings in this world. Don't be bothered about it too much. Oh yeah, I made a new interesting little program yesterday."

"Huh?"

Seeing the new message popping up in the chat window, Ciri's attention was instantly diverted. The chat window was really something Ciri had never heard of. While Joshua had explained that it was a type of "magic" that was written using runes, Ciri still could not understand the core principle of it.

Ciri knew that magic like Eagle's Eye or Insight would change the scope of one's field of vision, but for an interactive communication window right before one's vision? Ciri had never heard of it.

When Ciri asked Joshua how he chanted the runes for the chat window, Joshua only answered with, "Uh... very simple. You only need like two to three kilobytes... Ugh, no, if it's using original runes, about seventy thousand of them."

At that moment, Ciri could only think that Joshua was pulling her leg because even the most destructive strategic-level spells only needed about ten thousand runes. But Joshua's window needed seventy thousand of them? Ciri found it totally unbelievable.

"Here, catch."

A phantasmic spinning cube appeared in Joshua's hand, and with a wave of his hand, he threw it to Ciri in the carriage beside him. The cube then successfully entered her body.

That was the realistic version of a Local Area Network data transmission, with its medium being Joshua's spiritual powers. Its range was the radius that Joshua's spiritual powers could cover, perhaps about a hundred meters or two.

Ciri accepted the runic program that Joshua gave her, and soon, another new item appeared in her field of vision aside from the chat window.

"What is this?"

Ciri looked at the extra window, and there were two long cuboids on each side of it, as well as a tiny cube before one of them.

"Pong."

Joshua's response was a name that was destined to be included in the annals of video game history.

The game, Pong was the primogenitor of all video games back on Earth. The origin of all video games had been invented by a United States physicist, William Higinbotham. The moment his machine appeared, it heralded the birth of entertainment systems that would turn the world upside down.

Pong was a very simple game, so simple it only consisted of two cuboids as the "bat", and a small cube as the "ball".

Pong immediately became popular even when it first appeared in an age where no one knew what video games even were.

Joshua remembered that William Higinbotham had brought his machine into a bar before he allowed the people there to play a game using a dime, which came to be known as the arcade in later generations. The machine was filled to the brim with coins within a few days of its launch.

After Joshua introduced the rules of the game to Ciri, her attention was immediately captured by it. This was the first time the mage was exposed to a video game and the first time she became addicted to it.