Yule Brynner

The queue outside my local games emporium stretched almost to the kerb, and it smelled a great deal. I joined it anyway, copy of Syncromesh Slaughter: Exploded Liver Outrage Edition for PC clasped in my hand. There was a bandaid over my knuckle. Looking at the rest of the queue, I saw everyone else wore a similar bandaid, bandage, T-shirt tourniquet or anything else they’d had to hand to staunch the bleeding.

It was a copy-protection issue. Syncromesh Slaughter was of course originally a console game, splattering on to Xbox 360 and PS3 in mid-2007. The PC version – Exploded Liver Outrage Edition – had been released just in time for the Christmas rush. And in typical fashion, all us gamers had spent $120 on it instead of on presents for our families.

Where the copy protection came into it was the way the game box shot out a little surgical lance thing and took a blood sample when you opened it. Then the sample was stored indelibly on some kind of e-paper and you had to submit to a similar blood test every time you wanted to run the game.

The first ten, fifteen times, it was okay. After a while though, the repetitive trauma to your knuckle – slight as each incision was – eventually took its toll. From simple blood loss all the way up to bone infections requiring amputation.

Even this wouldn’t be so bad except the game crashed ten or twelve times in every session. Countless restarts, countless slices, the emos were loving it but the rest of us were calling it “the unkindest cut of all”. Which made my Jewish friends sneer.

William Liability, CEO and lead plant-waterer at distributor Blind Drunk went on the internet, streamed in HD, and told us all to get over ourselves. Buy a console, he said, if you don’t like DRM. Or just stop pirating games. He laughed then.

A bunch of smartarses looked at the name of the game and realised a possible acronym was SSEL Out. So now here we were in front of our local games emporium, the walking wounded, demanding restitution.

“It’s not the being cut on the knuckle over and over so much,” muttered a kid in a Syncromesh Slaughter T-shirt, “it’s the bloody insult.”

“That’s right,” said a kid in a Syncromesh Slaughter baseball cap. “We’ve been fanboys for this game for years. We insisted it would be better on PC and didn’t play it on console and we spent our money on the tin and the T-shirt and the stickers and all that other crap we didn’t really want because PC is better, man.”

“I hear you,” said a kid with a Syncromesh Slaughter tattoo right up the side of his left arm. The tattoo looked really badly infected. “And don’t get me started on the bugs. Even this official tattoo is buggy.”

We all looked at the inflamed ruin of his bicep.

“Which bugs exactly?” I asked.

“Uh, doctor said something called Staphylococcus aureus.”

There was a commotion at the head of the line. It was kind of difficult to see inside the local games emporium because of all the BIG SALE NOW ON! bunting that hung permanently from the ceiling, but the bunting was thrashing around a bit. Parts of it fell down. A trestle-table covered with PSP games and a sign that read “$5 in-store credit if you take one PLEASE” fell over, scattering the boxes into the street. People hitched up their metaphorical skirts to avoid being touched by them.

Then the entire plate-glass front of the shop exploded outwards and a kid who was luckily wearing his Syncromesh Slaughter motorcycle helmet and leathers sailed out at about shoulder-height, hit the road and skidded to a halt in front of a car full of other kids all wearing some kind of Syncromesh Slaughter merch and, now, a series of very shocked expressions.

A man in black jeans and shirt emerged from the local games emporium. He was totally bald. His eyes were like diamonds. He wasn’t wearing a battered black Stetson, though: he was wearing a little Santa hat. Because of the pre-Christmas sale.

“Disperse!” he said, in the flat measured tones of the vat-grown security synthetic. “You have fifty seconds to disperse.”

“We demand refunds!” screamed a kid, lost in the crowd of bleeding PC gamers.

“No refunds!” barked the security bot.

A kid in a bandanna that was hard to read from this angle but probably had a Syncromesh Slaughter logo on it, picked up what appeared to be a traffic bollard and hit the security bot right in the face with it. The thing’s head jerked away, and when it turned back the face was gone: all we could see were bright wires, circuitry, whirring cogs and sparking electricity.

“What about the refund policy?” demanded the kid with the traffic bollard.

“The seven day no questions asked refund offer has been cancelled,” said that faceless monstrosity.

There was a sudden, shocked pause. Then the kid with the infected tattoo raised himself up, took a big breath and screamed:

“BURN THEM! BURN THEM ALL!”

The crowd surged forward, lighters in hand. And that’s how we saved Christmas.