(And yeah, I know “cha-ching” was a thing like thirty years ago. But guess what? I just made it come back—and got paid for it.)

I was nineteen years old, and I was officially “rich as hell.” Seriously, that was my bracket in TurboTax.

I lived in a massive top secret gated estate with mango trees and white tigers and croquet and all this other rich-person shit I didn’t care about. I let Razor Frank stay in my guesthouse and earn money as my butler sometimes, just to pay him back for all those free meals he gave me when I was still poor.I

I ate whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. So, Mr. T cereal for every meal. I owned a dozen Lambos, all blacked out. And tech? Bro, I owned the latest Samsung LaserDisc before Samsung did. Apple came to me for the very first iPod playlist (all Bell Biv DeVoe, all the time). And Gateway—I told them to make all their boxes look like cows as a gag, and they actually did it.

I was the most successful, most dominant gaming champion in the country. I’d laid waste to all my rivals—not like you could really call them rivals. I’d embarrassed them in front of their mothers, humiliated them in front of their wives, but I pretty much made them look okay in front of their kids, because that’s crossing a line.

But it was too much of a good thing!

I thrive off competition, all right? I feed off it! It lifts me to the peaks of the highest mountains, and I seek it out at the ends of the longest, darkest alleyways. Competition, danger, violence—it’s what makes me who I am, it’s what makes the Two-Time the greatest of all time.

All that was gone, and I felt like I had nothing left to prove.

So now, instead of celebrating the utter annihilation of my foes in Halo, instead of pumping my massive fist and whipping my stunning mullet through the air and screaming “YAYAYAYA!” at the top of my lungs—for the first time in my life I was wondering if maybe, just maybe, I should retire from professional gaming.

Hold on—did you catch that? Because that was huge. Fucking HUGE.

But finally something was about to happen that not only would challenge me, it would change the course of world history.

I heard a window break! My reflexes sharp as the claws of a jungle cat, I spun and threw my bowie knife.

“AGHHHHHHH!”

There, in the shadows, cowering against the wall, was this little hunchbacked dude with big bulging eyes. My blade was jutting out of his shoulder and he was bleeding everywhere.

“Ow, that hurts!” he whined.

“Stop crying like a skinny punk baby,” I said. “That’s barely even a flesh wound.”