CHAPTER 2 :1998
George didn't know how long he sat in that chair.
It could have been five minutes or an hour. Time had turned soft, unstable, like a memory that refuses to take shape. The only concrete things were the plastic and metal chair pressing its edge into his thighs, the almost imperceptible hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and the date printed on the newspaper he was still holding with both hands as if it were the only thing tethering him to the world.
San Francisco Chronicle. March 14, 1998. Saturday.
One part of him, the adult part, the part that had paid taxes and attended funerals and watched the world age alongside him, told him this was impossible. People did not fall asleep at forty-nine and wake up at twenty-one. That didn't happen. It was a dream, or a psychotic episode, or a brain tumor generating hallucinations.
But another part, more instinctive, more animal, told him everything was real. That the smell of cheap detergent on the sheets was not a hallucination. That the pressure in his bladder that was starting to bother him was not the product of a tumor. That the hunger he felt was the specific kind of hunger of a young body that hasn't had breakfast.
George set the newspaper on the desk. He stood up. Went to the bathroom, washed his hands, and looked in the mirror once more. The same young face from fifteen minutes ago stared back at him. He opened his mouth and looked at his teeth. He had the wisdom teeth they had pulled at twenty-five. He had a mole on his neck that he vaguely remembered but hadn't seen in decades.
It was not a dream.
He dried his hands on a towel that had seen better days and went back to the room. If this was real, if he truly was twenty-one again, then he needed to stop questioning and start understanding where he stood.
* * *
The apartment was a studio of about thirty-five square meters on the second floor above Fulton Street, near the University of San Francisco campus. George remembered it now with a clarity he hadn't had in decades: the landlord's name was Mr. Kowalski, a Polish man in his mid-seventies who lived on the first floor and came up every first Monday of the month to collect rent in cash. Four hundred and fifty dollars a month. In 1998, in San Francisco, that was cheap even for a student.
The main room served as bedroom, living room, and office. The futon was against the left wall. The desk against the right, below the window that faced the street. Between them, just enough space to walk and a closet without a door where t-shirts, jeans, and a synthetic leather jacket hung; George remembered the jacket with a mix of embarrassment and nostalgia. At twenty-one, that jacket had seemed to him the height of sophistication. At forty-nine, he would have donated it without a second thought.
The kitchen was a strip of a meter and a half at the back: a two-burner stove, a chest-high refrigerator, a sink, and a cabinet with three plates, two mugs, a frying pan, and a pot. The food consisted of half a packet of instant ramen, an almost empty box of Lucky Charms cereal, milk that was probably about to expire, and four cans of Dr Pepper. The diet of a twenty-one-year-old who believes he is immortal.
George opened the refrigerator, smelled the milk, decided it would survive one more day, and poured himself a bowl of cereal. He sat on the futon to eat, legs crossed, the way he used to at twenty-one, and discovered that the body adopted the position with an ease that at forty-nine would have required a chiropractor and an apology.
The Lucky Charms marshmallows tasted exactly as he remembered. Sweet to the point of pain, artificial to the point of obscenity, and absolutely delicious in a way no responsible adult would ever admit.
While he ate, he began to think.
* * *
The first thing was to know what he had.
He searched the desk drawer and found what he expected: a Bank of America checkbook, an envelope with his most recent account statement, and a manila folder with student loan documents.
Checking account: one thousand two hundred forty-seven dollars and thirty-eight cents. His parents sent him five hundred dollars a month to help with expenses. Rent swallowed four hundred fifty. The rest went to food, transportation, and the small indulgences of a college student.
Student loan: he had nearly nine thousand dollars available to withdraw in the coming semesters. Interest that would not start accruing until after graduation.
George did the mental math. If he cut his expenses to the minimum, ramen, coffee, no going out, no luxuries, he could stretch that money to cover rent and have a budget of roughly ten to fifteen thousand dollars to invest in his project. It wasn't much. For anyone else it would be laughably little. But George knew exactly what to do with every dollar, and that made all the difference.
He then checked his university backpack. Notebooks with class notes, a crumpled course syllabus for the semester. He was taking four subjects: Data Structures, C++ Programming, Calculus III, and Introduction to Operating Systems. Second-to-last year of Computer Science. He had this semester left, a free summer, and two more semesters until graduation.
He flipped through the notes and stopped at a page where the twenty-one-year-old George had scrawled, in the margin alongside class notes, the rudimentary design of a game. A stick figure with a sword, some platforms, arrows indicating movement. It was rough, childlike, but it revealed something: even at twenty-one, before the industry had crushed his ambition, George had dreamed of making games.
He closed the notebook carefully, as if it were a sacred document.
Classes would not be a problem. He could pass every subject without effort with what he already knew. The question was maintaining the appearance of a normal student while dedicating every free hour to his real project. He couldn't drop out; his parents expected him to graduate, and any drastic change in behavior would raise red flags.
* * *
George turned on the computer.
The tower let out a mechanical groan that struck him as familiar as a lullaby. The processor fan started with an asthmatic hum. The CRT monitor clicked, flickered, and slowly, with that glacial patience that tube monitors took to come into existence, the screen came to life.
The BIOS scrolled its green numbers on a black background. Intel Pentium II 333 MHz. 64 MB SDRAM. 4.3 GB HDD. George read each line the way you read a medical diagnosis. A Pentium II at 333 megahertz with 64 megabytes of RAM. In 2025, his phone had more processing power than this machine. But in 1998, this was a decent computer for a student.
Windows 98 loaded. The desktop appeared with its default cloud wallpaper and the Internet Explorer 4 icon in the corner. George moved the mouse, a ball mouse, good lord, a ball mouse, and began to explore.
Hard drive: 4.3 gigabytes total, 1.8 available. The rest was taken up by Windows, programs, and a folder called "My Documents" that contained university papers, source code from class projects, and a subfolder called "GAMES" with demos of Quake II, the Doom shareware executable, and a copy of Star Wars: Dark Forces.
Installed software: Visual C++ 5.0, which had come with a pirated copy he had probably gotten from another student. Notepad. An IRC client called mIRC. Netscape Navigator 4. And the DirectX SDK version 5, which meant the twenty-one-year-old George had already been experimenting with graphics programming. George opened the DirectX projects folder and found three abandoned attempts: a program that drew a rotating triangle, another that loaded a bitmap and moved it around the screen with the arrow keys, and a third that was the start of a side-scrolling game that never got past showing a blue background with stars.
George closed the folder. Those three abandoned projects were proof that at twenty-one he had already wanted to do this. He just hadn't had the experience or the conviction to see it through. Now he had both.
He plugged the phone cable into the modem. The device played its characteristic symphony: the dial tone, the electronic screech of protocol negotiation, the final whistle indicating a connection had been established. The internet. At 33.6 kilobits per second.
He opened Netscape Navigator and stared at the screen with the same feeling an astronaut would have returning to Earth after thirty years to find people still using horse-drawn carriages. There was no Google. No YouTube, no Twitter, no Reddit. Knowledge was scattered across personal pages with star-field backgrounds and green text, forums, Usenet groups, and chat channels.
He browsed for a while to map the terrain. He didn't need to learn anything; he knew it all by heart. But he wanted to know what was available now, in this moment, in this year. He found that Visual C++ 6.0 had just been released, a significant improvement over version 5. DirectX 6 was in development and would arrive in August; for now, version 5 was enough to get started. FastTracker II and Impulse Tracker, the music composition programs from the demoscene, were free and produced files that weighed kilobytes but sounded like orchestras. And the IRC channels dedicated to tracker music were full of talented composers nobody had ever heard of.
He disconnected the modem and leaned back in the chair.
He had a working computer. He had development tools. He had a tight but viable budget. He had a year and a half before graduation. And he had, inside his head, the complete blueprints for a game that no one in this world had yet imagined.
* * *
George pulled a fresh notebook from the drawer. One of those composition notebooks with the black-and-white marbled cover sold at any drugstore for a dollar. He opened it to the first page. He picked up a pen.
And he began to write.
At the top of the page, in capital letters he pressed so hard they marked the next three sheets through, he wrote: CASTLEVANIA: SYMPHONY OF THE NIGHT.
Below it, in more controlled handwriting, he began to outline everything he could remember.
Dracula's castle. Every zone, every secret corridor, every hidden room. The Marble Gallery with its statues and chandeliers. The Long Library with its endless bookshelves. The Clock Tower with its giant gears. The Royal Chapel with its stained glass windows and ecclesiastical monsters. The Catacombs, the Colosseum, the Underground Caverns. A vast world, interconnected, full of secrets that rewarded the curious player.
Alucard. Dracula's son. A character with weight, with history, with an internal conflict between his father's legacy and his mother's humanity. His transformations: wolf, bat, mist. His weapons, his spells, his familiars that accompanied him like loyal shadows. A protagonist who was not merely an avatar for the player, but someone with a soul of his own.
The gameplay system. Free exploration through a massive map. Enemies that gave experience. Levels that made you stronger. Weapons and armor that changed the way you fought. Areas blocked off until you obtained new abilities. And the ultimate surprise: the inverted castle, a complete second version of the game that opened when you thought you had finished. A trick that doubled the content without doubling the effort.
The bosses. Slogra and Gaibon guarding the entrance. The Doppelganger that copied your movements. Olrox in his dark chamber. Richter Belmont, the vampire hunter possessed by Shaft, functioning as the false ending. And at the end of the inverted castle, Shaft first, and then Dracula himself. The final battle between father and son.
The music. That was what hurt most to think about not being able to create on his own. Every zone needed a theme that brought it to life, that created an atmosphere to wrap around you. He needed to find someone capable of composing something that came close to the magic Michiru Yamane had created in another world, in another life. Someone who understood that the music of a video game was not decoration but skeleton.
George wrote for more than an hour. He filled sixteen pages with everything he could remember. It was not perfect; there were details that escaped him, minor enemies whose design was blurry, exact numbers that time had worn away. But the structure was there, solid as the foundation of a building.
He also wrote what he needed: an artist who could bring all of this to life in pixels. A musician who could translate his descriptions into melodies. And time. A great deal of time.
When he finished, his hand ached. The light through the window had changed: the sun was low, orange, casting long shadows across the room. He had spent hours without moving from the desk, without eating anything beyond the bowl of cereal that morning.
George closed the notebook and looked at it. A one-dollar notebook containing the blueprints for something that would change the history of video games. If anyone found it, they would think it was the journal of an obsessive student with an overactive imagination. No one would suspect that every word came from the memory of a future this world would never live.
* * *
That night, George went out for a walk.
San Francisco in March of 1998. The air was cold but not biting, with that particular dampness from the bay that got into your bones in an almost pleasant way. The streets near USF were quiet at nine on a Saturday night; the student nightlife was concentrated further south, in the Mission or the Castro.
George walked without direction, letting his young legs carry him. He passed closed shops, a Blockbuster Video with its shelves of movies visible through the window, a laundromat where a woman read a magazine under fluorescent lights, a pizzeria that smelled exactly as he remembered: dough, oregano, grease.
The world of 1998 was slower. Quieter. Nobody was looking at a phone while they walked because cell phones were expensive bricks that only worked for calls. The people on the street were truly on the street, present, looking ahead or talking to each other. There were no algorithms competing for their attention. No notifications. No infinite scroll. Just the sound of cars, the wind, and half-heard conversations drifting from open windows.
He had forgotten what this felt like. A world without urgency.
George sat down on a bench in Alamo Square Park, facing the Painted Ladies, the Victorian houses that appeared in the Full House opening credits. The city lights glittered below, and behind them, the dark silhouette of the bay with the Bay Bridge lit up like a string of pearls.
And there, sitting on a cold bench, twenty-one years old with the entire life of a forty-nine-year-old man inside his chest, George allowed the enormity of what he was living to hit him full force.
His parents were alive.
His father, Richard Hightower, was fifty-five years old and alive. The man who would die of a heart attack at sixty-seven was right now, at this very moment, probably sitting on the couch in the house in Sunset District, watching the news or reading the paper, his heart beating in his chest without knowing that his years were numbered. George could call him. He could go see him tomorrow. He could hug him and feel his father's arms close around him with that clumsy, silent strength that was the only way Richard Hightower knew how to say he loved you.
His mother was alive. George tried to remember the last time he had hugged her in his real life, his previous one, not the mechanical embrace at Richard's funeral. He couldn't. The memory was there but blurred, buried under years of distance and neglect. He had let himself be loved without loving back, and by the time he wanted to return it, it was too late.
Claire was twenty-seven. She worked as a secretary at a bank and still talked to her younger brother. She had not yet said that terrible thing about hiding in work so you don't have to feel anything. There was still time.
George felt something break inside his chest. Not in the metaphorical way people say their heart breaks. In a physical, concrete way, as if a pressure he had carried for decades was released all at once and left a hollow that hurt as much as it relieved. His eyes filled with tears and he did nothing to stop them. He was alone in a park at ten at night and no one was going to see him, and even if they did, he didn't care.
He cried for his father, who had died without knowing that his son regretted every visit he never made, every call he put off, every Sunday he traded for extra hours at the office. He cried for his mother, who had followed Richard as if life without him was a formality not worth completing. He cried for Claire, whom he had stopped calling because it was easier to ignore the distance than to face it. And he cried for himself, for the forty-nine-year-old man who had gone to bed one night in Montreal convinced that life had already given him everything it was going to give.
How wrong he had been.
When he finished crying, he wiped his face with the sleeve of the synthetic leather jacket, breathed in the cold San Francisco air, and looked at the city lights as if seeing them for the first time.
Because, in a certain sense, he was.
* * *
He walked back to the apartment quickly, hands in his pockets and his mind clearer than it had been all day. The crying had cleaned something out. It had released the built-up pressure and left room to think with clarity.
He sat at the desk. Opened the notebook. And on the last page he had written, below all the game planning, he wrote a shorter, more personal list.
THINGS I AM GOING TO DO DIFFERENTLY:
1. Call my parents at least once a week. Visit them every two weeks at minimum.
2. Talk to Claire. Really talk. Not just out of obligation.
3. Not let work consume me to the point of losing the people who matter.
4. Create something that matters. Something that is mine.
5. Stop being afraid.
George looked at the list. Five points. Simple. The kind of thing anyone would write in a New Year's resolution and forget by February. But George was not anyone. He had already lived the consequences of failing each one of those points. He knew the exact cost of each failure, measured in solitary funerals, calls that were never made, and nights spent watching others accept awards for the kind of work he had never dared to attempt.
This time would be different.
He closed the notebook. Turned off the desk lamp. Got into the futon.
The white ceiling with its familiar crack looked down at him. George looked back.
Tomorrow was Sunday. He would call his parents. Tell them he wanted to come for lunch. He would see his father. He would hug his mother. He would try not to cry when Richard opened the door with that expression of restrained surprise he wore every time George showed up unannounced, as if he couldn't quite believe his son wanted to spend time with him.
And on Monday, between classes, he would begin to build Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.
George closed his eyes. This time, for the first time in years, in either of his two lives, he fell asleep with something close to peace.
End of Chapter 2