Samsung Fluffies
~by Oculus~
In the spring of 2060, Samsung made the sudden announcement that they were entering the console war with a then unrevealed entry to the 12th generation of video game consoles. The news shook an industry which was one of many that had been affected by the Second Great Depression. As the Depression had affected the consumer market, purchases of video game consoles was at an all-time low due to their high price, the result of both a lower income as well as a rising cost of consoles due to the control of rare metals by China. The Second Great Depression saw the departure of Sony from the console war, followed by the company’s eventual collapse, with Microsoft and Nintendo barely surviving the Depression by focusing on cheaper forms of electronic entertainment.
Following the end of the Depression, and with consumer spending power returning to normal levels, there was speculation that there would be a need for a new competitor to the console market that could compete with the titans of Nintendo and Microsoft. Many had suspected it would have been Apple or Amazon, but contrary to industry speculation neither tech giant made the announcement.
On paper, it made sense. Samsung was one of the largest chaebols, and was well-known in the history of electronics. It had developed a reputation as one of the largest smartphone manufacturers, its Galaxy series being a constant competitor to the ageless Apple iphone. Even during the Depression, Samsung sailed through with their emphasis on dumber phones. With a brand recognition that had survived one of the greatest economic crises of our time, it would make sense that Samsung could create a console that could compete with the likes of Nintendo’s Virtual Man and the Microsoft PCFX360.
But to everyone’s shock, Samsung’s video game console was an iteration of the fluffy pony.
There was a long story as to how this happened. Prior to the depression, both Apple and Sony had released the iMonkey and the Sony Orangutan, both of which were bioelectronics that utilized a 3D printed organic template with electronic parts. Although Hasbio’s fluffy pony is a genetically engineered animal that consumed food organically and reproduced naturally, the original MM622 and Arthurnen templates of the fluffy pony were both 3D-printed bio-electronics. This was especially true in the case of the Arthurnen, where each organic body part was 3D-printed, then assembled into the finished product. Following the break-in at Hasbio that released the later products and prototypes of the fluffy pony into the wild, one of documents that was leaked on the dark web was the blueprints to the fluffy pony biotoy template. These bluepirnts landed up in the hands of both hobbyists and corporate spies, as the dissolution of Hasbio meant that anybody could make their own variant of the fluffy pony, as well as augment the DNA of a creature then considered to be an invasive species during the Depression.
In Samsung’s case, the brain of the fluffy pony was interesting, as Hasbio had developed a highly advanced humanlike brain. Thus, and to improve on Hasbio’s design, Samsung re-engineered the fluffy pony away from the latter Hasbio variants that were capable of reproduction – all Samsung fluffies had no means of reproduction. In addition, instead of relying on food and digestion for energy, Samsung fluffies could be recharged by a USB input on the back. However, and being semi-organic in nature, Samsung fluffies still had hooves, spoke in fluffspeak and were highly affectionate.
But the console market is not just about hardware, but also about the specific content that thrived on an ecosystem established by a competitor into the market. The failure of the Ataria Jaguar, Sega Dreamcast, Ouya and Google Stadia many generations before was because of a lack of exclusives and unique content on their platforms. And by the time of the 12th generation, the biggest games on the market was Half-Life 15 on the PCFX360 and LoZ: The Faces of Evil on the Virtual Man. What could the Samsung fluffy offer against games like this?
Prior to the Depression, one of the most popular games on both the home PC and console markets was the multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) “League of Ancients”, or LoA. In what was seen as a then stale market, LoA revolutionized the genre by introducing mind-machine interface, thus allowing the gamer to actually participate in the game. While initially popular, one of the major side effects of the interface was that gamers who played the game for too long started confusing the world of the game with the real world, resulting in various cases of schizophrenia, psychosis and even dementia.
However, and during the depression, biohackers discovered that an easier and cheaper way to playsuch advanced MOBAs without affecting one’s brain was to get a fluffy pony and hack its brain, such that the fluffy could play the game on behalf of its owner. As fluffies were still considered ”biotoys”, the procedure was seen as cheaper and less riskier than hacking one’s own brain. A rising underground gaming scene existed during the depression, as budding biohackers competed over their own augmentations of the biotoy brain.
Not too long after the depression, the US Senate recognized fluffies as “humanlike” animals and signed more rights for their kind, causing the biotoy hacking scene to go underground. However, this had caught the attention of Samsung, who were also working on a next generation of mind-machine interface machines. The other big news at the time was the announcement of “the King of Fluffies: Wild Impact”. The newest iteration of the highly successful King of Fluffies series, this new game was a marked departure from the previous games by virtue of being a MOBA instead of a fighting game. As unregistered biohacking fluffies was outlawed under the new regulation, Samsung’s fluffy pony was seen as an official version of what was a popular underground in the past. In addition, the Samsung fluffy sported improvements in the bioports, meaning that adopters of the latest version of virtual reality entertainment could safely jack into the console with minimal risk, compared to the earlier iterations.
But of course, there were some teetering problems. Early versions of the Samsung’s biotoy product was likely to fail due to sensory overload, and some biotoys were known to catch fire and ‘explode’, causing some to call this phenomena “fluffsplosions”. In other cases, and in protacted underwater fighters, the consoles were observed to “drown”. Nonetheless, and with subsequent patching, these problems managed to be routed out after a while.
