It’s 1994 and everything is falling apart…
The tight-knit Madre family, nestled deep in the California Mountains, is the envy of the computer gaming world. Since founding the company fifteen years earlier, Will and Kendra Roberts have pioneered an industry by following their own brand of folksy, do-the-right-thing business ethic. But success proves to be their greatest enemy as their growth begins to slip wildly beyond their control and venture capitalists, smelling money, flood the market with cheap knock-offs of Madre’s product. Not only that, but the new, monstrously popular 3D shoot-em-ups threaten to put the final bullet in Madre’s signature Adventure Games.
At home, Will and Kendra struggle to deal with the fact that their daughter spends all her time in front of the computer absorbed in chat forums and playing the competitors’ games. When Heather makes a friend of unknown identity on the Internet, the world’s first all-female Deathmatch Clan is born and Kendra wonders if her daughter will ever come back out of the computer. As Will watches everything he’s worked to achieve in his life slip between his fingers, Kendra, between the daily pressures of work and family, begins to lose her mind, convinced that the brazen action heroes of the competition’s games are coming to kill her…
As a hostile takeover looms on the horizon, the varied characters of Madre are put to the test: Do they become the enemy they hate to survive, or stick to the simple ways that have served them well… and fall.
Fiction – 300,000 words