Manfred von Karma hated games. They were even less than the most mindless "entertainment", violent wastes of money and time that proved nothing more than society's increasing degeneration into madness. Decisively worthless.
He believed that the purpose of their continued existence was to taunt him. To mock him. The mere idea that there was something out there so cherished and yet so pointless was nothing short of a personal affront to his sense of being.
He was going to prove how worthless they were by conquering them, just like everything else he disliked. After all, he was perfect. These video games were not.
Once at his computer, it took only minutes to find the perfect (and he used that term very loosely) subject for his challenge. It would cost nothing, and the Internet site he had found it on considered it "quite fiendish."
As it downloaded (far too slowly for his liking), he chuckled at the absurdity of that idea. He could beat everything without a single mistake. Why would something this mindless be different?
It finished. He snapped his fingers at the computer screen immediately, willing his superiority over the system.
"Show me how fiendish you are. Now!"
With that, he extracted the folder and double-clicked the program, and stared at his screen as it faded to black and then to logos of developers he didn't care about, people who had undoubtedly wasted years of their lives on this. Absolutely pathetic.
Quickly sick of this, he smashed the space bar, once to skip the irrelevant exposition and a second time to start. Horrifying chirpy music met his ears as a blocky character moved across a map and danced, as if neither the developers nor the 'characters' could be bothered to take this seriously. He snapped his fingers again at the garbage tainting his senses.
How could any sane human being consider something like this art!?
He grumbled at the absurdity of it all as his green avatar nonsensically dropped from the sky and he at last gained control. He was perfect, he thought as he immediately moved right to the next screen and ignored everything on the first, so the character he was controlling would be perfect as well. A flawless conclusion, and he felt so assured of his perfect and absolute victory that he had given no thought to studying the game ahead of time.
As the next screen scrolled into view, he quickly realized that he had no way of reaching the next area. When he moved right, all his avatar did was foolishly walk into a wall, and hitting the space key again merely made his character dance with some kind of white line. He assumed he needed to jump onto those cliffs, as the solution might be related to the white blob above, but none of the logical keys or his demands of "Jump! Now!" responded to his efforts. He gave his keyboard a sharp glare, willing it to do what he demanded.
He came to the conclusion that it was a dead end, put in by the developers to mock him, so he moved his avatar left instead. His avatar walked far too slowly past the first room and the second room, which were void of dead ends, and into the third room, which was covered in ladders and vaguely snake-like blue blobs. He was not a stupid man, and realized immediately that they were easily avoided enemies. Did the developers of this game think that he wouldn't understand?
He moved his avatar left to the ladder, and hit the up key (the logical button) as soon as he considered himself close enough. Instead of climbing the ladder as he wanted, his avatar picked this moment to leap into the air and hit his head on the ceiling, and he immediately slammed a fist on the keyboard to punish it for not cooperating earlier.
Satisfied by the crunch it made, and ignoring the dull pain in his hand, he moved his avatar to the ladder and pressed the key again, pleased when it climbed it as ordered. Clearly, even a machine could learn from discipline.
After what he believed was far too long, and after many disciplinary attacks on his keyboard, von Karma concluded that he had reached a mastery of the game. He had collected cylinders dropped from pots scattered across the blocky game world, he had come to the logical and perfect conclusion that the white line his character used was a whip (and one that had not even the slightest comparison to his daughter's), and most importantly, his skills were absolute perfection. He had made no mistakes. He had not been hit once, and he had strong plans to keep it that way until he was finished.
He had decided to ignore the path to the left he had been taking, as it was leading nowhere, and had instead returned to that dead end. Now that the game was doing as he demanded, he was easily able to conquer it and climb the path. Feeling confident (as always), he moved to the right into the next area, which was an irritatingly loud blocky waterfall with a white blob flying back and forth for no logical reason. It was the only possible path, and surely, his avatar was capable of swimming, so he immediately leaped over it.
He hadn't been paying attention to the flying blob, assuming it was some completely foolhardy attempt at atmosphere, but the "thump" he heard reverberated in his ears before what had happened registered. Nonsensically, the white blob had somehow damaged his avatar merely by touching it, and the avatar turned around and flew back as if it had been shot. von Karma clenched his right shoulder in dawning horror, sweating as the avatar fell backwards over the side of the water and down a cliff that spanned several rooms.
His perfect run was ruined. Now this monstrosity was just mocking him!
The avatar finally stopped falling and landed in a pool of water, but von Karma was too stunned and furious to do anything. A rapid beeping that lasted only a second but seemed to go on forever, and then his avatar foolishly collapsed. He stared in increasing disbelief as the screen faded out to darkness, to more overly loud and overly peppy music that only made his rage at the words on the screen that much stronger.
"GAME OVER"
Before the music could even finish, he snapped out of his disbelief and tore the keyboard from the computer in a burst of adrenaline, the tower making a loud screech as it was pulled across his floor. In a single rage-fueled motion and with a scream that was only matched by that day in the elevator all those years ago, he tossed the keyboard at the wall behind him, not even grinning in satisfaction as it slammed against the floor instead.
"GAME!!"
He turned back to his monitor and grabbed it with both hands, slamming his forehead into it with rage-fueled force.
"How..." SLAM "...dare..." SLAM "...you..." SLAM "...mock..." SLAM "...ME! I'll tear you apart with my bare hands! I'll destroy you and everything that created you! Death! Death to every last one of you! Death!"
He hadn't even heard the door open, and it took him a few moments to even register someone speaking.
"Sir?" said Edgeworth, tentatively, weakly, as if afraid that he had stupidly walked into a situation he would rather have nothing to do with. von Karma turned slowly from his monitor to look at him, fixing him with a glare of pure hatred.
"Get out, boy!" he screamed, finally, standing up to his full height. The boy gaped at him but turned and ran, the familiarity of von Karma's scream not even registering. von Karma gave the computer a final slam with his forehead and decided he would sell it right away. It was clearly cursed.