25th of March, 2025.
At last, it is consummated.
Primum Devir is no longer dream nor draft, but a reality given contour. What once lived only as lore, as a manuscript in silence, now stands embodied — not merely on the page, but in code, in structure, in a world that breathes beneath my hands.
I sit in a narrow apartment in Moscow. The windowpane trembles with the draught, the pipes moan with their habitual decay. I am not Russian, though I have dwelt here long enough for the frost to carve its mark upon me.
The winds of the West never favoured me. They spat me out. And so I turned eastward, where the air is heavier, but at least it is honest.
A year has passed since the last volume was published — the final stone laid upon the arch I had laboured to raise for decades.
And now, this: a world not merely written but rendered, not imagined but inhabited.
How many nights consumed in silence — learning C#, forcing Unreal Engine into obedience, enduring the torment of a craft alien to the hand of a writer. I carved it alone, as one who hollows an island out of sheer refusal to belong to the mainland. No commerce with the world, no vase in common with the stream.
And today, the server breathes.
Today, the launch is not promise but fact. After years of fracture, tests aborted, errors multiplied — the dream is awake. A contrarian edifice, built against the tide.
The black screen glows.
My own world, released.
[...]
And now, step outside the narrow room; look at him from without.
The one before us is not merely a player. He is an author.
He never speaks of himself publicly. He writes under a pseudonym, refuses every invitation, declines every interview. No channel of media ever interviewed him. He has no interest in it. In sum, he is a solitary figure, a nameless nobody.
That is, in fact, his chosen signature: Nameless nobody. Literally.If one prefers brevity, he can be called simply — Nameless.
And, as it is impossible to talk about authors without mentioning their works, let's look at some more context.
First, to speak of him is to speak of the world he opposed — the industry that demanded conformity, the market he refused
For those who have not yet perceived it — and to spare the less attuned the strain of conjecture — the matter is single, not double: islands, continents, vessels that do not communicate.
It began with novels. Not the scattered tales of entertainment, but a saga — one webnovel story carried across volumes, a design laid stone upon stone. Primum Devir: a name at first spoken only in the solitude of late nights, then published in fragments, then bound into books. A world conceived as a continent of its own, immune to the dilution of trends, impervious to the aesthetic prostitution demanded by the present age.
It had only recently reached its end, published volume by volume over years of relentless work. To many, it was just another fantasy. To the author, it was the centre of a life's effort — a story where empires rose and fell, where power was not only measured in strength but in the hidden weight of revelation.
From the very beginning, his intention had been clear: Primum Devir would not be shaped by market demands or by the easy concessions of the age. He refused to turn his story into a showcase of imposed "representation" or fashionable symbols. To him, the form of the tale mattered more than its popularity.
That is why he called it an island. An island that did not share its waters with the continent of entertainment around it. A story sealed against compromise, written as it needed to be, not as others wished it to become.
First came the webnovels. Then, illustrations and animations, created directly by his own hand so that no studio could alter what he had envisioned. And now, at last, came the final step: an MMORPG built entirely alone, coded line by line, without the backing of any publisher or production company. No interpreter was granted passage; no director added his gloss. Each stroke, each shade, each pause — a prolongation of the same vision.
And now, the last transposition: a game. Not one devised by shareholders, nor steered by demographic demand, but raised in solitude, code by code, until it breathed. An MMORPG against the current — without the patronage of studios, without the softening of concessions. A digital island, self-enclosed, sealed from the ocean of mediocrity that swells around it.
Thus the circle closed. The novels had spoken; the images had moved; and now the world itself had opened, inhabitable, real.
What began as words on a page had become a world. And today, that world opened to all...
Ideally, it would be counted as one more VRMMORPG. A genre relatively common, relatively recent, and relatively successful. A niche of the gaming industry that wove together neural interfaces and virtual reality, promising not just vision or control, but total immersion.
Like every technology, it was born of war and of money. Its first steps came in the conflict that tore at Crimea, when Russia and Ukraine turned to training soldiers through immersion shooters, the VRFPS — where every shot was simulation, and later, too often, more than simulation. Drones, tactical scenarios, "games of real combat" where death itself was no longer abstract.
From there, the machinery was repurposed and scrapped. War to market, weapons to entertainment. The same neural conduits that had disciplined soldiers became the toys of civilians.
The VRMMORPG arrived after another invention: the system of productive dreams. From 2015 onwards, the human night itself was captured and sold. Why dream freely, if dreaming did not yield profit? Dreams were free — and therefore suspect. To create the distance between king and commoner, the market devised the dream apparatus: VR devices designed for complete immersion, worn in sleep, so that one's nights could be spent streaming, consuming, learning.
Why not learn Arabic while you slept? Why not take a certification course, update the CV, or polish the digital résumé? Night became an object of productivity, measured and monetised. Even silence was colonised, for silence had no place in the market.
Thus was born the VRMMORPG: the youngest child of this colonisation of human emptiness. The final offspring of a system determined to conquer those hours once reserved for "nothing", for rest, for dreams.
They began to spread in 2019 and 2020, riding the waves of pandemic lockdowns. The boom was immense. Entire populations, confined, turned eagerly to the promise of other worlds.
But! Primum Devir was not like the others.
Most VRMMORPGs were copies of one another, draped in new colours but born of the same mould. Primum Devir was different because it was not based on games at all — it was based on its own lore, a saga that had already been written and sealed. Every stone, every law, every image of the world came from that origin, not from borrowed templates.
Second, there were no classes. No screen where one chose between a sword, a bow, or a staff. In Primum Devir, a warrior was one who made war — not one who pressed a button. Each player had to shape a way of life, to craft a path, to choose a school or even found one. One could be disciple or master, but no class existed apart from the man who bore it. Every player was potentially a teacher, every one a learner.
Third, there was no market. Characters could not be sold. No items traded for money outside the walls of the game. No pay to win. Death was the only coin. Whoever fell in battle — especially in PvP — was gone for good. To return, one had to pay a fee and begin again, stripped of all progress, returned to the zero from which all had once started. A design so ruthless that the gaming industry rejected it outright, calling it impossible, unmarketable, unacceptable.
Fourth, there was no ceiling. No cap to level or to growth. The game was not flattened to ensure equality. It began with balance — everyone born at the same threshold — but from then on it was only friction: man against man, man against world, man against himself. Advancement had no limit. A player could climb endlessly, while another remained at the dust of the beginning.
A vertical world, without concession.
Most VRMMORPGs were the opposite of this.
They bore names so ironic in their emptiness that one could hardly distinguish them: Eternal Legends Online, Age of Heroes Reborn, World of Eternal Fantasy II. Worlds that promised eternity but delivered only repetition.
Their classes were templates more than roles: Knight, Mage, Ranger, Assassin. Nothing more than pre-set skins, a row of costumes to be worn at the click of a button. To be a knight was to select a sword icon. To be a mage was to equip a staff. No one became anything; they merely selected from a menu.
The mediocrity ran deeper still. Many developers did not even trouble themselves to alter the assets. Animators reused sprites from template markets, names unchanged, models recycled. A "dragon" was the same dragon seen in ten other games, only tinted blue or red. Some characters even carried over the default names given by asset sellers — half-forgotten placeholders like Hero001 or DarkMageNPC.
The industry did not mind. The market bought it anyway. A loop of content reskinned, fed to millions.
Primum Devir was not born to be part of that loop.
The industry hated it.
From the very beginning, Primum Devir was called unmarketable. No studio would touch it, no publisher would fund it. The reasons were repeated like mantras: too brutal, too niche, players will never accept permanent death, no monetisation system can sustain it.
Every law of the market condemned it. Games were supposed to flatter the player, not break him. They were supposed to reward every hour with trinkets, badges, cosmetics — a stream of bright distractions. Primum Devir offered none of that. No in-game store, no trading, no shortcuts. Progress could only be taken, never bought.
The journalists and critics joined in the chorus. They called it arrogant, outdated, suicidal as a business model. They accused its creator of elitism, of cruelty, of detachment from reality. Some wrote that it was not even a "game", but a punishment disguised as entertainment.
And yet, players were curious.
The very rules that repelled the industry attracted a different kind of attention. To some, the promise of a world without pay-to-win, without class templates, without ceilings, was intoxicating. To others, the sheer finality of death inside the game was irresistible. If nothing could be bought, then everything had to be earned.
It was a design hated by companies but whispered about in forums, in hidden channels, in places where players who had grown tired of recycled worlds gathered. There, Primum Devir was spoken of not as a product, but as a test.
And when the date of its release was announced, the reaction was divided: ridicule in the market, fascination among the restless.
The same principle guided him from the beginning: the island.
When he first wrote Primum Devir as a webnovel, the format itself served this purpose. It allowed him to write slowly, to refine each chapter in time, without the obligation of releasing a full and polished work all at once. Time — the most expensive currency of the modern world — was preserved for the form. The island of the webnovel meant he could remain untouched by the demands of speed and completion that ruled other markets.
Later came the animations. They too were his alone. No studio, no producer, no "creative team" altering the vision. He used the new tools of artificial intelligence not to surrender authorship, but to concentrate it entirely in his own hands. The AI became servant to the form, not its corrupter. In that way, every frame, every gesture, remained a direct extension of the same voice that had written the books.
And finally, the game. After years of labour, and after returning to his earliest roots as a programmer, he created the MMORPG by himself. No publisher, no sponsors, no investors. The code, the systems, the world itself — all were built alone.
Always the same refusal: no help from the market, no interest in its offers, no concession to its prostitution.
Primum Devir was an island from the first line of the webnovel to the first server of the game.
The work had already been known for the same nature. The novels bore it. The animation too had carried it. And now the game, faithful to the same spirit, was nothing less than a continuation of that refusal.
A contrast in every respect. Built alone, sealed against the market, opposed to everything the industry demanded. And yet — for that very reason — it drew attention. The island was not unseen. For all its solitude, eyes had gathered on its shores.
On this day, 25th of March, 2025, three million people stood waiting.
Three million players, hands poised over their devices, ready to make their first input the moment the gates opened.
A world designed as an island, and a crowd pressing at its shores...
Three million players awaited the opening. But only one of them was its author.
In a narrow apartment in Moscow, the screen lit the room with its cold glow. The black interface trembled for a second, then steadied.
It was the first screen of Primum Devir: VRMMORPG.