Button Mash squinted his baggy, bloodshot eyes before his personal ponycade machine. The large green device flickered with brilliant flashes as he deftly jiggled the control stick and racked up wicked combo moves. He didn't look so hot himself, though. His eyes were lined with a crust of dried tears and his muzzle was stained with synthetic orange powder from half-stale bags of Cheese Oats. Baggy black half-circles hung under his crusted, bloodshot eyes, completing an unholy trinity of messiness, matched only by the horrifying state of his room.

Empty wrappers and discarded bottles of Rabid Pony laid scattered about, drifting up to waist height like dunes of garbage. Rabid Pony, specifically, was an energy drink consisting of concentrated caffeine extract, minotaur sweat, filtered rainbow, red dye number forty-seven, and enough sugar so as to be nigh-indistinguishable from rocket fuel.

A bead of red dye number forty-seven-tinted saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth. An ear twitched.

“Okay, Button Mash, you got this,” he muttered to himself as the final boss stage six cutscene neared completion. “You've stayed up fifty-two hours straight in this redeye, hardcore, no save, Phony Filly Fantasy Forever marathon challenge. All you have left is the final part of the final boss, and with three whole heart containers left, it'll be a piece of cake.”

On the flashing ponycade screen, the camera stopped panning and zoomed in on the action. The furious and tense battle music faded away to silence, leaving only the bleeping urgency of his blinking heart meter. It all came down to that very moment. The next three minutes would determine if the previous fifty-two hours were worth it. He could either unlock the rarest, hardest, most prestigious achievement in the history of pony gaming, or die trying.

“Well, if I don't do it, I'd rather die.”

Deftly, he guided his ponytar towards the flailing final final final final final final boss's wing-tentacles and whacked at the glowing, red, weak spot. The boss's heart meter flickered as satisfying chunks of its health were chipped away.

Suddenly, a flash behind him crackled like lightning, nearly causing him to jerk the controls. Wind howled through his room, stirring up Cheese Oat wrappers and partially peeling down posters, leaving them flapping in the breeze. Were these more hallucinations? The crawling spots on the walls had appeared after the thirtieth hour, and the flying, orange, cyclopean roos had appeared after his thirtieth can of Rabid Pony. Random lightning and indoor weather seemed about on par.

A sad bleeping noise jolted him back to reality. On screen, his last three heart containers bounced away. With his attention diverted, his ponytar had wandered away from the boss monster and cast Aqua Hoof on an electrical panel. Like a knife through his furiously beating heart, the “Game Over” splash screen cut through the scene before it too cut away to a mandatory, unskippable, ten minute death animation where the game mocked him for dying in the most ignominious manner possible.

“No. No! Noooooooo!” he screamed as singing, dancing skeletons paced back and forth, taking turns urinating on his corpse.

His eyes rolled up in his head and blackness closed in from all angles. He barely even registered a vague, three-headed abomination yelling, “Grab him!” and getting wrapped in thousands of hooves of many different colors.

It was game over; that was all that mattered.

Game Over. Next Chapter: Cutie Mark Crusading Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 26 Minutes